Week 6: why we must study Orientalist painting

We were looking at Spanish art and we saw the kind of Golden Age in the 16th and 17th centuries, we jumped to the 20th century with Salvador Dalí and we saw how he reinvented Spanish history, but there was a big part in the middle that I mentioned the 19th century, which doesn't get a lot of attention in Spanish art, and the reason it doesn't get much attention in Spanish art history is because France really dominates in the 19th century in terms of the art world, obviously with the Impressionist movement. a lot of people are familiar with

orientalist

painting

, which is what we're going to talk about today, so I hope everyone can see this, this is Napoleon visiting the Jaffa plague of 1804 and this is the

painting

we're going to look at.

To begin with, we can't jump directly to Spain, we have to start with France because France is like the center of

orientalist

painting and the reason for this is that even politically, Francis thought that he had started to colonize the Middle East, so then I'm just going to review what I'm recording for this question, so yeah, this will be available on YouTube later and yeah, so France started this trend of colonizing the Middle East in 1788. I think that's a long day, actually, let me check my notes 1798. when Napoleon sent a load of troops into Syria and essentially Syria and Egypt were the main places, the reason they did it is because they were trying to block Britain's access to India, so there were all kinds of political motivations, but what we're going to focus on is the impact that this political event had on the arts and this is really the painting that most people start with when you look at this period, so yeah, France lost this battle trying to conquer Syria in Egypt because Britain teamed up with the Ottoman Empire to try to stop France's invasion successfully, so France lost, but if you look at the painting on your screen you won't necessarily think that France lost this battle because when Napoleon returned he decided he wanted to. using art to brand himself as a successful invader, he really understood the power of art as propaganda and if you look at his portraits, he really looks like the kings and queens of history even though he was an emperor, so he really He adopted many things. of royal portrait tropes to look more powerful and this is a great example of that, so first in this painting, if you zoom in, which we will do on this slide in the background, in the middle of the painting, there is a Flag Frenchwoman on top of this burning building, which makes the whole event seem like a success for France, although in reality it wasn't, it was a huge failure and if you get closer to Napoleon himself, sorry, this is not a very good reproduction but you will see that all the people around him cover their mouths because they are in this plague-stricken mosque and that is one of the reasons why France was not successful in this invasion because so many troops died. by this plague, so all the generals around Napoleon cover their mouths, he was really scared by this plague, but Napoleon has proven to be, you know, totally fearless, he reaches out and even touches one of the people who has the pest, so it

must

be shown. like this hero, this total hero, so yeah, it's, I mean, it's a lie, it's propaganda, but anyway it was very effective at the time and there are more techniques that Napoleon uses to really enhance his piety and in this painting, everyone in different parts of the painting are turning. looking at him so that he's really the main focus of attention and the whole outside of the painting is in shadow and he's illuminated like he's a Christ, this is very typical of religious painting, so really embrace that as Well, one of the things I find most interesting is that the artist decides to put it in the same position as the Apollo Belvedere, this really famous Greek sculpture that we looked at maybe in the second or third

week

when we were talking about sculpture. and we know we mentioned that Greek sculptures have all these connotations of democracy, power, Empire and this was really helpful because you have to remember that academic artists were

study

ing Greek sculpture, so they really copied these poses on purpose, so yeah, There are a million things that Napoleon does. to try to make this invasion look successful and I've just included this image here so you can get an idea of ​​the scale of this painting in the Louvre, it's absolutely huge, which again adds to the propaganda of it, if that's even a Word just yes this painting is basically where you can start to see the beginnings of orientalist painting so the artists who painted this had never been to Egypt but he copied Egyptian architecture from the artists sketchbooks . that Napoleon had taken with him on his journey and this is something really important about the beginning of colonization in the Middle East is that the European powers and the European generals took artists with them and the artists made sketches and they came back and these sketches and drawings began to set trends among European artists who had never been to the Middle East, so from the beginning of colonization in the Middle East art was enormously important and I just remembered that I included this slide here because one of the soldiers from Napoleon actually I found in Egypt the rosetta stone, which is a really famous stone for the

study

of Egypt, whether you are a historian or an art historian, yes, it totally changed what everyone understood as ancient Egyptian history and eventually this ended in the British Museum, so a lot of things that French, British and Spanish soldiers sometimes found as they began to colonize the Middle East in the 19th century ended up in the British Museum and this is another one of those really controversial things and issues of repatriation that we talk about often in this class, I won't go into that stage, we have a lot to overcome and I'm going to try to make the class a little shorter so there's more time for questions, so feel free to pop in with questions at any time. moment, yes.

These artists were the ones who went with him and basically started to inspire artists who had never been like the one you're seeing here and you know that even though the painting we're seeing was a political failure, it was a great artistic success and Later in the century XIX, when France continued its colonization of the Middle East like many other European powers at the time, the trend for the type of orientalist tropes you are seeing in this painting became increasingly popular, which brings me Let's move on to the type of second artist we are going to talk about, which is Dellacroix.

I hope you can see the seal here, so now we are in a different part of the world, we have moved away from Egypt because in 1830, 30 years ago. Later France conquered Algeria and again sent artists with their political troops and one of the artists they sent was actually Della Kwan who was most famous for his romantic paintings but he also did many orientalist paintings and this was one of them women of Algeria, this is a very famous orientalist painting because it is considered one of the first in this style. We'll come back to this painting though, so I'm not going to talk too much about it now, so I've included a map. here just to show you that basically in the late 19th century, so you know, in the hundred years after Napoleon first tried to colonize Syria and Egypt, European colonization was basically a disaster, so a lot of European powers were trying of doing the same thing and I just got too much, so basically what happened is that they decided to have a big political meeting in 1882.

I think so, although let me check my notes, yes. In 1882 they held a large political meeting that became known as the fight for Africa, where they basically divided all the territories of Africa between the different European powers that were trying to conquer Africa and the Middle East. And it's really a sad time because before 1882, before the Scramble for Africa, I think it may have actually been 1884, but I just have to mark the class before this time, Africa was a relatively independent continent and after 1880 to 90 percent was colonized by Europe, so on this map on the right side I hope you can see, this is after 1882.

We'll focus on the blue and the yellow because the blue represents France and the yellow represents Spain and We're actually going to approach this corner of North Africa looking primarily at Algeria and Morocco, but this just gives you a sense of what was happening politically and this had a huge impact on the arts and basically we're going to study that impact today and I've also I included these three images just to show you that in the late 19th century when this had been going on for a hundred years. Orientalism was not only infiltrating painting but also advertising, so advertising in visual culture is starting to appear everywhere basically and there are still remnants of this today, but you know when you look at these ads you'll be By the end of the class I could see how similar they are and how much they take from Orientalist paintings and it also had a big influence on architecture, so I'll talk briefly about this, although we'll come back to this.

This is the Spanish pavilion. from 1878 throughout the 19th century from 1851 onwards some of you may know that Great Britain, France, Spain and several other nations did international exhibitions together about every 10 or 11 years and they were basically huge exhibitions, often in Paris, but sometimes in Barcelona, ​​sometimes in Philadelphia, in the United States, where each nation would build a pavilion to represent itself and fill it with items that they felt best displayed their nation and basically these displays were enormously important for colonialism because many nations used them to show what their colonies were. They had plundered their colonies and it's interesting to me that Spain actually used orientalist architecture in 1878 to represent itself, but you see orientalist architecture everywhere and some of you in the UK may have seen the I don't remember its name. in Brighton I haven't included a photo of it, but the Grand Palace in Brighton which also uses Orientalist architecture, so you really see it everywhere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so yes, it happens in advertising, it happens in architecture, but what we're going to focus on is the way it happened when painting the Brighton pavilion, apparently it's called yeah, okay, cool, so people are familiar with it and I haven't actually seen it. in person but from what I remember I think it's Indian Inspired Architecture because Orientalist architecture is very authentic but I think that's the case it would make sense because obviously the UK was colonizing India at the time so yeah , Orientalism is always connected in some way to the colonial history that surrounds it. what really happened to the painting because I could do all about orientalist architecture, but I always talk for too long, we'll just focus on the painting, so now we're in the second half of the 19th century, you know, 60 years after the first painting we saw in Egypt and now colonization is such a widespread political trend that artists really got on board with this, it becomes more and more popular and they start to remember those first colonial missions and romanticize them, so here you have Napoleon in The Cairo. and here you have the same Napoleon in Cairo, it's a kite, it becomes a kind of obsessive theme in France, remembering this failed French battle and really romanticizing it like they had done in the beginning and this is a good time to talk about it .

