Pino Blasone

Orientalism,

Veiled and Unveiled

1 – Jean-Léon Gérôme, Woman of Constantinople and VeiledCircassian Lady (Gevherin Nedaxe Seteney, third wife of the

Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz I ?)

A Few Literary Sources

Sir James Justinian Morier was a British diplomat and traveller. Since he was born in

Smyrna/Izmir, where his father was consul and East India Company agent, he spoke well

Turkish and learnt some Persian too. In A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and

Asia Minor, to Constantinople, between the Years 1810 and 1816 (see the bibliography

below), he narrates a nice anecdote about his fortuitous meeting with an Ethiopian eunuch,

guardian of an Iranian harem. The poor guy was disconcerted and somewhat perplexed, at

hearing from his interlocutor about the quite free life of women in Europe at those times.

When Mourier showed him a small portable portrait of his mother, the eunuch asked if her

husband was a painter, so reluctant he was to believe that an extraneous man might have

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been allowed to gaze so long and confidentially at her, in order to depict her face unveiled.1

Gérard de Nerval is the better known pen-name of the French poet and traveller

Gérard Labrunie. “The Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient” is a section of his

Voyage en Orient, published in the journal Revue des Deux Mondes from May 1846 to

October 1847 and later in two volumes (Paris: Sartorius, 1848 and 1850). An extended and

revised edition will be issued in 1851 by Charpentier at Paris. “Throughout the length and

breadth of the Levant,” the late Romantic author writes, in the chapter The Mask and the

Veil, “there is no town where women are more utterly and completely veiled than at Cairo.

At Constantinople, at Smyrna, through a veil of white or black gauze, it is occasionally

possible to catch a glimpse of the face of some Muslim beauty. No matter how severe the

laws may be, they seldom succeed in rendering that delicate tissue any more opaque”.

“When I first came here,” De Nerval continues, “I did not quite understand what the

attraction could be about the mystery with which the more interesting half of the people of

the Orient enshrouds itself. But a few days sufficed to show me that a woman who knows

herself to be the object of attention can usually find an opportunity to let herself be seen if

she is beautiful. [...] The town itself, like those who dwell in it, unveils its most shady

retreats, its most delightful interiors, only by degrees” (trans. Conrad Elphinstone?, 1930).

By comparing Morier with De Nerval, about the same theme, what we can comment is that

the former does not renounce to a certain English wit and taste for hyperbolic anecdotage,

whereas the latter willingly indulges in a French fashioned malicious insinuation. Both of

them remain diplomatically external to any possible problematic aspect of the matter, if not

superficial anyway. Let us turn to a Liberal patriot and exile as the Italian Princess Cristina

di Belgiojoso, in her Asie Mineure et Syrie: Souvenirs de Voyages, published before in the

Revue des Deux Mondes and in 1858 by the “Michael Lévy Brothers” at Paris. Oriental

Harems and Scenery – New York: Carleton, 1862 – is only a partial translation from it.

In Oriental Harems and Scenery, the noblewoman credits herself, referring to the

female condition in Near and Middle East: “I was better qualified than most travellers for

studying one important side of Mussulman society – the domestic side, that in which

Woman predominates. The Harem, the Mahometan sanctuary, hermetically sealed to all

men, was open to me; I could enter it freely and converse with those mysterious beings

1 A mythology of harems was not new, in European literatures: especially, cf. some fictional episodes in the Persian Letters written in 1721 by the French thinker Charles de Montesquieu.

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whom the Frank [generically, an Occidental male] never sees but when veiled; I could

interrogate some of those minds which never overflow of themselves, and tempt them to

precious disclosures concerning an unexplored world of passion and misfortune”. In the

pictorial field, a consonant author can be considered the French Sophie Boutellier, who

assumed the artistic name Henriette Browne. For instance, her painting A Visit: Harem

Interior, Constantinople 1860 (sold at Christieʼs Auction House, London, in 2000) did not

fail to disappoint the habitués of the Paris Salon in 1861, for its modest setting and familiar

atmosphere, clashing with a prevailing morbid and imaginary Orientalistic voyeurism.

As reported by Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, the description of harems was even

more disenchanting, as dealing with hygienic conditions and social promiscuity despite their

gender segregation. Yet here it is interesting what a kind of feminine glance she could have

at a female appearance, beneath the usual veil. Actually this early sociologist lady was a

severe judge of beauty and make-up as well, who wrote: “nothing can be more slovenly than

their hair, the very great ladies who had lived at the capital [Istanbul] alone possessing

combs. As to the paint, which they apply immoderately, both in variety of color and in

quantity, its distribution can only be regulated by mutual consultation, and as all the women

living under one roof are so many rivals, they willingly encourage the most grotesque

illumination of their respective faces. They apply vermilion to the lips, red to the cheeks,

nose, forehead, and chin, white wherever a vacant spot occurs, and blue around the eyes and

under the nose. What is yet more strange is their manner of constructing eyebrows... Every

womanʼs face is a complicated work of art, which is not to be retouched every morning”.

