Slave market (Gérôme)
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| Slave market |
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| Jean-Léon Gérôme , 1866 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 84.6 x 63.3 cm |
| Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
Sklavenmarkt , also the slave market , ( French Marché d'esclaves ) is a painting by the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme from 1866. The picture, painted in oil on canvas, has a height of 84.6 cm and a width of 63.3 cm. It shows a scene in the Middle East in which a naked woman is offered in public as a merchandise for sale. The portrayal of an exotic world, painted in the style of Orientalism , did not correspond to real events, but to the sexualized imagination of the European public. The painting belongs to the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts .
Image description
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Gérôme shows an oriental scene in the painting Slave Market . In the center of the picture is a frontal view of a naked woman who is offered for sale. A white rope around her neck identifies her as a slave. Apart from the dark hair on the head, there is no body hair to be seen; even the pubic hair in the genital area is missing. The critic Paul Mantz described her in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1867 as “femme en ivoire” ( woman made of ivory ) and thus emphasized her flawless body with light skin color. The naked slave is flanked by two clothed men. Behind her stands a dark-skinned man with a black beard who takes on the role of the slave trader. The man, who looks unfriendly at the slave girl, wears an ocher-colored cap on his shaved head; his light oriental clothing could be a jallabiya . With his left hand on his hip, the dealer grasps a stick that extends diagonally to the floor. This thin stick does not serve as a support for the man, but is more suitable for emphasizing his instructions with blows. In front of his chest he is holding a piece of white cloth with his right hand, with which the slave was probably previously clothed. The undressing of the woman enables the potential buyer to better examine the human goods . The customer stands to her right and is shown in profile. He wears a green robe with white decoration. Dark clothing can be seen underneath. On the front and on the broadly folded sleeve, a bright golden fabric identifies the wearer as a wealthy man. Only the area around his nose and eyes can be seen of his dark-skinned face, as part of his white headscarf is tied in front of his mouth. The customer looks down at the slightly smaller slave. He has placed his left hand on her head tilted to one side and sticks two fingers of his right hand between her barely opened lips. He seems to use his fingers to check the condition of her teeth - an act more familiar from the horse market. Behind the customer are two other men who may be among his entourage. While one of these men is largely covered up and almost only the white headgear can be seen, a young man with a gray turban and a striking red robe looks over the shoulder of the prospective buyer. He also seems to want to catch a glimpse of the naked woman. The potential buyer, however, is the only person in the picture who sees the slave girl from the front in all her nakedness. Only the viewer of the picture has an equally clear view of the undressed slave.
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The background cannot be clearly located. The architecture with its columns, arches, canopies and light brickwork is reminiscent of buildings in the Middle East . For example, the place could be a caravanserai . The scenery behind the action in the foreground is populated by numerous people. On the left edge of the picture, two men deep in conversation stand in front of a column. Before that, a dog has laid down on the floor. At the left edge of the picture a group of women is sitting on the ground. Two women are wrapped in white clothes and wear a veil over their faces. One of them takes care of a half-naked toddler. Next to it sits a woman in a blue robe, whose dark, almost black face can be seen from the front. She does not look at the viewer, but looks thoughtfully ahead of her. Behind the seated women is a group of men. Like the men on the left, they are wrapped in oriental clothing. These include turbans and caftans , some in colored fabrics. It is difficult to make out a naked, dark-skinned man standing in front of the clothed men on the right edge of the picture. You examine his front face while he turns his back to the viewer. In terms of skin color and gender, he forms an opposite pole to the female slave in the center of the picture.
The light situation in the picture is indefinite. Although the scenery is presumably set in the open air, the light does not fall on the people from above. Instead, shadows falling obliquely to the left can be seen in the left half of the picture. The scene in the foreground, which appears in bright light, appears to be lit from the front on a stage. The fine painting in the style of academic art, characteristic of Gérôme, fits this . Not only the facial features of the slave trader or the fabrics of the robes are executed with great attention to detail, but also individual stones in the foreground of the picture were painterly described individually. The painting was signed “JL GEROME” lower right.
