A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
The romance and exoticism of the Orient, as captured by 19th-century European and American painters, are brought to life in this important volume. Nineteenth-century Europe was fascinated by the Orient. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798 initiated this phenomenon, and its history-the most notable episodes of which include the Greek uprising against the Turks in 1821 and the French taking of Algiers in 1830-was closely linked to changing attitudes toward the "Eastern question." Artists of the period, too, were captivated by these events, and the rich body of imagery they produced is the subject of this volume. Incorporating much recent research, author Christine Peltre's elegant text retraces Orientalism's artistic history, in which the French and British schools predominated. The "high poetry" of the Romantics' Orient, often inspired by Byron or Hugo, strove for dramatic effect, as the works of David Roberts, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Eugène Delacroix attest. A different brand of imagery was produced by the "ethnographic gaze" of the century's middle years, practiced by artists who visited the sites they represented, such as John Frederick Lewis, Eugène Fromentin, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, as well as by others who remained studio-bound, including J.-A.-D. Ingres and Adolphe Monticelli. Work of this kind was eventually superseded by a "third style,"a fusion of European and Eastern elements, as seen in the work of August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse. Witnesses to a history that they influenced in subtle ways through their imagery, the Orientalist painters also produced a history of their own, that of a spiritual and formal quest to find in the "East" the ideal of "primitive" purity. Illustrated with more than two hundred expertly selected Orientalist paintings and drawings, Orientalism in Art is an indispensable volume for art historians and anyone lured by the romance and exoticism of Orientalist art. AUTHOR Christine Peltre is professor of the history of contemporary art at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg. The author of a book on the encounter of nineteenth-century European artists with Greece (Retour en Arcadie, 1997), she is also a specialist in Orientalism and has published widely on the subject (L'Atelier du voyage, 1995). ILLUSTRATIONS 220 illustrations
Shafik Gabr started his collection of Orientalist art in 1993. His collection comprises some of the finest examples of the greatest masters of Orientalism.
The Orientalists pursues the mid to late 19th century, when American and European artists traveled and painted throughout the Holy Land and India. The highly cinematic images they created suggest a great influence on modern visual culture.
Of all the customs and traditions concerning the lives of oriental women, the harem is probably the most familiar and least understood in the West. Over 150 orientalist painters, both prestigious and less known, are brought together in this book as individual monographs.
The Orientalism debate, inspired by the work of Edward Said, has been a major source of cross-disciplinary controversy. This work offers a re-evaluation of this vast literature of Orientalism by a historian of imperalism, giving it a historical perspective
Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, 6 December 1997 - 22 February 1998, and the Auckland City Art Gallery, 20 March - 7 June 1998.
The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 marks the inception of orientalism as a discourse. Since then, Orientalism has remained highly polemical and has become a widely employed epistemological tool. Three decades on, this volume sets out to survey, analyse and revisit the state of the Orientalist debate, both past and present. The leitmotiv of this book is its emphasis on an intimate connection between art, land and voyage. Orientalist art of all kinds frequently derives from a consideration of the land which is encountered on a voyage or pilgrimage, a relationship which, until now, has received little attention. Through adopting a thematic and prosopographical approach, and attempting to locate the fundamentals of the debate in the historical and cultural contexts in which they arose, this book brings together a diversity of opinions, analyses and arguments.
Lavishly illustrated with exotic images ranging from Renoir's forgotten Algerian oeuvre to the abstract vision of Matisse's Morocco and beyond, this book is the first history of Orientalist art during the period of high modernism. Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade of research in untapped archives, introduces many unfamiliar paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging across the decorative arts, colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers. Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a lush body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists never before discussed in English. The painter-critic Eugène Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim melded the Persian miniature with Western perspective. Benjamin considers armchair Orientalists concocting dreams from studio bric-à-brac, naturalists who spent years living in the oases of the Sahara, and Fauve and Cubist travelers who transposed the discoveries of the Parisian Salons to create decors of indigenous figures and tropical plants. The network that linked these artists with writers and museum curators was influenced by a complex web of tourism, rapid travel across the Mediterranean, and the march of modernity into a colonized culture. Orientalist Aesthetics shows how colonial policy affected aesthetics, how Europeans visualized cultural difference, and how indigenous artists in turn manipulated Western visual languages.
