ABSTRACT
The Orient was 'almost a European invention', Edward Said argues, turning Orientalism into a critical discourse through his 1978 book Orientalism. There he opened up notions of 'the Orient' to interrogation as a complex discursive field of knowledge, to show that Orientalist representations were enmeshed in the politics of colonial power. Rhetorically, Man Ray's photograph is premised on a visual pun (paronomasia) where an image makes a connection between two elements (woman and violin), which have no logical relation (a false homology). The status and position of Ingres in French culture was being elevated at the beginning of the twentieth century, as more than just another nineteenth-century French Academy painter who had studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. While the surrealists' appeal to the Orient was intended to challenge positively the hegemonic authority of Western culture, they also found themselves attacked for using the 'Orient myth' by Pierre Naville.