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2 – Frederick Arthur Bridgman, A Constantinople Beauty; and

Théodore Ralli, Hanoum, a Young Girl of Constantinople

The Veil, as a Transparency

Reliably, the finest portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme as an Orientalist are An Almeh

(1882; private collection) and Veiled Circassian Lady (ca. 1876; sold at Christieʼs, New

York, in 1997). In Arabic a ‘ālmeh – or, better, ‘ālimah – is an Oriental female dancer, often

“learned” in traditional singing and music too. The lofty expression and the detached gaze

of the resting dancer, as depicted by the French painter, confirm what told about a then

renowned ‘ālmeh, by the German architect Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in his relation of

a journey to Egypt: “After she had danced a quarter of an hour, she drank coffee and

smoked with us as solemnly as a Pasha” (Aus Mehemed Aliʼs Reich; Stuttgart: Hallberger,

1844). Mostly this category of free women, which has been also likened to our courtesans of

the past, is represented with no veil over their faces. In Gérômeʼs painting, the only one is a

transparent blouse covering her trunk. The artist adopts a different way in order to portray

the Circassian woman, or his transparent veiled Almeh with Pipe painted in 1873, or else the

nearly contemporary Woman of Constantinople, currently located in a private collection.

The Circassian girls were much sought after as concubines in the harems, for their

legendary beauty and alleged training in feminine arts. They are the famed odalisques. That

one portrayed by Gérôme is a girl no longer. Indeed she looks so beautiful and elegant as to

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not need any heavy make-up, so ruthlessly criticized by Cristina di Belgiojoso. Nay, her

charm is increased by the dark transparent veil, which the artistʼs skill has painted over her

visage. If the gaze of An Almeh is quite lofty, hers is somewhat melancholic, as if

proceeding from a removed or eclipsed dimension of life. Either of them are staring out of

the picture, straight at the virtual observer. Whereas the ‘ālmeh has a tambourine in one

hand, the Veiled Circassian is holding a long stemmed pipe, the chibouk. In an Orientalistic

ambit at least, especially the latter and the Woman of Constantinople – whose veil is white

and covers the lower half face – may have worked as a foundation for a tiny iconographic

genre. This is the transparent veiled portrait, where the transparency does not seem to have

been a mere expedient. Rather, it was an additional and magnifying means of expression.

The lesson of Gérôme was learnt by some of his former apprentices. Frederick Arthur

Bridgman, sometimes called the “American Gérôme”, painted A Veiled Beauty of

Constantinople in 1880 (sold at Christieʼs, New York, in 2007), A Circassian Beauty in 1881

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and another Constantinople Beauty, undated and sold by

Sothebyʼs, New York, in 2010. In all these cases, a white transparent veil covers half of their

faces, their eyes excluded. The most expressive and impressive is A Constantinople Beauty.

There a young woman, half bust portrayed, is intensely gazing at the observer while

supporting her forehead with one hand, in a pensive attitude. Very similar are two portrayals

by the Greek Theodoros Rallis or Théodore Ralli, which are Hanoum, a Young Girl of

Constantinople (1884; sold at Sothebyʼs, London, in 2009) and an undated Turkish Woman

also sold by Sothebyʼs, London, in 2008. Like his master-painter Gérôme and Bridgman,

Ralli travelled in the Middle East, particularly to Cairo and Istanbul, where he was born.

Nearly integral versions of head veils or scarves were not lacking in the Orientalistic

portraiture, as in a full length picture of Lady Jane Elizabeth Digby al-Mezrab by the

German Carl Haag (1862; Tareq Rajab Museum, Kuwait). Almost integral, except for the

eyes, are the white transparent veils in a portrait of the artistʼs wife Ann Sarkizova painted in

1882 by the Russian/Armenian Ivan Aivazovsky, or in Portrait of a Veiled Woman with

Pearls by the American/Armenian Hovsep Pushman (1877-1966). Exceptionally the artists

could be women, as the French Mathilde L. W. Bonaparte. The countenance of her Fellah

(from the Arabic fellāhah, “peasant woman”; 1861: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes) is

wholly covered by a dark veil, save the light blue eyes. This veil is not transparent at all.

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The later Turkish paintress Mihri Müşfik, lived from 1885 to 1954, might be defined as an

Oriental Orientalist, since she had been an apprentice of the Italian Fausto Zonaro. Among

her works, there are a Woman with Veil and the Woman in Black, whose dark transparent veil

may somewhat remind us of the hat-veil fashionable amid European ladies in the first half

of the 20th century (cf. Taha Toros, İlk Kadın Ressamlarımız; in bibliography).

