| (....) The second orientalist wave concerns military life and is grafted onto the conquest of Algeria from 1830. (....)
Around 1846-47, the great departure of Provencal painters took place. Ziem, Laurens, Loubon will make trips to Turkey, Persia, Palestine which will mark until 1890 the generation of Boze, Huguet, Maggy (....) Finally from 1890 to 1914, the Symbolists and the Fauves use Orientalism in a personal way. The last of these phases is the one where both the most sensual and the most literary attraction for beauty is exercised and a taste for an Orient which one feels more and more dispossessed of, an Orient which is more that of dream than travel: as crises multiply, the dream and its train of fantasies prevail over the serenity of documentalism or the simple picturesque. And here with painters such as Valère Bernard, Gustav-Aolf Mossa and Pierre Girieud everything becomes subjectivized, becomes a mirror of desires and at the same time takes charge of contemporary experiences: Art Nouveau, Symbolism and the Nabis. The trip itself is no longer so useful. The Orient became, in these years 1880-1910, one of the conditions of this attractive religiosity at the same time as esoteric, founded on an easy but worried spirituality, which mixes a little everything and which allows to combine with the aims of the art the expression of eroticism, lasciviousness and cruelty. (....) |