Orientalist Aesthetics_ Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 ( PDFDrive )

ORIENTALIST AESTHETICS



Orientalist Aesthetics

ART, COLONIALISM, AND
FRENCH NORTH AFRICA, 1880–1930

Roger Benjamin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benjamin, Roger, 1957–
Orientalist aesthetics : art, colonialism, and French

North Africa, 1880–1930 / Roger Benjamin.
p. cm.

“Ahmanson Murphy fine arts imprint.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-22217-2 (alk. paper)
1. Orientalism in art—France. 2. Orientalism in
art—Africa, North. 3. Painting, French—19th century.
4. Painting, French—20th century. 5. Africa, North—
In art. I. Title.

nd1460.e95 b46 2003 2002022627
758'.995— dc21

Printed in Canada
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/niso z39-48-1992 (r 1997)
(Permanence of Paper). 8

For Kate, Sophia, and Stuart



Contents

Acknowledgments / ix
List of Illustrations / xiii
Introduction / 1

1. Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates / 11
2. Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism / 33
3. A Society for Orientalists / 57
4. Orientalists in the Public Eye / 79
5. Colonial Panoramania / 105
6. Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic / 129
7. Matisse and Modernist Orientalism / 159
8. Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts / 191
9. Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb / 221
10. Colonial Museology in Algiers / 249

Conclusion / 275
Notes / 283
Selected Bibliography / 325
Index / 337



Acknowledgments

T he story of this book’s long preparation has been a péripatie undertaken in diverse corners
of the globe. Despite the disembodying facilities of electronic mail, I think of the friends
and colleagues who have contributed so much as located in specific places.
The project was devised at the University of Melbourne, where Margaret Manion, Margaret Rid-
dle, Chris McAuli¤e, and the late John Pigot gave initial encouragement and advice. It became a re-
ality thanks to the award of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, which took me to Baltimore,
New York, and Paris. My work at Johns Hopkins was facilitated by Charles Dempsey, while Maria
Gough, Judith Butler and Yve-Alain Bois were valued interlocutors. A visit to the University of Texas
at Austin gave me the benefit of Richard Shi¤’s guidance and support.

In New York the discovery at the Frick Art Reference Library of the catalogues of the Society of
French Orientalist Painters shaped my research in unforeseeable ways. My colleagues Christopher
Robinson, the regretté Robert Boardingham, Fred Bohrer, John Klein, and Elizabeth Childs were the
source of excellent research clues. Two summer months in London provided some serendipitous ac-
quaintances, including Perry and Benedict Anderson, Gill Perry, Kathy Adler, and John House. In
France the Getty funds supported work at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée Na-
tional des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, and an all too brief journey to Tangier, Fez, and Meknès.
Robert Simon, Laurie Monahan, Barbara Comte, and Hélène Hourmat were most helpful, as were

ix

Michael Enright and François Frey in Aix-en-Provence, where the Centre des Archives d’Outre-
Mer are a Mecca for research on the French colonies.

My major debt in Paris is to Lynne Thornton, the doyenne of Orientalist studies. Her books and
sale catalogues have been largely responsible for recovering the enormous corpus of Orientalist art.
Lynne has been remarkably generous in answering queries and providing materials. I also want to
acknowledge the precious contribution of my research assistants, particularly Peter Rudd for his two
long stints in Paris and, more recently, Lara Smith and Natalie Adamson. Their work, as well as much
of the material of scholarship, was funded by generous grants from the Australian Research Council.

I have grateful memories of my hosts at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, who were
extraordinarily kind to a stranger at a time when it was becoming difficult for foreigners to travel
there: Malika Bouabdellah, then director of the museum; my hosts Samia and Djafaar Boulharouf;
and my guide in the city, Nouredine Ferroukhi. They have often been in my thoughts during the tur-
moil of their country.

Two major exhibitions gave a scholarly fillip to my research. I thank Caroline Turner and Doug
Hall of the Queensland Art Gallery for the exhibition Matisse, which gave me the opportunity to
revisit his Moroccan phase. Edmund Capon’s commission to curate Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee
facilitated my work in all kinds of unexpected ways. His colleagues at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales, in particular Anne Flanagan and Ursula Prunster, were most helpful, as were Brahim Alaoui,
Mounira Khemir, Caroline Mathieu, Geneviève Lacambre, Dominique Taffin, and Jean-François
Heim in Paris. I have fond memories of working with Brian McDermott of the Mathaf Gallery, of
Tayeb Zahzah and Maître Si-Ali Tiar. The specialist booksellers of Paris, particularly Michèle Dhen-
nequin, must be thanked. François Pouillon’s brilliant scholarship in Orientalist art has been matched
by his generous friendship.

Along the way I have been the fortunate recipient of advice from Peter Kohane, David Brand,
Timothy J. Clark, Aimée Brown Price, Phillip Goad, Terry Smith, Thomas Crow, Karen Esielonis,
Paul Duro, Emily Apter, Richard Pennell, Zeynep Çelik, and Peter Hulme. The students in my sem-
inar on Orientalist visual culture at Melbourne University challenged my intellectual stasis, while
former students Mary Roberts, Caroline Jordan, Lara Smith, and Luke Gartlan have been most enrich-
ing interlocutors. The librarians of Ormond and Trinity Colleges in Melbourne graciously provided
me with places to write.

The book was finalized at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National Uni-
versity, Canberra. I am profoundly grateful to its foundation director, Nicholas Thomas, for pro-
viding the luxury of a research fellowship in this uniquely stimulating environment. Thanks also to
the ever-supportive Iain McCalman, Howard Morphy, and Caroline Turner, and those able admin-
istrators Anne-Maree O’Brien and Julie Gorrell. Anne McGrath, Hollis Clayson, David Mac-
Dougall, Lynne Thornton, and François Pouillon read chapter drafts at this time, while CCR col-

x Acknowledgments

leagues, including Christopher Pinney, Klaus Neumann, Greg Dening, and above all Nicholas
Thomas o¤ered fruitful conversations. Chaitanya Sambrani and Natalie Adamson helped order il-
lustrations, while Neal McCracken and Stuart Hay proved to be the nec plus ultra of black-and-white
photography.

At the University of California Press, I want to o¤er my commissioning editor, Deborah Kirsh-
man, and her assistants Kim Darwin and Jennie Sutton my thanks for their faith in this project and
the gift of their patience. The Press’s three external readers offered extremely productive sugges-
tions and advice. My editor, Stephanie Fay, improved my expression in a way I no longer believed
was possible and, with Fronia Simpson, brought the manuscript to a new level of consistency and
rigor.

Finally to Kate Sands, my wife, I owe an inestimable debt—for her calming encouragement and
advice, for her skillful reading of drafts, and her sustaining ways over months and years. Our chil-
dren, Sophia and Stuart, were born and have grown alongside this book; they have shown me that
satisfaction in a task completed is a primal pleasure that should never be deferred too long.

Author’s note: In the interests of accessibility, I have translated all French texts (unless another trans-
lator is acknowledged). I have used English versions of names for museums and organizations ex-
cept where convention demands it (e.g. Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Titles of paintings are given in both
English and French, books and articles in French only. For the orthography of Arabic names I have
used the French rather than the English model.

Acknowledgments xi



Illustrations

Abbreviations
ADAGP Société des Auteurs Dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Paris
ANU Australian National University, Canberra
RMN Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris

Map of North Africa circa 1900 (opposite page 1)
Plates (following page 104)
1. Eugène Fromentin, Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat (La rue bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat), 1859, oil on

canvas, 142 x 103 cm. Musée de la Chartreuse Douai (photo: Claude Theriez)
2. Henri Regnault, Hassan and Namouna (Hassan et Namouna), 1870, watercolor, gouache, and black

pencil on paper, 56.5 x 79 cm. Alain Lesieutre Collection, Paris (photo courtesy Beaussant & Lefèvre)
3. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mosque at Algiers (La mosquée à Alger), 1882, oil on canvas, 49 x 60 cm. Private

collection (photo: A. C. Cooper Ltd)
4. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Jardin d’Essai in Algiers (Le Jardin d’Essai, Alger), 1881, oil on canvas,

80 x 65 cm. Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas

xiii

5. André Suréda, A Fountain at Tlemcen (Une fontaine à Tlemcen), 1916, gouache. From L’Illustration, 1930
(photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne)

6. Etienne Dinet, “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute) (“La quesba” [longue flûte de roseau]), ca. 1914, oil on
canvas, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy Gros & Delettrez, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

7. Etienne Dinet, Andalusia in the Time of the Moors (L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures), 1900, color lith-
ograph poster, 257 x 97 cm. Courtesy Dominique Durand, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

8. Victor Prouvé, Arab Horseman (Cavalier arabe), 1890, oil on canvas, 80 x 54 cm. Musée de l’Ecole de
Nancy. © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

9. Léon Carré, The Nude Dancer (La danseuse nue), 1912, gouache and gold leaf, 21.3 x 14.5 cm. Private
collection (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

10. Charles Dufresne, Oriental Scene or Bathers (Scène orientale or Baigneuses), ca. 1914, watercolor, wash,
and pencil on paper, 36 x 47 cm. Photothèque du Musée des Années 30, Boulogne-Billancourt. © ADAGP.
Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

11. Henri Matisse, The Casbah Gate (La porte de la Casbah), 1912–13, oil on canvas, 116 x 80 cm. Pushkin
Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (photo: Art Resource, New York). © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed
by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

12. Henri Matisse, Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape (Les acanthes, paysage marocain), 1912, oil on canvas,
115 x 80 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

13. Azouaou Mammeri, View of Moulay-Idriss (Vue de Moulay-Idriss), ca. 1929, oil on canvas, 100 x 130 cm.
Private collection

14. Mohammed Racim, Illumination with Koranic verse, 1916–17, gouache and gold leaf, 24.5 x 19 cm. From
Dinet and Ibrahim, La vie de Mohammed, prophète d’Allah, Paris, 1918 (photo courtesy Gros & Delet-
trez, Paris)

15. Mohammed Racim, The Rais (Le raïs), ca. 1931, gouache heightened with gold, 18.5 x 13.5 cm. Tayeb
Zahzah Collection, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

16. Ketty Carré, The Courtesan (La courtisane), 1918, distemper on cardboard, 30.3 x 23 cm. Private collec-
tion (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

Figures

1. Eugène Giraud, Théophile Gautier Smoking His Chibouk (Théophile Gautier fumant son chibouk), 1862,
watercolor, 51 x 38 cm. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 13

2. Emile Lessore and William Wyld, View of Algiers, Seen from the Faubourg Bab-Azoun (Vue d’Alger, prise
du Faubourg Bab-Azoun), from Voyage pittoresque dans la Régence d’Alger, 1835, lithograph, 22 x 33 cm.
Private collection (ANU Photography) / 14

3. Adrien Dauzats, The Place du Gouvernement at Algiers (La Place du Gouvernement à Alger), 1849, oil on
canvas, 17 x 22 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly (photo: Bridgeman Art Library) / 14

