Orientalist Aesthetics : Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 / Roger Benjamin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Benjamin, Roger W., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Orientalism in art.

Painting, French--19th century.

Painting, French.

Painting, French--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (376 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2003]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Lavishly illustrated with exotic images ranging from Renoir's forgotten Algerian oeuvre to the abstract vision of Matisse's Morocco and beyond, this book is the first history of Orientalist art during the period of high modernism. Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade of research in untapped archives, introduces many unfamiliar paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging across the decorative arts, colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers. Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a lush body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists never before discussed in English. The painter-critic Eugène Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim melded the Persian miniature with Western perspective. Benjamin considers armchair Orientalists concocting dreams from studio bric-à-brac, naturalists who spent years living in the oases of the Sahara, and Fauve and Cubist travelers who transposed the discoveries of the Parisian Salons to create decors of indigenous figures and tropical plants. The network that linked these artists with writers and museum curators was influenced by a complex web of tourism, rapid travel across the Mediterranean, and the march of modernity into a colonized culture. Orientalist Aesthetics shows how colonial policy affected aesthetics, how Europeans visualized cultural difference, and how indigenous artists in turn manipulated Western visual languages.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates

2. Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

3. A Society for Orientalists

4. Orientalists in the Public Eye

5. Colonial Panoramania

6. Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic

7. Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

8. Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

9. Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb

10. Colonial Museology in Algiers

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2024)

ISBN:

9780520420649

OCLC:

1457220131