The Islamic world inspired Western artists for centuries From 1843mag
Like many students of the Middle East, I am still haunted by Edward Said 41 years after he wrote “Orientalism”. The seminal book argued that Western academics, writers, artists and journalists had been agents of European soft power for over two centuries, constructing an image of the East that was exotic and therefore in need of taming.
Since the publication of “Orientalism” in 1978 many museums and art galleries have hidden away their collections of desert landscapes, desolate ancient ruins and other memorabilia from 19th-century tours of the Orient. A new exhibition at the British Museum attempts to cast off the guilt and shame. Its neutral title – “Inspired by the East: how the Islamic world influenced Western art” – seems to strip art of political baggage. “We’re hoping to move beyond Said,” explains a curator.
The curators are right that Orientalism is more complex and blurred than Said believed. Western fascination with the East predates European colonisation by many centuries. It thrived when Islam was a rising influence in the world and Muslim armies advanced to the gates of Vienna in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th century, Handel and Mozart wrote operas about sultans as the Ottomans consolidated their hold on south-eastern Europe.
Yet Orientalist art cannot be divorced from the political backdrop in which it was produced. Most Orientalists survived by satisfying Europe’s market and catering to the colonial mindset. Some, like the French painter Claude Joseph Vernet , worked to commission for European emperors, queens and ambassadors. Others fed European fantasies with harem scenes from the East that, if they had been set in London or Paris, would have been thought pornographic.
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