Arabesque

Where exactly is 'the Orient'?

To the nineteenth-century European mind 'the Orient' was centred around the Arab world, Turkey, Iran and North Africa. By the twentieth century it had come to include India and the Near and Far East. But it has always been an illusive realm, exotic and indefinable — a construct of Western imagination that unites East and West.

There are many pictorial categories of Orientalist works, including historical and religious images, genre paintings, landscapes and portraiture. They tend to stand outside time, depicting an imaginary reality made up of authentic cultural details — what Roland Barthes has called 'l'effet de réel' (the reality effect)¹— and pure fantasy. The end result is an idealised and romanticised vision of the mythical East.

The reality of the nineteenth century was perhaps less romantic. According to the historian Edward Said, the political and economic involvement of the West in the Near East and North Africa over this period constituted imperialist domination; nineteenth-century Orientalist art, whether literary or visual, was therefore more of an attempt to reinforce Western superiority in these lands than to understand local culture.² The perception of racial and cultural superiority that this colonial approach tended to engender in the West is evident in many Orientalist works, particularly in those of British artists. (It is interesting that this attitude was not a feature of earlier East—West relationships: the Crusaders, for example, never regarded their Eastern enemy to be other than a worthy opponent.) Despite its colonial legacy, Orientalism has remained a popular movement in the West in the late twentieth century, with works continuing to provide exotic escapes for both 'armchair travellers' and souvenir-gathering tourists.

Many early Orientalist artists never travelled to the Near East. Rather, they sought inspiration from the wealth of literary material available — over two hundred books about the Orient were published in the seventeenth century alone. The Romantic Orientalism of French artists such as Baron Antoine-Jean Gros and Théodore Géricault was typified by the works of the poet Byron: sex, violence, wealth, decadence and opulence translated into fine art. Gros depicted imaginary reconstructions of historic battles in the Near East, while Géricault's Orientalist pieces, such as his carefully recorded Mameluke series, drew their authenticity from military souvenirs and fragments of Middle Eastern costumes. These scenes of fighting men in exotic settings, based on historical literature, constituted a whole genre.

One of the first Romanticists to travel to the Orient and to observe life there was Eugéne Delacroix. Sketches he made during his visits to Morocco and Algiers reveal a concern for realism and ethnographic accuracy. He was greatly impressed by the nobility of the local population who lived 'closer to nature in a thousand ways… and so beauty has a share in everything they make'.³ By the end of his life, however, Delacroix had returned to literary sources for Orientalist inspiration.

Other nineteenth-century artists followed. That they were usually either British or French is not surprising, given the presence of both Britain and France in the Orient at that time. Increasing military ambitions, allied with a corresponding expansion of colonialism, saw each country vying to secure a foothold in the area. The French took Algiers in 1830; nine years later the British established themselves at Aden, having already taken control in India and parts of the Far East. This colonial presence encouraged Oriental excursions which used as their bases the commercial outposts of the empires. By the 1880s the region was attracting mass tourism. (One guidebook at the time recommended sending three or four locals through one's lodgings to carry off all the fleas.)

There were subtle differences in the British and French approaches to the Orient. The French were less analytical in their interest, and often concentrated on aspects of contemporary Middle Eastern life and culture. The British, on the other hand, avoided personal interpretations and focused on the evidence of the classical world. They invariably excluded contemporary civilisations from their imagery in an attempt to reclaim antiquity for the Western world.

The monumental scope of some of this British art can be seen in the photography of the period and in the topographical works of English artists such as David Roberts, whose prints, with their ethnic bias, opulent taste, over-objectivity and religious preoccupations, reflect the standards of Victorian Britain.

The role of the East as a living museum of religious history became increasingly prominent during the mid-nineteenth century, as religious revivalism in Victorian Britain caused a swing away from interest in the classical world. The biblical attractions of the region became the focus for tourists and artists. By the 1870s Holy Land tours were highly organised events, sometimes with more than a thousand pilgrims under canvas at a time. Murray's guidebooks modestly deferred to the Bible as the best handbook of the area; and well into the twentieth century, writers were still presenting contemporary Palestine as 'eloquent of Biblical times, from mountain and wilderness, plain and sea, and the paths that connect them', albeit with the qualification that one must not suppose 'that everything Oriental will illustrate Biblical history’ .⁴

British artists, in particular, were interested in the search for biblical authenticity. David Roberts focused on the Palestinian landscape. He believed it to be the authentic countryside of Christ's travels, but depicted few biblical sites because of his Protestant fear of idolatry. He enhanced his images of what he considered to be a vast and desolate landscape with dramatic weather scenes and eerie light effects.

Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt visited Palestine three times in the 1860s, collecting examples of local costumes and artefacts; he accurately reproduced these in his paintings as representations of biblical times.

Hunt's work, The abundance of Egypt c. 1887, part of a series of related works begun at Giza in 1854, depicts an Egyptian village girl posed, symbolically, with grain and water. Interpreting religious order slightly differently, Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie firmly believed that biblical truth could be found through a study of contemporary life: portraits of Arab families became nativity scenes in his search for 'a new style of scripture subjects'. Others doubted the use of ethnographic realism for this purpose, with Eugéne Fromentin writing in 1854: 'To costume the Bible is to destroy it… To place it in a recognisable location is false to its spirit.’⁵

Western portraiture of Near Eastern notaries dates back to the Renaissance. In the nineteenth century, portrait artists focused primarily on the poise and dignity of the Arab, whether ambassador or local guide. Horace Vernet, another traveller to the East, believed, like Wilkie, that contemporary Arab culture was a direct link with the biblical past. He abandoned his earlier Romantic paintings for images that paid precise attention to ethnographic detail, His portrait Mohamed Ali, Pacha, Vice-Roi d'Egypte [Pasha Mohamed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt] 1818 shows the Eastern dignitary in full regalia.

