Uninspired by the East

We went to the British Museum in London recently with high hopes of Inspired by the East, a show intended to explore how the Islamic world influenced Western art. 

We'd seen a very enlightening exhibition in Paris earlier in the year called Oriental Visions that looked at how painters gave an often thoroughly mendacious interpretation of the Middle East, and then we were intrigued by the successful 19th-century English artist John Frederick Lewis, who liked to reimagine himself as a Arab merchant or chieftain. 

And the British Museum show starts off strongly, with an arresting image from the Victorian heyday of Orientalism: The Prayer by the American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman. 

A splendidly dressed man and another wearing a patched garment are worshipping inside a mosque. The details are splendid; Bridgman brought many props back from trips to the Orient, including the lamp and carpet so meticulously rendered here. "My impressions of North Africa can never be dispelled," Bridgman wrote.  

The picture is from the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, which has jointly organised this exhibition and will be showing it next year. Unfortunately, most of the other paintings on display are also from the same institution, and it has to be said that they're generally rather dull.... 

The Paris show, at the Musée Marmottan Monet, brought together the likes of Ingres, Matisse, Kandinsky and Vallotton. Here, while we do get examples of the work of that polished yet unreliable French recorder of local colour, Jean-Léon Gérôme -- Arnaut Drinking (an Arnaut being an Albanian, serving as a soldier) and The Grain Threshers, they don't come across as having the intoxicatingly spicy flavour of the Orient that his more striking paintings do (which was surely the point in the 19th century of attempting to sell the Orient to the West). Rudolf Weisse from Bohemia and Paul Joanowits from Serbia are among the artists featured. Feel free to Google them....

Of course, one of the favoured motifs of Western Orientalist painters was the imagined harem scene, with its opportunity to depict naked or semi-naked young women. Oddly, there isn't one on display here. Out of respect for religious sensitivities? It's a striking omission, nonetheless. 

We only found one picture by Lewis, the most eminent British Orientalist, Portrait of a Memlook Bey, in which he depicted himself, as so often, in Middle Eastern clothing, or so he thought. The sash around his head was actually a piece of contemporary Indian fabric. He appears to be a dead ringer for the England footballer Harry Kane!

Alfred Dehodencq's The Hajj purportedly depicts a group of pilgrims on their way to Mecca, but the geography seems a tad uncertain. 

An exotic image, certainly, all those colourful costumes and camels. But strangely, it reminded us of another picture of a group of religious travellers from much the same period, the middle of the 19th century, by the Danish painter William Marstrand, depicting boatloads of Swedish churchgoers arriving in their Sunday best for a service at a lakeside chapel. Exoticism is relative, as evidenced by a quote from a 16th-century European on a diplomatic mission to the East:

In many ways, the most interesting aspect of this show is the extent of the appreciation of Islamic architecture and craftsmanship in the form of pottery and fabrics, and the attempts to reproduce these in the West. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

This delicate and intricate Iznik plate from Turkey was copied by craftsmen in northern Italy, but you can see in the exhibition that the Italians weren't able to match the fine painting or the vibrant colouring of the original. 

One case contains this quite remarkable assortment of handbags, made in France in the 18th century using Iranian silks that were already a century old. This is fusion fashion, perhaps: not such a new phenomenon.  

These craft products tend to have more of an impact than the art itself, though we should give a mention to Charles Cordier, whose sculptures we also encountered earlier this year in an exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris on the role of Black Models in art.

Cordier's works recall classical busts, and his egalitarian viewpoint -- splendidly enlightened for the 19th century -- is highlighted in this quote: "Beauty does not belong to a single, privileged race. I have promoted throughout the world of art the idea that beauty is everywhere."

An ultimately disappointing show, this, though, with artworks largely not as inspiring as we were hoping for and lacking the British Museum's usual depth and sparkle. The two previous exhibitions on Orientalism we'd seen this year, while smaller in scope, were actually considerably more illuminating.

Practicalities

Inspired by the East is on at the British Museum in London until January 26 and is open daily from 1000 to 1730, with lates on Fridays to 2030. Closed December 24-26 and January 1. Full-price tickets are £14 and are bookable online here. The museum entrance is on Great Russell St, with Holborn and Tottenham Court Road the nearest Tube stations.

Images

Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The Prayer, 1877. © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
Alfred Dehodencq, The Hajj, undated, Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
View of caption from exhibition
Glazed and gilded pottery, Iznik (Turkey), 1600–25. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Purses, France, 1700 onwards, made from silk, Iran, 1600s, Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
Charles Cordier, Arab Sheikh of Cairo, after 1867, Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia