BRITISH ORIENTALIST PAINTING AT THE TATE GALLERY THE LURE OF THE EAST

Yemen Times
July 03, 2008
Yemen

According to John Ruskin "amongst the most wonderful pictures in the
world": John Frederick Lewis’s A Frank Encampment in the Desert of
Mount Sinai

The Tate Gallery’s exhibition on British Orientalist Painting explores
the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of
the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930. Susannah Tarbush
found out that the exhibits are more than just representations of an
"imperialist gaze"

The cover of the catalogue for the exhibition "The Lure of the East:
British Orientalist Painting" shows the 1881 oil painting An Arab
Interior by Scottish artist Arthur Melville. This captivating work
portrays a white-bearded man, long tobacco pipe in hand, seated
before a mashrabiyya, or latticed wooden screen. Exhibition curator
Nicholas Tromans notes: "The patterns of strong sunlight falling
through these screens into an interior became a favourite motif of
British painters." The subdued interior is gently brightened by the
rosy hues of the furnishings and the man’s dress. An Arab Interior
has an intimacy and warmth, and is an enticing introduction to the
exhibition of some 115 works by 46 artists which runs at the Tate
Britain gallery in London until the end of August.

Going East

The exhibition is organised in association with the Yale Center
of British Art, in Connecticut, where it was first displayed in
February-April this year. Following its run at Tate Britain the
exhibition will move, in partnership with the British Council, to
the Pera Museum in Istanbul (October-January) and Sharjah Art Museum
(February-April).

Most of the pictures date from the 19th century, when the arrival of
steam travel made parts of the Middle East and North Africa much more
accessible. Many British artists visited the Eastern Mediterranean
and its great cities. Some travelled directly by steamship. Others
went via Spain and Morocco, or through Greece and the Balkans.

Among the artists who brought back images of the Orient were Edward
Lear, William Holman Hunt, Thomas Seddon, David Roberts, Frank Dillon,
Lord Frederic Leighton and William James Muller (son of a Prussian
émigré).

New heights of achievement

The dominant presence in the exhibition is John Frederick Lewis,
represented by 32 works. Lewis lived in Cairo for a decade from 1841,
wearing local dress and living in a grand house. He executed nearly
600 watercolours and drawings during that time. Lewis is particularly
known for his beautifully detailed interiors and harem scenes, of
which the exhibition has fine examples including The Reception and
Hhareem Life, Constantinople.

In his masterpiece A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai,
1842, painted in 1856 Lewis’s watercolour technique reaches new
heights of achievement. Commissioned by Viscount Castlereagh, the
picture shows the aristocrat languidly resting in his tent during
a Artistic master of his subject: John Frederick Lewis painted An
Armenian Lady in Cairo in 1855

hunting expedition. Lewis’s close friend, the critic John Ruskin,
declared it "amongst the most wonderful pictures in the world".

There was exciting news for the organisers of the Tate Britain
exhibition when, a few weeks before it opened, three works they had
hoped to include but had been unable to locate were found in the Qatar
Orientalist Museum. The pictures, among them Lewis’s exquisite 1855 oil
An Armenian Lady in Cairo – The Love Missive, have been incorporated
into the exhibition.

The eyes of the young Armenian woman are lowered as if she is in
a reverie and she holds a posy. The picture resonates with certain
other works on show, by Lewis and others, in which the language of
flowers is an essential element.

Debates on Orientalism in art

Inevitably, especially in a year that marks the 30th anniversary
of publication of the late Edward Said’s hugely influential but
increasingly challenged book Orientalism, the exhibition is surrounded
by debates on Orientalism in art. The exhibition organisers have tried
to ensure that the issues are explored from both Western and Middle
Eastern perspectives. Thirty prominent people, including Arab, Turkish
and Jewish scholars and writers, have contributed their thoughts on
particular works which are displayed alongside the exhibits.

Two of the four introductory essays in the handsome 224-page catalogue
are by Arab women writers: Syrian Rana Kabbani and Moroccan Fatema
Mernissi. Kabbani’s essay, which is angry in tone, sees a link between
pictures painted at a time when Britain enjoyed military and economic
mastery over the peoples and places depicted, and the modern era
"in which Britain has again participated in the occupation of an
Arab country". She admits, though, that "many of these paintings have
managed to preserve a poignant visual record of places that are now
altered beyond recognition, or have vanished forever."

The West’s attitude towards the dark – and the nude

Mernissi adopts a more forgiving approach in her essay Seduced by
‘Samar’, or: how British Orientalist painters learned to stop worrying
and love the darkness. In her view the exhibition is "a wonderful
opportunity to probe the link between the West’s attitude towards the
dark and its fear of Islam". She concludes that the painters’ encounter
with a different world "led not to conflict but to creativity, and
we have much to learn from them."

Anyone coming to the exhibition in the hope of seeing lurid
and titillating examples of Orientalist art will be largely
disappointed. One point made by the organisers i John Frederick
Lewis lived in Cairo between 1841 and 1850. "Interior of a Mosque,
Afternoon Prayer (The ‘Asr)", was finished 1857, six years after his
return to England

s that there were marked differences between British Oriental artists
and those of certain other countries, in particular France. For all
his numerous paintings of harem scenes, John Frederick Lewis, unlike
some of his French counterparts, never painted a nude.

Tromans points out: "The iconography of the odalisque – the Turkish
sex slave whose image is offered up to the viewer as freely as
she herself supposedly was to her master – is almost entirely
French in origin." The odalisque is particularly associated with
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, in paintings such as The Turkish Bath
crowded with voluptuous nudes.

Combination of cruelty and eroticism

By way of drawing contrasts between the British and French Orientalist
painters’ approach, French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s For sale:
Slaves at Cairo is hung near the Scottish artist William Allan’s The
Slave Market, Constantinople. As typifies Gérôme’s slave market
paintings, For sale: Slaves at Cairo combines cruelty and eroticism –
one of the slaves is naked, long dark hair cascading down between her
breasts, others are revealingly clad. Allan’s painting, showing Turkish
slavers on horseback splitting up the women of a captured Greek family,
is melodramatic but has none of the prurience of Gérôme.

It would be a pity if the mass of debate over Orientalist art
acted as an invisible screen between visitors and the paintings on
display. One visitor whose preconceptions were turned upside down was
the British Asian Muslim columnist Yasmin Ablihai-Brown. She wrote
in the Independent newspaper that she had gone to the exhibition
prepared to detest the artists for presuming that through beauty
they could deny the unforgivable truth, that they were upholders of
illegitimate imperial privilege.

Instead: "All expectations fell away as I gazed upon painting after
painting, many of which seemed, to my eye, expressions of undeclared
love of the Middle East by white, Christian, upper-class gents,
their secret pain and longings, the conflict between head and heart,
between Antony and Cleopatra."

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