Not always nor necessarily the veil, so often covering the female mouth, could

“sound” like symbolic of a silent and anonymous presence or condition. This is the case of

an extraordinary series of portrayals dedicated by Zonaro to the eminent Turkish poetess

Nigār Hanım, lived from 1856 to 1918. They are watercolours and oil paintings, all

executed at Istanbul in a period between 1891 and 1909: Nigar Hanim, the Poetess, A Stroll

along the Bosphorus, On a Visit. In all of them, the gentle lady wears a white transparent

veil on the lower part of her face, on both sides attached to a headgear akin to a turban on

her head. Yet there is another one, titled Woman in a Ferace – “walking dress” –, where the

poetess is going to fully unveil her pretty visage with one hand, as if in order to recite her

verse. Like in other above portraits of her, in the background we may enjoy a blue view of

the Bosphorus seascape. In the Asiyan Museum at Istanbul, a room is devoted to Nigār.

3 – Mathilde Laetitia Wilhelmine Bonaparte, Fellah Woman; and

Mihri Müşfik, Siyahlı Kadın (“Woman in Black”)

An Unveiling Gesture

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In the production of Fausto Zonaro, the Woman in a Ferace is not the sole one to be

portrayed while unveiling herself. In another image by him, The New Turkey, the gesture of

removing the veil from her face, by the popular woman there represented, has a clear

symbolic and progressive meaning, allusive to a modernization of the customs and mentality

of the country and with special reference to the female condition (circa 1908; print after a

pastel: Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris). It can be objected that such an ideal attitude

reflected an European point of view of the author. Yet we cannot forget that he was well

inserted in the intellectual milieu and high society of Istanbul, so much as to become official

painter at the Ottoman court for a period. The Circassian woman artist Mihri Müşfik was his

apprentice, such as an important Turkish painter and archaeologist of that epoch, Osman

Hamdi, had been of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. Another Turkish woman

artist, Müfide Kadri, was an apprentice to Osman Hamdi. From the early un-peopled scenes,

they turned and focused that modern Oriental painting on the human figure and person.

In sum, the “Oriental Orientalism” was not only a pictorial transition movement, but

also a cultural vehicle or ferment of new ideas. What peculiarly the local artists had to face

was a religious interdiction of the figural representation, often interpreted and applied in a

restrictive manner, which had long limited the Middle Eastern art to a decorative or

miniaturistic dimension, or achieved its best expressions in a calligraphic representation of

sacred texts and in the architecture. In the production of Osman Hamdi not a few female

figures are discretely veiled, as A Lady of Constantinople (1881; private collection), other

times unveiled and emerging from a decorated background when depicted in an interior.

Unlike for several Occidental Orientalists, the “Arabesque” – or “Turquesque”, if you just

prefer so – artistic tradition was not forgotten but deeply transformed. Inside this context, it

is to be considered the most controversial and a little disconcerting artwork by Hamdi,

entitled Mihrāb. Even more than a symbolic value, it possesses a Symbolistic connotation.

Nowadays, this oil on canvas created in 1901 is housed in a private collection, but it

has been object of a various art criticism. It represents an unveiled radiant lady, wearing an

Oriental long robe and sitting on a high seat. A lot of old volumes are confusedly heaped at

her feet. She is staring beyond the observer of the picture, at something he is presumably

unable to discern. In this sense she may remind certain Byzantine female allegories of Sofia,

the divine Wisdom – or, why not, the Shekinah, as a divine Presence according to the Jewish

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Kabbalah –, also because the setting of the scene is a sacred one, reliably a Mosque. In fact,

what is visible in the rear of her is a mihrāb. That is is the absolutely empty niche, toward

which the pious Muslims are used to orient their prayers. Much better than the female veil,

the mihrāb symbolizes the non-representation, or an impossible and thus forbidden

representation. Along with the books ruined on the floor, such a detail, giving its title to the

composition, determines an enigmatic ambiguity of any possible interpretation, what makes

of this work the end of the Orientalism and a beginning of a modern Oriental art anyhow.

In a less esoteric way, we might hazard to guess that the unveiled woman before the

mihrāb stands for the representation itself, as a difference between the Western civilization

largely based on the representation and an aniconic one like that of the Near and Middle

East. May these contrasting traditions be reconciled, on a cultural level at least? Doubtless,

that had to be a problem for Hamdi as a figurative painter. Probably, it was such for him as a

thinker too, in a broader and wider sense. Nevertheless, what matters here is why that

representation in a broad and wide sense assumed a female form. Likely again, it was so not

only for psychological but also for historical reasons, because in the civilization to which

the artist belonged especially the representation of women had been object of a so long

concealment or removal, as to involve them generally as human beings. It is also true, as

representative of an absence of false representations, even the mihrāb cannot be considered

apart from one representation at least: that of the human beings who pray turned toward it.

Long before the First World War put an end to the so called Belle Époque, Osman

Hamdi concurred to the birth of a School of Fine Arts in 1883 and founded the Istanbul

Archaeology Museum in 1891. Mihri Müşfik worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome

and, by the way, was a good friend of the Italian poet Gabriele dʼAnnunzio. She was one of

the first teachers in the School of Fine Arts for Girls, opened at Instanbul in 1914. Thanks to

those artists the female figure, veiled or unveiled, or else portrayed while lifting her veil,

grew a recurrent motif in the new born Eastern figurative art. That worked as an useful

premise, if not as a contribution, to womanly emancipation. Actually, it happened in a

different way from that of so many Western painters of unveiling dancers or gracious

females, looking like unveiling themselves for an imaginary enjoyment of the artist. Or of

the Austrian Rudolf Ernst, who, in The Favourite, depicted a man while unveiling a girl in

his harem, chiefly to meet and gratify diffuse sexual fantasies (1872; private collection).

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4 – Fausto Zonaro, The New Turkey, and Woman in a Ferace

Morbid Veiled Fantasies

There are plays on words, as well as may be plays on images. A possible play on

images involving the Oriental female veil was too seductive, for certain Orientalist painters

– or sometimes photographers –, indulgent to the fabulous voyeurism of harems. This is the

case of the French Henri Lucien Doucet, who not seldom represented the Parisian mundane

life in an audacious and piquant way. He had been a student of the academic and Orientalist

artist Gustave Rodolphe Clarence Boulanger, a fellow professor of Jean-Léon Gérôme. His

portrayal Beauty of Harem probably had as subject an European model, proposed in an

Oriental guise (about 1882 or later; sold at Christieʼs, New York, in 1992). In the manner of

Gérôme, the head of this harem beauty, half bust portrayed, is wrapped in a white

transparent veil. Stylized with an almost Impressionistic technique, her features are hardly

discernible. Yet her trunk and breast are left bare, so as to create a contrasting effect.

Somehow surreal and fascinating, the same expedient was employed in Gachucha,

by the French Guillaume Seignac (1870-1924; sold at Sothebyʼs, New York, in 1991),

where the smiling girl has the face covered by a dark transparent veil over a naked body,

and is holding a tambourine in one hand. Indeed, her name does not sound an Oriental one,

but this scarcely matters in an occasional Orientalism, unlike that of Gérôme and Boulanger.

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A bit less occasional was the exoticism of the Dutch Kees van Dongen. Now in a private

collection, his Moorish Dancing Girl is part of a series he painted in about 1910, shortly

after a trip to Morocco. The jewelled woman is depicted nearly full length. Her head is

covered by a dark mantle and a mask. This time we cannot see her face but only her nude

body, standing out against a nocturne background. The dim impression of a fountain behind

her suggests the setting of a garden. That is a typical achievement of the Expressionistic art

of the author. Yet it might have well been influenced by a popular photographic production

then originated in North-Africa and quickly spread over the colonialist Europe, in form of

erotic illustrations or postcards. In fact, Van Dongenʼs picture looks very resemblant to a

contemporary “academic study” by the Czech photographer Rudolf Franz Lehnert, titled in

French Type dʼOrient and representing a Tunisian young model as a scarce veiled dancer.

In Tunis, Rudolf Lehnert sometimes collaborated with the Russian painter Alexander

Roubtzoff, who also pictured fully or partly veiled women but in a realistic and respectful

way. However, the best and most realistic Orientalistic eroticism was expressed by the

French Alphonse-Étienne Dinet, who long lived in South-Algeria and eventually, converted

to Islam, assumed the Arabic name Nasr al-Din. His nudes of Berber girls do not emerge

from the shade of fictitious harems or from the artificial light of art studios, but from the

sunlight or moonlight of open air natural spaces. The game of veiling and unveiling

themselves is intrinsic in not a few of these images, displaying itself like a ballet without

steps. Fillette se voilant, a young girl portrayed while veiling herself (1901; sold at

Christieʼs, Paris, in 2007), and La baigneuse aux bijoux, a bather depicted while unveiling

herself but still adorned with her jewels (1906; sold at Sothebyʼs, Paris, in 2006), reliably

represent the same model, whose name we know from another canvas of the same series:

Raoucha. Above all, they represent opposite but complementary aspects of one dynamics.

The veiling and unveiling dynamism is an ancient or archetypal one, already present

in the Mediterranean Hellenic culture. In the poem Odyssey by Homer, the deity Calypso

was not only a character, but also an allegoric personification of a subliminal concept. In

Greek, her name means “she who veils or hides”, as well as kálymma was the female veil.

Her magic faculty to veil and unveil has probably something to do with the gift of

immortality, refused by a “human, all too human” hero Ulysses. And the pre-Socratic

philosopher Heraclitus hermetically wrote: “Nature loves to hide”. This is also a secret of its

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power of seduction, originating every production or reproduction on earth. In the Hellenistic

Egypt, the goddess Isis was represented fully veiled, as symbolic of a mysterical knowledge.

Incidentally, a hint more about may ring out of the title of a minor Orientalistic artwork: the

lithograph Beauté Cachée/Die Araberin, “Hidden Beauty, or the Arab Woman” by the

German Clemens von Pausinger, dated 1908. There, we meet with the image of a lady so

wrapped in her scarf, that hardly she seems to eye out of the picture. Yet this is enough to let

us suspect of a not seldom hidden beauty, which we are unable or even afraid to discover.

After considering the veil and the woman as subjects, let us focus on the background

as a setting and a context. Above we have seen it as the harem, mainly as affabulated in the

Arab literary tradition of the Thousand and One Nights. Despite his apparent realism, in the

paintings of Étienne Dinet it looks idealized like an incontaminate and Dionysian nature,

after an old Mediterranean mythology and a modern Nietzschean philosophy. In the

perspective of Fausto Zonaro, the unveiling gesture is connected with the scenery of

modernity. In the Symbolism of Osman Hamdi, the represented unveiled woman contrasts

with a sacred environment and an aniconic culture. In Jane Elizabeth Digby al-Mezrab by

Carl Haag, the Islamized lady stands out against a view of classical ruins of the Syrian town

of Palmyra. This contrast is between the full veiled figure and what the Arabs call jāhiliyya,

that is the pagan civilization perceived as a time of “ignorance”. Nonetheless, clearly that is

represented in an emblematic way, not without an European nostalgia for such a past.

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5 – Persian Safavid miniature, representing an unveiling beauty

who offers drink or food to a dervish (ca. 1650; BrooklynMuseum, New York); and Osman Hamdi, Mihrāb (in bothimages, a symbolic or mystic value is more than probable)

Daughters of the Sea,

Daughters of the Country

In an online weekly supplement to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram (17-23 May

2007, Issue No. 845), we can read an interesting article by Mohammed Salmawy, entitled

“Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: A passion for the Arts”. Notoriously Naguib Mahfouz, or

Nagib Mahfuz, is the best Egyptian novelist of the 20th century, died in 2006 and Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1988. Salmawy reports and comments a late interview to him. In

particular, let us consider a passage from that: “My first exposure to the plastic arts was in

the late 1920s... I remember reading an article by Al-ʻAqqad about an artist called Mahmud

Saʻid. This was kind of unusual, for art wasnʼt really big back then. So for someone like Al-

ʻAqqad to write a whole article about an artist was a bit of a shock. After that, I learned that

Saʻid came from a prominent family and had a brilliant career in the judiciary, a career that

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he abandoned to dedicate his life to art. From then on I made a point of going to all Saʻidʼs

exhibitions. [...] Some of Saʻidʼs paintings are still imprinted on my mind: The Girls of

Bahari, The Liquorice Merchant, and those splendid portraits of countryside women”.

Mahfuz goes on by emphasizing some artistic influences – especially of Saʻidʼs

paintings – on his own literary production. Here let us focus upon The Girls of Bahari, since

not seldom this Surrealistic fashioned masterpiece, executed in 1935 or 1937, has been

considered a true beginning of contemporary painting in Egypt by local art-historians. In

reality, we have two versions of it, one of which – today in the Mahmud Saʻid Museum at

Alexandria – is larger and includes more characters. In both versions the central represented

subjects are three charming women walking together, full length and frontally portrayed. A

long transparent veil, the so called melayah laf often used in the belly dance, half covers

their faces. In the background, we can see the Corniche of Alexandria, so that the beautiful

and elegant – just a bit equivocal, indeed – ladies may resemble veiled sirens proceeding

from the sea. Actually, Bahari is the name of a popular seaside part of the town. Yet Bahari

is also an adjective generically employed to design the Lower Egypt dwellers, close to the

Mediterranean sea (in Arabic, bahr means “sea”). With a poetic play on words, the original

title of the painting Banāt Bahāri might sound like Banāt al-Bahri, “Daughters of the Sea”.