Jerome because the two paintings we have seen here are by the same artist and he basically becomes the most famous 19th century orientalist painter of all time and people really copy his style so when you look at his paintings you can have a very good idea of ​​what the typical traits of orientalist painting are, so you can see that it's very realistic, you know, extremely academic, like a very flat surface, very technical, but also super romantic and really obsessed with the type of landscape and textiles, all this. These kinds of things and the reason why the distinctive characteristics of the Orientalist style are so interesting, I included this here is because they are very different from what we normally associate with the late 19th century, because Impressionism is like the most art historical movement. famous of this time. but it happens at exactly the same time as the orientalist painting, so I've included these two images here so you can see that they were both painted in the same year, one of them is impressionist style, one of them is oriental style.

They are both painted in France as well and are incredibly different in subject matter, one is extremely strict on political events and the other isn't really the style of painting, like the brush strokes, everything is different and the reason why these styles contrast so much. A lot of it is because the orientalist painters were trained in the French academies and the typically orientalist painters were very academic, they went through all the right steps to be painters and were very well trained,while the impressionists all they did was hate academic painting. They left the Academy, they didn't exhibit in academic venues, so yes, these are two very different painting styles.

The whole thing about orientalism is illuminated, it's almost hyper-realistic, and in fact, talking about hyper-reality brings me to my next point. Which is what art historians over the last 50 years or so have started to say is that it's so hyperreal because it's actually unreal. All these orientalist paintings do not represent the reality of life in the Middle East and this started this whole debate about realist painting and the debate focused mainly on this image that we are going to see here, so this was an image that was analyzed by a historian of very famous art. She's most famous for her feminist art history, but she actually wrote this article that really shook the world of art history, if you can say that.

It was called Imaginary Orient and her name is Linda nock links I don't think I said her name and basically she argued and actually demonstrated that Orientalist paintings were complete fantasies, although they look really realistic and academic, they were a total pastiche. which is basically like a collage of many different elements, many different photographs randomly put together, so this painting that we are seeing in the snake charmer, the tiles are taken from Turkey, the floor is taken from another completely different part of the Middle East . the clothes are taken from a different region and basically everything comes from where the artist wants and they put it together in this big pastiche to make it look as beautiful and romantic as possible and what Linda Nochlin said is that often these pastiches weren't like that.

These types of fantastical collages really didn't do the Middle East any favors because they often perpetuate stereotypes that are still alive today. So they came out of this idea of ​​exoticism and nudity, and one of the things that she really noticed was the Orientalist paintings, even though they are incredibly beautiful and very well painted, the architecture is in stunning decay, so you can see in the corners, you can see in this corner, for example, again a terrible reproduction and in the floor mosaics you can see at the bottom everything. she's kind of broken and she perpetuated this idea that these nations were somehow declining or that they had some kind of political background of nations that needed to be saved and that I colonized, so all of these stereotypes really go back to orientalist painting .

This was Lyndon. Optins' argument and it wasn't just Lyndon Oaklands argument, it was also Edward Sayid's argument, who wrote a book in 1978, a hundred years after this painting was made, and I have a quote in my notes that I should say, leave me. Find it, yeah, so this is Edward Said's argument about the colonization of the Middle East and the kind of literature, painting and advertising that emerged in Europe along with the colonization, so he says that in all of its imperial colonial areas and neocolonials, the Western powers used their domination to impose a simplistic vision of the East, a sensual, corrupt, devious, lazy, tyrannical and backward, so this was theirs, this was their argument and it actually used the painting that we were seeing in the cover of his book, so he obviously thought that this painting really represents this beautiful but negative fantasy in the best way, so anyway this was Lyndon Oaklands argument about painting and one of the types of painting that best suits her argument, if you really want to prove her right, it's a kind of subsection of orientalist painting called harem by painting its extremes.

