Delacroix's Orientalism

Eugene Delacroix
Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement =
Algerian Women in their Apartment
Salon de 1834
oil on canvas
Musee du Louvre


I think is is pretty interesting that the Louvre chose to shoot its works in their frames, something I've never seen.

A classic work by a classic artist, Women of Algiers has its own Wikipedia page.
" 'The last of the great artists of the Renaissance and the first modern'; thus Baudelaire on Delacroix." (Gilles Neret) This work was striking in 19th century France with its sexual content, Orientalism, and use of light. The influence of the work continues to echo. Picasso was supremely influenced producing a number of works after The Women of Algiers, inspiring their own exhibition recently, Picasso-Delacroix, at the Louvre. The harem was one of the most popular subjects for painters of the 18th century interested in the Orient (present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa). While many artists got their inspiration and information from travelogues and literature available in Europe, some, including Delacroix, got their subjects from direct experience on journeys to the region, though westerners may not have been allowed entrance, they culled their experience and fantasies for their paintings. "Beyond their implicit eroticism, harem scenes evoked a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation to which many Westerners aspired." (Meagher, Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art)

Friedrich

Abbey in the Oakwood 1808-10
Caspar David Friedrich oil on canvas
Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staaliche Museen zu Berlin.

This late post is not late due to my own laziness! My internet is being horribly weird. Sat down to find me a great Friedrich painting and the wireless did not want to assist in that endeavor.

Anyway, here I am and here is a gorgeous painting by Caspar David Freidrich. I went from a love of shoes in art to my love of trees. Most specifically I am fascinated by bare, leafless trees, branches imbued with a stark and rich life all their own. While I am still struggling with my own artwork, one of the things that always places me into a creative state is looking at trees and branches (in life and in art). Even in the bright blue sky of day, seeing strips of branch across the sky holds for me an underlying edge that I am having trouble giving a word (it's not so far as being sinister, but it surely isn't sweet). Associated with romanticism, Friedrich's landscapes are pretty but delve much deeper than that. Many of them are also executed so beautifully that one might mistake it for a photograph (as I recall a slide of the Sea of Ice doing so in my 19th c. crit class)

"One of the few landscape painters to see both forest and tree, Friedrich found no conflict between the separate splendors of the individual and the collective. That rare pictorial capacity makes his Nature so persuasive and original. " (http://artchive.com/artchive/F/friedrich.html)

As usual, I would like to share more, but an appointment is to pull me away. Enjoy the painting for what it is (or not, it's your aesthetic choice) and I hope to have some concerted efforts for you next week!