Like Osman Hamdi in Turkey, Mohammed Racim in Algeria or Abdul Qadir al-

Rassam in Iraq, albeit in different ways, Mahmud Saʻid can be counted among a few

pioneers of a figurative art in the Islamic World.2 He studied after Italian painters in Egypt

and French ones in Paris. His emancipation from the Orientalism was well expressed in his

declared persuasion that, generally in the field of a contemporary culture, “the question is

not just emerging and disappearing of trends, rather it is the issue of domestic trends in

every country”. However, in his case like in others the same old problem was the irruption

of a figural representation into a non representative and aniconic civilization, like that of the

Near and Middle East. Also for him, willingly such a problem coincided with the question

of female veiling and unveiling. In itself, easily the pictorial representation involves such a

question. In Banāt Bahāri, once again the problem is resolved with the expedient of a

transparent veil. Nay, there, this veiled transparency is the implied subject of the picture. At

2 To such mentioned pioneers we can add the Iranian Muhammad Ghaffari, better known as Kamal al-Mulk (1847–1940). In 1911, he opened Iranʼs first Academy of Fine Arts. Among his disciples, we have to remember here at least the painters Mahmud Olia and Abbas Katuzian.

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the same time, The Girls of Bahari look like the latest sisters of the veiled Hellenistic

statuettes of Tanagra, admired by the artist in a wide Mediterranean retrospective view.

Even more than reflecting a foreign novelty, Saʻidʼs art strives to portray his own

reality and to recover a local, nearly forgotten figural tradition. In other female portrayals by

him, indeed his unveiling goes so far, that his are some of the finest nudes in the Egyptian

and Arabian modern painting. Yet here we like to pay better attention to “those splendid

portraits of countryside women”, mentioned by Nagib Mahfuz, such as Naima (1925;

Shafeiʼs collection, Cairo) or Girl with Red Headscarf (1947; sold at Christieʼs, Dubai, in

2007). Their faces are unveiled, but a coloured scarf and a dark veil cover the head of both

of them, according to a popular usage. Rather than “Daughters of the Sea” these appear to

be daughters of the country, as also attested by the landscape in the background, peculiarly

in the former portrait rendering the life of an Egyptian village. The conversion from

Orientalism to a national figurative painting is now complete. And the female figure has

played a decisive role on this path, might it be in a realistic or surreal autonomous manner.

Even if Mahmud Saʻid was not the sole Egyptian “pioneer”, his lesson influenced

later painters, in the local contemporary art scene. Here we can just mention Abdelal Hassan

Ghouniem, born at Port Saʻid in 1944. In his portrayals of countryside or popular women,

scarves and veils maintain a deal of the seductiveness perceptible in certain works of Saʻid.

Furthermore, their typical beauty and make-up may recall the ancient Egyptian, carved or

painted, portraits, like those discovered by the archaeologists in the oasis of Al-Fayiūm. In

the today Arabic area, Egypt is that country, where a so strong plastic or figurative tradition

– and related imagery – preceded any religious forbidding of images, that the artworks of

the past are always susceptible to return to exert an ascendancy over visual arts, besides or

apart from Orientalistic interferences. Then, the Sea and the Country might sound like

symbolic concepts of different dimensions and horizons, between which not only a modern

Eastern art but also specific national identities could find their cultural ways of realization.

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6 – Alphonse-Étienne Dinet, La baigneuse aux bijoux or “The

Jewelled Bather”; and Kees van Dongen, Moorish Dancing Girl(no doubt, both painters were influenced by popular Orientalist

photographers as J. Geiser or R. Lehnert and E. Landrock)

A Veiled Ironic Criticism

Both in a pictorial and in a literary field, the Orientalism was a cultural fashion made

of frequent stereotypes, going to warp the reality of subjects and settings which it pretended

to portray. We have seen though, the Orientalist artists or writers dealt with a civilization

characterized by a forced lack of representation. Easily and even unwillingly, they could fill

those empties of a figurative tradition with their figural imagery or – in a minor measure –

with their narrative imagination. It is so much true, that not seldom their representations

contributed to a nostalgic self-representation by Eastern learned people, in a more or less

critical way. For instance, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, published in 1980 by the

Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, was expressly inspired by the pictorial Orientalism of

Delacroix. Often referred to Orientalistic iconography, an ironic criticism is that of todayʼs

artists as the Moroccan Lalla Essaydi, Majida Khattari and Hassan Hajjaj, the Iranian Shirin

Neshat and Gita Meh, the Saudi Manal al-Dowayan or the Armenian Abelina Galustian.

Indeed, they are more photographers or designers than painters. What is relevant here is

that, in their provocative re-visitation, the images of veiled women play an expected role.

What is somewhat unexpected is a new conceptual context and background, in a

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broad sense, but also an external and secondary circumstance regarding the history of art.

After the somewhat obsessive interest of the Orientalists, too long the Eastern reality has

been an object of scarce attention in the Western artistic representation, as if in consequence

of a disillusionment or bad conscience by the Occidental main stream culture. Much more

than one hundred years later, still now especially in the production of Lalla Essaydi some of

the painters referred to are Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix or Jean-Léon

Gérôme, although mainly in a parodic manner. By the Moroccan artist, at the same time

there is an effort in recovering a non figurative tradition of the Islamic art, in a quite original

and synthetic way. The figures borrowed from those old Orientalists are reproduced in a

photographic form and wholly dressed with Arabesque decorative or Arabic calligraphy

motifs. Almost the same technique is applied by Shirin Neshat, to some of her works.

Thanks to their artistic intuition, either of these photographer-painters shows how

even the question of the female veil is connected not only with a subconscious veiling-

unveiling dynamics but also – if not above all – with a representation and non-

representation dialectic. With the prominent exception of the eyes, their images of veiled

women are double covered by a minute Arabic calligraphy, they have to glance through in

order to see the surrounding reality. That is to mean nobody of us, Western or Eastern, male

or female, for historical reasons the Eastern females in a forward line, can do apart from his

own culture but should try to turn it into a critical and auto-critical instrument besides an

identitarian one. Particularly in the artworks of Shirin Neshat, more rarely in those of

Hassan Hajjaj – for example, in his picture titled Eyes; 2007 –, that womanly gaze acquires

a suffering or disquieting connotation, which is the reflection of dramatic contingencies.

Decidedly tragic is The Loss of Our Identity #6, another composite image of veiled woman

depicted by the Iranian artist Sadegh Tirafkan and sold by Sothebyʼs, London, in 2008.

No worries, they seem to ironize other images by Hajjaj, a consumerist system is able

to neutralize any head-scarf by reducing it to a fashionable garment. Actually, some of his

veiled girls resemble certain ambiguous characters sketched in the best seller collection of

short stories Taxi, by the Egyptian Khaled al-Khamissi in 2007. Likely, the most concerned

with such a topic is Majida Khattari. In 2003-04 she participated in an exhibition in

England, entitled Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, together with Shirin

Neshat and others. More recently, in 1910, she staged a performance in Paris and had a solo

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show at Casablanca, Morocco, centred on the same theme. In her production, cryptic

quotations from the Orientalistic painting and photography are not lacking, as in the

paradoxical series of 2007-08 Parisian Women: Veiled/Unveiled. There, a nude model and a

full veiled one are friendly facing each other. Albeit split and cast into a changed context,

they may well remind us of the afore mentioned works by Van Dongen or Lehnert.

What could appear a generic theorization is translated into visual messages in the

production of a little known Iranian painter, Hossein ʻAli Olia, lately specialized in digital

art.3 His architectonic learning makes him mind back much earlier than the modern

Orientalism, to the Hellenistic civilization based on a mimetic representation of nature.

Already in ancient times it was faced to an Oriental symbolism and stylization, such as in

the Persian art. In his compositions, it recurs a confrontation between Greek archaeological

artefacts and abstract forms more congenial to an Eastern aesthetic sensitiveness. In his

computer artwork Will of Representation, executed in 2008, a young naked dancer – whose

face is hidden by no veil but by her long loose hair – is depicted whilst emerging from a

dark pool encumbered with geometrical shapes to a free and enlightened area of the picture.

After all, we can interpret this enigmatic scene, the representation itself cannot be but an

unavoidable step, as a recurring first one in a rise from the unconscious to consciousness.

3 Architect as well as painter, son to Mahmud Olia together with the sculptor Reza Olia (see note no. 2), surely he belongs to the mainstream of contemporary Iranian art, currently and unfortunately operating abroad, mainly in Italy where both brothers studied when young.

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7 – Mahmud Saʻid, The Girls of Bahari; and an untitled portraitby Abdelal Hassan (2000; current location unknown)

Aisha, an Unveiled Beauty?

At last, let us step back in history. In Arabic, Aisha is a common female name – better

if transliterated as ʿĀʾishah –, which means “lively”. Aisha bint Abu Bakr was a so young

wife of Muhammad, that at first she used to play with dolls in the presence of him. Here we

prefer to recall her niece Aisha bint Talha, daughter to Talha ibn ‘Ubaydullah. We might say,

the feminine side of an early Islamic milieu was eminently represented by Aisha the

favourite wife, Fatima the beloved daughter of the prophet, and Aisha the independent-

minded. Taught by her homonymous aunt, she herself got well known for being learned and

beautiful at once. So much, as to marry thrice, before dying in 728. She also liked to listen

to poets and story tellers at her own home, judging their literary productions. In her 1996ʼs

book Womenʼs Rebellion & Islamic Memory, the Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi reports

a tradition. When asked for it by her husband Musab ibn Zubayr, Aisha refused to wear the

veil, with a proud but thoughtful reply like this: “Since God made me so beautiful, I wish

people may see me and recognize His Grace in my beauty, and to glorify Him”.

