Les Femmes du Maroc: Grande Odalisque
Artist: Lalla Essaydi (Moroccan, b. 1956)
Date: 2008
Dimensions:
H: 50 in. (127 cm); W: 60 in. (152.4 cm)
Medium: Chromogenic print
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Gift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society
Object number: 2011.8
Label Text:Lalla 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.”
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.”
DescriptionChromogenic enlargement print mounted to aluminum and protected with Mactac luster laminate
Not on view
In Collection(s)