Tragically, just as the West was waking up to the beauty and skill of Islamic decorative arts, the practice of those crafts was under threat in their native countries. A lot of people are buying things because they're popular and in demand, and the reason they're popular and in demand is because the artists a generation before had been to these places and brought back huge quantities of carpets and weapons and other artefacts." He tells BBC Culture "the paintings came before the scholarship. Lucien de Guise curated Beyond Orientalism, a 2008 exhibition at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia exploring Islamic art's influence on the West. The stylised floral tile designs, geometric architectural features, ornate metalwork, spectacular jewellery and intricately woven textiles and rugs left Western collectors spellbound. The scenes these artists portrayed may have been inaccurate, but the objects and artefacts they depicted were rendered with unstinting accuracy. A stream of North American and European artists flocked to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), Jerusalem, Cairo and Marrakech. The paintings they created freely merged fantasy with reality, especially when it came to depictions of the harem, to which no male would have ever been granted access, which depicted local women with an exoticised otherness that also reflected a sense of Western superiority.īut although the clichéd Orientalism of these works has been criticised, the paintings provided wider audiences with their first glimpse of the beauty of Islamic craftsmanship, an area which was then of little interest to Western museums and scholars. Although for centuries traders and diplomats had been the only Europeans able to visit the empires of the Middle East, the advent of the colonial era and the increasing Western influence in the region saw opportunities for travel opening up in the 19th Century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |