Audio Stop 218

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A woman wearing a sheer white blouse, short red and gold vest, and full-legged, patterned pants cinched below the knee lies back and looks at us with hooded eyes in this horizontal painting. Her shoulders lean back against an oversized white pillow, up along the right edge of the composition. Her body tips toward us, and her knees are bent so her feet are together in the lower left corner. Her right arm rests along the side of her body, and she props herself up with her other arm. That hand has a gold band on the ring finger. Her light skin is tinged with green on her face. Her head rolls slightly away from us so she looks down her cheeks at us with slitted, dark eyes through heavily lined lids. She has dark brows, and her rose-red lips are parted. The angle of her head creates a slight double chin. Gold hoops with dangling fringe or chains hang from her ears, and she wears three strands of dark beads around her neck. Her black hair is plaited in a thick braid that comes down over her left shoulder, closer to us. A cap made of gold-colored disks and red fringe sits on the far side of her head. The woman’s clothing is more loosely painted. We may see her breasts and pink nipples through her sheer, silver-gray tunic, which has long, voluminous sleeves. The short, bolero-style vest is strawberry red and gold, with narrow cap sleeves. A sea-blue sash around her waist is striped with overlapping burnt-orange and black lines. Her pants have flaring legs gathered with a button just below her knees. The pattern is of sage-green circles with swipes of rust-red in the center, suggesting flowers and vines against a black background. Her knees are spread open so her feet can barely be contained within the composition. Her teal-green slip-on shoes have the suggestion of flowers painted with dabs of yellow, black, and red, and a pompom atop each toe box. A red and gold cushion sits just beyond her feet. On it is a tray of oranges and an emerald-green jug. The pillow the woman leans on is propped against a short section of wall or piece of furniture painted with a border of roses. The room opens up beyond this, and has a turquoise and brown rug leading back to a cranberry-red sofa, on which a gray piece of fabric has been draped. The wall above is patterned with yellow and green diamonds and pink flowers against a laurel-green background. The artist signed the lower left, “A. Renoir. 70.”

Auguste Renoir

Odalisque, 1870

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 81

Novelist Laila Lalami and curator and head of French paintings Mary Morton discuss the histories and legacies surrounding Renoir’s imagined portrayal of an Algerian woman.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
Auguste Renoir was incredibly skilled at beguiling viewers’ senses with rich color, shimmering light, and thoughtful composition. Curator Mary Morton:

MORTON:
One of the extraordinary things about the painting is how much pleasure and what a challenge Renoir is meeting in describing all of the textures of these fantastic textiles - the velvet, the brocade, the transparent, diaphanous bodice, the feathers, the gold, metal, the slippers, and then of course her incredible expression alongside the positioning of her legs and the arching of her foot, captivate the viewer.

NARRATOR:
The painting sets out to make us think we’re inside a harem – a strictly private, female space in a North African home at the time. But in fact, this is Renoir’s own studio.

LAILA LALAMI:
I'm not at all surprised to learn that the model for this painting was, in fact, a woman in Paris – My name is Laila Lalami and I am a novelist and essayist based in Los Angeles.

Renoir, like any other Frenchman, would not have had access to this intimate space in the home of an Algerian family. But what is clear is that there is this desire/to violate a barrier. It is a woman that is being portrayed almost as an offering.

MARY MORTON:
He has rented, probably, a fantastic costume, vaguely North African. And then he's also embellished his studio space with some decorative arts.

LAILA LALAMI:
It is impossible to look at this picture from 1870 and not think about the context in which it was painted - at this point, France has invaded Algeria and is now in control of the country.

We like to think of ourselves as more modern and more enlightened creatures, but all we have to do is look at how this way of looking at women continues today, because of this fantasy, this view of Arab and Amazigh and Muslim women as other.

MARY MORTON:
So what does one do with pictures like this, which served to advance the stereotype of the colonized? I think it's crucial that we don’t hide it away. We need to use objects like this, to help us access critically the past and history.

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