There were bathhouses in North Africa, in some parts of Egypt and Syria and also in Turkey, and they were usually very beautiful inside and were also women-only spaces. I'm going to pause and let the sound catch up because I think some people are having trouble with the sound so let me check that I'm not muted, can everyone hear me now? I'll let people be okay, cool, so the sound seems to be back, so yeah, we'll continue talking about her and the paintings of her, so, let's go. Look, and there was, so I'm just looking at my notes and mine on this.

I was writing about the fact that there are so many of these hürrem paintings in Orientalism that you would really think they existed in all Middle Eastern cultures. on the corner of every street were the complete obsession of Western painters who loved the idea of ​​this bathhouse. Okay, I'm still having trouble with the sound. So how about we now be patient and wait for people to capture much better sound? Okay, cool people. Now you can hear me. I did something to unmute, so I hope it works. So yes, his own paintings. The reason they fit so well with Linden Oakland's arguments is because, as I just mentioned, they were women-only spaces, so even though there are thousands of Orientalists. hürrem paintings painted by men, in reality they would never have been allowed to see it and would never have entered, so when you look at this painting by dellacroix of three women in a harem in Algeria, you might think differently about whether this is realistic or not, considering now you know he was never actually allowed into the harem, so this was Linden Oakland's point, basically, that orientalist painting gave you all these fantastic ideas about the Middle East that ultimately created slightly negative stereotypes about this guy of exotic. veiled culture that, you know, was very centralized, so this was her argument.

I'll do it and give you the other side of the debate. People who don't agree with this argument, although it's pretty clear what I like, I fall for it, but it's interesting. debate, so I'm going to give you both sides and before I do that, this image on the screen that we're looking at now reminded me that I wanted to mention that you might notice that it's worth noting that you may see a lot of orientalist paintings. especially in the harem in the bathhouse he juxtaposed really white skinned women with black women and it's a repetitive thing that you will always see an oriental in his paintings, even in this very early one and I can see that I actually wrote 1934 in on the screen, but it's 1834 so I'll have to change that and I always get the dates wrong, but our historians have started writing about this about the depictions of race in their oriental paintings because basically a lot of the harem paintings are from the Ottoman Empire. in Turkey and it's certainly true that in the Ottoman Empire and in many of the territories they conquered like Syria and Egypt and I mean everywhere and they had bathhouses and they also had a UNIX and Unix type slaves who had servants specifically if they were men castrated so that they could work very closely with the Sultan without being a threat to him because they couldn't have any family or dynasty or anything like that, so there were UNIX and Unix-like if they were slaves that had been taken. from the African continent, but sometimes they would also be white if they had been from Eastern Europe, for example, where the Optimal Empire also had territories, but the interesting thing about European orientalist paintings is that when they depict eunuchs, these types of servant figures in We almost always represent the hürrem as black so that they do not show any of the racial diversity of the Ottoman Empire.

They have this same kind of repetitive group, this repetitive division between whites and blacks and our historians now say that this is because it fit better with European ideas about race and racism that they created well, they didn't create them, which they took mainly about the slave trade, so this was really trying to be acceptable to white European audiences, so I thought that was an interesting point because you see. in so many orientalist paintings, so yes, the other side of the argument goes back to Linda Nochlin. I will briefly summarize that, from her point of view, Orientalist paintings did not portray the reality of the Middle East, in a way they simplified it, they made it.

