Orientalism and Eroticism in 19th-Century Art
Simon’s Rock Faculty Forum Lecture Series
The first Simon’s Rock Faculty Forum lecture “Orientalism and Eroticism in 19th-Century
Art” will be held on Monday, September 26, in Blodgett House at 4:00 p.m. During the
talk, Professor of Art History Joan DelPlato will read from her new book, Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures. The book, an edited volume of eight papers written by internationally acclaimed
art historians, was published this past spring by Routledge and co-edited with Julie
Codell of Arizona State University. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Throughout the talk, Joan will use some of the many images in the book to illuminate its themes. “This new book has two overlapping themes. One is ‘orientalism,’ the cultural notions of Middle Eastern and Asian peoples as represented in painting, sculpture, and prints in the long 19th century,” she says. “The book asks its readers to rethink those orientalist ideas in the context of our 21st-century world, which is deeply and dangerously divided.”
The second, intertwined theme of the book, is eroticism in art. “Such orientalist views can be especially harmful when they are given an erotic charge,” she explains. “The nude, indolent woman living in a harem is one of the most popular tropes in 19th century art of England, France, and the U.S.”
Joan’s first book, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), was devoted exclusively to the theme of the harem in art. “We think we know what a sexy or erotic artwork is when we see and experience it, but the studies in Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visualities in Global Cultures show how these are not self-evident concepts, and that they can operate at deeper levels of the human psyche,” Joan reveals. “Yet these also have political implications. So these are multivalent artworks—having different meanings for different viewers. When eroticized images are imbued with recycled clichés of the ‘exotic’ you have a complex mixture.”
The author first became interested in the harem image while in graduate school “I realize now, in part, because I grew up in a large, traditional Italian-Polish-Catholic American family of six girls and two boys.” Joan adds, “In that mostly gynocentric household I came to empathize with some of the family dynamics of living with mostly women, as typically happens in a real harem.”
Since her first book was written, Joan notes the enormous changes in scholarly thinking about the intersections of orientalism and eroticism. Oriental erotics plays out differently for varieties of genders, geographies, ethnicities, and religions. Most notably, recent studies show how indigenous artists themselves created “oriental” and “erotic” images for their own purposes, often to demonstrate their cultural modernity. Scholars in this edited volume explore art of India, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and Circassia (formerly in the Soviet Union), as well as Britain, France, and the United States in the 19th century as modernism was developing, though in distinctive ways, in select global cultures.
Joan has been a professor of art history at Simon’s Rock since 1987. She earned her BA from University of Buffalo and her MA and PhD from UCLA.