Journal #24:

"reproduction and production"

Houria Niati's No to Torture: A Modernist Reconfiguration of Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment ¹
by: Sarah Rogers

In 1834, Eugene Delacroix exhibited the first version of his work, Women of Algiers in their Apartment at the Salon in Paris. Photographed, painted, and described representations of North Africa and the Middle East traveled through French society at the time. Both the subject of the harem and Delacroix's employment of conventional nineteenth-century artistic tropes located his work within this popular nineteenth-century discourse on North Africa and the Middle East. One exceptional, authenticating detail, however, distinguished Delacroix's work from other nineteenth-century representations of the harem; he was the first European male to gain access to the private space of the Algerian woman. This small, yet crucial narrative accompanied Delacroix's painting, lending it an unprecedented artistic and documentary status.

Over a century later, in 1982, the Algerian artist Houria Niati problematized Delacroix's representation of the harem in her work, No to Torture (Fig. 1), by interrogating the historical accuracy and visual pleasure often ascribed to his painting. Quoting Delacroix's poses of the Algerian women, Niati reconfigures Delacroix's imagery through a modernist vocabulary. By defacing and amputating the figures, Niati inserts another body into the historical and artistic narrative: the tortured Algerian female body during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954-1962. In this essay, I will argue that it is the intersection of French colonial rule and Niati's use of modernist visual strategies that gives No to Torture its creative ambivalence, while radically subverting both the authoritative Western vision assumed in Delacroix's imagery and the universal claims of modernist aesthetics.

No to Torture is a multi-media piece that was first exhibited in 1990 at the Cartwright Hall Museum in Bradford, England. Niati accompanies her paintings with taped recordings of herself singing traditional Algerian songs and reading poetry which she writes in French and translates into English. No to Torture includes five paintings. The viewer immediately recognizes the reference to Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment in the central painting (Fig. 2)^.2 Niati strips away the familiar setting of the harem and the conventional Orientalist props, and situates the bodies in an abstract space, defined through clouded swatches of bold purples, reds, and blues. Removing the figures' clothing and jewelry, Niati builds up the figural bodies with thickly applied paint, and indicates a sense of corporeality through roughly defined color transitions. What does Niati achieve through her choice of representational strategies and how does her reworking of Delacroix's composition complicate the discourse which lends his work meaning? In order to address these questions, I will begin briefly with Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

After capturing the city of Algiers in 1830, the French government sought an alliance with the neighboring country of Morocco and in 1832 sent the Comte de Mornay to establish diplomatic relations with the Moroccan sultan. The Comte de Mornay invited Delacroix on the trip, as nineteenth-century government officials often brought along artists and photographers to record expeditions to North Africa and the Middle East. After spending a month in Morocco, the two traveled to the city of Algiers for a three-day visit. At the port, Delacroix met the chief engineer of the harbor, who then introduced Delacroix to the harbormaster. A lover of paintings, the harbormaster agreed, after a series of negotiations, to allow Delacroix into his harem, although most probably just so far as the reception area of the harem.³ Although it is critical not to neglect the context of nineteenth-century Romanticism in a careful consideration of Delacroix's work, I am more interested here in how the story of Delacroix's access to the harem spoke through Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Champions of Delacroix praised the painting for its "pure color," whereas his critics at the 1834 salon condemned the painting for being "too real."⁴ As the scholar Joanna de Groot has argued, "nineteenth-century imagery of the Orient grounded otherness in real knowledge."⁵ Women of Algiers in their Apartment bases its "real knowledge" on Delacroix's witnessing of a historical reality traditionally prohibited to males outside of the immediate family. The choice to rework Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment allows Niati to challenge not only more general nineteenth- and twentieth-century visions of the harem, but also that particular vision which came to be endowed with a reputation of objectiveness. Niati's No to Torture thus upsets one historical reality with yet another which is also often unseen: the tortured Algerian body.

The body of the Algerian woman materialized during the French-Algerian war as a site of contestation in both French colonialist discourse and Algerian nationalist rhetoric. Evoked as the embodiment of the Algerian nation, the Algerian woman signified the sacred, domestic space which was to be protected and reclaimed from French colonial imposition. The intimate pact between modernization and colonialism has often been viewed through the prism of vision and power. During the French-Algerian War, this partnership revealed itself on the site of the veiled Algerian woman. The French colonial government considered unveiling the Algerian woman as a progressive step towards a more European form of modernization. As the scholar Meyda Yegenoglu remarks, "In fact, one of the central elements in the ideological justification of colonial culture is the criticism of cultural practices and religious customs of Oriental societies which are shown to be monstrously oppressing women."⁶ As fragments standing in for complex cultural and religious identities, the harem and the veil became synonymous symbols of broader ideological differences established, albeit uncritically, between East and West.

