Orientalist Aethetics, Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa: 1880-1930 - Book Review

Roger Benjamin University of California Press, 2003, ISBN 0 520 22217 2, $45.00 (cloth)

The continuing investigation into the origins of nineteenth-century Orientalist imagery has inspied an increasing number of recent publications. Orientalist Aesthetics--because of its original point of view and extensive primary field research--has emerged as the most substantial new book in this field of colonialist study. The author constructs a balanced examination of Orientalist themes, taking into account not only those artists considered progressive, but also those long thought to be highly conservative who were, none the less, in the forefront of the interest in the Near East. As a result, he has produced the most comprehensive examination of Orientalist imagery in print. In order to achieve his goal, Roger Benjamin carefully reconstructs the Societe des peintres orientalistes Francais. He examines how these artists made their paintings known to the public by exhibiting them in shows organised by their Society, and other venues such as the World's Fairs, where they were seen by a large international public. In doing so, Orientalist painters promoted a vision of the Near East that went far beyond seeing the region only as a place populated by 'the other'.

Through a series of ten carefully argued chapters, Benjamin demonstrates an awareness of all the debates that have enlivened colonial and post colonial discourse. He recognises that there were many who wanted to see the Near East as an extension of France, where French points of view and culture were to be assimilated and used without regard for local customs. At the same time, in later chapters, Benjamin presents a series of indigenous artists who documented well-established traditions of their region, thus demonstrating that a native school of Orientalist painters existed whose high quality works could compete with the best of those from France. These two aspects--colonialist art and native representation--function as Leitmotivs throughout a good part of the text, providing the reader with an awareness of the larger issues pertinent to the evolution of Orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Throughout his book, Benjamin tries, with considerable success, to present a balanced, cohesive picture of Orientalism by examining artists from both sides of the modern divide. He devotes two chapters to showing how artists associated with the modernist canon--namely Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse--responded to Algeria and Morocco. By minutely reconstructing Renoir's trips to the Near East in 1881 and 1882, Benjamin reveals how this artist's exoticism was refined by a selection of sites that not only reinforced an interest in Impressionist light and colour, but also how specific locations became known as appropriate places for Westerners to paint. Similarly, when Benjamin examines the role that sites and human models played for Matisse during his visits to the region, beginning in 1906, he reveals that an interest in the formal properties of exotic forms meshed with the need to intensify the colour harmonies inspired by the light of the environment. In both these cases, Benjamin provides a substantial way of understanding the modernist aspects of both artists' creative work against the traditions of the region that inspired them. Further, by using these artists, as well as Eugene Delacroix, as the progenitors of a modernist aesthetic, Benjamin is able to show how one contingent of painters--from the most progressive group--can be compared with artists whose vision of the Near East was expressed in a more detailed, even photographic manner.

In his discussion, a number of heroes emerge from the pages of history. One of these is Leonce Benedite, the curator of the Musee du Luxembourg--the only modern art museum in Paris during the 1890s--who became a fervent advocate of a meticulous type of Orientalism best realised by painters with a strong naturalistic bias. Benedite did much to foster an appreciation for Orientalism by supporting exhibitions, organising Orientalist societies, and sponsoring artists such as Gustave Guillaumet or Charles Cottet, painters who were dedicated to scenes of actuality and whose work was deeply appreciated by many of their contemporaries. Benedite, who was regarded by the modernists as a stumbling-block towards acceptance of the avant-garde, must now be seen in a different light. He supported an alternative group of artists of a slightly more conservative bent than those in the modernist canon. This ability to see Benedite's contribution in a more open and generous way informs Benjamin's text in several chapters. Perhaps the most telling way in which Benedite's support of Orientalism is recognised is summarised in the closing chapter: here, in a very subtle and creative analysis, Benjamin brings his discourse to a final summation.

Aware of the importance of the Musee National des Beaux Arts, Algiers, a museum officially opened during the late phase of colonialism in 1930, Benjamin uses this collection as a way of summing up his study. In the discussion of how the museum came to be organised and how its collections were formed, several pressing issues come to the forefront. By showing how a privileged European vision was transferred to Algiers through the acquisition of works by the most celebrated French painters of the nineteenth century, Benjamin pinpoints one of the basic functions of the museum. Even more important was how the acquisition of indigenous examples of Orientalist art upheld native traditions. The Fine Arts Museum was seen by its founders as an important educator that was supposed to champion not only the elite aesthetic of French art, but equally to advocate the importance of a symbiotic relationship that emphasised a 'joining [of] the mother country and her adopted children'. This approach also represents a brilliant way of combining an active reconstruction of a collection with the larger themes of this study to show whether assimilation or appropriation of ideas across cultures and decades could actually be seen and understood. In the process, Benjamin goes far toward demonstrating how the reconstruction of a museum collection (formed at a given moment in time) can also reflect cultural and political forces that were pulling in many directions simultaneously.

Even though Benjamin throws his net quite wide in his attempt to rediscover a host of forgotten Orientalists, some of them better than others, he fails to assess, or even discuss at length, at least two of the primary Orientalists among the academic teachers of the nineteenth century, namely Jean-Leon Gerome and Leon Bonnat. Both are worthy of consideration, however, not only because they travelled widely throughout the Near East in order to become well-versed in actual scenes and types that could be used in their own works, but also because of the position that they held as purveyors of a Near Eastern mythology through their teaching in France. Why these significant Orientalists are all but left out of the story remains a mystery. It weakens the depth of Benjamin's discourse.

This is not to say, however, that this is not a commanding, challenging and excellent study. Benjamin shows considerable verve and imagination in locating new material; he also demonstrates a keen intelligence when he places his archival finds within a larger historical and cultural matrix in an effort to demonstrate why they are significant. The fact that he has done this with ease, and that his text is seamlessly written, reveals that he has a gift for constructing a narrative that most will find engaging. As a consummate historian, Benjamin has gone far towards reconstructing an era, and towards making this period come alive for new generations of readers intrigued by Orientalism. The result is a book from which much can be learned, which will undoubtedly set the benchmark in Orientalist studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for years to come. Above all, it probes the range of colonialist intervention in the Near East while trying to establish that there was a homegrown indigenous tradition that was attracting a number of Europeans at the same time.

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