4. Riding Camels, anonymous wood engraving, from Cox, In Search of Winter Sunbeams, 1869 (photo:
Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 15

xiv Illustrations

5. Eugène Delacroix, Arabs Traveling (Arabes en voyage), 1855, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm. Museum of Art,
Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Appropriation / 16

6. Eugène Fromentin, Arab Falconer (Fauconnier arabe), 1863, oil on canvas, 108 x 73 cm. Chrysler Museum
of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.648 / 20

7. Théodore Chassériau, Arab Chiefs Challenging Each Other to Single Combat under the Ramparts of a City
(Chefs de tribus arabes se défiant au combat singulier, sous les remparts d’une ville), 1852, oil on canvas,
91 x 118 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN, Gérard Blot) / 21

8. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Almeh (Arab Girl in a Doorway) (L’Almée), 1873, oil on canvas, 53 x 40.5 cm.
Najd Collection (photo courtesy of the Mathaf Gallery, London) / 26

9. Eugène Fromentin, photographic carte de visite, ca. 1870. Société de la Géographie, Paris. Bibliothèque
Nationale de France photographic plate / 28

10. Gustave Guillaumet, Weaving Women at Bou-Saâda (Tisseuses à Bou-Saâda), ca. 1885, oil on canvas,
55 x 75 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN) / 30

11. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Copy after Delacroix’s “Jewish Wedding” (Copie d’après “Les noces juives” de Dela-
croix), 1875, oil on canvas, 108.7 x 144.9 cm. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts / 35

12. Photo of Mosque Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, Algiers, ca. 1929. From Georges Rozet, L’Algérie, 1929 (ANU
Photography) / 38

13. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Stairway in Algiers (Escalier à Alger), 1882, oil on canvas, 73 x 60.5 cm. Private
collection / 39

14. Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street (Rue à Alger), ca. 1876, oil on canvas. Musée National des Arts d’Afrique
et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) / 40

15. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume, 1882, oil on canvas, 126.5 x 78.2 cm.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1955.586 / 44

16. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Algerian Figures (Types algériens), 1882, oil on canvas, 35 x 40 cm. Musée Na-
tional des Beaux-Arts, Algiers (photo: Giraudon) / 46

17. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Old Arab Woman (Vieille femme arabe), 1882, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 cm. Worces-
ter Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, museum purchase / 47

18. Albert Lebourg, The Port of Algiers (Le port d’Alger), 1876, oil on canvas, 31 x 47 cm. Musée d’Orsay,
Paris (photo: RMN) / 50

19. Nadar Studio, Léonce Bénédite, ca. 1900. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 51
20. Gustave Guillaumet, The Seghia, Biskra (La Séguia, Biskra), 1884, oil on canvas, 100 x 155 cm. Musée

d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN, Hervé Lewandowski) / 54
21. G. Fraipont, Algerian Exposition: The Interior Courtyard (Exposition algérienne—La cour intérieure), wood

engraving. From Huard, Livre d’or de l’exposition, 1889. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic
plate / 60
22. Eugène Grasset, At the Place Clichy (A la Place Clichy), ca. 1895, typographic poster. From Les maîtres
de l’affiche, 1895–96 (photo: National Gallery of Australia) / 63
23. Frédéric Régamey, The Colonial Delegates, November 1892 (Les délégués aux colonies, novembre 1892), oil
on canvas, 90 x 79 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN) / 64

Illustrations xv

24. Marius Perret, Souvenir of the Fouta Expedition (Souvenir de la colonne de Fouta), 1892, lithograph. From
Les peintres-lithographes: Album spéciale, les Orientalistes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic
plate / 68

25. The Bonvalot Mission in Abyssinia (La mission Bonvalot en Abyssinie). Maurice Potter second from left,
Gabriel Bonvalot center. From L’Illustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 68

26. Alfred Dehodencq, Execution of the Jewish Woman (Le massacre de la Juive), n.d., oil on canvas. Musée
Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) / 70

27. Etienne Dinet, Portrait of Sliman ben Ibrahim (Portrait de Sliman ben Ibrahim), ca. 1902, oil on cardboard.
Whereabouts unknown (photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 72

28. Paul Leroy, The Chourbah: The Orientalists’ Dinner (La Chourbah: Dîner des orientalistes), March 1897,
lithograph. From Les peintres-lithographes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 73

29. Paul Leroy, symbol of the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Marque de la Société des Peintres
Orientalistes Français), 1895, wood engraving (ANU Photography) / 75

30. Victor Peter, medal awarded by the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Médaille de récompense de
la Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français), 1899. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliothèque
Nationale de France photographic plate / 75

31. Adolphe Chudant, Algiers—Cocktail Hour (Alger—l’heure verte), ca. 1895, lithograph. From Les peintres-
lithographes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 76

32. Adolphe Chudant, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters (6e Exposition des Peintres Oriental-
istes Français), 1899, lithograph. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliothèque Nationale de France
photographic plate / 76

33. Alexandre Lunois, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters (6e Exposition des Peintres Oriental-
istes Français), 1899, maquette for poster, oil on canvas, 116 x 81 cm. (photo courtesy Gros & Delettrez,
Paris) / 80

34. Charles Cottet, Low Mass in Winter, Brittany (Messe basse en hiver, Bretagne), 1902, oil on canvas. Musée
du Petit Palais, Paris (© Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris; photo: Pierrain) / 84

35. Charles Cottet, Fellah Women (Femmes fellahs), 1894, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne
et Contemporain de Strasbourg / 85

36. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. Evening Promenade, Morocco (Promenade du soir), ca. 1930, oil on canvas,
81 x 65 cm. Private collection / 88

37. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Portrait of Pierre Loti, “Phantom of the Orient” (Portrait de Pierre Loti, “Phan-
tôme de l’Orient”), 1896, pastel, 42 x 56 cm. Musée Basque de Bayonne / 88

38. Emile Bernard, Cairo Merchants (Les marchands du Caire), 1900, oil on canvas, 242 x 196 cm. Musée
National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Syd-
ney, 2001 / 90

39. Théodore Rivière, Salammbô and Mathô (Salammbô et Mathô), 1895, bronze. From The Paris Exhibi-
tion, 1900 (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 91

40. Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary), 1891, oil on canvas, 114 x 88 cm. The Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 51.112.2. All rights reserved / 93

xvi Illustrations

41. Etienne Dinet, Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la prière: “At Tahia”), ca. 1921, oil
on canvas, 78.2 x 85.4 cm. Private collection (photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 96

42. Etienne Dinet, The Son of a Holy M’rabeth (Le fils d’un saint M’rabeth), 1900, oil on canvas, 87.6 x 92 cm.
(photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 97

43. Etienne Dinet, Sliman ben Ibrahim at the Place de la Concorde (Sliman ben Ibrahim à la Place de la Con-
corde), before 1908, oil on canvas. Whereabouts unknown. From Dinet and Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie
arabe, 1908 (ANU Photography) / 99

44. Dinet painting on his terrace [at Bou-Saâda], ca. 1925 (ANU Photography) / 101
45. Colonial precinct of the Trocadéro Palace gardens, west side, Paris, 1900. From Hachette, Paris Expo-

sition, 1900. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 107
46. The Algerian Street—Unofficial Section, Paris, 1900. From The Paris Exhibition, 1900 (photo: State Ref-

erence Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 108
47. Joseph de la Nézière, Diorama of Fez, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 m. long. Moroccan Pavilion. From Livre

d’or de l’exposition coloniale, 1922. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 111
48. Louis Tinayre, The Panorama of Madagascar (Panorama de Madagascar), Paris, 1900, oil on canvas,

timber, and plaster. From Le Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 112
49. Scellier de Gisors, Pavilion of the Dioramas (Pavillon des dioramas), Paris, 1900. From Souvenir de

l’exposition coloniale de 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 113
50. Moving Stereorama, or Poème de la Mer, Palais des Attractions algériennes, Paris, 1900. From De Natuur,

1900 (ANU Photography) / 115
51. Louis Dumoulin and Alexandre Marcel, Le Tour du Monde, 1900. From Le Panorama, 1900 (photo:

Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 115
52. Javanese dancers with Louis Dumoulin’s painted view of Angkor Wat, in Le Tour du Monde. From Le

Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 117
53. Lion Court (Cour des lions), in L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Le

Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 119
54. The Arena (Les Arènes), in L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Le Panorama,

1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 120
55. Installation of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, Moroccan Pavilion, Ghent Exposition, 1913.

From L’Action africaine, 1913. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 121
56. Jules Charles-Roux, ca. 1906. From Notice officielle et catalogue illustré des expositions des Beaux-Arts,

Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille, 1906 (photo courtesy Frick Art Reference Library, New
York) / 123
57. Abyssinia—Arrival at Harrar of M. Lagarde, envoy of the French government (Abyssinie—Arrivée à
Harrar de M. Lagarde, envoyé du gouvernement français). From L’Illustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu
Library, Melbourne) / 133
58. Paul Bu¤et, The King of Ka¤a (Central Africa) (Le roi de Ka¤a [Afrique centrale]), pen sketch after a
painting, ca. 1897. From Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1899 (photo: National Gallery of Australia) / 134

Illustrations xvii

59. Etienne Dinet, The Terraces of Laghouat (Les terrasses de Laghouat), 1885, oil on canvas, 27 x 39 cm. Musée
National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 137

60. Victor Prouvé, Fantasia, 1888, watercolor from the Liber Amicorum of René Wiener, 31 x 23.7 cm.
© Musée Lorrain, Nancy (photo: P. Mingot) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 141

61. Victor Prouvé, At the Menzel Foutain (A la fontaine de Menzel), 1895, lithograph. From Les peintres-
lithographes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Syd-
ney, 2001 / 142

62. Jean Bouchaud, The Villa Abd-el-Tif Overlooking Algiers, gouache. From L’Illustration, 1925 (photo: Bail-
lieu Library, Melbourne) / 146

63. Léon Cauvy, Wintering—Tourism—Algeria (Hivernage—Tourisme—Algérie), ca. 1930; color lithograph
poster (ANU Photography) / 148

64. Léon Carré painting in a garden overlooking Algiers, ca. 1913. From L’Art et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU
Photography) / 149

65. Léon Carré, The Muleteer (Le muletier), 1910; oil on canvas. From L’Art et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU Pho-
tography) / 150

66. Léon Carré, Murals in Presidential Antechamber, ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothèque
Forney, Paris) / 152

67. Léon Carré, Muslim Life (La vie musulmane), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothèque
Forney, Paris) / 153

68. Marius de Buzon, Return from the Market (Retour du marché), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo:
Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 154

69. Charles Dufresne, North African Landscape—the Oued at Bou-Saâda (Paysage nord-africain—l’oued de
Bou-Saâda), ca. 1910–12, pen and ink, 26.5 x 36 cm. © Centre Georges Pompidou (photo: P. Migéat)
© ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 155

70. Charles Dufresne, Algerian Oasis (Oasis algérienne), ca. 1912, gouache, pastel, Chinese ink, pencil on
cream paper, 45 x 40 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (photo: Lysiane Gauthier © Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 156

71. Biskra, with old indigenous village in the foreground and new town beyond. From Georges Hardy,
Géographie et colonisation, 1933 (ANU Photography) / 162

72. Henri Matisse, Street in Biskra (Rue à Biskra), 1906, oil on canvas, 34 x 41 cm. Collection J. Rump, Statens
Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 162

73. Etienne Dinet, An Ouled-Naïl, before 1906, oil on canvas. From Dinet and Ibrahim, Khadra, danseuse
Ouled-Naïl, 1927 edition (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 166

74. Henri Matisse, H. Matisse by Himself (H. Matisse par lui-même), 1912, pen and ink on paper, 19.3 x 25.3 cm.
Private collection. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 171

75. Henri Matisse, On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse), 1912–13, oil on canvas, 115 x 100 cm. Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts, Moscow. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 172

76. Henri Matisse, The Standing Riffian (Le Rifain debout), 1912, oil on canvas, 146.6 x 97.7 cm. The State Her-
mitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 175

xviii Illustrations

77. Abd el-Krim. From L’Illustration, 1922 (ANU Photography) / 177
78. A. Delannoy, Marcel Sembat, ca. 1910. From Les Hommes du Jour, 1910 (ANU Photography) / 178
79. Henri Matisse, Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu d’une fenêtre), 1912–13, oil on canvas,

115 x 80 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy,
Sydney, 2001 / 182
80. Bab el Assa, Tangier, 1991 (photo: Hélène Hourmat) / 183
81. Henri Matisse, Moroccan Café (Café marocain),1912–13. Distemper on canvas, 176 x 210 cm. The State Her-
mitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 185
82. E.-A. Séguy, Mass of Anthuriums in the Garden at Hamma, Algiers (Massif d’anthuriums dans le jardin du
Hamma, à Alger), 1921. From L’Illustration, 1922 (ANU Photography) / 187
83. Henri Matisse, Moroccan Garden (Jardin marocain), 1912, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, 116.8 x 82.5 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn (photo © The Museum of
Modern Art, New York) © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 188
84. Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey. From L’Illustration, 1931 (ANU Photography) / 193
85. Gold and silver Berber jewelry from Algeria. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1901. Bibliothèque Nationale
de France photographic plate / 196
86. Mme Luce Ben-Aben’s indigenous embroidery workshop (Ouvroir de broderie indigène de Mme Luce
Ben-Aben). From A. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907. Bibliothèque Nationale de
France photographic plate / 197
87. Edouard Herzig, Trial Creation of a Carpet in Hispano-Moorish Style (Essai de création d’un tapis de style
hispano-mauresque), ca. 1907. From A. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907. Bibliothèque
Nationale de France photographic plate / 199
88. Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Daisy (Une marguerite), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917. Bibliothèque Nationale
de France photographic plate / 204
89. Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Bouquet of Flowers (Un bouquet de fleurs), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 205
90. Classic Rabat carpet, mid–nineteenth century. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 1, 1923 (photo:
La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 206
91. Joseph de la Nézière, photo of the Exhibition of Moroccan Carpets at the Pavillon de Marsan, 1919. From
France-Maroc, 1919. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 208
92. Rabat carpet of modern manufacture, ca. 1920. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 1, 1923 (photo:
La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 209
93. Analysis of the design of a Zaïan carpet. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 2, 1926 (photo: La
Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 209
94. Central Patio of Moroccan Pavilion, International Colonial Exposition of Marseille, 1922. From
L’Illustration, 1922 (photo: La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 212
95. The “Studio orientale,” apartment of Jacques Doucet at Neuilly, ca. 1929. Moroccan ceramics in vi-
trines. From L’Illustration, 1930 (Photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 214

Illustrations xix

96. Office/Smoking-Room and Bathroom (Bureau-Fumoir et Salle de Bains). Moroccan section, Interna-
tional Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris, 1925. From Monde colonial illustré,
1925. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 216

97. Léon Cauvy, Carpets and Their Manufacture (Les tapis et leur fabrication), mural, Algerian section. From
Album de l’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs, 1925 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 218

98. Azouaou Mammeri, The Fountain (La fontaine), ca. 1917, crayon drawing. From France-Maroc, 1917.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 225

99. Azouaou Mammeri, Interior of a Koranic School (Intérieur d’une école coranique), ca. 1917–18, oil on can-
vas, 77.5 x 92.1 cm. © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001, Gift of Jacques Cartier, 1923.223 / 227

100. Azouaou Mammeri, View of Fez (Vue de Fez ), ca. 1920, oil on canvas, 70 x 92 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris
(photo: RMN, Hervé Lewandowski) / 230

101. Fez from the tombs of the Merinids. From L’Illustration, 1922 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 231
102. Azouaou Mammeri, The “Monteée des Rats” at Fez (La “Montée des Rats” à Fès), ca. 1920, oil on can-

vas. From L’Illustration, 1921 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 232
103. Si Azouaou Mammeri, Muslim artist and drawing teacher . . . Rabat (Si Azouaou Mammeri, artiste

musulman, professeur de dessin . . . Rabat). From L’Illustration, 1921 (photo: Baillieu Library, Mel-
bourne) / 234
104. Mohammed Racim, frontispiece for Mardrus, Les mille nuits et une nuit, vol. 10, 1930. Courtesy Gros &
Delettrez, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) / 239
105. Mohammed Racim, Persian Hunt (Chasse persane), ca. 1920, gouache heightened with gold. Musée
National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 240
106. Mohammed Racim, Casbah Terraces (Les terrasses de la casbah), n.d., gouache heightened with gold,
26 x 32 cm. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 242
107. Bayot, Terraces of Algiers (Terrasses d’Alger), 1837, lithograph. From Berbrugger, L’Algérie historique,
pittoresque, et monumentale, 1843 (ANU Photography) / 243
108. Barbary Galley (Barbarÿsche Galeÿen), Flemish engraving, seventeenth century. From L’Illustration, 1930
(photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 246
109. Mohammed Racim, Naval Battle (Bataille navale), ca. 1932, gouache heightened with gold, 30 x 23 cm.
Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 246
110. The Monument aux morts, Algiers. Boy Scouts salute the fallen of World War I. From Mercier, Le
Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 253
111. Pierre-Marie Poisson, Centenary of French Algeria medal, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de
l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 253
112. Dormoy, Algeria, Land of Great Agricultural Production (L’Algérie, pays de grande production agricole),
maquette for centenary poster, 1930, oil on board (photo: Centre des Archives de l’Outre-Mer, Aix-
en-Provence) / 254
113. Indigenous Chiefs Await the President of the Republic (Les grands chefs indigènes attendent le Président de
la République). From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 255

xx Illustrations

114. The Salle Pierre Bordes, concert hall in Algiers, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930
(ANU Photography) / 256

115. Installation of the Armée d’Afrique, Musée de la Casbah, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Al-
gérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 257

116. Regnier and Guion, architects, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des Musées
de France, 1930. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 260

117. Paul Guion, design for the terrace of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, ca. 1928. From Le
Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, 1930. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 262

118. Hall of plaster casts, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Note sur l’ethnographie, l’archéolo-
gie, les musées, et les beaux-arts en Algérie, 1948 (ANU Photography) / 262

119. Claude Monet, Rocks at Belle-Ile (Les rochers de Belle-Ile, or Mer démontée), 1886, oil on canvas,
65 x 81 cm. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger (photo: Giraudon) / 264

120. Facade with Antoine Bourdelle ’s La France, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Note sur
l’ethnographie . . . et les beaux-arts en Algérie, 1948 (ANU Photography) / 265

121. François Barry, Inauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers,
1846 (L’inauguration de la statue du duc d’Orléans sur la place du Gouvernement, à Alger en 1846), n.d.,
oil on canvas. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des musées de France, 1930.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 267

122. Albert Marquet, The Admiralty Dock at Algiers (Le Bassin de l’Amirauté à Alger), ca. 1930, oil on can-
vas. From L’Illustration, 1930 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy,
Sydney, 2001 / 270

123. Charles Halley, architect. Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, Vincennes. From Edma Nicoll,
A travers l’exposition coloniale, 1931 (ANU Photography) / 277

Illustrations xxi

SARDINIA

PORTUGAL S PA I N

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Córdoba Philippeville
Seville
Bougie (Skikda)
Granada
Algiers (Bejaïa)
Tunis
Blida GREARTAENRGKEABYLE LESSER KABYLE Bône
RANGE (Annaba) Nabeul

Tangier Constantine Sousse

AT L A N T I C Tétouan Oran MAOUURNÈSTAIN S Kairouan
OCEAN Tlemcen
RIF MOUNTAINS UNTAINS El Kantara Timgad El Djem
O Bou-Saâda
M
Biskra Sfax

Volubilis Moulay-Idriss

Rabat Fez TUNISIA
Casablanca Gabès
Meknès Laghouat

Touggourt Médénine
Douïreth
S M’ZAB
A Ghardaïa
L
Marrakech T Ouargla
A

MOROCCO D E S E RT
SAHARA

L I B YA

ALGERIA

North Africa, circa 1900.

Introduction

T he strangest library I have ever worked in is that of the National Museum of Fine Arts of
Algiers. It is bright, airy, and well-appointed, high up in the crumbling art deco building
made to celebrate one hundred years of the French occupation of Algeria. The collection
is not strange: this is a serious scholarly library on European (and to a lesser extent, Islamic) art, formed
between 1930 and 1962, the year when over one million French abandoned the North African colony.
The library as I found it in early 1993, however, was all but deserted. The young librarian graciously
allowed me to photocopy, but because of a lack of toner the machine made almost illegible prints.
The breezy silence was sometimes broken by the chanting of young Islamist cadres, demonstrating
on the former Champ de Manoeuvres (French military parade grounds) nearby.

Like the museum and its collections, the library had changed function, all but lost its brief. A
colonial cultural institution, it nowadays speaks to but a fraction of the people. Yet what treasures
it contains for the seeker after Orientalist and French art! The Algerian sta¤ were rightly proud of
the nineteenth-century pictures, by major French artists from Gustave Courbet to Edouard Vuil-
lard. They were doubly proud of the national heritage represented by the rooms devoted to the
miniaturist Mohammed Racim and more recent works by Algerian abstract painters.

Yet the then director and her sta¤ knew little of their museum’s history. The French, I was told,
had repatriated both the old records and the paintings. Although most of the pictures were later re-

1

turned to Algiers, the papers remained in France. I had seen them in the colonial archives at Aix-en-
Provence. The founding of the Algiers museum is the subject of the final chapter of this book.

One sees the circuitous byways of knowledge by which a foreigner—in my case, an Australian
trained in America and traveling via Paris—with no claims other than intellectual curiosity and
moral sympathy, can construct a history of someone else ’s heritage. They are byways where first
world privilege opens borders, as when I cruised through the customs barrier at Nice airport while
French officials held back family groups of Algerian workers. Borders, as sites of conflict and con-
straint, can embody long-standing tensions. In my work on this project, my being neither French
nor Algerian, nor indeed American, may have given me a clearer view of cultural traffic in the
Mediterranean during an earlier era.

It is a view as if from a spy satellite looking down on the region—an appropriate metaphor per-
haps for the right of infinite purview that the Western way of knowing arrogates to itself. The cam-
era eye in the satellite receives a mass of undi¤erentiated information that has to be interpreted. Chan-
nels for information have to be formed, data made to tell a story. Such a process involves selection,
hypotheses, prejudices. I am mindful of the morass of information I have confronted in excavating
this history of Orientalism. Forging channels and constructing stories have been the hardest parts of
the exercise, given the relative dearth of scholarship on such images and texts.

As the camera eye of the satellite responds to the commands of the controlling power, so my his-
torical construction serves a set of scholarly protocols, moral or ideological biases, aesthetic aver-
sions and preferences, even publishing imperatives. The discipline of art history has helped guide
me, although I feel this book is as much an informal contribution to the sociology of art or of colo-
nial culture as, say, a history of style. My aversions have not been to kinds of painting—my admi-
ration for cultural studies enables me to regard the sea of Orientalist “kitsch” as material worthy of
study. My preferences for the modernism of the French masters has nevertheless ensured that mod-
ernism remains a vector in this history. As for guiding moral biases, they will be too explicit for some,
too feebly expressed for others. Although not in itself a contribution to Theory, this book is built on
my responses to the intellectual climate of postcolonial theory, in particular the work of Frantz Fanon,
Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, profound critics of colonialism. In Australia I have lived with the
actuality of a settler culture coming to terms with its indigenous past and present. My own passion
for both Aboriginal art and the politics of its interpretation has been the screen through which I have,
semiconsciously, viewed questions about settler and indigenous cultures and political relations in
North Africa.

The cultural heritage I study in this book is by no means my own. Who has the greatest claim on
Orientalist painting, it is hard to say. It is only marginally the heritage of the Algerians, many of
whom must have but a tangential interest in the visual arts of their colonial past. At the struggling
museum, closed soon after my visit because of explicit threats from the fundamentalists, there were

2 Introduction

more pressing issues than museum history. And indeed the museum, with its gross sculptures that
contradict the Hadith (or deeds of the Prophet) and its lubricious subjects in painting, had never spo-
ken to orthodox Islam. It had been built by the French, for the French and a minority of Europeanized
évolués (indigenous who had “evolved” toward the colonialists’ culture) who savored the visual arts.
Its renewed relevance in decolonized Algeria did not extend to the celebration of colonial origins.

As for the French, they too are divided in their claims on this art, although French men and women
were its main exponents. Very few French art historians or curators have visited the Algiers museum—
some curators were astonished when I stated my intention of visiting. But they were the custodians
of modernism, and the relation of modernism to the colonial sphere has always been uneasy. Else-
where in France there is a lively interest in art colonial (to use the current French term), fueled by
colonial nostalgia and the art market’s search for new sensations, both complex. Colonial nostalgia,
the sentiment of loss experienced by French people driven by political circumstances from a coun-
try where they had struggled to make a home, has its validity. The pieds-noirs (Algerian-born French
people) may be as close as one gets to the owners of the culture I am studying. But the scholarship
emerging from such nostalgia can be partial to a fault.1 The new market for Orientalism involves a
considerable clientele of non-Western buyers, Muslims who are coming to see in the sometimes
unlovely products of French ethnographic painting indices of their own premodern past.2

My own interest in the French painting of North Africa is rooted in allegiance to the modernist
tradition. All my postgraduate work in the United States dealt with Henri Matisse. Regrettably my
initial master’s paper on Matisse ’s Moroccan paintings had been written with a sense of ignorance
regarding the cultural context of such exoticist moments. I conceived this book a decade later to an-
swer the question, what was Orientalist art in the time of its historical emergence? How was it thought
about, written up, reviewed? Under what conditions was it produced, exhibited, collected?

The answer entails a careful historical account of Orientalist art and its relations with colonial cul-
ture, one that considers the politics of representation driving postcolonial theory and retains a sense
of connection to the problematics of modernism, if only to view them obliquely, in the light of his-
tories whose existence modernist historiographers have forgotten. What does it mean to attach Pierre-
Auguste Renoir to the Orientalist tradition, and see his impressionism as a secondary matter? To learn
that some critics argued the innovations of impressionism were enabled by prior experiences of trav-
elers to the East? How would it skew the image of Henri Matisse to see him as a fellow traveler in
the caravan of colonial art tourists, whose work was made possible by the annexation of Morocco?
To accept the aesthetic riddle of his seeking inspiration in Islamic art yet turn the tables on avant-
gardist histories and see that quest as the spin-o¤ of colonial policies of government support for Is-
lamic artisanal traditions? It amounts to recontextualizing modernism from the periphery: consid-
ering how Renoir and Matisse looked from colonial Algiers and Tangier, on the one hand, and from
the perspective of the now marginalized belle époque academicism, on the other.

Introduction 3

The many imagined claimants on such a history of Orientalism, from art-loving Saudi sheikhs to
pied-noir families, from French museum professionals to American art history students, indicate that
it is eminently cross-cultural. Orientalist painting is an art of the interstices, often made literally on
the move. In its primary state, images made “before the motif ” in places distant from France, it vi-
sually translates cultural misunderstanding, limited or absolute, across borders. The Orientalist view
or photograph retains, as it were, the skin of the scene, but little of its inwardness. Among the few
traveling artists—they are a special focus of this book—who took the time to learn their way into
indigenous cultures, absorbing language, religion, and customs or living with the people they
painted, was Etienne Dinet, alias Nasr’Edine Dinet (to give him his Algerian name). In his case, re-
socializing the self made it possible to transform the meaning of Orientalist paintings, even if it pro-
vided little in the way of aesthetic revelation.

On the other side of such a cross-cultural exchange is the work of the few indigenous artists who
took up painting. They are rare indeed compared with the myriad Europeans, Americans, even Aus-
tralians who traveled in search of subjects to the countries of the Maghreb (the Arabic word for the
setting sun that designates the cultural and geographic bloc comprising the three large states of Tunisia,
Algeria, and Morocco). The future artists Racim and the landscapist Azouoau Mammeri, as children
of the indigenous elite in Algeria, had little choice whether to imbibe French language and cultural
knowledge alongside the mother tongue and the Koran. For them, to be socialized by Francophone
culture was a way forward. In adulthood, however, their decision to pursue painting in the face of
local tradition was a distinct expression of will.

To reconsider Orientalist art in the hands of “oriental” subjects is to break free of the interpreta-
tive vise applied to painting by admirers of Edward Said’s great study of European literary Oriental-
ism.3 Orientalism is no longer a one-way journey, a stream of visions frozen by European travelers
and carted home for consumption, without reference to the responses of those objectified in the pro-
cess. A visual technology like painting, implanted in a colonial situation, becomes available to users
other than those who imported it. Like language, it can talk back to the colonizer, in strophes appre-
ciated for their visual poetry even if their potential to restate meaning goes unperceived at the time
(as in Racim’s case). The forms of painting shift and are riven in the exchange, and non-European
currents—such as the Persian miniatures that are Racim’s primary reference—may be incorporated
into the mix, stressing cultural fealties outside the local, agonistic range.

Better tools for describing such relations are available since Homi Bhabha suggested how indige-
nous people in colonial situations could live their mental life, strategically mimicking the Other to
retain a space for the self.4 Even if such mimicry means splitting that self, this revised estimate of
colonial situations recognizes the possibilities for indigenous agency. The recognition needs to be ex-
tended from the study of individuals to colonialism as a system. Colonial systems, stretching back
to the Roman imperium, can be thought of as the most ancient instance of the supracommunal struc-

4 Introduction

tures now called globalizing. The best models for analyzing them stress precisely the endless mutual
inflection of participants, even in situations of unequal power. As Nicholas Thomas observes: “the
dynamics of colonialism cannot be understood if it is assumed that some unitary representation is
extended from the metropole and cast across passive spaces, unmediated by perceptions or encoun-
ters. Colonial projects are construed, misconstrued, adapted and enacted by actors whose subjectivi-
ties are fractured—half here, half there, sometimes disloyal, sometimes almost ‘on the side ’ of the
people they patronize and dominate, and against the interests of some metropolitan office.”5

At the same time, given such a necessary correction to unidirectional, condemnatory discourses,
one needs a realistic assessment of power in the colonial relation. In this book of ten chapters, just
two treat the activity of indigenous artists, and one of these involves a subaltern relation of anony-
mous decorative artisans organized by French colonial bureaucrats. The in-between men like Dinet,
Mammeri, and Racim remain remarkable exceptions. Their unusual status is the result of many things,
including the cultural disinclination among Maghrebians to make figurative images and the prevalence
of painting skills (since vanished) among the French middle classes. But their exceptionalism also re-
sults from the extrinsic limitations, both institutional and personal, of my project, which have to be
acknowledged. The museums, archives, and libraries where I have worked were assembled largely by
the French, and my linguistic skills (I do not know Arabic) mean that the overwhelming voice, when
it comes to painting in North Africa, is a “French” one, as I have translated it. When other histories
of such material are written, scholars with di¤erent language skills and vantage points may complete
what is here only a partial movement toward reassessing indigenous agency in Orientalist art.

My treatment of the visual and textual materials out of which I write has two main axes: art-
theoretical and institutional. The ten chapters broadly alternate between these axes—between con-
ditions of production and conditions of reception. The one informs the other: the cognitive and crit-
ical understanding of Orientalist painting modified the personal and governmental strategies that
brought the paintings about, and vice versa. The institutional approach, it seems to me, has the virtue
of dispensing with the minute intensive scrutiny of enlightened individuals that is the bane (and the
joy) of conventional art history. It allows broad patterns for the Orientalist phenomenon to emerge—
the role of exhibiting societies, of events like colonial expositions, of travel scholarships adminis-
tered by the state, of art museums.

In particular, this emphasis on institutions allows the first art-historical test of a provocative part
of Said’s thesis, his Foucauldian insight that the links between colonial governance and aesthetic pro-
duction were more than just benign and circumstantial, that they were constitutive in fundamental
ways. My research corroborates this part of Said’s case. Not only was the French colonial presence
in the Maghreb a precondition of Orientalist art there, but Orientalist precepts also harmonized with
thinking about the Other in contemporary colonial theory.

The danger in dealing with institutions is the loss of the human face, and in a book on art, of the

Introduction 5

aesthetic dimension. My second emphasis—on Orientalist aesthetics and artists—gives me the chance
to people the account with vivid personalities and signal pictures. Some of the artists are familiar
names in less-than-familiar guises (like Renoir or Matisse, each given a chapter). Others (like Mam-
meri or Racim) are unfamiliar names whose claim on the attention of Euro-American art lovers I
want to press here. Writing chapters on individual artists compels an engagement with mainstream
art history—largely the history of the avant-garde. But earlier arguments on the Orientalism of the
past have been based on incomplete art-historical information.

A major aim of this book is to inject further information into the discussion. I have taken pains to
seek out forgotten primary texts on Orientalism—and they, like the artists themselves, are remark-
ably numerous. Some, by major art critics like Eugène Fromentin or Léonce Bénédite, merit close
attention, for they articulate an aesthetics of Orientalism that is co-extensive with the painting. Oth-
ers, such as the numberless reviews of exhibitions of Orientalist art, give a sense of the conceptual
range in which the French public and critics thought about pictures made in colonies or protectorates
overseas.

The alternating accounts of institutions and specific identities take the reader through a series of
microstudies of specific institutions, works, and actors. I intend with this approach to underscore the
connectedness of colonial personalities, art world organizers, artists, and works in a historically
grounded theater of colonial activity, looking both out and back from the metropole (roughly, the
home country). Long-lived, energetic critics and bureaucrats, intent on carving out power bases from
which to advance their personal and colonial agendas, shaped the world of French colonial culture
to a significant degree. Again and again in Parisian Orientalist a¤airs one comes across these gate-
keepers, such as Léonce Bénédite, art scholar and curator of the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, who
shuttled between that city and Algiers; Armand Dayot, the administrator of traveling scholarships
who founded the journal Art et les Artistes; or Gaston Bernheim, the famous dealer who helped run
the Colonial Society of French Artists. In the Maghreb their counterparts were the more elusive Pros-
per Ricard, an expert in Algerian and Moroccan indigenous art; Jean Alazard, curator of the Na-
tional Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers; and Victor Barrucand, the lapsed symbolist newspaperman
and patron of the writer Isabelle Eberhardt. Among the artists only Etienne Dinet had a compara-
ble ubiquity of action in shaping the emerging field of European art in dialogue with indigenous sites
and traditions. From the patterns of their influence, something like a sociology of the colonial art
world emerges.

Specific institutions associated with such figures are woven into the historical account. It is worth
considering those institutions as collectivities generating Orientalism: large entities that (like the mod-
ern corporation or nongovernmental organization) shift men about and (unlike it) produce artworks.
The first of the institutions is the Society of French Orientalist Painters, set up around 1893 by Dinet
and Bénédite, its president, whose aesthetic platform was modeled partly on the ideas of the critic-

6 Introduction

painter Fromentin. The society was like a visual propaganda-development wing of the Ministry of
the Colonies, which helped fund its annual Salons and, with the governments of the bigger colonies,
established scholarships for young artists from the metropole to work in the French colonial empire
from Morocco to Indochina.

The society, first envisaged at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, thereafter contributed easel
pictures and panoramic paintings to almost every universal and colonial exhibition in France. Dio-
ramas and panoramas (see Chapter 5) mediated colonial imagery for the mass audience of the great
expositions. The French Ministry of the Colonies commissioned the society’s artists and made the
exotic both a paying attraction and a form of propaganda. Indeed the globe-trotting painter Louis
Dumoulin proved himself a versatile showman in his grandiose panoramic installation of 1900, the
Tour du Monde.

Traveling scholarships have a cross-institutional character, fertilizing Orientalist art by bringing
individual painters, sculptors, and architects into the broader machine of the French colonial empire.
My study of the scholarships descends to the quotidian, telling how young and often insecure artists
coped with life on government stipends in remote desert locations. Their expressions of enthusiasm
or bewilderment are held against the visual record of their pictures, and the challenge of landscapes
and peoples well beyond their previous experience. The Algerian government’s scholars at the Villa
Abd-et-Tif, who were designated by Bénédite in Paris, gave a specific visual profile to colonial paint-
ing in the 1920s—the so-called School of Algiers. That group in turn had a formative impact on the
National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, set up in 1930 by Jean Alazard.

A study like this,which aims at grounded cultural history rather than investigates visual typolo-
gies, needs temporal and geographic limits. The half century from about 1880 to 1930 that I have cho-
sen to study involves the period when French colonial expansion was at its apogee, and when the art
movements of modernism complicate the aesthetic tableau. Because many of the critical issues raised
by Orientalist art were present in romantic and realist criticism between 1850 and 1880, Chapter 1
sketches that earlier critical discourse. My own account becomes more detailed at the point when stan-
dard accounts of Orientalism say the movement went into decline. I argue on the contrary that
Renoir’s Algerian impressionism and Gustave Guillaumet’s and Dinet’s desert naturalism mark an
entirely new phase, the least known and most interesting of all. The period after 1880 also marks the
new imperialism, as France acquired colonies or protectorates—in Indochina, Tunisia, West Africa,
Madagascar, and Morocco—in the years leading up to World War I. The many artists issuing from
France in this period were a cultural by-product of this engine house of colonial expansion under
the Third Republic.

The book’s main focus is the high modernist era bounded by the exposition of 1900 and two ex-
positions of the early 1930s that make a logical terminus: the Centenary of French Algeria in 1930
and the International Colonial Exposition at Vincennes in 1931. The National Museum of Fine Arts

Introduction 7

of Algiers was built for the little-known centenary, for the visual was crucial to centenary symbol-
ism: paintings, posters, stamps, photographs, museum and military displays—all had a place in this
grand fete of colonialism. If the signs of colonial resistance were largely suppressed in Algeria, in
Paris two counter-expositions showed the anticolonial currents nascent among metropolitan and in-
digenous radicals. The book closes with them, but only in the 1950s did a chain reaction of political
crises and wars bring about the almost complete dismemberment of the French colonial empire.

I want to explain my geographic focus on North Africa in view of my remarks on colonialism as
a global system. Historical ideas on Orientalism have always been closely tied to geopolitical con-
ceptions of space. For the painter-writer Ary Renan (son of the great historian), the Orient was a
“vague word defined quite clearly by the frontiers of the ancient Muslim conquests”; that is also my
general rule of thumb.6 In a century of warfare France, England, and to a lesser extent Italy had re-
placed the Turks as the main military and trading forces in much of the Ottoman Empire. Although
I accept the French sense of the term “Orient,” I focus on relations between the metropole and the
western part of that Orient—the Maghreb—for several reasons.

Algeria was much the oldest French possession in North Africa, and the only one that became a
thoroughgoing settler colony. Its history was permanently entwined with the visual arts—from the
popular woodblocks that recorded the landing of French troops at Sidi-Ferruch in 1830 and Eugène
Delacroix’s monumental Women of Algiers of 1834 forward. As will be seen in Chapter 1, Algeria long
remained the setting most popular for Salon pictures of Eastern subjects. A variety of conditions—
travel infrastructure, relative security, francophony—abetted the raw appeal of the exotic that ap-
peared so abundant in the mountains and oases of that country.

The smaller nation of Tunisia, declared a French protectorate (governed jointly with the beys of
Tunis) in 1881, also became a popular destination for artist travelers (the most celebrated of whom
was the Swiss Paul Klee). Except for the part it plays in my discussion of the art nouveau designer
Victor Prouvé, who went there on a traveling scholarship, Tunisia is less a focus of my account than
Morocco, which succeeded Algeria as the favored destination of French artists after it was made a
protectorate in 1912. For the French, Morocco, never an Ottoman possession, represented an ancient
and inaccessible Moorish culture. Its symbolic status had been established by Delacroix’s watercol-
ors and canvases, images later revised by rare visitors like Benjamin Constant and Henri Regnault.
After the annexation of 1912 Matisse was among the first to arrive there in what became a veritable
flood of painters. But protectorate Morocco is equally interesting for its experiments in fostering the
indigenous decorative arts under the guidance of Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey.

Lyautey, a career soldier and administrator with experience in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria, and
Morocco, is a crossover figure who exemplifies colonialism as a transnational system. His progressive
ideas about associating the colonial government with native hierarchies, adopted in all four colonial
theaters, bore fruit in his cultural policies for Morocco. He encouraged the indigenous painter Mam-

8 Introduction

meri and placed heritage issues, such as “reviving” the extensive Moroccan arts industries, in the hands
of French artists working alongside indigenous craftsmen and -women. Orientalist artist bureaucrats
like Dumoulin or Joseph de la Nézière (whom Lyautey hired) were similarly creatures of global colo-
nialism. But their peregrinations to Indochina, Japan, or Senegal are beyond the scope of this book.
This study, unlike Gwendolyn Wright’s admirable work on French urbanism in Morocco, Madagascar,
and Indochina, is not a deliberately comparative project.7 French painting in other colonial theaters
must await further study. I hope instead to gain strength from my spatial focus on the axis from Paris
to Algiers, with lines of cross-reference to Tangier and Tunis, Granada and Marseille.

The North African component of this ancient Mediterranean littoral was a byway of Roman, Punic,
and Berber cultures in antiquity and of Arab, Berber, and European cultures in modern times. Part
of the French covetousness of the nearby Orient drew on perceptions of the imaginative and his-
torical richness of the Maghreb as a location for culture. It is a commonplace that the national imag-
ining of France was defined in part by what (or whom) it excluded—those people who were outre-
Rhin or outre-Manche, or Belgian or Spanish. The Maghreb is curious in that the French imperial will
required its integration into the idea of the French nation. The easy way, conceptually, was to adopt
a hierarchical model of inferior colonial dependencies that enriched, but did not impinge on, the metro-
pole. Much Orientalist painting of Maghrebian people and places observes that separation. The more
difficult and interesting (if equally problematic) option was to rethink the French nation as encom-
passing and embracing North Africa, culturally and politically. The antique Latin connection—
Frenchmen asserting that they were the new Romans come to reclaim their inheritance—went some
distance but violently negated the Arab and Berber presence. The concept of cross-cultural fusion
with current North African culture remains fascinating.

That idea advanced further in art and letters than in politics. It animates the most interesting mo-
ments of Orientalism—when French painters “went native,” Algerians “went modern,” and Euro-
pean avant-gardists and conservatives alike opened up to the promptings of aesthetic traditions not
their own. Political history called a violent halt to the process on the ground, but in the rarefied realm
of the aesthetic, the rather beautiful idea of such a merging has by no means had its day.

Introduction 9



1 Orient or France?
Nineteenth-Century Debates

Romantic Critics before a Desert Street
I myself am su¤ering to some extent from a nostalgia which drags me
towards the sun; for I find an intoxicating mist arising from these lumi-
nous canvases, which soon condenses into desires and regrets. I catch
myself envying the lot of those men who are lying outstretched amid
their azure shades, and whose eyes, neither waking nor sleeping, express,
if anything at all, only love of repose and a feeling of blissful happiness
inspired by an immensity of light.
– c h a r l e s b a u d e l a i r e , “The Salon of 1859”
(translated by Jonathan Mayne)
Few writers did more to suggest a psychology for European exoticism than Charles Baudelaire. The
desire for expatriation is strong in his contemplation of an oil painting, nostalgia for a sun so absent
in a wet Paris spring, envy for the lot of men understood as creatures entirely given over to their
senses. Baudelaire looks to the East as a place to repair the deficiencies of life in modern France, a

11

mentality continued in his poems of longing for distant climes. In his “Parfum exotique,” “La
chevelure,” and the celebrated “Invitation au voyage” from his book Les fleurs du mal of 1857, imag-
inative escape is conjured by meditations on the poet’s Creole lover, Jeanne Duval. Images of ports
and ships, of half-glimpsed tropical foliage, abundant fruit, and warm seas arose as he contemplated
the body of his sleeping mistress and her origins elsewhere.1 They entered the French imaginary in
a powerful way, suggesting subjects for many a painter, sculptor, and later writer on Orientalist art.

The picture that inspired Baudelaire’s reverie in the epigraph to this chapter was Eugène Fromentin’s
Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat (La rue bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat) (1859; see Plate 1). Fromentin had
a way of presenting the physical intensity of color, the direct fall of African light on sun-warmed
buildings so that viewers of the painting, in the filtered light of the Paris Salon, were momentarily
transported down there, to a land of altered existence. Théophile Gautier also stopped in front of this
painting. A leading romantic novelist, travel writer, and poet whom Baudelaire admired, Gautier was
probably the most influential art critic of the Second Empire (Fig. 1).2 In a characteristic witticism he
confronts regimented European modernity with haphazard African life: “The Street at Laghouat will
never please lovers of progress, who demand for each town in the world the same footpaths, tarmac,
street alignment, gas lamps, and enamel house numbers.” The street itself is “as jumbled as the bed
of a dry watercourse,” while in the deep shadow cast by the wall of crumbling mud brick, the critic
discerns a row of “practical philosophers,” lying as inert as “cadavers enveloped in their shrouds.”3

These words resound today, first, for predicting French colonial urbanism and, second, for allud-
ing to the sack of Laghouat by the French army some years before the painting was made. Not that
Gautier, though a seasoned traveler, necessarily knew of the oasis town’s tragic history. Early in a se-
ries of journeys to Spain, Turkey, Egypt, and Russia, he spent three months in Algeria in 1845, fifteen
years after the French capture of Algiers, the corsair capital, and just two after the first long war of
colonial pacification, which crushed the Emir Abd-el-Kader’s jihad, or holy war. The siege and sack
of Laghouat did not take place until 1852, as a response to one of the sporadic rebellions in the region.

Gautier’s early visit to Algiers had alerted him to an aspect of French colonization that he was one
of the earliest writers to regret: the modernization of the ancient corsair city (captured in elegiac mode
by Emile Lessore and William Wyld, Fig. 2). Although echoing his friend Gérard de Nerval, per-
petually disappointed as he traveled through the Near East encountering peoples and visiting sites that
failed to live up to his expectations,4 Gautier varies the theme. His disenchantments resulted from the
depredations of Europeans. Orientalist paintings—like those of William Wyld, who had painted View
of Bab-Azoun Street (Vue de la rue Bab-Azoun) in 1833—were the visual documents that allowed Gau-
tier to judge the depressing march of civilization: “Having seen [Bab-Azoun Street] recently, I can
say that it has not gained from our civilizing presence. . . . So varied, so picturesque, so interesting in
former times, [it] will soon be nothing more than a prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli. . . . That abom-
inably fine road, which cannot stretch past the Louvre, has jumped the Mediterranean and toppled

12 Orient or France?

figure 1
Eugène Giraud, Théophile
Gautier Smoking His
Chibouk, watercolor, 1862.

the elegant Moorish buildings so as to continue its frightful arcades.”5 As if in a prelude to the ar-
guments over Baron Haussmann’s demolition of old quarters of Paris to make way for the great boule-
vards in the 1860s, Gautier in 1849 regretted the passing of old Algiers. The most glaring act of de-
struction there was the razing of the Turkish Palace of the Deys to open up the vast Place du
Gouvernement (soon ringed with Haussmannesque buildings).6

Adrien Dauzats was one of the early artists to depict this much-painted center of public life in Al-
giers (Fig. 3). The recently erected statue of the duc d’Orléans (a leader in the war against Abd-el-
Kader) and the masts of ships beyond contrast the French presence with the Mosquée de la Pêcherie,
with its stately domes and soaring minaret. The motley crowd—French soldiers, civilian men and

Orient or France? 13

figure 2
Emile Lessore and William

Wyld, View of Algiers,
Seen from the Faubourg
Bab-Azoun, lithograph,

1835.

figure 3
Adrien Dauzats, The Place
du Gouvernement at Algiers,

oil on canvas, 1849.

14

figure 4
Riding Camels,
wood engraving,
1869.

women, Turks, biskris (members of the guild of porters, originally from the town of Biskra), Bedouin
(nomadic Arabs), and Berbers in full costume—gives a sense of the polyglot city ignored by most
artists. In 1846 in his account of the city, Alger extra-muros, Gautier lamented the incongruity of the
new French buildings (encroaching at far left in Dauzat’s painting) and the loss of historic buildings
like the forbidding fortress Bab-Azoun.7

Thus in viewing the Street at Laghouat Gautier rejoices in what o¤ends those “lovers of progress”
the French colonists, who were settling the temperate hinterlands of Algeria. Gautier did not oppose
modernization as such: he lauded the new steam technologies that powered the passenger boats, en-
abling rapid scheduled crossings of the Mediterranean. “Steam-power, so often belittled as bourgeois
and prosaic, has carried o¤ [artists] with the spin of a propeller or a wheel, with more speed than the
legendary hippogri¤. Today the Sahara is dotted with as many landscapists’ parasols as the Forest of
Fontainebleau in days gone by.”8 European modernity, preceded (as Gautier conceded) by military
conquest, had done much to enlarge the horizons of art by giving artists new subjects. But the march
of modernity itself in the Algerian colony was generally not a valid subject for serious art (Fig. 4).
The romantic critic expected paintings to image otherness—architectural, ethnographic, or climatic.
Insofar as Gautier and the traveling Salon artists he applauded were tourists, that requirement of the
cultural tour has changed little in a century and a half.

In the Fromentin painting, the shadow where the sleeping Arabs lie is, metaphorically, the shadow
of a violent past of which the artist was well aware. Fromentin was the first major artist to sojourn
in Algeria for extended periods after the war with Abd-el-Kader. Most of Dauzats’s or Horace Ver-
net’s paintings in the earlier 1840s had been commissioned to celebrate the campaigns of the duc d’Or-

Orient or France? 15

figure 5
Eugène Delacroix,
Arabs Traveling, oil

on canvas, 1855.

léans, the duc d’Aumale, and Field Marshal Bugeaud—Vernet produced huge military canvases of
a kind execrated by Baudelaire.9 Fromentin, traveling as a private individual, instead imaged a more
peaceable Algeria, its landscapes and above all its Bedouin people of the plains. But France ’s
pacification was provisional: there was intermittent military action in the Saharan zone and, later in
the century, in the populous mountains of Kabylia and the Aurès, in particular the great Kabyle In-
surrection of 1871 and its aftershocks.

The Siege of Laghouat of 1852 was such an action, with bloody repression following the taking
of the town. Like most of the French campaigns it was depicted in now largely forgotten military
paintings.10 In his travel book Un été dans le Sahara Fromentin noted the devastation of the desert
town, put to the sword by the French just months before his arrival there in 1853. Fromentin gave no
sense that he thought the French were wrong in their massacre of inhabitants, carried out with the
collusion of tribes “friendly” to the French. To do so would have been impolitic, given his own re-
liance on the French military presence for his security. Traveling with a small armed entourage, he
could have journeyed to the Sahara only with the permission of the military officers of the Bureaux
arabes who administered the Algerian territories. In his apparently timeless image of Laghouat peace

16 Orient or France?

is restored, and the age-old afternoon siesta resumes, allowing a concentration on such aesthetic is-
sues as the opposition between the intensely blue sky and the parched mud-coated desert buildings.
Fromentin’s material vision made the romanticized Moroccan landscapes of Delacroix (Fig. 5) seem
dated and presaged the early impressionists’ experiments with light in the next decade.11

Fromentin and the Aesthetics of Travel

Between his debut in 1847 and his painting Bab-el-Gharbi Street at Laghouat of 1859 Fromentin be-
came the figure around whom debates on the merits of the Orientalist genre crystallized. While his
paintings gave rise to passionate discussions, his writings on Algeria essayed an aesthetic of Orien-
talist practice. By the time his novel Dominique was published in 1862, Fromentin had established a
unique reputation, being recognized equally as a writer and a painter. He is best remembered by art
historians for Les maîtres d’autrefois (1876), a work on the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish
schools that Meyer Schapiro called “a masterpiece of criticism which may be read beside Baudelaire’s.”12
Of his two travel books, Un été dans le Sahara (1857; Sahara hereafter) and Une année dans le Sahel
(1859; Sahel hereafter),13 the first received eloquent reviews from George Sand and from Gautier, who
quipped that Fromentin as a writer “has become a master without ever being a student.”14

Fromentin’s role as a theorist of Orientalism has yet to be given its due. If the studies of Léonce
Bénédite at the turn of the twentieth century are any guide, Fromentin was the most influential voice
on this issue in the nineteenth century. Delacroix, who preceded him as a painter and writer who trav-
eled to North Africa, o¤ered no systematic discussion of the problems of painting in the East. Whereas
Fromentin published two travel narratives that are as complete as novels, Delacroix attempted noth-
ing more than private letters home, fascinating though they are, and artist’s notes published posthu-
mously as part of his Journal.

In his pages on what he calls “la peinture orientale” Fromentin systematically explores the pa-
rameters of the category. He had journeyed to Algiers and Blida in the spring of 1846 with Armand
du Mesnil, returning to make his Salon debut with two Algerian landscapes. He went back to Alge-
ria for the 1847–48 winter, traveling farther south with the painter and early photographer Auguste
Salzmann to the near Saharan oasis of Biskra (about which see Chapter 7).15 His last and longest stay,
of 1852–53—in the company of his wife, Marie Cavallet de Beaumont, who remained in the tem-
perate Sahel while Fromentin ventured south to Laghouat—became the basis for his Sahara.

He wrote Sahel, however, five years after leaving Algeria, in the form of letters backdated to the
time of his travels to give immediacy to his text. Elisabeth Cardonne emphasizes Sahel as “the fruit
of a profound work of memory, which draws the data of experience into mental compositions of ex-
ceptional acuity”—a mnemonic feat much admired by the Goncourts and others.16 Although Fro-
mentin traveled to Algeria primarily to paint, he recounts very little of that activity in his books,

Orient or France? 17

moving about the country, once he has left Algiers, less as a purposeful traveler than a flâneur of the
open spaces whose aims are not revealed. Key passages, however, address the problems of painting
the Orient. The most important of them, in Sahel, begins: “The Orient . . . has the fault of being
unknown and new, and of evoking at first a feeling foreign to art—dangerous to it—that I would
like to forbid: a feeling of curiosity.” Curiosity in this now dated sense is the attraction of the new
and peculiar and involves a quickening aroused by novelty that might seem trivial in the grand scheme
of art. For the Orient, Fromentin continues, “is exceptional, and history shows us that nothing beau-
tiful or durable has been made with exceptions. It escapes general laws, the only ones worth follow-
ing. . . . Even when it is very beautiful, it retains a certain modicum . . . of exaggeration, of violence
that renders it excessive. This is an order of beauty that, having no precedents in either ancient lit-
erature or art, strikes us initially as bizarre.”17

Fromentin’s skepticism about the project of painting the East is surprising. He gains his convic-
tion from measuring the task against a familiar system: the academic tradition he had imbibed in the
painting studio of Louis Cabat. He responds to scenes that “escape general laws” and “have no pre-
cedent in either ancient literature or art” with an alarm similar to that of classicist and neoclassicist
critics confronting an excess of brute, vulgar detail (whether in the paintings of Caravaggio in the
seventeenth century or in the realism of Fromentin’s contemporary Courbet). The task of painting,
in this academic tradition, was not merely to copy nature in all its unselected, chaotic form, but to
assimilate the visible to ideas of the beautiful, le beau idéal, by selectively adjusting natural elements.18
Classicist criticism rates academic precedent and the active forming of material above any truth inas-
similable to the tradition it represented.

Fromentin nevertheless had the resources to go beyond academic tradition, and in treating the new
class of subject, he generated a critique of “documentary” painting of the exotic. In the 1850s Fro-
mentin had argued forcefully against an ethnographic approach to painting. He thought it danger-
ous to present to the European viewer aspects of life in the Orient so bizarre as to be inassimilable
to the art of painting. Displaying something without precedent in the history of European repre-
sentation would risk revealing “de périlleuses nouveautés”—dangerous novelties (a phrase later taken
up by Léonce Bénédite). As Fromentin argued, the public might come to expect of painters infor-
mation proper to travel diaries, “pictures composed like an inventory, [so that] the taste for ethnog-
raphy will end up being confused with the feeling for beauty.”19

Fromentin called the manifestations of the taste for ethnography documents, meaning “the visual
signal for a country . . . the exact type of its inhabitants . . . their foreign and strange costumes, their
attitudes, their postures, their customs, their duties, which are not ours.”20 Clearly, Fromentin had
little tolerance for the scientific image making that for well over a century had been part of the task
of exploration in the Pacific and elsewhere. In that attitude he di¤ered from Gautier, who proclaimed
that the old national schools of Europe must be succeeded by a universal school, in which all types

18 Orient or France?

of humanity will be represented, the “monotony of the European type” being varied by “the exotic
charms of Hindu beauty, Arab beauty, Turkish beauty, Chinese beauty.”21

The disciplines of ethnography and ethnology, understood as writing or describing the charac-
teristics of peoples, had first emerged as a science in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century.
French and British voyages of exploration in the Pacific and even Russian scientific expeditions sta¤ed
by German scholars to newly conquered Siberian territories typically impelled such study.22 By the
1820s and 1830s in France ethnologists began to integrate diverse racial, geographic, linguistic, and
historical elements, so that the first Ethnological Society, founded in Paris in 1839, dedicated itself to
pursuing “the physical organization, the intellectual and moral character, the languages and histor-
ical traditions” of specific peoples.23 The concept of ethnography was widely di¤used enough for
Gautier and Fromentin to take it up in the late 1850s, and Jean-Léon Gérôme to be labeled a producer
of “ethnographic canvases” on account of his “remarkable aptitude for seizing and rendering the
typical characteristics of diverse peoples.”24 The broad sense of “ethnography” was gradually dis-
placed, and by the turn of the century it was considered descriptive, “the scientific mapping out of
di¤erent racial regions, nations and tribes.”25 As Patricia Lorcin has shown, Algeria was the great
French testing ground for ethnographic data and theories of race.26

Fromentin’s books make up for the avoidance of ethnographic detail in his paintings. His travel-
ogues contain copious descriptions of the North African scene, the landscape and vegetation, the
towns, the oases and their activity, and the people he met and occasionally befriended. In Sahel he
gives a detailed picture of Mustapha, the hamlet where he lived just outside the walls of Algiers, and
includes vignettes of his favorite corner café in the Algiers Casbah (the “Carrefour de Fromentin”).
Further sites include that focus of women’s public social life, the cemetery of Bab-Azoun. Such texts
correspond to an iconography of Algerian subjects selected by Orientalist painters and lithographers
like Wyld and Théodore Frère but largely neglected in Fromentin’s own painting. His awareness of
the local discomfort with the painter’s prying eyes led him to suggest a protocol he largely followed,
one that appears radical in the context of later Orientalist practice: “It might have been possible for
me to enter the mosque, but I did not try. To penetrate further into Arab life than is permitted seems
to me misplaced curiosity. This people must be seen from the distance at which it chooses to reveal
itself: men close up, women from afar. To describe a women’s apartment or to paint the ceremonies
of the Arabs’ religion is in my opinion graver than fraud: it is to commit, in the matter of art, an er-
ror of point of view.”27

Fromentin’s own art looked, not to the iconography of town and city, but to the great open spaces
of Bedouin nomadic life. He painted distant views of their encampments under rolling clouds and
innumerable scenes of horsemanship and the hunt on the open plains of the Sahel (Fig. 6). While
squarely in the tradition of Delacroix’s and Théodore Chassériau’s more violent mounted duels and
lion hunts (Fig. 7), such images correspond closely to the milieu evoked in the second half of Sahel.

Orient or France? 19

figure 6
Eugène Fromentin,

Arab Falconer, oil
on canvas, 1863.

20

figure 7
Théodore Chassériau,
Arab Chiefs Challenging
Each Other to Single Combat
under the Ramparts of a
City, oil on canvas, 1852.

There Fromentin details a falconry hunt at Lake Haououa and a fatal fantasia (a display of riding
and skill in arms by a mass of galloping horsemen) that followed. In the latter a key character in the
narrative, a Mozabite (town-dwelling desert Berber) beauty friendly to the narrator, named Haoua,
is crushed by a horse ridden by her jealous husband. The drama of both the fantasia and the accident
is absent from Fromentin’s painting, however, as are the scenes of harsh desert life in the Sahara vol-
ume (with the notable exception of the Land of Thirst (Pays du soif ).28

Fromentin admitted he was emotionally drawn to the glamour of the exotic yet rationally repelled
by it. That incompatibility of responses can be linked to his technical limitations as a painter, which
he himself lamented. (He felt, for example, that Delacroix was the only artist skilled enough to rep-
resent adequately that great image of Maghrebian horsemanship, the fantasia.)29 But the broader prob-
lem was to communicate with a European public lacking the wherewithal to appreciate the exotic
scene, because the Oriental landscape, for Fromentin, “escapes every convention; it is outside any
discipline; it transposes, it inverts everything.”30

Such classicizing biases impinge on one last aspect of Fromentin’s travel books: his sense of the
East as biblical. Presuppositions shared by Delacroix, Gautier, and many other travelers to the East
in the nineteenth century led them to compare the Oriental scene to ancient Rome and Palestine. Fro-

Orient or France? 21

mentin pushed the biblical analogies further than most.31 In Sahara, for example, his encounter with
a tribe on a march evoked the migrations of ancient Israel. Painter colleagues in Paris had recently
argued that the old masters “had disfigured the Bible by painting it,” and the only way to revive its
spirit was to go to the Orient and contemplate its “living effigy.”32

In theology the correlate of this argument was Ernst Renan’s Vie de Jésus Christ of 1861, a con-
troversial ethnographic reconstruction of Christ’s life that had the e¤ect of querying his divinity.
Against such modernism Fromentin sided with the old masters, reinforcing the biblical character of
the Arab people of the Sahara, who possessed “real grandeur,” achieving “without being nude, . . .
that almost complete stripping back of exterior form that the masters conceived in the simplicity
of their great souls.”33 Fromentin was not pleading here for painters to use Bedouin sitters to give
local color to biblical paintings. For him that approach was doomed: “To costume the Bible is to de-
stroy it.”

Such conversations about race and ethnicity continually animate Fromentin’s narratives. His ob-
servations treat not just Arab people but also categories like “Moors” and “Negroes,” whom he had
trouble defining, and the mercantile classes of Jews, who were ancient immigrants, and Mozabites,
who were autochthonous people. Fromentin wrote almost nothing, however, about the various south-
ern Mediterranean peoples—Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, and Spanish, who, with the Provençals,
Alsatians, and other French, made up a good proportion of the colonials arriving in North Africa in
the nineteenth century.

Such exercises in ethnographic classification typify the writings of French visitors to, and settlers
in, the colony, starting with the military observers of the Bureaux arabes who had first begun to cat-
egorize the peoples with whom they had either to negotiate or to fight. As Patricia Lorcin has ad-
mirably demonstrated, such writings propagated the Kabyle myth, which argued for the racial sep-
arateness of the Berber peoples of Algeria (primarily the Kabyle, Chaouia, and Mozabite groups)
from the Arabs. The Berbers were considered autochthonous Algerians who had resisted the waves
of Arab conquest by retreating to the Atlas Mountains of Kabylia and the Aurès. They lived in vil-
lages and farmed, unlike the nomadic Arabs, and thus had developed characteristics and social insti-
tutions that brought them far closer to Europeans than the Arabs would ever come. The Berbers’
conversion to Islam had only ever been partial, unlike that of the “fanatic” Arabs. According to the
racial scale most Europeans accepted in the nineteenth century, the Berbers were well above the Arabs,
if below the Europeans. Arabs were generally denigrated for their immorality (their practice of
polygamy), their irrationality (their acceptance of Koranic religion), their lack of productivity (their
failure to either farm or pursue a trade), and a general duplicity.34

Fromentin’s observations contradict the conclusions of the Kabyle myth while preserving its struc-
ture and its contrast between nomadic and sedentary peoples. He idolized the Arabs, writing of the
heroism of their nomadic life, their moral toughness, their simplicity. In Sahel he spends pages defining

22 Orient or France?

the Bedouin peoples of the plain against the sedentary Moors, city dwellers of Turkish heritage and
commercial disposition. Kabyle farmers scarcely appear in his account, perhaps because he rarely
encountered them. Such racial preferences underwrite the imagery of his painting, so wholly given
over to the people of the plains and arid zones.

As for indigenous perceptions of the French, Fromentin had few illusions. Indeed, in a politically
precocious passage he describes the Arab hatred of the French. But he defends his countrymen as
much better rulers than the Turks, even as he details the estrangement of a colonized people in their
own land because of the abhorrent presence of an invader: “What [the Arabs] detest in us . . . is not
our administration, more equitable than that of the Turks; our less venial legal system; our religion,
which is tolerant of theirs. . . . What they detest is our proximity, that is to say, ourselves: our style,
our habits, our character, our genius. They fear our very kindness. Not being able to exterminate us,
they endure us; unable to flee us, they avoid us. Their principle, their maxim, is to be silent, to dis-
appear, and to have us forget them.”35

The Realist Critique of Orientalism: Castagnary and Duranty

It is not far from Fromentin’s ambivalence about the French presence in the Orient to outright op-
position, both to colonialism and the more specialized art it engendered. It is not surprising that when
an intellectually sustained critique of Orientalist painting challenged the unmitigated approbation of
Gautier and Baudelaire and the equivocation of Fromentin, it came from the realists. Members of that
camp were both opponents of the academic order and critics of the social order. Baudelaire’s distaste
for military painting and all it stood for was shared by authors on the French Left, but as the century
advanced, their perception of the problems of the colonial enterprise became more far-reaching. The
socialist position—that capitalists in the international framework had as little right to exploit work-
ers in foreign climes as they did the European proletariat—was articulated well before the turn of
the century. Charles-Robert Ageron has shown that leftists had no monopoly on anticolonial senti-
ment.36 They were joined, for di¤ering reasons, by French royalists and by republicans such as Georges
Clémenceau, who felt that after the defeat of 1871 France should muster all its military resources to
face the threat on the border with Germany, rather than spread them thin across territories outside
Europe. Argument also raged (and has continued to rage) over the economic benefit of the colonies
to France—whether they cost more to run than they returned, thus draining the nation’s resources
in the name of national pride and in the desire that France hold a position commensurate with that
of her European rivals, England in particular.

Such arguments only occasionally filtered through to discussions of art. More often writers on the
visual arts justified French colonialism on cultural grounds. Because, they argued, colonialism is a
civilizing enterprise, bringing to African and East Asian countries the “benefits” of a modern social

Orient or France? 23

order, trade, communications, literacy, and—perhaps above all—religion, it was an indisputable good.
The argument against modernization also found its place early on in art criticism, with Gautier, as
we have seen, leading the way. He valued the East for its di¤erence from modernizing Europe and
feared European urbanism, imported from across the Mediterranean, as a destructive force.

Realist writers such as Champfleury, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and above all Antoine Castagnary
seldom dismissed Orientalist art on explicitly political grounds, instead relying on aesthetic argu-
ments. Yet there is a logical congruence between rejecting European colonial hegemony and the re-
alists’ call for French artists to occupy themselves with the problems of the national school on French
soil, to prefer France to the Orient.

Castagnary developed a critique and sustained it over two decades, from 1857 (when as a young
law clerk he published his first Salon review) to 1876, when he e¤ectively declared Orientalism dead
and buried.37 He may be credited with introducing the term “Orientalism” to define a tendency in
art, as often happens, in a pejorative sense, isolating and decrying what he considered a negative de-
velopment. Gautier, an ebullient but unsystematic critic, had written positively of “Africanist” and
then of “ethnographic” painting but let both rubrics quickly fall into disuse. Castagnary realized the
advantages of being consistent in his negativity.

In his “Salon of 1857” he refused to describe exoticist painting in detail, considering it a waste of
space he could devote to the contemporary French school of landscape, led by his hero Gustave
Courbet, which was making important advances. He classed exponents of exotic scenes among the
inferior landscapists, who “go far o¤ to search in the Orient, deep in the desert, for a nature that is
extraordinary and lacks any relation to our ideas and our temperament. . . . In vain do they . . .
reproduce e¤ects that we, as men of the Occident, are unable to judge, as these e¤ects find no har-
mony in ourselves.”38

These arguments have a familiar ring. Fromentin had appealed to concepts of “le beau” in claim-
ing that the African landscape stretched the limits of representation. Castagnary appeals, not to such
elite values, but rather to the psychology of the broad public, whose faculty of judgment is seem-
ingly limited to affirming the veracity of what it knows by experience. Courbet put that view of paint-
ing in his famous letter to his students of 1861, a manifesto of realism thought to have been ghost-
written by his friend Castagnary. The letter argued that painting was an essentially concrete art that
should be concerned only with real and existing things, and that judgments about beauty and truth
were always relative, dependent on an individual’s faculty of understanding.39 It follows for Castag-
nary that painting the local French scene makes the best sense in art: “I love the nature that surrounds
me because, being born into it, used to seeing it, I and such a nature are in intimate correlation. It
has, as it were, entered into the development of my ideas, participated in the formation of my per-
sonality, and wherever I go, I carry it with me. Now your desert, your palm trees, your camels may
astonish my intelligence, but they will never produce the sweet and peaceful emotion given me by

24 Orient or France?

the sight of cows in a meadow edged with poplars.”40 That affirmation of place and European iden-
tity is almost xenophobic. In describing some archetypal Barbizon landscape replete with cows, mead-
ows, and poplars, Castagnary excludes any image of the nation made outside the hexagon of true
France. The French colonial empire—what came to be called greater France or France overseas—
did not qualify as a subject for painting.

Fromentin’s growing reputation caused Castagnary to make a few concessions. It is not clear when
he first read Fromentin’s Sahara, but in his next major Salon review Castagnary betrayed a sneak-
ing admiration for Fromentin, an amateur writer envied by professionals, a lawyer and artist unan-
imously considered preeminent among painters of the Orient. Nevertheless for Castagnary, Fro-
mentin remained too much the romantic, interested in the “picturesque point of view,” always
searching for “the joujou, the pretty touch that fits in well.” But the critic continued to hope Fro-
mentin would take a more naturalist turn, and again paint French subjects, French identity.41

The term “Orientalist” first appears in Castagnary’s writing when he returns to the attack in his
“Salon of 1864.” There is nothing remarkable about the term itself, which, as Said has shown, was
regularly used to describe nineteenth-century scholars, in particular linguists, philologists, and his-
torians of the Near and Middle East. Indeed in 1873 the International Congress of Orientalists was
founded in France to promote such studies.42 Castagnary sought reason to find the painters he called
Orientalists (such as Léon Belly and Narcisse Berchère) unpatriotic, guilty of a failure to believe in
the beauty of France and its people. Orientalists, consumed by a hatred of the here and now, have
but one desire, to “flee Paris, to abscond from the world around them, to escape the obsession with
the real and the present. There is nothing they would not prefer to what is.”43

It is not surprising to find the realist associating escapism not only with place but also with time.
That imaginative transposition includes both mythological subjects and the painters of distant ages,
like Lawrence Alma-Tadema, in his Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Egyptiens de la dix-huitième
dynastie). Jean-Léon Gérôme, an exponent of the neo-Greek taste, was one of the most prominent
contemporary Orientalists who traveled regularly (Fig. 8). Castagnary was scathing about Gérôme ’s
selling o¤ the studies he had made during his voyage to the Orient: “His Almeh is a note he should
have kept in the portfolio. It is of a coldly calculating indecency, and I recoil from describing it. Pe-
tit métier, in any case, mean, unpleasant, boring in the extreme.”44

Escapism, lack of patriotism, abhorrence of social realities, technical conservatism—such were
the insults the realist critic threw at Orientalism in the year following the Salon des Refusés. Before
the end of the decade little had occurred to counter the decadence of the genre for Castagnary.45
Then the young Henri Regnault burst onto the scene. His Spanish work, the Portrait of General Prim
(Portrait du Général Prim) and his Salomé of 1870, attracted considerable attention from the many
artists and critics who still had faith in the Salon as the location of important new art. Regnault was
an elite convert to Orientalism: winner of the Prix de Rome, he had defected from the academic main-

Orient or France? 25

figure 8
Jean-Léon Gérôme,
The Almeh (Arab Girl in a
Doorway), oil on canvas,

1873.

stream by giving up his scholarship and residency at the Villa Medici (the base in Rome for the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts, often called the Rome School) to travel to Granada. There, in the company of his
friend Benjamin Constant, he made a series of magnificent watercolor studies of the Alhambra Palace.
The two men then set up a studio at Tangier (on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar), where Reg-
nault intended to undertake a series of ambitious canvases on life under the Moorish caliphs of
Granada. Few were painted: Regnault’s Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada (Exé-
cution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade) is by far the most famous. The little-known Ex-
ecution of a Janissary (L’Exécution d’un janissaire), its setting modern Egypt under Sultan Mahmoud II
(who suppressed that elite armed force in 1826), was also produced in Tangier.46 Regnault, return-
ing to France in a patriotic fervor in 1870, was killed by a stray bullet while on defensive patrol against
the besieging Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris.

26 Orient or France?

Castagnary admired Regnault, although he mistrusted the bravura of the General Prim and con-
sidered the Salomé (which he failed to categorize as an Orientalist work at the Salon of 1870) as an
exercise in painting colored accessories. Castagnary was doubtless aware of the Summary Execution,
which, after the restoration of order, spread the shock waves of its theatrical violence through the
Musée du Luxembourg (as through the Musée d’Orsay today). Regnault’s more intimate masterpieces,
including the watercolors Hassan and Namouna (Hassan et Namouna) (named for a tale from the Thou-
sand and One Nights; see Plate 2) and Haoua (named for the tragic heroine of Fromentin’s Sahel ),
had been painted in a Parisian studio during the Siege of Paris. They were shown in a posthumous
exhibition of Regnault’s work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872 and praised by an aged Gautier.47

After the successive catastrophes of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1871, Castag-
nary, a staunch republican, was able to return to his reviewing. From 1873 to 1879 he came to occupy
an increasingly significant position as a political commentator and official, and in 1887 (the year be-
fore his death) he was named to the peak administrative position of director of fine arts.48 The year
1876 marked the final battle of his campaign against Orientalism. He orchestrated all his previous
critiques into an expanded text that culminated in the coup de grâce of declaring the movement dead
and buried. He wrote the most cogent historiography of the movement yet to appear, detailing its
initial development, stimulated by the Greek War of Independence, and its progression during the
war for Algeria, when “Horace Vernet began gluing the pages of this almost daily epic to the walls
of Versailles.” With the Arabs suppressed, French landscapists could risk going onto the plains. “This
is the brilliant epoch of Fromentin,” he wrote, “with his fantasias, his falconry hunts, his nervous,
swift little horses.”49 But for Castagnary interest in the exotic waned with the rise of the naturalist
movement, and then a self-protective introspection, brought about, he argues, by the defeats of the
Franco-Prussian War. He viewed the Orientalist personnel as largely defunct: the landscapist Charles-
Emile de Tournemine was dead, Belly had stopped painting, and Fromentin was “powerless to re-
new himself.” Among the newcomers only Gustave Guillaumet provided “figures not lacking in
grandeur.” But the real hope was the late Regnault, who

could have been a useful recruit. His stay in Spain and Tangier, his grandiose imagi-
nation, the verve and the brilliance of his execution might have done more for the
doctrine than twenty years of camels and desert. . . . Men like him cannot be replaced.
The two students he leaves behind [Benjamin Constant and Georges Clairin] are
not worthy successors. . . . It is not their fault after all, if the lessons of 1870 bear
fruit . . . and each Frenchman feels he is becoming more French. Let us abandon this
movement, and let history be its judge. In a few years’ time we will be able to set up
a stone, and engrave upon it this consoling word: Orientalism was once alive
in French painting.50

Orient or France? 27