A Woman’s Pleasure: the Grand Odalisque by Jean August Dominique Ingres [View all]

[CTyankee]

[IMG][/IMG]

It has been said that every movie has its own historical moment, to a larger or lesser extent. This dictum can be applied to painting if we delve into the history of how and why an artist chose the “moment” to paint.

How does this idea play into Ingres great nude work, La Grande Odalisque? It seems to be a work of fantasy: a creamy skinned nude, lying on a cushioned divan with her backside to the viewer and turning her head to look at him. It has an indistinct, exotic reference to the Orient (and is, indeed, straight out of the Orientalist style of 19th century French art).

But the historical “moment” for France when Ingres was painting this work was its loss of Egypt after Napoleon’s earlier conquest. That sense of lost hegemony becomes imbued in French perceptions of the East after the defeat, perhaps sublimating unattainable desires in the theme of the harem woman and resulting in its haunting appeal to the French public going forward in time. What emerges in French art is the Oriental nude, bather or harem woman. Ingres’ Odalisque is rendered with hints of the harem -- the peacock fan, the ornamented opium pipe leaning on a narghile where we can see steam escaping, and her exquisite turban.

Ah, that turban! How it bespeaks Ingres devotion to Raphael’s turbaned Madonna della Sedia
[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]
Ingres odalisque’s face is a contrast of the coolness in her eyes and the rest of her face. Try this: cover her eyes and you see that you are looking at a very young woman. Perhaps it is her small mouth and chin, but I found it an amazing experiment. Her mien changes instantly...was she looking at her harem sultan
in a questioning way...or was she trying to determine his mood?

There is an economy of color use here in his blue drapes with red and gold flowers that contrast coldly with the woman’s pale body. I think the artist did this for the effect of that contrast: he wanted his female subject’s sensuality to triumph over all in this picture (and proudly leaves his “signature” on the cushion underneath her bare legs and feet).

With this odalisque, Ingres is clearly on the road from Neoclassicism to the Romantic subgenre of Orientalism. He has his own idea about how to sensualize his subject by even more emphatically elongating her back and pelvis. Her right arm is also extended unnaturally. Her left leg is anatomically odd and her breast seems to emerge from under her arm. Ingres had hoped for a sinuous (and sensuous), almost serpentine, effect. But this distortion of anatomy was what annoyed the Parisians who attended the Salon of 1819 when he exhibited his Bather of Valpincon
[IMG][/IMG]
[IMG][/IMG]

His bathers in The Turkish Baths evoked outrage by the public for its straightforward depiction of two women in a lovely but quite frankly erotic embrace. And perhaps the threatening idea that women could have a place of comfort with other women in a communal space where they were relaxing after their bath, drinking coffee and dancing. The central figure (who we saw in The Bather) is serenading them, accompanied by a black woman holding a large tambourine. One woman grooms another’s hair while holding a small incense ball by a chain.

Ingres used no real models for this work, relying instead on figures used in his previous paintings and his numerous figure studies. His inspiration was from the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, describing her visit to a Turkish bath in the early 18th century (in case you are wondering --and yes, you are-- she was, by all accounts, fully dressed herself). Ingres had copied those notes into his notebook. Note also that it is also the second appearance of the Bather of Valpincon.

The Turkish Bath was deemed so controversial it was only exhibited publicly in 1905 after the artist’s death. Pablo Picasso was in attendance. It is thought that this painting inspired Picasso’s early masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

[IMG][/IMG]