In selecting French orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme for its major autumn show, the musée d'Orsay has made a perhaps surprising choice, writes David Tresilian in Paris Jean-Léon Gérôme, l'histoire en spectacle, an exhibition of the work of this nineteenth-century French orientalist painter at the musée d'Orsay in Paris, is the first major exhibition of Gérôme's work to take place in France since his death in 1904, and even now it is presented with a somewhat apologetic air. Gérôme was a member of the Institut de France and professor of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris for nearly four decades and, eventually, a Grand Officier of the French Légion d'honneur. Closely connected to official circles and unashamedly commercial in attitude, Gérôme epitomised the kind of pompous taste criticised by the late nineteenth- century impressionist painters, his paintings being executed in the academic manner they did so much to overturn. The contempt, it seems, was mutual, and, as the excellent catalogue produced for the exhibition by curators Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Réaulx and Edouard Papet reminds us, Gérôme did not hesitate to use whatever means were available to him to rubbish the work of the younger generations. "Stop, Monsieur le president," he told the president of France on a tour of the 1900 Exposition universelle in Paris as the two men were about to enter rooms dedicated to impressionist painting. "This work dishonours France." Three years later and just a year before his death, Gérôme did his best to sabotage an exhibition of impressionist painting at the musée du Luxembourg, while at the same time exhibiting the last of his own sometimes grotesque orientalist paintings, Prédication dans la mosquée and Vue de Médinet El Fayoum, at that year's salon. Few people visiting the musée d'Orsay's Gérôme exhibition, already seen in Los Angeles at the Getty Museum and scheduled to move to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid next year, are likely to emerge with their view of Gérôme fundamentally shaken. A lot of the work could only appeal to eyes uneducated not only by everything that happened next, but also by the work of Gérôme's own contemporaries -- Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Degas and the rest -- whose work, ironically, is celebrated in the very museum housing the present retrospective. However, as Guy Cogeval, president of the musée d'Orsay and apparently one of the prime movers behind the exhibition, writes in the accompanying material, Gérôme's "experiments with narrative," his history painting and his links to cinema, not least in the series of paintings he produced of Roman gladiators, directly inspiring Hollywood, may all be reasons to look at him again. Add to these Gérôme's fascinating position in the nineteenth-century art market, embattled defender of proper painting though he saw himself, and his long-standing interest in the Arab world, producing dozens of orientalist paintings over more than three decades, and there are perhaps more than enough reasons to stage a major show. Gérôme saw early on, perhaps before any other major artist, the commercial opportunities offered not only by the American market, selling many of his works to the millionaires of the time, including the Astors and the Vanderbilts, but also the limited value of state commissions, not bothering to compete for them unless there was the possibility of a lucrative private sale. He also understood the new possibilities offered by photography and mass reproduction, and he supervised the printing of reproductions of his works in editions of tens of thousands. His Sortie du bal masqué (1857-59), now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and lent for the present show, was the subject of dozens of different reproductions in different formats over several decades, themselves produced in the thousands and making Gérôme one of the first major artists to understand the importance of mass marketing. It is ironic, then, that the Orsay gift shop, awash with photographic reproductions of works by Manet, a particular dislike of his, has comparatively few of works by Gérôme. According to novelist Emile Zola, a contemporary, "it is well known that Gérôme's pictures are only done to be photographed, so that reproductions can then be used to decorate thousands of middle-class drawing rooms." No longer, it seems. While Jean-Léon Gérôme, l'histoire en spectacle has several themes, developed in the exhibition itself and exhaustively described in the accompanying catalogue, one of the most important is undoubtedly Gérôme's version of the orient. Starting his career as a "Neo-Greek" painter and producing highly finished pictures on classical themes in the manner of Ingres and of his own immediate teacher, history painter Paul Delaroche, from the 1850s onwards Gérôme began to travel widely in the Middle East, visiting Turkey, Palestine and Egypt on many occasions and staying for months at a time. Like Flaubert, who visited Egypt in the late 1840s in the company of photographer Maxime du Camp, Gérôme was accompanied on his Middle Eastern trips by a photographer, the aim being to collect as much as possible by way of oriental iconography. This material -- hundreds of images of Middle Eastern landscapes, figures, towns and buildings -- was then sorted through on the painter's return to Paris and used as ingredients in orientalist paintings. The exhibition devotes several rooms to Gérôme's work in this genre, producing some fascinating juxtapositions. One such is the positioning of a photograph of mashrabiyyah by Auguste Bartholdi, the photographer who accompanied Gérôme on his first trip to Egypt in 1855-56, with the painting Gérôme developed out of it. Bartholdi's photograph, taken in Yemen in the 1860s, shows a house in an empty street, the focus being on the elaborate mashrabiyyah, or turned woodwork, used to screen the first-floor windows. In his Le Marché aux chevaux, or Marchand de chevaux au Caire, Gérôme has used the architectural detail from Bartholdi's photograph, copied in the studio, and added human figures, really a small human drama, in front of it. This technique marks all of Gérôme's orientalist paintings: the backgrounds, whether natural