O To the great odalisque We have already talked about this in Art, but let's return to this grandiose image and try to read it through the famous anecdote about the length of the spine. Ingres's heroine. Amaury-Duval - Ingres's student and memoirist of his studio - states that when Great departures first appeared at the Paris Salon of 1819, certain Auguste-Hilarion of Keratry sharply and sarcastically remarked that this extraordinary woman had 'three vertebrae more'. Interestingly, it was later discovered that this sharp statement was not included in the original text of the aforementioned critic.
But the apocryphal tale has survived, not only because it was a striking formulation of what should have been the painter's unforgivable crime - especially if he is interpreted as an exemplary representative of neoclassicism who had to beware of such deviations - but also because it has remained, in various versions, a lasting reminder that there is indeed something in Ingres's portrayal of various heroines. more, a certain excess that - in a scene intended for enjoyment, erotic satisfaction or sexual gratification - irritates the gaze, preventing its full dedication to the object of desire.
This effect of the author's corporeal design became even stronger when the first, and then continuous impression, was linked to scientific verification: in an essay published in a medical journal, it was irrefutably established - when Ingres's wife was statistically compared with an 'ordinary', 'normal' woman - that the established assessment was, as it is now customary to say, merely 'conservative', that is, that things, if we look at it through the lens of the painter's deviation, were even worse than they seemed. made it, even more drastically than assumed. So, the painter's intervention was even more extreme than it seems. thought: the odalisque has as many as five extra lumbar vertebrae. What is the nature of this excess, or rather the excess of excess?
Due to its internal dual structure, due to its inherent duplication (a fetish is, in fact, always already an imaginary double), Ingres' fetishistic signifier causes two types of adhesion, implies a double location within the painting, a double arrangement in space and time, and therefore a double modality of descriptions: the painter distinctively forms the fetish of the body and the fetish of the object, which do not have to be coincident at all, which is why the author's works can often be, within themselves, contradictory, contradictory, apocryphal, even though their origin and point of fascination are the same.
Great departures, in this respect, is also a large fetishistic inventory, an extremely specific list of objects which, even without interaction with the body, contribute to the glorious radiance of the image, its unsurpassed brilliance, the charismatic beauty of the surface. While, for example, the ambience in Valpinçon swimwear (1808) scarce, in To the great odalisque It is richly filled with exclusive objects that are there to increase fascination and visual refinement, but not to provide any additional narrative clues in the story that are either absent or completely marginalized.
A turban, a large brooch, delicate fabrics, delicate linens and cushions, a bracelet, a fan with peacock feathers, luxurious curtains, a long, thin pipe: Ingres pays great attention to 'secondary' details, luxurious objects that are meant to provide the entire painting with additional visual splendor in which the portrayed body will gain even greater potential for signification. The painter achieves this with a double signature, which means a comparative, double fetishization.
Namely, all the painted objects, in their meticulous description, retain a mimetic authenticity: when it comes to objects, Ingres is always rigorously 'accurate', even historically reliable, filigreely precise to the point that his description cannot be disturbed by any objections, whether technical or interpretative. The objects in To the great odalisque - 'little things' strategically placed within the proscenium - are, in their adequacy, triumphantly indisputable.
But what is true of objects - this is Ingres's fundamental doctrine, his mode of two-stage fetishization - is not true of the body itself. Although they remain frozen in the painter's fixed gaze, objects and the body do not seem to belong to the same physical laws. Thus, in his fetishistic procedure, Ingres combines four levels of enunciation, which are at the same time extremely retrograde and uncompromisingly progressive, completely backward and almost autistic, as well as futuristically advanced. Namely, in order to realize A great odalisque Ingres seemed to have had to combine painting, photography, photoshop, and plastic surgery in his manuscript, in order to give beauty the necessary abstract characterization.
The painter's intervention is multifaceted, as the body is subjected to multiple operations. Great departures is, by crossing numerous references in imagining a special body that will be like no other in its unheimlich dimension, in the most important repercussion, completely introduced into a citational and signifier correspondence with the history of painting: the painting primarily addresses its own (i)history, its own set of laws: if it is truly directed somewhere, the odalisque's gaze is a gaze of looking back into the past, of accepting an internal constitution that nevertheless does not have to seek any verification from external authorities.
In a kind of anticipation of daguerreotypes and photography (which the painter would later use in his work), Ingres treats parts of space in To the great odalisque, more precisely, objects as objects of elegance and exoticism, with photographic accuracy and almost meticulous orthodoxy: hyper-realistic precision, however, in this context produces precisely the most astonishing shifts in the general design. Ingres's photo-shop intervention on the body, on the other hand, is located within the boundaries of the image (not of realistic likeness), but in such a way that the points of processing become - Brechtian-bare, still visible because there is no painless seam of transition that would mimetically absorb the figure. The errors that are the consequences of the author's manner of erasing and adding are not there to blur, but to especially purify the scene: Ingres's method may be extreme, but it is always sterile.
And on the fourth level, in sharpening the rhetoric, the author takes on the role - once the sterility of the setting has been ensured - of a plastic surgeon, because his poetic rule - or even his unconditional duty - is to necessarily perform aesthetic corrections, most often despite the appropriate anatomical coordinates. Just look at how directly 'modern', or rather artificially 'inflated', the breasts on the Sphinx, on all the odalisques and bathers, in fact, on all of Ingres' heroines, look.
Great departures confirms both structurally and enunciatively that for women enjoyment (which always remains in the space of the Real) there is no language that would express and state it in an unambiguous way (that is, in a way that would have for it an indisputable sign of marking and expression) and that, consequently, the only thing left for the male observer and the male artist is to construct, in the imaginary and symbolic order, a phallus that would guarantee the presence of pleasure in textual systems: the fetish governs Ingres's economy of pleasure and desire. This constellation is even more pronounced - to the point of an autopoietic and metapoietic constitution - because in this painting the female figure, both as a voyeuristic and as a semantic object - is deprived of narrative explication, of a certain plot that would place the scene within a diegesis that would, if nothing else, facilitate the interpretative effort.
Bonus video:
