english text 167 freedom. With him, the fascination of the image of a beautifully formed nude male body gave rise to a modern narcissistic vision in the broadest sense of the term. If we wish to know his ideal of beauty we have only to read the description he gives of the Belvedere Torso, in which he says: “The artist has presented in this Hercules a lofty ideal of a body elevated above nature, and a shape at the full development of manhood, such as it might be if exalted to the degree of divine sufficiency.” One of the artists most extensively influenced by these ideas was the German photographer Herbert List (1903–1975). Like various Central European artists and writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he too travelled to the south of Europe in search of his Arcadia, a tranquil, beautiful and sexually permissive Arcadia. Attracted by the ruins of Olympia and Delphos, he adopted Shelley’s cry of “We are all Greeks”, acknowledging spiritual indebtedness to the land of Greece. List was fascinated by the art of antiquity and wished to be able to create a synthesis of it with modernity. With this aim he made very varied photographs of heroes of antiquity which speak to us of the passing of time, of another age and civilisation, with evident nostalgia. We can see a clear expression of this in his attempts to endow his models with the characteristics of prototypes of timeless beauty (In the Morning II, Athens, 1936), as if they were modern gods, availing himself of all kinds of accessories for this purpose, such as columns, Attic masks or fanciful lighting. In many of his photographs in which there are statues, or fragments of them, made of marble, the viewer may even confuse that material with human flesh and not be able to distinguish one from the other. List’s ingenious treatment of light allows him to deploy a considerable range of contrasts between veiling and transparency of shadows, creating an atmosphere full of symbology in which light imbues and modulates buildings and sculptures in such a way as to bring about the appearance of a visionary, almost supernatural presence (Cella and Portico of the Parthenon, Athens, 1937). The boys in Herbert List’s photographs find support in their classical ancestors to suggest to us that the ancient gods and heroes are gazing at us through these contemporary ephebes. He tended to present the male body as if it were an ancient sculpture and vice versa, “endowing with life” the marble sculptures he photographed in Greece, an oneiric view that converted his human models into myths of stony sculptural form. As the French writer and photographer Michel Tournier noted, Herbert List was a refined aesthete who enjoyed an aristocratic narcissism and who was enamoured of the archaeology of antiquity in a kind of joyous celebration of stones and landscapes and the naked bodies of young Greeks. In parallel with this fascination with the south of Europe, for the travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Arab world (in this case, North Africa) was a genuine source of suggestions and discoveries. A world where it was possible to dream that one was in a marvellous land, a strange, foreign world that revealed itself as an object of fascination, a sensual, unreal world tinged with fantasy and exoticism converted into a construction of the imagination (Nadar’s Sarah Bernhardt, 1860). Between 1798 and 1914 North Africa was a region that exercised a significant attraction in European countries because of the belief that it could satisfy the urgent desire of Europeans for exotic experiences, exoticism understood as an artistic exploration of territories and eras in which the imagination could fly freely because, ranging far beyond the restrictive boundaries that marked European society at the time. Initially artists visited those countries for very specific reasons such as making topographic drawings or recording chronicles of military expeditions. However, as Western domination was gradually consolidated, routes and destinations were established that favoured the presence of substantial tourism. For this purpose, the countries of the Maghreb were in a special situation. Algeria was quickly converted into a French “province” and, as a result of its proximity to Spain and its cultural links with our country, Morocco was the object of many frequent visits. They were confined, at first, to Tangier, where a large population of Jewish origin offered a warm welcome to Western travellers, and later extended to the whole country. Despite these facilities, most of the Western travellers and tourists were not capable or desirous of participating in local life in those countries at any time; the language barrier and cultural and religious differences were solid obstacles that made the visits short in time and superficial in terms of knowledge. We have to admit that among Westerners there was a fairly generalised hostile opinion which condemned many of the forms of life in those countries, considering them primitive and rather savage. The conception of North Africa as an exotic region constituted a powerful focus of attention in the fascination with which Westerners viewed women in those cultures. They were perceived as strange, enigmatic creatures who covered their bodies with veils and lived apart from the gaze of men in inaccessible places, such as harems or baths, which aroused the imagination and desires of Western travellers. In this regard it is interesting to see the photographs taken by the Hungarian photographer Nicolás Müller (1913–2000), who lived in the city of Tangier for nine years when it was part of the Spanish protectorate. His series on Morocco in the 1940s brings out some of the aspects indicated here, an unknown world in which the whole environment is bathed in an excess of sunlight which conditions the way of seeing and the composition of his photographs, deliberately seeking the contrast and intensity of chiaroscuro. The whitewashed Arab houses, the women in their “haiks” with their face covered, the souk, the moneychangers sitting in the middle of the street, the kasbah with its narrow, winding streets and
Entre el mite i l'espant
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