Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930

African Studies Review, Dec 2003 by Zarobell, John

Roger Benjamin. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 352 pp. 16 color plates. 123 b/w illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Cloth.

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, art historians have explored the political and cultural implications of Orientalist imagery. Many of these examinations have provided compelling new interpretations of canonical artists using sophisticated and sometimes confounding theoretical tools. Others have assembled broad exhibitions of Orientalist art, employing Said's cultural analysis to form a new category of art history. In the process, the subtleties of Said's theories can get lost, but the politics of colonialism and the images featuring the exotic inhabitants and terrain of the "Orient" have now been definitively linked.

Roger Benjamin has long been working on Orientalist art, and his catalog Orientalism (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997) is one of the most accomplished studies of this artistic phenomenon to date. Another beautiful exhibition organized by Benjamin, Renoir and Algeria, is touring the U.S. and France this year (Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2003), making Benjamin one of the most-published authorities on the topic. Onentalist Aesthetics is his juggernaut, an exhaustive and definitive analysis of French Orientalist art depicting the Mahgreb between 1880 and 1930. This richly detailed text provides a complex array of studies, not only of famous and obscure French and Algerian artists (yes, finally, an analysis of Orientalism produced by Orientals themselves), but also of the cultural institutions and historical developments that contributed to the flowering of Orientalist art in France and the promotion of indigenous arts in the colonies. This is a defining work of cultural history examining the particularities behind the blanket term "Orientalist art."

Benjamin dispenses with the generalities that guide most studies of Orientalist imagery and rigorously situates both artists and works in very specific historical moments and geographical locations. he manages to produce a history of the politics and imagery of colonialism in the Maghreb that operates as a study of both colonial and artistic development. To achieve this remarkable feat, he juxtaposes chapters devoted to analyses of individual artists with others focusing on the history of colonialism in North Africa. Benjamin devotes chapters to Renoir and Matisse, but his exploration of less well-known artists such as Etienne Dinet, Azouaou Mammeri, and Mohammed Racim yields fresh insights and new perspectives from which to consider the interaction between the metropole and the colony. Chapters on colonial muscology, the presentation of North African colonies at the Universal Exposition of 9 1900 ("Colonial Panoramania"), and the creation of traveling scholarships for French artists to North Africa offer much new material and illuminating arguments about the institutional support for Orientalist art and the social world in which such art was consumed. At first, it is true, the effect of combining art historical analyses with broader cultural interpretations is disorienting, but gradually the various aspects of Benjamin's analysis fall into place, and it becomes clear that only by presenting such information about the evolution of colonialism in North Africa can the reader comprehend the political and cultural weight of the imagery he so cogently addresses.

From Benjamin's perspective, the pictures themselves speak in a formal language familiar to art historians, but the stories they tell reflect the social complexities that were previously the domain of the colonial historian. A perfect example is Benjamin's coining of the term "associationist aesthetics," a term that suggests just how provocative and original the author's formulations can be. However, Benjamin's analysis of Orientalist images does not grant the pictures any agency in shaping colonial ideology or policy. In other words, while readers will come to understand the complex world of metropolitan and colonial politics that led to the creation of Orientalist works of art, they will not come away thinking that these works themselves altered the course of that history. For Benjamin, Orientalist works of art are products of colonial history, rather than catalysts for it.

John Zarobell

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania