Orientalism

The product of painters on the move, Orientalism was first and foremost a question of territories - territories lying mainly within the confines of the Ottoman Empire. The map - read from the point of view "not of the geographer, but of the painter", as Eugène Fromentin put it during his travels in Algeria - was standard equipment for a whole group of 19th-century artists. The encounter between the intimate and the foreign, between like and unlike, defines the roving life and is the essence of Orientalism. "The world is less real than the force that drives our inner life," wrote Ella Maillart - one of the great woman travelers of the 20th century. Orientalist works are not just the product of map-reading or of changes in artistic fashion, they reflect the contact between real places and an imagination shaped by a specific context. Out of these culturally filtered comparisons between "here" and "elsewhere" emerged Western interpretations that merit our interest and understanding. From Delacroix to Paul Klee, this book retraces the evolution of a movement whose significance and complexity are at last coming to be recognized.