The Getty Celebrates what the 20th-Century Forgot: The Art of Gérôme

By Guido Ghedin

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s works are impressive. This is the first thing that crossed my mind when I was facing masterpieces like Pollice Verso and The Death of Caesar, both bright and astonishing like they were frames from a movie picture. With a precise, sleek and powerful yet graceful touch, the French Orientalist painter and sculptor was able to convey the action in an hyperrealistic way, may it be of a cockfight, an epic battle in Ancient Rome, a prostitute or the King of France.  

Pollice Verso, photo courtesy of www.jeanleongerome.org

 The Death of Caesar, photo courtesy of www.jeanleongerome.org

This Getty Museum initiative is definitely a not-to-be-missed event, since it’s the first comprehensive show of his work in almost 40 years. It casts a light on Gérôme’s meticulous work - and on the whole Neo-Classic and Academic scene as well - bringing back the popular interest for a form of art that started to become unfashionable by the end of the the Ninetieth Century, slightly eclipsed by the dawn of Impressionism, and therefore swept away by all the New-Waves of the 1900s.

Born in Vesoul, France, Jean-Léon Gérôme came to Paris in 1840 at the age of sixteen. After numerous travels to Italy and Middle-Eastern countries such as Egypt, he developed the passion and ability to become the most recognized Orientalist painter of his age, bringing the French Academic Art to a climax. Until his death in 1904, Gérôme has been proudly and fiercely opposing most of new artistic movements, sometimes showing public hostility to what he called the “decadent fashion” of painters such as Sisley, Monet, Renoir, or Pissarro. But his stubbornness did not prevent him from being objectively open towards innovation: he warmly welcomed the rise of photography as a valid alternative to photorealistic painting.

Also, he was honest enough to acknowledge other artists’ talent. In an 1884 exhibition at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, he saw the works of another stubborn and rebellious artist, that only twenty years before wasn’t even able to get his paintings exposed at the Salon de Paris, the same Salon where Gérôme used to win prizes and gain social honors. Sources report that Gérôme admitted: “It was not so bad as I thought.” The name of that painter was Édouard Manet, and something was changing in the world of art.

For almost a century Naturalists, Academics and Orientalists have been castigated as only being “photo-realists,” old-fashioned artists searching for a blank look of unposed and spontaneous nature to transfer onto the canvas as a sheer academic exercise. This was not true for Gérôme: he produced a relevant amount of socially aware works, using an accurate and intense touch to draw the ruthlessness and unfairness of human nature. In fact, one of the most eye-catching pictures of the Getty exhibition is the Turkish Slave Market, where the painter portraits six women leaning against a wall, exposed to passers-by. The emptiness of their glance, the detailed coarseness of the clothes and the drab background, make us feel uncomfortable yet not able to look away, feeling the raw and disturbing emotion that only the greatest photographers can give.

Turkish Slave Market, photo courtesy of www.orientalist-art.org.uk

The show, held from June 15 to September 12, hosts dozens of Gérôme masterpieces owned by museums all over the world, from the Hermitage Museum to the Phoenix Art Museum. The event is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Réunion Des Musées Nationaux, Paris, in association with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.