They often look quite broken and decrepit even though they still look very beautiful, they often focus on the most different and also the oldest elements of Middle Eastern culture, which automates, which I finally feel sorry for, It makes it look a bit medieval and in fact the reason I included the image on the right, the coffee house from 1888 is because this is a really unusual orientalist painting simply due to the fact that it includes a newspaper and this is a One of the things that Linda Nochlin points out is that Orientalist paintings never include newspapers and they don't really and she has a list of other things that they don't include, like cars or televisions or actually, I'm not sure when television was invented but basically any modern invention from the late 19th century, which are tons of them because we are just like in the late Industrial Revolution era, they are not included in the orientalist paintings, you will only see the older porcelain and smoking devices and instruments older, so it really made everything look quite medieval.

Anyway, that's Lyndon Oakland's argument. Someone just asked a very good question about what the term orientalist painting really means. Orientalist painting according to Linda Nochlin and Edward Sade is basically a painting that was produced in the 19th century after the beginning of the colonization of the Middle East and for them it is this. Really specific, it has geographical connotations and also historical connotations, so you're in North Africa and the Middle East and you're in the 19th century and the reason it's so specific to them is because they think it's directly connected to the colonial policy of the time so typical that people write orientalism with a lowercase oh, as if they were just saying that this oriental was, for example, if it is written with a lowercase oh, then it is typically the type of 1516, 17th centuries, really before colonization began because there has always been cultural exchange.

You know that people have been traveling before they started colonizing, so there were masses and tapestries made in Europe that can be inspired by the Chinese or the Ottoman Empire and can be called oriental with a little touch of their own, but because of the covers and Octarine and Edward. The orientalist painting of the site with a large o really means a very specific style and trend that developed when colonialism began, so I said I was going to give the other side of a debate some time, so I reassured him because, of course Otherwise, I never think I will ever do it.

Art historians have said that we focus too much on the colonial history behind Orientalist painting and that we should keep in mind that they show that his oriental paintings share this great admiration and respect for Middle Eastern cultures and, in particular, there is a historian John McKenzie who says that This is because the Industrial Age was making people really nostalgic in Europe and therefore they were looking for something to inspire them to inspire more arts and crafts, for example, and it is certainly true that Can you find something very beautiful and something that can be full of admiration for a culture and yet it is still part of the colonial context?

Then you know that these things are not mutually exclusive. I'll just read you some John Mackenzie like I read some Edward Sayid, these are like opposite sides, so according to John Mackenzie quotes, he says of course these highly positive responses to the architecture and the arts of the Islamic world were not the whole story, of course, there are texts in which the Islamic world was denigrated, it is unquestionable that a sense of exclusivity and racial superiority was often at the heart of the imperial ideology of the time, but the Asian and Eastern peoples The Middle East was often presented as superior to many indigenous peoples and the fact is that the arts revealed the way in which the East offered inspiration on a whole variety of levels, many Western commentators were obsessed with a sense of decadence and the East was seen as a example of excellence in design and craftsmanship, perhaps it is time to restore the word orientalism with great emphasis.

Oh two, it has a more positive meaning so this is their side of the debate and in fact if you really wanted to look at this debate a good place to start would be the British Museum catalogue, what was it called, inspired by the Exhibition of the East and which I believe closed very recently, that is where this essay was taken from. Many people criticized the exhibition because they said it did not include enough information about 19th century colonial history about that turning point where Europe begins. When trying to colonize the Middle East, many people said: how can you talk about Delacroix and the orientalist paintings of him without mentioning the fact that he was sent on a colonial mission to Algeria?

So it's very interconnected, but still the exhibition catalog has essays that really fit and that really give you a good idea of ​​the debate, so yeah, and a lot of people are commenting on the skill of these paintings, which is absolutely true, they are very well painted, honestly, technically they are really amazing and The other thing about thesepaintings is that they are absolutely beautiful and in fact one of the things that has really sparked the debate about orientalist painting and what it means and what it represents is the fact that these paintings in the 21st century are extremely popular in the Middle East and the major auction house sales of Orientalist paintings tend to go to Middle Eastern buyers who really admire these works and that's because they are absolutely beautiful, but Linda Nachman aims to take them with a pinch of salt or at least less always.

