In 1832, two years after the French occupation of Algeria, the Comte de Mornay invited Eugène Delacroix to accompany him on a diplomatic trip to the Maghreb. It was not a mere courtesy. The painter was expected to capture in some monumental oil painting an agreement with Morocco that did not materialize. He was supported by his resume as the author of dramatic orientalist scenes, such as The Massacre of Chios (1824) or The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). This was, however, the Frenchman's first trip to Muslim territory.
The artist's obsession was to visit a real harem. Mission, in principle, impossible, since Muslim homes were closed to foreigners. However, after many efforts, in June 1832 he managed to sneak into a house in Algiers, whose inhabitants received him dressed in his best clothes. Upon his return to Paris, he would recreate this experience in his studio, based on a few watercolor notes made in situ.
The resulting oil painting swept the famous Salon of 1834. Its verism, its exuberant coloring and its purely aesthetic character were praised, at a time when the ideal of art for art's sake was becoming extremely relevant. In the words of Gustave Planche, a critic of the time, “the Femmes d’Algers is painting and nothing more, fresh, vigorous painting, advanced with spirit and of a completely Venetian audacity, without concessions to the masters whom it recalls.”
For these same, purely formal reasons, he would later inspire impressionists and post-impressionists, especially Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, who would passionately praise his mastery of color.
Is this painting really “painting and nothing more,” as Planche claimed and the 19th-century French public apparently perceived? It is more than doubtful. Beyond its aesthetic virtues, Women of Algiers in her apartment represents a very specific view, the dreamy view of a cultured European man on a newly conquered world. His orientalism, filtered by the traveler's experience, is less stereotyped than that of his previous works or that of other artists of the same era.
Unlike other contemporaries, Delacroix cannot be accused of considering the cultures of the southern Mediterranean uncivilized or inferior. For him, they represented an admirable “living antiquity,” a noble population that reminded him of “Roman senators or the Greeks at the Panathenaic festival.” But this vision, although positive, is still the fanciful, even paternalistic, analogy of a lover of classical antiquity, who uses its references to interpret a reality whose codes and canons he does not know. "That beauty! As in the era of Homer”, he exclaims upon entering the forbidden chambers of the protagonists. His gaze is that of someone who adapts what he sees to his own corpus of knowledge, preferences and prejudices. In short, the colonial view of a French diplomat sent to a protectorate.
And if that look, transferred to the brush, achieved resounding success in 19th century France, it is because it evokes similar reactions in those who look like Delacroix: the European upper-middle class, immersed in the era of Romanticism and, later, , of Symbolism. People who read Byron and Gautier, who dream of a fictional, literary East, where everything is simpler than in the modern era, where science has not yet burst in to break the charm of mystery, where sensuality does not understand corsets.
The work seduced them because it allowed them to escape to an imaginary world, where women, reclining on cushions and rugs, wrapped in transparent silks and gauze, free of crinolines or bustles, adopt languid postures, smoking who knows what exotic drugs from their hookah, with a vaguely inviting air.
Delacroix's painting is extraordinary for its color, its treatment of light and its composition (attention to the diagonal lines of the curtain and the figure on the left, offset by the vertical of the window). But it is also because it subtly points out two possible paths to follow in orientalist painting.
Delacroix, despite everything, cares about being faithful to reality. In his sketches he includes precise notes about the color of his models' clothes. He does not idealize them, he does not undress them. He doesn't even mention the cliché of the harem: instead, he chooses the word “apartment,” which suggests homely intimacy, not eroticism. His approach is not without respect.
Other artists will prefer to stick to formulas for success. Dominique Ingres, for example, painted The Turkish Bath (1862) based on Greco-Roman nudes and the books of Lady Mary Montagu. Matisse's odalisques are more the result of Parisian bohemia than of his trips to Morocco.
Renoir, aware of clichés, goes one step further and pays homage to Delacroix with a parody title: Interior of a Harem in Montmartre. Parisian women dressed as Algerians (1872). Already in the middle of the 20th century, Picasso would acidly version Delacroix in multiple cubist paintings, with aggressive angles and colors. His female figures are far from passive and complacent.
What prompted the four women in the painting to sit for a French painter? We will never know. Women of Algiers tells us little about them and a lot about the society from which the man who portrayed them came. A society in which men look and women are looked at; in which the West is a creative force and the East, the product of its creation.
The success of the painting at the Salon of 1834 contributed to reinforcing stereotypes that would be reinvented by Gauguin, in his always stylized Polynesia, or by Van Gogh, imagining Japan from the south of France. Nineteenth-century Orientalism in general, and Women of Algiers in their Apartment in particular, is a story in the style of One Thousand and One Nights that cultivated Europeans told themselves, thanks to the extraordinary talent of one of them with the paintbrush. .
This text is part of an article published in number 642 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
