Exhibit of the week: The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme

Getty Center, Los Angeles

Through Sept. 12

In the late 19th century, “there was not a house in France that did not have a print by Jean-Léon Gérôme,” said Katharine Albritton in The Art Newspaper. Yet “while Gérôme was popular in his time,” there hasn’t been a major museum exhibition of his work in 40 years. The Getty Center’s important new show should thus reintroduce Gérôme to a new generation, tracing the artist’s development from painter of “lighthearted” neoclassical scenes to his more famous (and often lurid) works depicting Arab and other Eastern cultures. Reproductions of such pieces made the artist fabulously wealthy, said Griselda Murray Brown in the Financial Times. Yet younger artists looked down on them. Gérôme “refused to embrace the developments of impressionism and post-impressionism,” preferring the polished look of old-fashioned academic painting. Among critics, his art came to be seen as retrograde even before his death, in 1904.

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Today, what’s considered retrograde about Gérôme’s art isn’t its polished style but its often “politically incorrect” content, said Jori Finkel in the Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the 1970s, his “meticulously detailed, exquisitely decorated scenes of the Near East” began to be criticized as racist, imperialist propaganda. It’s certainly hard to deny the “racially charged, sexually questionable” nature of a painting like 1871’s For Sale (The Slave Market), which shows women lined up against a wall “like so many housewares for sale.” In the artist’s day, many saw the bloody Turkish Butcher Boy (1862) as a commentary on the “savage decadence of the East.” Yet this exhibition rightly asks us to look again. Gérôme traveled to places few other European artists had ever ventured, and his best works capture them with a true ethnographer’s eye. Indeed, Gérôme paintings are now extremely popular among Arab and Turkish collectors. “Can a painting still be considered racist if members of the race depicted apparently take pride in it?”

Perhaps those collectors are simply reacting to the same crowd-pleasing qualities that made Gérôme so popular in the first place, said Christopher Knight, also in the Los Angeles Times. Think of him as “the Jerry Bruckheimer of his day,” creating blockbuster scenarios to thrill the masses. While Gérôme’s art may have seemed passé to the impressionists, his embrace of popular taste and his affinity for mass reproduction make him a forerunner of postmodern artists from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst. “He was there at the dawn of popular culture”—he was, perhaps, the first true pop artist.