Ingres' The Turkish Bath
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John Berger's Ways of Seeing makes many suggestions about how to look at works from the great period of Western oil painting (1500-1900). He argues that the traditional ways in which art history looked at painting involved a great deal of mystification, that is, "the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident" (Berger 15-16). In Berger's view mystification involves explanations of the meanings of pictures, the reasons why they were painted, and what they meant to the painters and the owners. Analyses that mystify cover up certain aspects of this art; specifically those related to domination--domination of women by men, of the weak by the powerful, and of the not-rich by the rich. A closer look at one picture demonstrates how careful interrogation of what is in front of the viewer brings out information and possible meanings that are not evident from the analyses of art historians of the past. This essay examines a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres called The Turkish Bath (Bain Turc) and compares this reading of the painting with an account of it written by the art historian Walter Friedlaender in 1952. Ingres' painting was originally a rectangular composition (1859) that was revised in 1863 when he turned it into a round work with a diameter of 42.5 inches (108 cm). The painting, which is at the Louvre Museum in Paris, was oil on canvas on wood. It provides examples of some of the ideas Berger discussed in relation to the representation of wo
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The nineteenth century was the era of France's expansion into a new colonial empire and the Islamic regions of North Africa and, to a lesser extent, the Near East, were very important in this. The older empire had languished but in the 1830s "what began as a simple punitive expedition against the Bey of Algiers turned into a war of conquest" ("French Colonial"). Under Napoleon III the theory of empire was propagated and "in the 1860s . . . France's overseas holdings expanded tremendously," including the government's efforts to "fully subjugate the native populations in French colonies of settlement [including] the Algerian Arabs and Berbers that drew the condemnation of humanitarians throughout Europe" ("French Colonial"). Ingres' painting, done at the outset of the big push for empire, does not function as a poster advertising the charms of these lands (although that may be a part of its unstated message) but it does characterize the Islamic lands as essentially feminized, weak and available. Without any specific political intentions at all the painting does, none the less, demonstrate the popular conception of this foreign 'other' underlying the colonial project. And, of course, hypocritically, the sensual, self-indulgent,
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1746
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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