Truth Coming Out of Her Well

Sooo – that seems to be the extent of his symbolism. He personified a dope quote and followed it up with “photography is different than painting.” Cool, bro. 

Knowing that the painting isn’t the personification of a savage, existential truth coming to violently enlighten humanity, and is instead about photography isn’t reason enough to disdain his art as a whole. But outside of La Vérité Sortant du Puits Armée de son Martinet Pour Châtier L’humanité, his paintings are exclusively problematic French Orientalism. 

One particularly FUCKED-UP painting of his called, Le Jour Du Jugement Dernier, appears to be some ratchet-ass species of anti-Muslim propaganda

He was the kind of artist, and man, who should have feared the photograph, just like certain people today feel threatened by cellphone videos. In their rawest forms, these things show us life as it is. Although an artist composes the perspective, we are still seeing life as it genuinely unfolds. 

A painting, however, is a carefully curated image where the creator takes total control of color, mood, and composition, making you see a world of their own creation. They are not beholden to time, light, their own shadow, or the agency of their subjects. 

That’s especially true of Orientalists like Jean-Léon Gérôme; men who fetishized whole cultures and gawked at people because they wouldn’t validate the self-reported superiority of the strangers in their towns. They crafted their ignorance into a narrative of Exoctisism and framed their imperialism as an anthropological endeavor. 

Orientalists were responsible for the rare glimpses of the east that westerners got to see at the time and to this day, western culture is still trying to unlearn the lessons of its art. Bodies of work made by men with a vested interest in justifying themselves tried telling us stories that validated owning, occupying, and oppressing people who got in their way.  

While so much of European art shocks and awes the soul, it doesn’t dismiss the breath of it that was made to say: “Look how odd, and other they are.” and “These people? They deserve what we’re doing  to them.”

So feel free to start and stop your interest in Jean-Léon Gérôme here. There are a few cool biblical paintings he’s don’t but it doesn’t take long before you make it to some painting of a slave market. This painting, however, is a standalone mood. Use it to channel the energy of Truth coming out of her well to (figuratively) whip the shit out of the ideas people like Jean-Léon Gérôme put into this world.