What better environment than the Alhambra to discover the mysteries of the odalisques and art, in an exhibition where the concept of the female nude evolves hand in hand with these artists and others such as Delacroix, Ingres and Constant
Between exoticism and myth, on a fine line between the fascination for the feminine and misogyny, the odalisques captured the imagination of great artists of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, such as Matisse, Picasso, Delacroix O Chasseriau.
French painting was the one that worked the most on the figure of these women locked up in the harems, but in some cases (if they had the favor of the sultan on duty) they could become the first lady in the Ottoman Empire.
Under the beauty of the Alhambra
The exhibition Odalisques. From Ingres to Picasso It is presented in an incomparable setting such as the Palace of Carlos V in the Alhambra, in an exhibition that serves to relaunch this palace complex from the Muslim kingdom of Granada to the international circuit.
The 48 works are used to analyze how Western society looked at the odalisques and in parallel, to know the evolution of the female nude in art
The 48 pieces exhibited come from some of the most important museums in the world, such as that of Louvre, that of Orsay, the Pompidou Center or the Picasso of Paris.
The paintings are accompanied by a collection of objects from the Alhambra Museum that were part of the furniture of different harems in the eastern world, along with photographs and an audiovisual on odalisques -both the dreamed ones and the real ones- in dance and cinema.
Between myth and reality
The sample serves to differentiate between the reality of the odalisques, who despite the artistic glamor did not stop being sexual slaves, and “the reverie created by the artists in their construction of modernity”, indicates the Board of Trustees of the Alhambra and Generalife.
The different representations of the odalisques are the common thread to know how the aesthetics of art changed in a century and a half, especially the female nude.
A journey through art
The exhibition is divided into three rooms. The first features 18 drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres along with the paint Petit Harem of the Louvre, which are a clear example of how this neoclassical and romantic artist generated a plastic model on the odalisque that served as a model to represent the woman’s body.
Ingres’s art on the odalisques set a model for conceiving the female nude
The central room, with pieces of Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant, Jean-Léon Gérôme Y Adolf Seel, focus on the reverie of Europe for the eastern world, where fantasies, topics and misogynistic concepts about harems were generated.
Already in the third space the re-readings that Henri Matisse Y Picasso made of models of women in general and odalisques in particular that had inspired Ingres Y Delacroix.
There you can see an impressive odalisque of Matisse, along with works by the Malaga painter such as The autambourine woman Y Woman lying, that under its stroke deforms the classic image of the Turkish bath.
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