Jean-Léon Gérôme is by all accounts the poster boy of Orientalism.
During the second half of the 19th century, the French painter found critical and commercial success with his meticulously detailed, exquisitely decorated scenes of the near East, most notably Turkey and Egypt. He appealed to popular hunger for what was then typically called "ethnographic" images: scientific-seeming studies of a foreign culture's lifestyle, costumes and more.
His works were not just exhibited widely but reproduced shamelessly, the form of collectible etchings, lithographs and photographs, large and small. And he shared his techniques with students. A longtime professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Gérôme paved the way for dozens of so-called Orientalist painters to follow.
So when the field of Orientalism came under attack, Gérôme was directly in the line of fire. The poster boy became the whipping boy.
This happened in art history circles most dramatically with the triumph of the first wave of Impressionists, who in their quest for formal innovation rejected Gérôme as academic, reactionary and hopelessly passé.
And his reputation sank even further in 1978, when Edward Said published the enormously influential book "Orientalism." The book makes a compelling case that Western representations of the East (so often cast as exotic, erotic and uncivilized) are complicit in a larger effort at political domination. In short, Said wrote, these images are a form of imperialism.
Even though Said did not discuss Gérôme in the book, he used the artist's 1880 painting "The Snake Charmer" on its cover. And where Said left off, in 1983 art historian Linda Nochlin picked up, showing in brilliant detail how "The Snake Charmer" functions, in her words, as "a visual document of 19th-century colonialist ideology."
Together this approach has been so powerful and pervasive—required reading for so many college and graduate students—that it's been difficult to see Gérôme through any other lens.
This makes the fact that the Getty is mounting a major survey of the artist, "The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme," June 15 to September 12, that much more remarkable. The Getty is the first stop for the show, co-organized with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. After Paris, it goes to the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
Scott Allan and Mary Morton, who curated the Getty's version of the show, call it the first major survey of Gérôme's work in over 30 years. The last was organized in the early 1970s by Gerald Ackerman, whom they credit with nearly single-handedly keeping Gérôme scholarship alive in the interim.
Both curators admit that that their initial conversations about bringing the show to the Getty raised eyebrows of colleagues and superiors.
"For many scholars Gérôme represented all that was abhorrent and insidious about Orientalism," says Allan. "And it's all the more insidious because he was so talented a craftsman, so meticulous, not just recycling the stereotypes of other painters."
"His images are so powerful they slip into your memory. What people who hate him really hate about him is the way his images stick in the imagination," says Morton.
To encourage scholarship in the field, Morton and Allan commissioned a number of academic essays under the title "Reconsidering Gérôme," a book out this month.
The Getty curators also contributed to the Musée d'Orsay's massive exhibition catalogue, published in an English and French edition. It addresses topics ranging from the artist's travels to his relationship with photography and film. Some entries deal with the Orientalist pictures, others focus on his grand "history" paintings or even his sculptures, which are also part of the exhibition.
Between the two books, a new Gérôme just might rise from the dead. Or new Gérômes plural. For it takes many scholars with many strategies to complicate, if not fully counter, a critique as powerful as Said's and Nochlin's.
One technique--a classic strategy for re-evaluating an artist hopelessly out of fashion—involves putting lesser-known work in the spotlight to get us to see the artist anew. One example: Gérôme's moody and perplexing 1849 painting "Michelangelo Showing a Student the Belvedere Torso." In "Groping the Antique," his essay in "Reconsidering Gérôme," Allan Doyle explores the work's homoerotic dynamics and teacher-student relationship.
Another technique is to embrace or celebrate the shortcomings of the artist, as Guy Cogeval, head of the Musée d'Orsay, cleverly does in his catalogue essay. While admitting that "we are left aghast" at the artist's "fatalism and sadistic voyeurism," he goes on to suggest that his "poor taste delights us," like the super-campy work of Pierre and Gilles or Jeff Koons.
