The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened the exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy,” which explores how such major 19th-century artists as J.A.D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-Leon Gérôme represented the Middle East. Beginning with Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 and culminating with the French-trained Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), the show reveals that Orientalism was not a one-way street, but a genuinely artistic dialogue between East and West, through which admiration for the sophisticated techniques and forms mastered in the Islamic world introduced a new visual language to Western art and design.
Comprising four sections, this project features approximately 180 objects — created in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. — drawn from 12 different curatorial departments at the Met and enhanced by loans from other institutions and private collections. They include paintings, drawings, photographs, illustrated books, architecture, arms and armor, textiles, garments, glassware, ceramics, and metalwork.
Together these objects reflect not only direct aesthetic influences, but also the impact of colonialism, increased trade and travel, and the acclaimed displays of Islamic pieces at the world’s fairs that spurred Westerners to acquire them, ultimately landing in newly founded museums like the Met and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
This is the Met’s first exhibition dedicated to Orientalism, and also the first major collaboration between its departments of European paintings and Islamic art. Co-curator Asher Miller (European Paintings) notes that the project sheds new light on Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk (illustrated below), “the life-size painting of an Ottoman mercenary long favored by Met visitors, by presenting it alongside artworks that reveal untold stories about Orientalist portraits, likenesses, and types — and the fluid boundaries between those categories.”
Co-curator Maryam Ekhtiar (Islamic Art) adds, “Persian art and culture held a mesmerizing sway over the imaginations of Europeans and Americans, including writers, translators, poets, artists, craftsmen, architects, designers, and even composers… Visitors will learn that this tendency was so pervasive that many designers and manufacturers marketed their creations as ‘Persian,’ regardless of where they were actually made.”
Finally, co-curator Deniz Beyazit (Islamic Art) says, “One of the true discoveries for most visitors is the section on Osman Hamdi Bey. For the first time, a significant group of his rarely seen paintings is displayed alongside those by Gérôme and others. This juxtaposition reveals that, more than any artist of the 19th century, Hamdi represented modern cosmopolitan life in the Ottoman Empire from an insider’s perspective. His pictures offer an eye-opening response to the exoticized and stereotyped portrayals of ‘the East’ created by generations of European Orientalist painters.”
For more information about this exhibition, please visit www.metmuseum.org.
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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Fine Art Today