Yegenoglu's comments address how Delacroix's choice of the harem as subject contained the ability to elicit a moralizing gaze in its nineteenth-century European audience.⁷ For the West, the harem became a spatial embodiment of the various politically charged oppositions underpinning the colonial enterprise: male/female, visibility/invisibility, East/West, and tradition/modernity. These binaries played into and were played out in nineteenth-century European visions of the Orient, and continued on into the twentieth-century. Through her artistic act of defacement and amputation, Niati changes the signified--the Algerian woman--in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the harem; the Algerian woman as sign has shifted its meaning from the harem and all its baggage of sexuality, repressive tradition, and passivity to that of colonial torture.

Institutionalized in Greco-Roman times, physical and emotional torture was a tool employed for extracting truth from the body. France's establishment of les droits de l'homme after the French Revolution officially abolished torture, although it was not until the aftermath of World War II that the Untied Nations began the process of outlawing torture as a basic human right. Despite these legal measures, the French colonial government continued its use of physical and emotional torture in the Algerian colony into the mid-1960s.⁸ The French nation had awarded inadmissible rights to all French citizens, yet continued to deny Algerians basic human rights under international law. In order to resolve this contradiction, the colonial government appealed to France's "civilizing agenda" in the colonies. As the scholar Rita Maran argues, the French government sought to elevate the Algerian to the status of (almost) French citizen and justified the use of torture as a mechanism through which this was made possible.⁹ Moreover, the contradiction performed through France's policy in Algeria was repressed from the public in France until the early 1960s when the French lawyer, Gisele Halimi, defended the case of Djamilia Boupacha, an Algerian liberation fighter who was arrested and tortured. The case continued to circulate in public discourse with Halimi's publication of Boupacha's memoirs, Djamilia Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl which Shocked the French Liberal Opinion (1962). Niati's reference to the tortured and imprisoned Algerian woman therefore enables the artist to disturb one historical narrative with that of yet another. The artist herself declares, "Women in Algeria were fighting and dying. They were tortured. Western notions of the Oriental imagined a fantasy world of women. Delacroix's Arab women were half-naked. The images that he painted were used for many things. Behind his paintings suffering, torture, repression, unhappiness, and even spiritual happiness was not pictured."¹⁰

Although Niati maintains the sensual relaxed poses of Delacroix's figures, she interrupts the viewer's ability to consume, passively and comfortably, the bodies of the Algerian women as in Delacroix's work. The viewer desires to visually dwell in the lush array of colors in No to Torture, while simultaneously experiencing a sense of unease as a result of Niati's artistic act of violence. On the face of the figure on the left, the artist hatches scratch marks. She paints prison bars over the central figure and marks a double cross on the yellow figure's face. Decapitated and amputated the servant figure is no longer able to peal back the theatrical curtain for the viewer.¹¹

In a second canvas of the installation, Niati again subverts the use of the female body as a site of desire. The Red Woman (Fig. 3) depicts a female figure lying seductively on her side. One elbow props her upper body, while her remaining hand tucks under the curve of her hip. Juxtaposing the erotic nature of the figure's pose with the bonded feet and defaced head, Niati confronts the sexuality and passivity of Delacroix's harem, leaving a discomforting tension in its wake. The repeated pose of this figure in the four surrounding canvases only serves to compound a lingering sense of unease in the viewer.

Often read by art historians as merely an Algerian female response to Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment and French colonialism, No to Torture rarely receives formal consideration.¹² Niati's arrest by the colonial police in 1960, at the age of twelve, for writing anti-colonial graffiti and participating in a demonstration against the French presence in Algeria, is the privileged moment invoked from her biography to read meaning into No to Torture. I would argue that the historical context of the Algerian War of Independence and Niati's own encounter with the French colonial government can not, however, be divorced from the artistic language through which Niati engages with this history. Her choice of specific visual practices locates the Algerian woman in a second discourse, that of late Modernism.

Surrounding her figures in an environment of loose, visible brushstrokes and abrupt color transitions, Niati conceives of the background in a manner parallel to that of late Modernist artists, such as Henri Matisse. Within an acknowledgement of the canvas' two-dimensional surface exist subtle traces of spatial recession. The thin, black outlines of the figures at once flatten the figural body and also hint at a possible figure-ground relationship. Moreover, Niati's coupling of abstract and representational strategies within the figural body indicates an attentiveness to a second Modernist approach. Niati's application of red on the heel of the yellow figure's left foot and continuing up under the thigh alludes to a sense of figural three-dimensionality. Although Niati employs color gradations and brushstrokes to form the bodies, the same technique causes the disintegration of the body. The foot of the red figure, for example, loses form as it reaches the toes. Abstracted from the rest of the composition, the foot would resemble an oblong blob of red paint on a blue background. A parallel dissolution occurs with the red figure's left hand, which rests on the upper thigh. No to Torture's ambiguous blend of abstraction and figural representation recalls Willem de Kooning's Woman Series from the 1950s.¹³ In both works, the process of artistic agency in forming and deforming the female body is made visible through often violent traces of brushwork. Yet in Niati's work, the passive seductiveness of the figural poses works in tension with the disfigured faces, in contrast to the all-over dynamic movement of de Kooning's brushstrokes.

