Reclining Odalisque 

Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant painted this depiction of a reclining odalisque during a period when Europe was consumed with Orientalism. This infatuation perpetuated fantasies about the East as exotic, sensual, and frozen in time. Constant, like many of his contemporaries, never actually visited the places he painted. Instead, he created imagined scenes from the comfort of his Parisian studio. Here, the artist presents a nude woman in a pose reminiscent of classical reclining Venuses, yet he cloaks her in the guise of an odalisque from the Ottoman Empire, a woman whose identity is reduced to her presumed sexual availability. While Constant was celebrated in his time, today we are more critical of how such works reinforce power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, often at the expense of representing the true diversity and complexity of other cultures. The imagined and the real, the erotic and the subjugated, are all disturbingly layered here.