My Odalisque

My first encounter with Jean Dominique Ingres’ controversial 1814 oil painting “La Grande Odalisque” was in my AP Art History Class in the Spring of 2010, my senior year of high school. We had just finished the Neoclassical movement and were moving on to Romanticism. A slide of the painting was projected onto the whiteboard. For reasons I could not completely identify or articulate at the time, I was transfixed by Ingres’ enigmatic beauty, and for a time it became my “favorite” painting, but this attraction I felt was not out of pure ardor or appreciation. It was not solely because of the stunning aesthetic qualities or the mysterious, ethereal gaze of the subject. There was something else, a slight discomfort and personal identification with the work that I felt tug inside of me. It would be a couple of years before I would understand what exactly this tug was and why I felt it.

The “odalisque” Ingres portrays is the artist’s perception of a Middle Eastern concubine. The Romanticism movement in European painting, roughly spanning from the end of the 18th century into the first quarter of the 19th, was inspired by Napoleon’s conquests in Egypt and the sudden Western fascination with the “exotic,” referred to as Orientalism. La Grande Odalisque marks Ingres’ transition into this movement, a break from the classical obsession that preoccupied European painting for the greater part of the 18th century.

The painting was commissioned by Napoleon’s sister, and draws upon some classical models of the reclined nude, but was ultimately criticized in the art world for its irreverence in content and form. What we focused on in this art history class was the fact that the woman portrayed was not anatomically correct. Languidly and suggestively reclined, the Odalisque has a small head, overly elongated limbs, and five extra vertebrae. The long lines, we were taught, were deliberate on the part of Ingres to exude sensuality and desirability, which, in addition to the color scheme and the contents of the painting, reflected the Western fascination with the East and its women. This was all that we covered, and though I understood, I felt that there was more, a story that the quiet girl behind the painting was aching to tell but couldn’t. Why did this painting bother me and entice me at the same time?

As a seventeen year old, I was not aware of the problematic connotations of exoticism and the Western fascination with the East. Transitioning from one private school in a heavily white, protestant population into a more liberal international boarding school closer to New York City, the fact that there was an appreciation for beauty outside the Nordic and European norms of blonde hair, blue eyes and waiflike bodies was a flattering and novel prospect to me. Being complimented by my peers on my thick curly hair, my dark skin tone and my “ethnic” features was a strange but initially welcomed shift. Never before had I ever considered that these features were attractive, and it soon became my “thing” that I was the “ethnically ambiguous,” Spanish-speaking girl with the thick, shiny explosion of curls. Towards the end of my high school career I began to discover a fine line between the appreciation of diversity and a harmful objectification masked as admiration that perpetuated the cycle of racial and ethnic oppression: that those who are perceived as different become fascinating spectacles for those who have the privilege of not being asked to explain their cultural background, why they look a certain way, who can assume that their experiences are universal, the norm. But even in my education that stressed critical thinking, globalism and diversity I did not yet have the tools or the vocabulary to identify these subtleties or the way that they made me feel. Moreover, it wasn’t always clear to me when this line had been crossed, and was not sure if I myself had at times been a perpetrator by admiring the cultures and appearances of other people of color. It was something that was embedded in our discourses and our perceptions, of both Caucasian and the perceived “ethnics” alike.

Two years later, I was a sophomore at NYU Gallatin. I now had a better grasp of the discomfort I felt when others asked about my heritage, due to a series of classes and experiences that introduced terms like The Other, the Gaze, the Subject and the Object to my daily vocabulary and mode of thought. I would feel pangs of disgust and indignity when I or others were described as “exotic” or “ethnic” as compliments from either strangers or friends—statements that were supposed to be compliments, but were in fact far from innocuous. It was almost worse when people played off of these exoticisms and appropriated themselves through these fantastical images Others had created for them, but I realized they probably felt like they had no other choice and had unknowingly adopted these stereotypes and performed them. Why did these perceived differences in appearance and mannerisms have to be mentioned in these descriptions of beauty or intrigue? Why not just compliment without highlighting the supposed “exoticism” as the reason? It made no sense to me.  Did this girl I was friends with, among many others, not realize that saying “You look so ethnic” makes no sense, because everybody has an ethnicity? I attempted to explain this and stopped when I saw that I was facing blank stares. My identity as a multicultural/biracial Latina had entered this maelstrom of confusion and appropriation, where many seemingly innocuous conversations with friends and peers, and encounters with films, television shows and other media would leave me feeling angry, helpless, and unsure about how to act or present myself. Questions like “What are you?” and “ Where are you from? No, like where are you really from?” and “Are you some sort of Spanish?” made me bubble with anger in a way they never had before. I wanted to cry out with indignation at comments from friends and strangers such as “I’m really into the sexy and exotic Latin and/or black type,” or “You’re Peruvian? That’s hot.”

I watched images of brown and black bodies being sexualized and fetishized on television and computer screens, in song lyrics, in magazines and fashion billboards—both by white people and minorities. In addition to the overall moral and ethical problems I had with all of this latent racism, I felt personally affected and targeted. Not only did I find this offensive, but it made me even further question myself to the point of confusion; it seemed that no matter how I acted, looked, or embraced my heritage, I would either be feeding into these pre-packaged concepts or trying to “pass.” What’s more, I was afraid to speak. I didn’t want to play the “race” card, did not want to preach at my friends and try to assume a moral or intellectual superiority. Granted, I’ve met people who agree with me, but rarely are they able to connect to it on the same level. We are primarily taught that there is either racism or acceptance, and nothing in between.

The summer after my sophomore year, I took a Gallatin class in Paris entitled Black in the City of Light, which explored African-American history in Paris. I was intrigued by the subject but ultimately was more intrigued by the chance to live in Paris for a month. I had not been to Paris since I was nine years old and was excited to immerse myself now that I was proficient in French. The class itself, however, proved to further illuminate my confusions and struggles with racial appropriation and exoticism that had been troubling me. We were shown how a culture can be accepting and oppressive at the same time, and how ultimately, racial subjects themselves learn to adapt to the roles given to them in order to be accepted. While Josephine Baker, along with other famous Afro-American expats, was accepted and revered in Paris much more so than in the United States, she also gained fame with her “banana dance,” at the Cage aux Folles, for primarily male audiences, performing and sexualizing her race by embodying the stereotype of a primitive and erotic African woman, because that was what the audience wanted to see.

“La Grande Odalisque” – Jean Dominique Ingres (via Sarah Ross/Flickr)

By this point, I hadn’t thought of my odalisque for quite a while, as I had given up art history for film. It was during this class that I saw her again. We took a tour of the Louvre, but particularly the Romanticism and Oriental art wing. These rooms evoked memories of Ingres’ painting, and I asked the tour guide if we could make a stop to see La Grande Odalisque. Seeing her in the flesh (or rather, rendered on canvas) after two years of trying to weave through the secret discourses surrounding ethnicity and race, enabled me to recognize that je ne sais quoi that had caused me the discomfort that drew me to her in that high school classroom.

Why had it never occurred to me that though the concubine is supposed to be Middle Eastern, she has the skin tone and facial features of a European woman? Moreover, her anatomical inaccuracy accentuates the unattainable fantasy of what this sexual object of a woman should look like. Different could be beautiful, but only on the terms that the Dominant Gaze deems so. In the mind of an early 19th century French male viewer, the sort of person for whom this image was made, the odalisque would have conjured up not just a harem slave, itself a misconception, but a set of fears and desires linked to the long history of aggression between Christian Europe and Islamic Asia. Indeed, the sexuality of the odalisque is made acceptable even to an increasingly prudish French culture because of the subject’s distance. This obsessive fascination with the Orient, no matter how beautifully it may be painted, was in fact a grotesque and violent objectification that is still ingrained in Western society today. I saw it and felt it every day, in the most liberal of the liberal cities.

I stared at my Odalisque. Her eyes were smoky and aloof. She was offering herself and yet she was not real. She exists only in this gilded frame in a Parisian museum, a body of impossible contortions. Ingres chose to give her a mysterious, sexually charged gaze, a realization of a fantasized concubine. Seeing her as a naked, sexual object in the ornate Louvre museum felt dirty and wrong, like I was violating her. I became sad for the odalisque. I had identified with her so long ago because, unknowingly, I felt like an odalisque in a gilded frame. And more often than I would like, I still do. It is exhausting to see these representations  repeatedly expressed across mediums, and even worse, by those close to me. Though I have become far more argumentative on this subject and willing to stand up for my opinions, I still find myself staying silent at times because it is a conversation I am now tired of extolling, tired of being the one that sees and feels the oppression on an almost constant basis and has to tell everybody about it only for them to not really hear me. I wish everyone could see that Western society’s obsession with identifying an Other and maintaining power over them characterizes our culture, our politics, and our art. Images matter.

A few weeks ago in my Latin American film class, during which my classmates were discussing how a representation of indigenous people wearing loin cloths and face-paint in a Spanish-made feature film wasn’t offensive because “they agreed to do it,” I excused myself from class and went to the bathroom to momentarily burst into tears. I’ve become tired. I won’t give up, but I am still tired. It is exhausting because it is not something I should have to explicate: you can find beauty without having to own it, too.

Header image credit: Gautier Poupeau/Flickr