Remembering that they are fantastic and largely have a colonial context, they still hold up well. I guess everyone would have different opinions on it, so I wanted to also include this painter Osman Hamdi Bey, who is a Turkish painter who basically Again, you know how to talk about the Middle East and you know the contemporary Middle Eastern buyers who really admire painting oriental.A 19th century Turkish painter who really admired oriental painting and in fact began painting in the same style, however, what art historians have pointed out is that if you compare his paintings with the paintings of Jerome or another type of typical harem paintings that fall into orientalism When painting, there are certain key differences, for example, it often includes Arabic writing, which actually spells something because this was what happens with oriental painting.

They often had these kind of Arabicized letters that didn't actually spell anything, it was all fake, so you can see on the back of this painting that it includes text, it also includes very frequent readings and the Quran, which is actually quite absent in orientalist painting. You don't usually see people reading, so the idea is that Othman Hamdi Bey because he represents his own culture. It actually gives you a much more intellectual perception of Turkey in particular, so this is another scene where you can see a woman reading and reading the Quran, which is very unusual compared to harem type of scenes. that we have seen where women are portrayed. like nude models and nothing more, so his paintings are really interesting and another interesting thing about realistic painting.

I mean, there are a lot of interesting things about it, but another thing I had to mention is the fact that there are a lot of European orientalist women painters. Orientalist women painters finally in the history of art know that women are starting to participate in greater numbers and that's because, like colonialism, it was basically a great opportunity for European women because they were allowed into their ends and they were seen as having this privileged position where they could get information about women in the colonies, so suddenly they were sent on colonial missions, they were allowed to be journalists and painters, so you see orientalist paintings of European women and at first art historians started saying you know.

Potentially European women had this kind of more favorable view of the Middle East, they didn't perpetuate as many stereotypes as men, they had a kind of more domestic, more authentic view, because they were allowed into the harems. There is another. Here but now this argument is seen as a bit dated because actually all the female painters had different approaches and actually ultimately perpetuated the same stereotypes as the men and it was like a kind of compensation. liberated along gender lines, but just a base or they participated in this colonial context and participated in similar racial subordination, so they had to liberate themselves from one by creating a different negative hierarchy, so it's a really complicated thing to explain, but The point is that European women really participated in this and it wasn't always necessarily in a positive way, especially if you read their travel diaries and the literature they produced, it becomes clear that yes, they really participated in this. cultivate orientalist tropes that would later become stereotypes about the Middle East that we still see today, so you know, I want to see an ending with a super negative note about orientalist painting because actually now there are many women artists and artists who they are trying to deal with the legacy of orientalist painting and one of these artists is Leila Saed, there should be a why in her name so it's a typo but she's from Morocco and she basically makes these amazing settings that you know By looking at how intricate this is, you can see how long it takes her to put these things together, sometimes it takes her years to prepare a photograph, so she manipulates every detail and then photographs herself inside and at the same time Doing this, you basically hope you like it. taking orientalist painting to the extreme, almost like a parody of how constructed and manufactured they are so that people always remember that these paintings are put together like a collage, they are not, they are not a snapshot of reality, they are not like a photograph . and another thing she often does in her work is include a lot of calligraphy and legible authentic calligraphy.

It's kind of a parody of the fact that orientalist painting often has faux calligraphy inside, so yeah, her work and stuff is really worth looking at. was included in the British Museum exhibition at the end, if anyone went, yes, you will notice that we haven't spent much time talking about Spanish Orientalist painting, but that's on purpose because basically what happened to Spanish Orientalist painting is that was towed, we left it out of this debate. Hopefully you can see in this class that the debate continues and that there are many different elements of painting of greater interest that historians have discussed, but one of the things that no one discussed was Spain and that is because Spain Basically, the scenes have this really different exceptional relationship with the Middle East that just didn't fit into the debate and even Edward Syed believed this and I think I actually wrote like a final quote, yeah, this is something that Edward Sayid wrote about Spain, he said, "I said very little about the very complex relationship between Spain and Islam, which certainly could not be characterized simply as an imperial relationship.