Nudes in Gérômes depictions of antiquity and the Near East
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Gérôme is known for his depictions of ancient themes and subjects from the Middle East. In his work Phryne in front of the judges ( Hamburger Kunsthalle ), painted in 1861 , he shows a scene from ancient Greece in which a woman is shown undressed in a manner similar to that shown later in the slave market . The historicizing representation of the Phryne enabled the 19th century audience to enjoy themselves like a voyeur on the naked body of a woman without violating the strict moral standards of their contemporaries.
The painter's oriental motifs were not least influenced by his travels to the Middle East, which he undertook in 1856 and 1862. Gérôme spent several months in Egypt and its neighboring countries, studying landscapes and architectural monuments and observing the people who lived there. The sketches made in the Middle East were later used in Europe as a template for his paintings alongside contemporary photographs. The knowledge he gained on site brought him much fame in France. Maxime Du Camp , who himself traveled to the Middle East and also took photos there, praised Gérôme's slave market for its realistic representation. In his review Le Salon de 1867 , published in the Revue des Deux Mondes , he highlighted the exact description in Gérôme's painting. He also believed that he recognized the exact location of the picture. Accordingly, the motif is located in the ruins of the al-Hakim mosque in Cairo . In addition, Du Camp judged the naked woman shown in the picture that she was an Abyssinian and therefore one of the expensive slaves. The painter had skillfully portrayed her as submissive, humble and resigned. Not all contemporaries shared this positive assessment of the painting. The caricaturist Cham created a drawing based on Géromes painting, which he published in Le Charivari magazine in 1867 . Underneath he added the parodic signature: “M. GÉROME. Un Arabe qui a mal aux dents achète un esclave pour lui mâcher son dîner. ”(Analogously: An Arab with a toothache buys a slave so that she can chew dinner for him ).
In the painting Sklavenmarkt , the architecture and clothing of the people portrayed point to the Near East and against this background the event could well have taken place in Egypt in the 19th century, but there is no documented evidence of a slave market as it is depicted in the picture . Slavery in Islam was widespread in individual countries in the region until the 20th century, but Gérôme's slave market is neither a scene painted from life nor a neutral representation of real events. The public presentation of a naked slave was therefore probably a fantasy. The model for this could be a description by the author Gérard de Nerval , who described a slave market in his fictional trip Voyage en Orient in 1851 . In it he described a salesman who is undressing a slave. In this story, as in Gérôme's painting, the slave's mouth is opened to examine her teeth.
Gérôme repeatedly chose the subject of the slave market as a motif. Another painting with the same title is now in the Cincinnati Art Museum . This version of the theme, created in 1871, shows more or less clothed women who are to be sold as slaves crouching against a wall. The oriental trader is sitting here in front of the open window and waiting for customers. In addition, Gérôme created two slave market scenes set in ancient Rome in 1884. Both the slave market in Rome ( Walters Art Museum , Baltimore ) and the slave market in ancient Rome ( Hermitage , Saint Petersburg ) show a trader who has undressed a female slave on a raised stage and is offering her up for auction in front of an audience of male customers. The author Norbert Wolf pointed out that such depictions of slave markets could be seen in large numbers in the salon exhibitions in the 19th century. These pictures served as "sensational representations", "which documentary demonstrated to the comfortably shuddering audience how female capital was collected for later consumption, for later loss ..."
Jean-Léon Gérôme:
Slave Market , 1871,
Cincinnati Art Museum
Jean-Léon Gérôme:
Slave Market in Rome , around 1884,
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Jean-Léon Gérôme:
Slave Market in Ancient Rome , 1884
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
Jean-Léon Gérôme:
The Terrace of the Serail , 1898
private collection
Jean-Léon Gérôme:
The Snake Charmer , 1879
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
According to Wolf, such representations provided "the West, in whose countries" love for sale "had a considerable capitalist market share, one of those arguments that helped establish the moral inferiority of the Orient and, consequently, the" duty "to colonize it." Find at Gérôme Oriental nudes are not only reflected in the subject of a slave market. In The Terrace of the Seraglio, for example, he shows a harem fantasy typical of the 19th century , in which, among other things, he depicts naked women bathing in a seraglio in an open air fountain . One of the well-known models for such representations is the painting The Turkish Bath by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , a pictorial collection of naked women in an oriental setting. Occasionally Gérôme also shows a male nude in his pictures. His painting The Snake Charmer , in which a naked youth with a snake wrapped around his neck stands in front of an oriental audience, is also in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute . The boy has turned his back to the viewer. Like the female nudes, the naked youth also represents the voyeuristic point of view of the Europeans on a distant exotic scene. In the painting Slave Market, the dark-skinned male nude in the background illustrates that slavery can affect everyone, regardless of their skin color or gender. Nevertheless, the female nude is in the foreground in this picture and the dehumanizing scene is clearly sexually charged not only according to feminist interpretation. For the art historian Richard R. Brettell Gérôme slave market "a worldview did is permeated with stereotypes of race and gender" shows (Logically, a world view that is permeated with stereotypes of race and gender ).
Gérôme's slave market as a poster of the AfD in the 2019 European election campaign
The Berlin regional association of the Alternative for Germany party used a photo reproduction of Gérôme's painting Slave Market as a template for an election poster for the 2019 European elections . A section of the painting with the central group of figures was selected. Above the heads was a white caption "So that Europe does not become Eurabia ". At the top of the picture there was an explanation in white: “The picture is part of the AfD series Learn from Europe's history ”. At the bottom of the picture the poster was completed with the usual party emblems and a call to vote for the party. In the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel , Alexander Fröhlich noted that the AfD wanted to use the poster motif to “stir up fear of hostile takeover from the Orient”. He pointed out that the name Eurabia chosen in the poster was already used by the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik in the English form Eurabia . For Fröhlich the intended message of the poster is clear: "Islam comes upon us, Muslims enslave and abuse German and European women."
The poster draft came from the author and PR consultant Thor Kunkel , who had already worked for the AfD in the 2017 federal election . In the Austrian daily Der Standard , Ronald Pohl noted that Gérôme's painting from the time of European imperialism originally served the “needs of his customers” for a “gruesome Orient”, but is now being misused by the AfD's creative director as a “disgusting subject”, to create “anti-Muslim sentiment”. The news magazine Der Spiegel quoted Thor Kunkel, who saw in Gérôme's painting the “aestheticized implementation” of “what happened on New Year's Eve on Cologne Cathedral”.
In the online magazine Bento, Fabian Goldmann placed the painting in its historical context and emphasized that Gérôme's motifs show “no Arab everyday life”, “but the wishes of the lustful European public”. There is a clear distribution of roles: “Naked women who seem to have surrendered to their fate, and violent, powerful men.” For Goldmann, this clichéd image of the Orient illustrates “how little the AfD knew about the Orient at that time, and how little of it History of European culture that it claims to want to defend. "
Saskia Trebing made it clear in the magazine Monopol that the AfD “did not understand its own poster”. She portrays the message of the poster - “Oriental men, ie Muslims, humiliate women and make them slaves” - as simple and at the same time made it clear that “European painters contributed to a fictional image of the 'Orient' shaped by colonialism convey". The painting shows less "Arabs taking Europe, but exactly the opposite".