While scholars such as Linda Nochlin, Edward Said, and Malek Alloula have argued for a reading of nineteenth-century representational strategies integrated within the fabric of colonial ideologies, other art historians dispute what they consider a mapping of political discourse onto artistic representation.¹⁴ Rather, scholars such as John MacKenzie claim that nineteenth-century artists turned to the Orient as an alternative means of visual exploration.¹⁵ This debate continues into the twentieth-century with paintings of the Middle East and North Africa executed in the Modernist language. Roger Benjamin, discussing Matisse's work in Morocco, writes, "By dispensing of anecdotal realism of most nineteenth-century painting, the Modernist work reorganizes troubling subject matter in a way that endows it with the supposedly neutral character of abstraction."¹⁶ Focusing the meaning of Modernist representations of the Orient on formal concerns, art historians and artists are able to frame works within a primarily detached aesthetic discourse. Any possible political implications of the content are disguised beneath Modernism's claim to universalism through form.

Niati's enlistment of Delacroix's figures within a Modernist visual language allows for an undoing of the mythological apparatus of both Delacroix's harem and the universal language of form in Modernist art. As citations from Delacroix's work, one might view these figures and their attachment to a specific cultural code as signs imprinted on an otherwise abstract canvas. The bodies tread upon the spatial territory of Modernist abstraction and thus Niati unhinges abstraction from its claims to universality by playing it off a visual and historical specificity. The amputation and defacing of the body through a Modernist vocabulary brings to the surface that which is often displaced in Modernist aesthetic discourse--the violent and political history of colonialism embodied in the tortured and imprisoned female Algerian body.

I will conclude with a brief consideration of Niati's choice of title, No to Torture, which in its imperative tone implicates the viewer in the representation. The voice of the painting summons forth the voice of the viewer. Yet in an ironic gesture, Niati's title calls for the negation of the representation. By speaking "no to torture" the viewer is compelled to say no to the form and content of the painting. The title of the work translates the cultural symbol of Delacroix's work into a site of political activism. In recent decades, post-colonial studies have unmasked and confronted the political underpinnings of Delacroix's work. By directly involving the viewer, Niati forces us to do the same. The viewer's active voice thus works with Niati to disrupt two historical narratives, that of Delacroix's harem and the French silencing of the use of torture during the French-Algerian War.

 

 

Notes:

1 This Paper was originally given at Boston University's 18th Annual Graduate Symposium in the History of Art in March 2002.

2 It is interesting to note that in the few articles which discuss Niati's No to Torture, the only image reproduced is the central canvas, which refers directly to Delacroix's painting. The surrounding four canvases depict the same figural pose (Fig. 2), except that the body is painted in different colors.

3 For a literary description of Delacroix's adventures in Algeria and its political implications, see Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijin de Jager, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

4 Todd Porterfield, "Western Views of Oriental Women in Modern Painting and Photography," Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World, ed. Salwa Mikdadi Nashashibi, Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994, 60. In his essay, Portfield quotes the art critic Philippe Burty, who, in the 1880s, went so far as to claim that Women of Algiers in Their Apartment belonged to the modern ethnographic school.

5 Joanna de Groot, "Sex and Race: The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century," Sexuality and Subordination, eds. Susan Mendus and Jane Randall, London: Routledge, 1989, 95.

6 Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 98.

7 I realize that it is problematic to speak of a monolithic nineteenth-century European audience, but I am referring here to a discourse of Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said, as a set of tropes which constantly referred to and confirmed each other, thereby establishing a stake in representation as material reality. See Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

8 For an analysis of the use of torture in Algeria by the French colonial government see, Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French- Algerian War, New York: Praeger, 1989.

9 Ibid., 2.

10 As quoted in Porterfield, 30.

11 It is intriguing to note that Niati’s artistic violence to the body is centralized on the face as the site of visuality.

12 For such a reading, see Salah Hassan, “Nothing Romantic About It: A Critique of Orientalist Representation in the Installations of Houria Niati,” in Women, Patronage, and Self- Representation, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.

13 I would like to thank Erika Naginski for pointing out this comparison to me.

14 See, for example, Said, Orientalism; Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in Politics of Vision, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988; and Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

15 John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, 43.

16 Roger Benjamin, “Matisse in Morocco: A Colonizing Esthetic?” Art in America (Nov. 1990): 164.

 

 

Illustrations:

Fig. 1: Houria Niati, No To Torture, 1983.

Fig. 2: Eugene Delacroix, The Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834.

Fig. 3: Houria Niati, The Red Woman, 1983.

 

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3