The Fabricated Reality: Revealing the Harem Fallacies in Orientalist Paintings

Abstract

Orientalist art can be considered one of the most significant phenomena which needs to be reexamined. While orientalism tools and methods changed, until now its objectives remained the same. Since the cultural exchange between East and West, Europeans documented it through both written and visual media. Some of these records were relatively realistic, while others were nothing but the artists’ stereotypical preconceptions of the exotic and mystical East. Therefore, the East –the orient Harem – became an inspirational source for their paintings. Orientalism phenomenon was interested in tracing women’s issues and their sexual fantasies because women symbolize political dominance. The paper argues that orientalist painting is an ongoing phenomenon that is only concerned about representing the female body and its sexual desires because it was a product of European colonialism. This study aims to shed light on orientalist European art and its ideological aspects; shows the distinctions among European artists that depicted the orient Harem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and then compares Eastern representations of women to Western misrepresentations. The paper concludes that the depiction of Harem scenes in orientalist paintings was undermining many hidden political and sexual agendas. Because no specific records of a Western male had entered the orient Harem, its representation is nothing but a fallacy. Such artworks heavily relied on travelers’ narrations that were later on combined with sexual fantasies. Because these paintings recorded some aspects of Eastern heritage, many orientalist art collectors are Middle-Easterners. Orientalist paintings reminded the collectors of their glorious fading past, even though the works contained inappropriate underpinnings against Arabs in general, and against Muslims in particular.