On March 5, the Denver Art Museum opened Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism (on view through May 29, 2023). The exhibition examines themes of artistic cross-cultural borrowings specifically where these concern the dissemination of Orientalist motifs originated by nineteenth-century French artists. An example of which is Julius Rolshoven’s (1858—1930) painting Tunisian Bedouins, chosen for the exhibition not only because of its beauty and complexity, but also because Rolshoven was one of several artists who trained in Europe and applied the concepts he learned there to the subjects he later found in the American Southwest.
Julius Rolshoven, Tunisian Bedouins, 1910. Oil paint on canvas; 42 × 37 in. (106.7 × 94.0 cm). Gift of Mrs. Julius Rolshoven, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, 64.38.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Rolshoven studied art in New York, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Florence. In Florence, he studied under fellow American expat Frank Duveneck, whose influence is evident in Rolshoven’s loose handling of paint in his mature works. By 1886, he was in Paris studying at the Académie Julian with William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He remained in Paris for nearly 10 years, painting portraits and teaching life-drawing classes. The peripatetic artist moved to London in 1895 and then, in 1904, back to Florence—a city he would primarily consider his home for the rest of his life.
Around 1910, Rolshoven traveled to Tunisia and painted Tunisian Bedouins. In the painting, two women sit on an urban rooftop. Their names unknown, they function as representatives of a primarily nomadic tribe of people found throughout North Africa and the Middle East. As intriguing figures of exotic “otherness,” Bedouin people were painted by many European and Euro-American artists. Here Rolshoven depicts the central woman draped in multi-colored clothing as a sensual temptress: her arms flung open, she seems to offer up her variegated textiles, shimmering jewelry, and even her body. In contrast, the foregrounded woman in white is an observant stoic who returns our gaze and bars us from her enticing counterpart.
To escape World War I, in 1915 Rolshoven returned to the US and visited the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. Based on his interest in the American Southwest display, his friend and fellow artist, Fernand Lungren, recommended that Rolshoven and his wife Harriette visit Taos and Santa Fe, referring to the Pueblo peoples as “Arabs in America” in a letter to Rolshoven. While in Taos, Rolshoven painted several portraits of Native Americans from the area including a complex multifigured painting titled The Indian Council.
Julius Rolshoven, The Indian Council, about 1916. Oil paint on sized burlap-laid canvas; 72 × 90½ in. (182.9 × 228.6 cm). Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art: Gift of Harriett B. Rolshoven in memory of Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, 1956 (359.23P). Photo by Blair Clark.
Artists such as Rolshoven traveled abroad to learn from French masters, and in the process, picked up more than techniques. They also adopted certain tropes for representing non-European subjects, seen in Rolshoven’s simultaneous Orientalizing of and respect for Bedouin and Indigenous cultures. In both paintings, rendered in Rolshoven’s characteristic loose and expressive brushwork, the sitters are powerfully present as indomitable representatives of their cultures, yet at the same time flattened into nameless types.
Conservation
Associate Paintings Conservator Yasuko Ogino at work.
At 113 years old, Tunisian Bedouins (like any painting its age) needed some conservation. When it arrived at the Denver Art Museum, the painting exhibited noticeable distortions and stretcher bar creases where the slack canvas had been resting against the wooden structure behind it. The paint layer had areas of textured age cracks that were stable but visually distracting, and there were some small damages that had been somewhat crudely repaired in the past. The main condition issue was the layer of old varnish, which had no doubt been water-clear at the time of application, but had aged to a dull, uneven brownish tone (shown below left).
Conservation treatment of the painting consisted of removing grime and the unflattering varnish, as well as old restoration materials used to “touch up” small damages (and, inexplicably, cover the original design on the central figure’s chin with a flat, yellow-green color). The canvas was removed from the wood stretcher so that irregularities and areas of raised paint could be relaxed using controlled humidity under the even heat and pressure of a vacuum hot table. Once re-stretched, the painting was re-varnished using a modern synthetic resin, and old damages were filled level and conservatively toned so that the surrounding original paint was not covered over. The painting still exhibits subtle signs of its age, but the major deformations have been corrected and the original vibrant paint colors revealed (shown below right).