Spain is a notable exception in Europe because what brings the richness of the image of Islam in Spain is the fact that it constitutes an important one. part of Spanish culture rather than being an external and distant power that Spain

must

defend itself from, so this was the idea that people had that Spain could not perpetuate the same stereotypes because Islamic culture had been part of Spain and We looked at this last

week

when we did the jewels of Nazareth, for example, but basically you know, and it's certainly true, looking at the image that you see on the screen, the Spanish artists began to paint their own history, they didn't just travel to Turkey and paint . whatever they did you know specifically you look back to the Nazareth period and here you have a painting of Gbagbo Abdul he was the last Spanish ruler and here you also have another painting of a Nazareth court where you know Andalusia is painted as like the center of music, scientific literature, you have scientists on the right side, musicians on the left side, you know, this is positive painting, I guess, and you even have the Spanish rulers of the time commissioning orientalist rooms, oriental oriental rooms . in their palaces, which to be honest was happening all over Europe, but this one specifically, which is Spanish, had instead of Arabic calligraphy the initials III, all over the side and that was basically the Queen of Spain at that time doing this connection between her and Isabella the first who had reconquered Spain from the Empire of Nazareth, so it was as if they were really reliving their history, so the orientalism, I suppose, was more local and specific, however, however, you should know that It has to be said that the things that were being revived often did not necessarily have to do only with the Empire of Nazareth but with its conquest, so if you look at this and this is a painting of the Last King of Nazareth leaving and this was what for Spain It was important for them to show that they conquered this Islamic Kingdom because they themselves, if we go to this slide, we are actually trying to conquer it again.

You know they were part of the Scramble for Africa and invaded Morocco in 1859 during Spanish times. African war, so actually, even though they were reliving their own history slightly differently than France, they were doing it for the same kind of colonial reasons and a lot of politicians at the time were using this rhetoric and saying, You know, in 1857 or whatever. Before the war he said things like that Spain has more right to colonize Morocco than France, our biggest competitor because Spain has been Islamic. Spain has been African, you know, making all these generalizations to promote its colonial activities, so yeah, the sudden resurgence of Spain in the 19th century. of its Islamic history after centuries of repression was timely and again connected to the colonial context, so more and more Spain is being included in this debate, so it is worth looking at some more orientalist paintings from Spain that I just wanted include to finish this. painting by Dalí we can always trust that Dalí will make a historical painting about Spain, even if he is not known for his historical paintings, they will always be one that fits whatever part of Spanish history you are talking about and this is the Battle of Tetouan , which was the Spanish-African War and I'm just including this photograph here so you can see how big it is and it's huge this painting and super rare, really hard to get a picture of because it's actually in Japan, so I learned this. week and then I did say that I would talk less time and I can't believe it's seven o'clock so feel free to start asking questions or tell me what you think in the chat or in private about this debate I leave you with this type of Spanish orientalist paintings for show you that there are very violent Spanish Orientalist paintings that have the same stereotypes about the violence of the Islamic kingdoms that the realist love paintings focus on, but you also get a lot more portraits in Spanish Orientalism, which I'll let everyone take a look at. decision, so yeah, I think I'll leave it here because I've probably given too much information away, but I'd love to know what everyone thinks about the space because then, because yeah, it's ongoing and and Part of the reason this is going on is because the paintings are so beautiful that people are really obsessed with them and we want to make sense of them, so it's certainly possible to admire them and find them problematic at the same time, but yes, it's important.

I talk about them because I think it's a part of the story that really It's overlooked, and even in galleries and stuff, when you walk room by room, Orientalist paintings are often mixed in with other things, like those of the Impressionists or those of the Impressionists. with realist paintings from the early 19th century and when they really deserve a whole section to themselves so people can spend time thinking about this debate, yeah, so let me know what you think. I'll check the chat to see if anyone has any influence. Many people say they will see the British Museum exhibition.

Yes, I really recommend it, especially because, like the British Museum exhibition, it started in the 15th century, it gives you that sense of transition from cultural exchange to colonial exchange and how how there was that moment that changed when the power dynamics change and those things and