The Met Turns Orientalism Inside Out

The snake charmer is, in effect, a stand-in for Gérôme, whose art relies on seduction and deception. Whether it’s a steamy bathhouse nude or a mosque scene, his paintings follow the cardinal rule of the Orientalist handbook, which is to use a mashup of decorative styles to yield a tantalizing essence. In “The Snake Charmer,” the Listerine-colored tiles in the background are inspired by Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, the stone floor is drawn from architecture in Cairo, and the assorted costumes are from different times and places—an Ottoman helmet worn by a man on the left, for instance, is from the fifteenth century and personally belonged to Gérôme. (It’s in a display case here, next to a first edition of Said’s book.) As an establishment artist who taught at the École des Beaux-Arts and denounced the Impressionists, Gérôme has always been an easy target for serious artists and critics, who like to trash his “lightweight style” and his crowd-pleasing subjects. Émile Zola icily commented on Gérôme, “Here the subject matter is everything; the painting is nothing.”

That’s a serious miscalculation, in my opinion. How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation.

Contra Zola, Gérôme’s talents as a draftsman, combined with his slick finishes and his touches of veracity in costume and design, show how style was just as important to him as any subject. If the aim of a successful Orientalist painting is to create a vehicle for escape, so that a textile manufacturer in France, say, can float out of his grimy industrial existence and swim into a golden dream of beauty or sex or violence, then the artist’s handling of paint has to be highly persuasive. Otherwise, the fantasy gets stuck on the canvas.

At the end, the exhibition swings toward Hamdi. The curators present him as the more “authentic” Orientalist, less prone to stereotypes; instead of resorting to peepshows of exotic nudes, he faithfully documents mosques, Muslim scholars, dervishes, and quotidian scenes of the Ottoman capital. His most electric piece here is “At the Mosque Door” (1891). Approximately the size of a dining-room table, the canvas has fifteen people distributed along a set of stairs in front of a mosque, all of them flickering with very different kinds of life. A scrawny boy cracks a grin, a few women glide up the steps in silk robes, a man on the right rolls his left sleeve, another takes a nap, and the most impressive of them all, in a mustard-colored robe, shoots us a stern gaze.