La Grande Odalisque from the series Les Femmes du Maroc
2008
Color photograph
71 x 86 in. 
VMFA, Richmond

"Lalla Essaydi’s photography explores the charged issue of veiling and revealing that surrounds Islamic women. The women in the series Les Femmes du Maroc are enveloped in Islamic calligraphy, inscribed in henna on their skin, robes, and surrounding interiors. The text entraps them yet recalls a form of decoration often applied in celebration or for good luck. As an evocative response to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), Essaydi’s image replaces a Western male perspective on “the Orient” with that of a Muslim female."
— John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

READ AND TAKE NOTES:

• ESSAYDI'S ARTIST STATEMENT
• Orientalism in 19th Century Art

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Oil on canvas,
36" x 63" (91 x 162 cm), (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
1. Explain the 3 properties of art as you see them in Essadyi's work.
2. What is Orientalism? What inaccuracies have been presented in what Essaydi calls the "Orientalist lens of the West"?
3. How do Essaydi's images "conceal" AND "reveal"?

#1 Tile from a Squinch
Timurid period (1370–1507), 
Present–day Uzbekistan, Samarqand
Stonepaste; carved and glazed approx. 11" x  8"
Metropolitan Museum of Art




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​From http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/20.120.189: Often called muqarnas, or "stalactite," in Arabic, these architectural elements were used to fill squinches to provide a satisfactory transition between a square room and its domed ceiling. Muqarnas, however, were also employed as simple decorative devices to enrich the appearance of soffits, cornices, capitals of columns, and interiors of domes.

#2 Tile from a mihrab
1322–23 a.d.
Iran
Fritware, underglaze painted approx. 27" x 26"
Metropolitan Museum of Art











From http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/453211: This tile once formed part of a mihrab, or niche, facing Mecca, toward which prayer is directed in mosques. The inscription at its top includes a Qur'anic reference to the mihrab’s function, and provides the date of the tile’s manufacture in the fourteenth century. This surrounds the modeled vine and tendril motif executed with touches of black and turquoise. We must imagine that the interior walls of the building containing this mihrab were once covered in similar tiles, as was common during the Ilkhanid period in Iran.

Watch this video - take notes!

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:

1. a) What is the purpose of a squinch tile? b) What is a mihrab and why is it important in Islamic culture?
2. What role do patterns play in the Islamic religion? Where do the patterns come from and how are they intended to make those viewing them feel?
3. Looking at art has often been compared to a "religious experience." Explain your take on this statement as it relates to abstract art (as in the case of Jackson Pollock) and the principle of PATTERN.