Egypt

Exhibition: Lure of the East

Financial Times, UK

Time is running out if you want to visit this exhibition at the Tate, in London U.K., which closes on 31st August 2008:

A hookah casts whirls of smoke in the half-light streaming through the wooden mashrabiyya in Arthur Melville's "Arab Interior". Light filters as deliciously, dreamily, through the latticed screens in Frank Dillon's Cairo painting "A Room in the Female Quarters of the House of Sheikh al-Sadat". A scribe sits absorbed, rapt in his spiritual life, in John Frederick Lewis's "Commentator on the Koran". The sun sets on an ancient, monumental, still scene in David Roberts's "Ruins of the Great Temple of Karnak", and illuminates a lurid phantasmagorical desert drama in Holman Hunt's "The Scapegoat".

Arresting images of timeless pleasures and unchanging landscapes or politically charged works which misrepresent the Middle East as a place of exacerbated sensuality, decadence and an inability to keep up with the present? Since Edward Said's book Orientalism was published 30 years ago, it has become impossible to enjoy popular Victorian images of the Orient without debate about western cultural imperialism shrieking in the background. War in Iraq, terror in America and Europe, recent panicky attempts to understand Islamic culture, have all turned these paintings into art history's equivalent of hand grenades.

See the above page for the full story.

- Behind Orientalism's Veil
Saudi Aramco World (Juliet Highet) it just growing nostalgia for a vanished, pre-industrial past that made 2008 a year of record prices for Orientalist art? Or is there more to it? The sophisticated buyers—now located mostly in the lands depicted in...

- Tacoma Art Museum Presents Oasis: Western Dreams Of The Ottoman Empire
artdaily.org Tacoma Art Museum’s exhibition Oasis: Western Dreams of the Ottoman Empire from the Dahesh Museum of Art features a survey of nineteenth-century Western artists’ responses to the diverse cultures of the former Ottoman Empire. The exhibition...

- Exhibition Review: The Lure Of The East
This is London (Brian Sewell) The Lure of the East is an exhibition of painting at the Tate Britain (the original Tate in Pimlico, not to be confused with the Tate Modern). This is a review not merely of the exhibition but of the whole subject of "Orientalism"...

- Exhibition: New York Museum Explores Mystery Of Orient
Huliq.com Through paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, decorative arts, costume, ancient relics and modern souvenirs-drawn almost entirely from the New-York Historical Society's extensive collections-Allure of the East: Orientalism in New York,...

- Exhibition: Small Worlds: Travel Photography Of The 19th Century
http://tinyurl.com/3dsd8r (theage.com.au)The exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia) looks at travel photography world wide, but includes some notable images of Egypt."When Maxime Du Camp published the first illustrated book of images...

Egypt