"The Imaginary Orient" by Linda Nochlin

Linda Nochlin’s examination of nineteenth-century Oriental paintings reinforces Edward Said’s theory in describing the particular power structure of European culture and colonial domination over the Near Eastern world. This article asserts how Orientalism was understood and constructed through western values and expectations, which define Islamic society as being lazy, sexual, and cruel. Nochlin argues that the picturesque style and realism employed throughout Oriental art were used a tools to legitimize the western concept of Orientalism and the negative stereotypes associated with it. She further addresses how this unequal opposition of East and West is promoted through not only what the artists include within the works, but more importantly what the images tend to leave out.

Nochlin begins the article by discussing Jean-Leon Gerome’s Snake Charmer (late 1860s) as an example of Oriental art reinforcing the western conception of Near East culture and society through the absences of history and “art-ness”. She convincingly argues how the painting captures a picturesque scene of a traditional eastern performance, of which the viewer is not invited into but rather acts as a spectator meant to gaze upon the audience. This intended separation from the scene is established through the viewer not being able to identify with the figures or location within the image, which demonstrates how the western viewer controls the gaze over the Oriental world by perceiving the figures as “other”. Nochlin further describes how the gaze creates control, as she states, “Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delectation” (Nochlin, 35). Before even examining the absences within the painting, we can see how us, as the western viewer, immediately establishes power and control over the Islamic people through labeling them as being different and therefore inferior.

Nochlin goes on to describe how the absence of history throughout Oriental art largely supports the notion that these paintings were to be perceived as aesthetically appealing and timeless scenes that properly reflect the eastern world. Despite the drastic changes the western world was making on near eastern culture at this time, artists continued to depict pleasant and charming oriental works as a way to distract the viewer from the violence and conflict the Near East was enduring from the Western civilization. As the author addresses later in the article, Orientalist paintings rarely depicted violence of the West on the eastern cultures, but rather primarily portrayed representations of violence of Orientals to each other.

Another contributing factor to Nochlin’s argument is the absence of art, or in other words, the artist wanting the spectator to feel as though the image is a realistic scene and not a painting. Gerome’s Snake Charmer manages to create this effect as Nochlin states, “No other artist has so inexorably eradicated all traces of the picture plane as Gerome, denying us any clue to the artwork as a literal flat surface” (Nochlin, 37). The artist’s naturalism and “realistic” style allow the composition to seem more like a believable and aesthetically appealing depiction of the Oriental culture that the viewer would like to remember. The realistic technique employed within this work also has a metaphoric function that promotes the negative stereotypes of Eastern culture, shown in the worn down and neglected architecture that symbolizes the corruption of Islamic society during this time. Nochlin expands on this moralizing architecture illustrated throughout Oriental art as signifying these people as being lazy. Moreover, the common theme depicting scenes of leisure rather than images of people working reinforce the idea that the Oriental lifestyle was slothful and idle.

This realism, for Nochlin, was also employed in Oriental painting to convey not only the white man’s authority over the Islamic society as an inferior race, but also male dominance over women through sexualized themes of possession and slavery. Gerome’s Slave Market compositions express this popular nineteenth-century ideology of masculine power over feminine nakedness, and how the public reacted to it as being convincing and rational imagery due to the natural style, where “Gerome’s style justified his subject” (Nochlin, 44). Through these works, Gerome associated Orientalism with exotic and sexualized themes that emphasized both women and Islamic people as “other”. Moreover, the Slave Market images managed to reinforce the ideological beliefs of male power over women and white male power over darker races by constructing this notion of the inferior “other”.

This reading contributed to our understanding of war imagery through Oriental painting being perceived as a way for Western civilization to reinforce their authority over other cultures by portraying the negative stereotypes within that society. Therefore these images could be used a way to justify the Western civilization’s violence toward the Near East. Overall, Nochlin successfully described how Western culture constructed and understood Orientalism through picturesque and realistic depictions that legitimized their control and power, as well as describing other theories that support her argument.

Questions:

What types of connections can be made between the portrayal of women and oriental society within these images? How does the representation of both as “other” enhance the authority and power of white men?

How does the control of the gaze contribute to this power of Western culture? And where have we seen this use of the gaze as a means of control before in art?