or architectural, were taken from photographs made while traveling in the Middle East, with the human figures then being placed, arranged might be a better word, in front of them. The result is a mixture of backgrounds reproduced with almost photographic realism, onto which sentimental, erotic or violent human dramas are projected. Gérôme's best- known orientalist paintings were produced in this way, with background features and human figures sometimes curiously out of sync as a result. His Le Marchand de tapis au Caire, for example, an 1887 work now in Minneapolis and lent for the present exhibition, shows what seems to be a Persian carpet suspended from the balcony of a Cairo mansion for possible sale to a group of buyers. While in fact the buyers would have been European tourists, and presumably would not have been offered Persian carpets in Cairo, in his version of the scene Gérôme has replaced them with a group of impressively oriental-looking figures, allowing him to show off his skill in reproducing various kinds of turban and adding a crowd of spectators. In his innumerable harem scenes, or scenes of Middle Eastern slave markets where the female slaves are invariably naked, according to the catalogue to titillate gentleman purchasers, Gérôme mixes orientalist sensuality with intimations of cruelty. This is true of works in the present show such as A vendre, esclaves au Caire (1871), Marché d'esclaves (1866) and Promenade du harem, particularly admired by writer Théophile Gautier . La Porte de la mosquée shows a mediaeval entrance way decorated with severed human heads. There is a common emphasis on theatricality in these pictures, with crowds of spectators watching a central human scene. The background to Gérôme's Charmeur des serpents (1880), an ambiguous piece that shows a group of men intently observing a naked boy, is taken from decoration at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, while the figures themselves may be intended to be Arab. This painting, lent by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, is one of Gérôme's best-known orientalist images, having once been used on the cover of the late Edward Said's 1978 work Orientalism. The painting is also perhaps one of Gérôme's best in orientalist vein, and reproductions do not do justice to the quality of the detail in the original. Gérôme was very good at orientalist detailing, and this painting has some superb passages, comparable to the carpet painting in Le Marchand de tapis. This is particularly true of the assortment of exotic headgear, including turbans and what looks like a Mamluke, possibly Ottoman, helmet, worn by one of the seated spectators. One of the great benefits of a visit to the present show is that it provides an opportunity to see paintings that are rarely if ever brought together and that ordinarily would need a tour of the United States to see. Tiles also bring out the best in Gérôme, and decorative friezes of Ottoman-looking tiles figure in many of his paintings. They are there, most obviously, in Charmeur des serpents, as well as in his many bathing or harem scenes, and they are present, too, in the background to Le Barde noir, an 1888 image of a seated African musician now in the Orientalist Museum in Doha. From his slippers, the musician could be Algerian or Moroccan, but he is given what looks like a West African stringed instrument: Gérôme's splicing together of backgrounds, human figures and props from very different periods and places is once again in evidence. Other striking pictures include La Prière publique dans une mosquée from the 1870s, lent by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This is set in the Amr Ibn Al-As mosque in Cairo, visited by Gérôme on an 1868 visit and used as staging for rows of carefully painted orientalist figures, including a water-carrier and two Balkan- looking soldiers (they seem to be carrying swords). Le Prisonnier, especially popular in reproduction and now kept in Nantes, shows a prisoner being transported by boat against the background of the Nile at Luxor. La Douleur du pacha, one of the least attractive of Gérôme's orientalist images and based on a poem by French author Victor Hugo, shows an orientalist pasha apparently mourning a dead tiger before an architectural backdrop inspired by the Alhambra in southern Spain. In the show's final section, the curators make efforts to show the range of Gérôme's other interests, from Roman gladiators to French history painting, and the turn towards sculpture that occupied his final years. His history painting, notably Réception du Grand Condé par Louis XIV, is inspired by Delaroche, the event being imagined as a grandiose spectacle complete with dramatic stairs. An official commission, Audience des ambassadeurs de Siam à Fontainebleau, meant as elaborate flattery of Napoleon III, is based on David's Le Sacre de Napoléon, now in the Louvre. The curators make determined efforts to interest visitors in Gérôme's series of works depicting ancient Roman amphitheatres, started in the 1860s and continuing until just a few years before his death. Pollice verso (1872) shows a Roman gladiator about to finish off his opponent and waiting for the "down-turned thumb" of the emperor. The focus is on the gladiator's helmet, copied from one Gérôme had seen in Naples, while the pose apparently inspired director Ridley Scott in making his 2000 film Gladiator. The focus on architectural grandeur, taken over by Hollywood depictions of Roman amphitheatres in sword-and-sandels films from Quo Vadis to Ben Hur, is something that evidently attracted Gérôme, over time his amphitheatres becoming larger and larger and more and more fantastic. Sitting even towards the front of the tiered ranks of seats depicted in Dernières prières des martyrs chrétiens, notable for its wooden- looking lion, a Roman spectator must have been hard put to make out anything taking place in the sandy arena far below. The most distinguished picture in the final room of the exhibition is Le 7 Decembre 1815, neuf heures du matin, l'exécution du Maréchal Ney, now in England, a marvelous evocation of Ney's execution that is strongly reminiscent of Manet and the Spanish painting that inspired him. Jean-Léon Gérôme, l'histoire en spectacle, musée d'Orsay, Paris, until January 2011
