Zoë Wray
Art Criticism Response Essay
2/4/13
Nochlin’s Crusade for Political Provocation
In her article titled “The Imaginary Orient” that appeared in Art in America in May of
1983, Linda Nochlin responds to curator Donald Rosenthal’s treatment of 19th century French
Orientalist painting in his exhibition “Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting 18001880.” Nochlin takes issue with Rosenthal’s refusal to address David Said’s assertion that
Orientalism served as a method of proving the inferiority of the Near East and thereby morally
justify the French colonization of territories in the Middle East and North Africa. Nochlin
believes that to ignore the political motivations behind French Orientalist painting is to
dishonestly analyze them, to make viewers willingly blind to the actual truth of a genre of
painting that was in the business of conjuring mirages of the situation of the Near East. While
some of Nochlin’s arguments provide compelling support for her argument, as her article
progresses she begins to stretch her opinions too far, and by the end of the piece it dissolves into
a far-fetched cry for provocation and an opportunity to beat down famous 19th century French
artists.
The first part of Nochlin’s article provides readers with smart, insightful points using
pictorial evidence that clearly supports her position and weakens Rosenthal’s reasoning. Nochlin
uses The Snake Charmer, an 1870 oil on canvas by the French “pseudo-realist” painter JeanLéon Gérôme, to illustrate the specific intentions behind Gerome’s work as they art at odds with
that of another sort of realist painter, Edgar Degas. In contrast with Degas’s Café Concerts, as
Nochlin points out, in The Snake Charmer Gerome does not intend for viewers to identify with
the audience in the painting. By virtue of its vantage point, the painting makes the turbaned
audience as much a spectacle as the ostensible performer, distancing viewers from them and
emphasizing how different they are from Westerners and therefore in need of Western influence.
Gerome further estranges viewers from the audience in the painting by positioning them so that
they cannot see the front of the snake charmer in the painting. As Nochlin asserts, this forces
both the sex of the performer and the performance itself to remain ambiguous, an allegory for
“the mystery of the East itself, a standard topos of Orientalist ideology.” Nochlin further drives
her point by drawing attention to the lack of motion in the painting due to the resting posture of
the audience and the posed pause of the snake charmer. As a result, Gerome makes the East
appear as a world deprived of modernity and all its technological innovation, calling for Western
assistance.
At this point in the article, Nochlin then veers into unsupported territory in which she
seems to throw out almost wild criticisms of 19th century French society as demonstrated by
painters of the time with feminist undertones. As the footnotes in this section start to decrease, so
does the validity of her point. She moves on to Eugene Delacroix’s 1828 painting Death of
Sardanapalus and posits that it serves as Delacroix’s chance to express his personal fantasies to
demonstrate men’s feelings of superiority over and entitlement to women’s bodies, with the
Oriental subject matter helping to distance these fantasies from French women and make them
more acceptable. The issue with this argument is that Sardanapalus was an actual ancient
Assyrian king, and his exploitation of women was legendary. I do not think that Delacroix was
trying to use contemporary Near Eastern women as objects for his sexual satisfaction and further
promote the Near East’s inferiority to the West, as Nochlin seems to think. That is not to say that
Delacroix did not believe the West to be superior, as I’m sure most French people did at the time.
But I think that with Death of Sardanapalus Delacroix was seizing on a subject matter that was
popular at the time due to the recent exploration and colonization of the Near East and painting a
dramatic story that originated in that geographic location.
Given that this article appeared in Art in America, a commercial publication, it comes as
no surprise that Nochlin wanted to stir up some controversy and compose a diatribe on political
hot buttons such as Western relations with the Middle East and men’s objectification of women
in the context of art. While Nochlin’s piece did contain some cogent points for discussion, she
ultimately appeared overly eager to criticize a fellow art world denizen’s work for not being
sufficiently explosive and attention-grabbing. She apparently failed to notice that Rosenthal
wasn’t rejecting Said’s observation of the political purposes of Orientalist painting. He was only
saying that his show would focus instead on the “aesthetic quality and historical interest” of the
art, a theme that, while perhaps not as juicy as controversial politics, still has enough meat to
make for a worthwhile exhibition.