Orientalism

No, not that horrid book, but the artistic movement it complained about.

No doubt the European fascination with the East had some unfortunate effects -- the fascination of an extremely powerful admirer is always a dangerous thing -- but it was in its origin admiration. Many nineteenth-century Europeans were in love with the Arab world. This fascination was especially common among those who chafed at the restrictions of Victorianism and longed for a society with different rules.

Partly they were projecting things onto the East that they felt the lack of, like adventure and sexual freedom. But they were also intrigued by what they saw. To write the whole thing off as imperialism is the sort of splenetic narrowness that is the specialty of our over-politicized world. Some things, you know, have nothing to do with politics.

These days the prices of 19th-century Orientalist works are soaring because they are much sought after by Arab and Turkish collectors; people like the Emir of Kuwait don't seem the least bothered by the alleged imperial message.

When Orientalist art worked, it created an air of the exotic, an eroticized other world that seems rich with dangerous possibility. But after looking a couple of hundred Orientalist painting over the past two nights, I can say that most of the time it did not work very well. The erotic is always a hard thing to grasp and put on paper.

From top to bottom:
John Frederic Lewis, The Reception, 1873
Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, The Slave and the Lion
Gustave Bauernfeind, The Market at Jaffa, 1886
Jean-Léon Gerome, A Pool in a Harem, 1876
Ludwig Deutsch, The Philosopher, 1897
David Roberts, The Hypaethral Temple at Philae, 1838