By JACKIE WULLSCHLAGE [Financial Times] – Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the chairman of Qatar Museums, who has just launched Doha’s own survey of orientalist painting, says: “Although the notion of ‘orientalism’ is commonly perceived as a view from the west on the east, we believe that there is an opportunity to explore and appreciate the spaces in between. One may debate the composition of the works and question its accuracy – but one cannot deny the historical overview it gives us; nor the opportunity for discussion and reflection.”
There is evidence, in From Delacroix to Kandinsky, that this more open reading is also liberating European curators from an exclusively socio-political approach, encouraging a second significant development: the scope to explore not only the historic but the aesthetic imperative of orientalism. As this exhibition persuasively argues, mounting interest in non-European culture in the long 19th century helped push forward art’s formal agenda, until, in the 1900s, “the Orient germinated the modernist revolution”.
The show begins in 1798, when Napoleon conquered Eygpt and Delacroix was born in Paris. A bevy of artists accompanied the military campaign, returning with lively propaganda pictures such as Pierre Guérin’s “Bonaparte Pardoning the Cairo Insurgents”, and inciting a frenzy for things Egyptian that coloured French academic painting for half a century. The heightened realism of these pieces – Charles Gleyre’s sultry grass-skirted semi-nude on the Nile banks, “La Nubienne”, for example, or Gérôme’s vast desert canvas, “View from the Plain of Thebes (Upper Eygpt)”, and theatrically detailed, glassily reflective “Arab Women Carrying Water, Medina-el-Fayoum” – made them the more insidious as faux-documentary records.
For Said is surely right that what fuelled such seductive, reassuringly timeless imaginings of the orient was western discontent: with Europe’s rapid industrialisation, with repressive sexual mores.
Continued at the Financial Times | More Chronicle & Notices.