Women were popular subjects, portrayed as being equally exotic whether shrouded in veils or naked in harems. (Orientalism, like biblical themes, provided a legitimate excuse to depict the nude.) The juxtaposition of a fair-skinned woman in her finery with a black attendant, as in Delacroix's La juive d'Alger (Jewess of Algiers) 1833, became a common icon in Orientalist painting. In The Oriental Album 1862 Henry Van Lennep depicts the elaborate ceremonies and strange customs of a variety of cultural groups. Costumes and accessories are intricately reproduced against European style backgrounds, revealing an almost surreal glimpse of the private worlds of Turkish, Druse and Jewish women. Wilkie, too, was fascinated by the local people, writing of the crowds at Constantinople: 'with dresses splendid and dwellings wretched, still recalling, in all their doings, a race and time from which civilisation had sprung'.⁶ Perhaps his portrayal of the two women in The letter writer, Constantinople 1841 — one Greek (Christian), the other Turkish (Muslim) — was a purposeful gesture to draw attention to the peaceful mixing of races and religions.

Dressing in local garb when travelling in the Orient was popular in the nineteenth century. But, by the end of the century, it was considered to make one look foolish unless one spoke fluent Arabic. Nevertheless, the practice among Westerners of dressing in Eastern finery when posing for artists never lost its popularity. Wilkie produced a stunning series of portraits during his short stay in Constantinople. Finding it difficult to get Turkish women to pose for him, he opted for Western women in exotic finery. In Mrs Moore, wife of the British Consul, in Arab dress 1841, the subject is portrayed in flowing Arab robes, while the little girl in Daughter of Admiral Walker 1841 stands tiny and exquisite in Turkish costume. These 'dressing up' aspects of Orientalism were later picked up by twentieth-century 'Orientalists'. Pierre Auguste Renoir, the first Impressionist to travel to the Near East, found it fascinating to fuse innovative techniques with exotic subject matter.

Inspired as a young artist by Delacroix and deeply influenced by the character of the Near Eastern people and the mysteriousness of their women, Renoir produced a number of odalisques. However, his late work holds only an echo of his earlier exoticism. Henri Matisse, after visiting Algiers in 1906 and Tangiers in 1912—13, began a series of Orientalist costume pieces featuring genuine costumes and artefacts with Western models, a style that was to become very popular and much emulated.

The Islamic world had a considerable impact on nineteenth-century European design, encouraging new ways of seeing the effects of colour and ornament. While items of material culture were recorded in scientific detail in publications such as Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century of 1851, European designs featured the exotic blended with the new materials of modern industry. Among these was the 'new' style of Owen Jones and his circle. Fascinated by the geometrical patterns of Moorish architecture, Jones, who had toured Egypt, Turkey and Spain, produced a series of book designs as well as the acclaimed Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, in 1842—45. He also decorated London's Crystal Palace in 1851. His 'principles' of design were later published in The Grammar of Ornament, one of the most influential pattern books of the nineteenth century. Five of its twenty chapters are devoted to Islamic ornament.

One school of Orientalism took its inspiration from Eastern fiction rather than Western travellers' tales. The various translations of Alf Iai wa lail The Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, which was later immortalised in Richard Burton's sixteen-volume edition of 1885—88 prompted countless European fantasy and romance novels and illustrations. These, in turn, influenced the arts.

While eighteenth-century literature inspired by Oriental fairy-tales concentrated on the moral content of the tale, nineteenth-century Oriental romances depicted an exotic world of fantasy, myths and dreams. One such example was Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, originally published in 1817 as 'tales told to an Indian princess'. Filled with exotic imagery of jasmine, roses and doe-eyed nymphs, it included the story of Paradise and the Peri, later illustrated by Jones with a mixture of Persian and Indian motifs.

The Arabian Nights also inspired Sergei Diaghilev's famous Russian dance company, the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev gave the Orient a new twist of exotic fancy with the phenomenally successful ballet Schéhérazade. The costumes and sets were designed by Léon Bakst, whose name, ever after, has been linked with the use of certain colour combinations — golds, reds and intense oranges amid swirls of emerald green and sapphire blue. This whimsical Orientalism spilled over into the worlds of decorative arts and fashion. The decor of almost every salon featured exotic bronzes or carpets, while fashion raged its way through styles inspired by the ballet and by Bakst's designs. As Charles Ricketts noted: 'The Orient came once more into its own ... pastel shades ... replaced by a riot of barbaric hues ... and no mantelpiece was complete without its Buddha.'⁷ Georges Lepape's L'habit persan 1912 picks up the magic of Schéhérazade and echoes Bakst both in its vibrant colour and exotic cut. The Ballets Russes continued to captivate audiences with a series of exotic ballets, including Cléopåtre, Thamar and Le dieu bleu.

In the aftermath of these productions, and especially after the First World War, Orientalism changed its direction. One side effect of the war was the demystification of the Middle East. The region seemed to acquire a more tangible character in the wake of various political and economic movements and rising nationalism. Romantic mythology was hard to equate with contemporary cultural modernity.

There was a distinct change, too, in European artists' perceptions of the Middle East. Utilising exotic subject matter was no longer enough. Islamic art, the real rather than the imaginary, was to have a major impact on early twentieth-century painters. After a century of playing the role of a decorative accessory, it was to become the basis for Western abstract painting. The stage was set for a new twentieth-century interpretation of Orientalism: one that moved beyond the mythology of the exotic into the realm of technical innovation and an acceptance of the realities of the Middle East.

Jeni Allenby

International Art, National Gallery of Australia