The Clark Art Institute was not very enthusiastic about the AfD's campaign. As reported by Deutschlandfunk , museum director Olivier Meslay said: “We strictly condemn the fact that this work is used to underline the position of the AfD. We wrote to the party to stop. "
Provenance
Gérôme sold the painting Slave Market on August 23, 1866 to the Parisian art dealer Goupil & Cie . This sold the picture on September 22nd of the same year to the art collector Ernest Gambart from London. However, Gambart gave the painting back to the Goupil art dealer in November 1866. From there, on January 27, 1866, the Dresden businessman Johann Meyer acquired the plant. Meyer (also spelled Mayer ) initially left the work in France, where it was shown in the Salon de Paris in 1867 . It later found its place in Meyer's extensive art collection, which he showed to interested parties in his Dresden villa. In 1868 he loaned the painting to Berlin, where it was shown in an exhibition at the Lepke art dealer . In 1930 the Paris branch of Galerie Knoedler had the painting Slave Market in its offer. She sold the painting to art collector Robert Sterling Clark on May 1, 1930 . Together with his wife he founded the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , whose collection the painting has been part of since 1955.
literature
- James A. Ganz, Richard R. Brettell: Great French paintings from the Clark: Barbizon through impressionism . Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts and Skira Rizzoli, New York City 2011, ISBN 978-0-931102-91-2 .
- Sarah Lees, Richard Rand, Katharine J. Albert: Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute . Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts and Yale University Press, New Haven 2012, ISBN 978-0-300-17965-1 .
- Norbert Wolf: The art of the salon: painting in the 19th century . Prestel, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7913-4625-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The painting title Sklavenmarkt can be found in Norbert Wolf: The Art of the Salon: Painting in the 19th Century , 202.
- ↑ The term The Slave Market can be found in Klaus von Beyme: The fascination of the exotic: Exotism, racism and sexism in art , p. 118.
- ↑ The French title Marché d'esclaves comes from Gerald M. Ackermann: Jean-Léon Gérôme: 1824–1904: sa vie, so œuvre , p. 66.
- ^ Paul Mantz: Salon de 1867 in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, p. 531.
- ^ Norbert Wolf: The art of the salon: Painting in the 19th century , 202.
- ↑ James A. Ganz, Richard R. Brettell: Great French paintings from the Clark: Barbizon through impressionism , p. 134.
- ^ Sarah Lees, Richard Rand, Katharine J. Albert: Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , p. 360.
- ^ Sarah Lees, Richard Rand, Katharine J. Albert: Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , p. 360.
- ↑ Arnauld de Vresse (Ed.): Cham au Salon de 1867 , No. 642.
- ↑ James A. Ganz, Richard R. Brettell: Great French paintings from the Clark: Barbizon through impressionism , p. 134.
- ^ Sarah Lees, Richard Rand, Katharine J. Albert: Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , p. 360.
- ↑ Norbert Wolf: The art of the salon , p. 202.
- ↑ Norbert Wolf: The art of the salon , p. 202.
- ↑ James A. Ganz, Richard R. Brettell: Great French paintings from the Clark: Barbizon through impressionism , p. 134.
- ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: AfD European election campaign: The naked woman and the evil turban wearers , article in Der Tagesspiegel from April 12, 2019.
- ↑ Ronald Pohl: Kulturglosse: The Afd creates mood against Muslims with sultry salon painting , article in Der Standard from April 27, 2019.
- ↑ Melanie Amann: The situation on Thursday , article in Der Spiegel from April 25, 2019.
- ↑ Fabian Goldmann: Justice: AfD advertises with slavery posters - what is actually behind it.
- ↑ Saskia Trebing: Art as election advertising: Why the AfD did not understand its own poster , article in Monopol, from April 25, 2019.
- ↑ Saskia Trebing: Art as election advertising: Why the AfD did not understand its own poster , article in Monopol, from April 25, 2019.
- ↑ Election advertising: US Museum calls on AfD to no longer use “slave market” paintings by the painter Léon Gérôme for your election campaign , report on Deutschlandfunk from April 26, 2019
- ^ Sarah Lees, Richard Rand, Katharine J. Albert: Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , p. 360.