Orientalism began as a painting fashion and became an indictment
In the 19th century, Orientalism simply meant Western art that depicted the Middle East and North Africa, and Paris even had a society for its painters. Then in 1978 Edward Said turned the word into a charge: that the West imagined the East as static and exotic to justify ruling it.
The word rests on an old contrast between Orient and Occident, East and West. It reached English through Middle French from the Latin oriens, meaning the rising sun and so the direction it rises from. Chaucer used it in 1375 for lands beyond the Mediterranean, while by 1952 the Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan could stretch it to cover East Asia.
As an art movement, Orientalist painting was one branch of 19th-century academic art, flourishing as travel to Asia and North Africa grew easier. Artists were drawn by vivid clothing that contrasted with drab Western menswear, buyers were curious about traditional ways of life, and trade and colonial ties were multiplying. The French critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary made Orientalist a sneer, yet a Society of Orientalist Painters appeared in 1893, headed honorarily by Jean-Léon Gérôme, and it gave practitioners a sense of belonging to a movement. In Britain the label simply meant an artist. Historians separate realists who painted what they saw, such as Gustav Bauernfeind, from those who conjured scenes without leaving the studio; Eugène Delacroix and Gérôme are counted its leading lights.
Said's book reframed the whole tradition. In his reading, Western writers and artists reduced Asian and North African societies to an unchanging, undeveloped essence, a picture that could be studied and reproduced in the service of empire. Implicit in it was a flattering self-portrait of the West as rational, flexible and superior, which let the East appear both seductive and threatening. Said argued the habit supported Western domination not only under colonialism but in the present too.
Not everyone accepts that verdict. The art critic Jonathan Jones has argued the reverse, that most Orientalist work sprang from real fascination with and admiration for Eastern cultures rather than prejudice. The argument means the same canvases can be read as colonial fantasy or as sincere, if romantic, tribute.
Source: Orientalism
