Art, Travel, Empires
- Some of the most important debates in the study of Orientalist visual culture have taken place around major exhibitions of painting and photography. Choose two exhibitions and analyse how each distinctively contributes to our understanding of Orientalist visual culture. Analyse the range of work included in each exhibition and evaluate their stated curatorial premises. Where possible take into consideration reviews and academic responses to these exhibitions. What are the strengths and limitations of each?
- Is it fair to describe Eugène Delacroix as the first ethnographic artist to work in North Africa? How much weight should be given to his desire to document a foreign way of life when evaluating the work he produced during and after his trip of 1832? Be sure to consider Delacroix’s watercolours as well as at least three major canvases in your reply.
3.
“When the Oriental artists and intellectuals speak and begin shaping the terms of the debate, the Orient as represented by the West sheds its homogeneity, timelessness and passivity, and becomes nuanced and complicated. It can no longer fit the frozen categories.” (Zeynep Çelik)
Analyse how the inclusion of North African and Ottoman artists and patrons can ‘nuance’ and ‘complicate’ our understanding of Orientalist visual culture. In considering this issue analyse at least four works of art by European, North African and Ottoman artists and address their distinctive treatment of subject matter and style.
“The degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some attempt to clarify whose reality we are talking about.” (Linda Nochlin)
Consider the validity of this statement by analysing selected works by nineteenth-century Realist Orientalists. Address Linda Nochlin’s analysis as well as recent shifts in the study of Orientalist realism. (You might choose to consider the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, John Frederick Lewis, William Holman Hunt, or Osman Hamdi Bey).
- Analyse the various ways in which Western women’s Orientalism reaffirmed and/or challenged gender categories and Orientalist tropes. Compare the different responses of two or three women Orientalists focusing on the analysis of specific works of art and their critical reception.
- Gail Ching Liang Low states that for the Western Orientalist “the primary attract of cross-cultural dress is . . . the promise of ‘transgressive’ pleasure without the penalties of actual change.” Consider the validity of Low’s statement through the discussion of a few key examples of cross-cultural dressing (for example Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, Isabelle Eberhardt, Etienne Dinet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu). What was the significance of cross-cultural dressing as an Orientalist strategy?
I now abandon work. It penetrates me so deeply and so gently into me, I feel it and it gives me confidence in myself without effort. Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter.
– Diary of Paul Klee, Kairouan, Tunisia, 1914
Considering the case of at least one of the artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, or Paul Klee, analyse their version of the experience of travel to North Africa. Does the fact that their artwork is often described as “modernist” mean their work is any less Orientalist than that of J.-L. Gérôme or J. F. Lewis?
PLEASE NOTE:
Your essay should clearly and articulately develop an argument to answer the set question. For the correct form of presentation for footnotes, endnotes, bibliography and illustrations consult the Department’s Guide to Essay writing (on the Art History department website). Your essay should demonstrate skills in both visual analysis and historical research. The essay is due on Tuesday 16h May 2017 before 5pm, and must be submitted electronically via Turnitin on the Learning Management System.
Min 3 art works, max4-5
FOOTNOTES NEED
Include images which talked, represented in the essay
