Les Femmes du Maroc: Grande Odalisque

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Les Femmes du Maroc: Grande Odalisque

Artist Lalla Essaydi (Moroccan, b. 1956)

Date2008

DimensionsH: 50 in. (127 cm); W: 60 in. (152.4 cm)

MediumChromogenic print

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LineGift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society

Object number

2011.8

Not on View

DescriptionChromogenic enlargement print mounted to aluminum and protected with Mactac luster laminate

Label TextLalla Essaydi’s Grande Odalisque is part of her larger series Les Femmes du Maroc (Women of Morocco) responding to and countering the West’s perception of Arabic women through the lens of 19th-century Orientalism, in which European artists condescendingly treated Middle Eastern and North African cultures as passive, exotic, and “other.” This work takes direct inspiration from Neoclassical painter Jean August Dominique Ingres’ painting of an eroticized Near Eastern woman, La Grande Odalisque (1814). Instead of being fully nude, Essaydi’s figure is draped in white mourning fabric, and her gaze is more direct than inviting. Her skin is inscribed in henna with Arabic calligraphy. In the Islamic tradition, calligraphy is typically reserved for men, but henna is a form practiced by women. Further, Essaydi includes musings on personal freedom, identity, and memory from her own journals. She explains, “By reclaiming the rich tradition of calligraphy and interweaving it with the traditionally female art of henna, I have been able to express, and yet, in another sense, dissolve the contradictions I have encountered in my culture: between hierarchy and fluidity, between public and private space, between the richness and the confining aspects of Islamic traditions.” Essaydi employs beauty as a lure, which can reveal our complicity in perpetuating orientalist tropes. She says, “I invite viewers to resist stereotypes.”Published Referencesc.f. Essaydi, Lalla, Les Femmes du Maroc, Brooklyn, Powerhouse Books, 2009, p. 12, repr. pp. 27 and 90.

c.f. Okeke-Agulu, Chika, Contemporary African Art Since 1980, New York, Damiani, 2009.

Exhibition HistoryCf. Chicago, Schneider Gallery; Scottsdale, Lisa Sette Gallery; New York, Edwynn Houk Gallery; Kuwait, Sultan Gallery; Marrakech, Galerie Tindouf; Lincoln, MA, Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; New Brunswich, NJ, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University; Hamilton, NY, Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University; Lewiston, ME, Bates College Museum of Art; Zürich, Edwynn Houk Gallery, Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc, 2006-2011.

Toledo Museum of Art, Gifts on Paper from The Apollo Society, Apr. 10-May 31, 2015.