11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
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Plain talk
Whenever the word "Orientalism" is mentioned, the name of Edward Said springs to mind. It was his provocative book with this title which stimulated discussions for over two decades. Now considered a classic, it has given a specific meaning and connotation to the word "orientalism", evoking a train of writers, associated mostly with the spread of colonialism.
Before Edward Said published Orientalism, the word was already in the dictionary, of course. It was Victor Hugo in his Les orientales (1829) who wrote: "In Louis XIV's time one was a Hellenist, now one is an orientalist. For empires as far as literature, perhaps it will not be too long before the orient is called upon to play a role in the occident."
I was reminded of this when I read details of an exhibition organised by the New York Dahesh Museum, with the title "A Distant Muse." I had the pleasure of visiting the exhibition which displayed 550 orientalist images in a variety of media -- paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, books and decorative arts -- and of reading the article in the accompanying catalogue titled "Western Eyes, Eastern Visions" by Lisa Small.
"To orient oneself," Small writes, "both physically and mentally, is to determine one's position in relation to the surrounding area: to establish a fixed point from which everything else maybe surveyed and understood." Orientalism, in her opinion, is the vast body of art and scholarship resulting from the Western drive to examine cultures and lands quite different from their own.
Orientalism flourished in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte's military campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) A line of artists began to visit the Middle East, starting with Eugene Delacroix who travelled to Morocco in 1832, then the romantic novelist and art critic Theophile Gautier who, in 1859, wrote: "The voyage to Algiers is becoming as indispensable for painters as the pilgrimage to Italy; they go there to learn from the sun, to study light, to seek out unseen types, and manners and postures that are primitive and biblical."
Among the European artists who invoked the Orient in their works were Jean-Leon Gerome, David Roberts, Edwin Long, Auguste Renoir, Gustave Moreau and Henri Matisse. Small believes that the orient loomed large in the occidental collective consciousness, being at once "an actual place that could be visited and depicted with more or less verisimilitude, and an imaginary construct whose meaning was determined by what a particular artist or viewer wanted or needed to see."
In addition to images of harems, dancers, Arab warriors on horseback, Napoleon and his officers, Turkish soldiers, and dervishes, the exhibition at the New York Dahesh Museum included many landscape paintings, from the strictly topographical to the picturesque: famous buildings, mosques, views of ancient monuments, busy street scenes, and caravans traversing the desert sands. It seems that the picturesque markets along the Nile and the Egyptian feluccas moored off its banks, were favourite motifs of landscapists. Also attractive were the many temples along the banks of the Nile, including, the Temples of Luxor at Karnak. It was natural that the exhibition displayed a number of David Roberts lithographs of the Holy Land, Syria and Egypt.
Scenes of everyday life and activities dominated orientalist art by the mid 19th century. It is interesting that while by that time many artists had visited the region, there were others who made careers out of orientalism without setting foot here. They referred to many descriptive books such as the Description de l'Egypte by Napoleon's savants, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians by John Gardner Wilkinson or Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians by Edward William Lane. Incidentally the exhibitions included rare copies of these books.
Whatever their motives were, there is no doubt that the orientalist artists have helped to record the image of the orient in olden days and have given us a glimpse of what our region looked like then.
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