Most probably that is a story rather than a tradition. Even if so, it is such as to put a

hyperbolic question and to induce a philosophical reflection, dealing with a reality which is

transcendent but also manifested in the images of this world. May the female beauty work

as the best expression of creation? Is this natural beauty susceptible to help us distinguish

true from false representations? In menʼs eyes, easily it should be thus. In realistic or

allegorical ways, mystics as Ibn ‘Arabi or love poets as Al-Mutanabbi were sensitive to an

assumption like that. In a verse of the latter, an unveiled lady is likened to the full moon,

with allusion to its hiding and unhiding phases. On the other hand, an anecdote tells of one

jurist Ibn Tumart, so stern as to throw an Almoravid princess off her horse for she went out

unveiled in public: it is also true, this could betray a local impatience against a decadent

Arabizing aristocracy. Of course, there are other anecdotes or alleged traditions about. Yet

mostly they denote male reactions or interpretations, with the rare exception of that ascribed

to Aisha bint Talha. Moreover, let us notice, she said or did mean generally “people”

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without distinction of gender, nor is there reason for thinking that it was a casual detail.

What sounds instead like a coincidence, or a bit more than a coincidence, is that in a

modern Orientalistic portraiture willingly the unveiled beauties were named “Aisha”. One

of them at least is painted not by a man, but by the French woman artist Marie Elisabeth

Aimée Lucas-Robiquet in 1900. This Berber or Bedouin Aicha is portrayed clad in a long

festive robe, whilst removing her mantle to glance at her own visage reflected in a small

mirror. We can even presume, according to a then popular usage, the gorgeous robe and

jewels she wears were all her dowry or possession on earth, with the obvious exception of

her very young age and virginal beauty. In Aicha, a Woman of Morocco by the North-

American Frederick Arthur Bridgman, an elegant unveiled lady is depicted not in a public

space but at home or in a harem, seen in profile, while sitting on a sofa and staring out of a

narrow window toward an external daylight (1883; Newark Museum, U.S.A.). With one

hand supporting her head and a musing expression, she is a type of pensive woman, almost

as if considering that her apparent welfare is strictly depending on her secluded condition.

The Orientalistic female portraiture is a peculiar genre, also because with difficulty it

can leave out of consideration any connotation regarding a different womanly condition and

related mentality in both involved societies, those of the portraitist and of the portrayed. Yet

sometimes the artistic intuition itself finds the way to an original identification. Jean-

François Portaels was a Belgian Orientalist portraitist. His images of women in a pensive

pose are so recurrent, with an intense gaze proceeding out of the picture and one or both

hands supporting their heads, that they might look like as many reflections of the unveiled

soul of the author. In his Aisha, painted at Tangier probably in the second half of the 19th

century and sold by Christieʼs, London, in 2004, a hand of the model is still holding an edge

of her white veil and is covered by it while going to support her chin. A similar Portrait of a

Young North-African Woman, by Portaels, likely is the best Orientalistic one ever depicted,

but this is only a personal opinion (1874; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi, Belgium).

Indeed, the Moorish Aisha or Aicha Rifeña by George Owen Wynne Apperley – born

in England in 1884 and died at Tangier in 1960 – is somewhat more uncovered than the

others. In fact, she is portrayed frontally and half length, with a half bare breast (watercolour

sold at the Bonhams Auction House, London, in 2010; there is also an oil version of it,

dating to 1938-40). In this picture of a nice girl of the Moroccan Rif, a detail worth noting is

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the pearl necklace hanging from her neck, with a typical golden charm in form of khamsah

or “Hand of Fatima”. That is otherwise called “Hand of Miriam” by the Jews, what gives us

a hint for just a glimpse at the attitude about the female veiling, by the minorities in an

Islamic context. For example, let us consider the veiled Coptic Mother painted by Carl Haag

in 1859, or the Portrait of Aicha Ben Gerbaz, drawn by the French Théodore Chassériau at

Algiers (1846; private collection). Like in other works by the same artist, particularly in this

latter painting we can admire an unveiled Jewish Aisha, as a rare testimony about the

presence, costumes and culture of the old Sephardic communities in North-Africa.

8 – Lalla Essaydi, Converging Territories #24, 2005; and Hadeel

A. Dhaher (born at Baghdad in 1981), Beneath the Silence;below: Shirin Neshat, I Am Its Secret, 1993, detail

An Extensive Bibliography

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the Arab Thought”, in B@belonline No. 6, Department of Philosophy of the ThirdUniversity in Rome, 2009; pages 255-64.

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Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass (edited by), Interrogating Orientalism:Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices; Columbus, OH: Ohio State UniversityPress, 2006.

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9 – Carl Haag, A Coptic Mother; and Marie E. A. Lucas-

Robiquet, Aicha (both of them, in private collections)

Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2011

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