‘The Lure Of The East:’ British Artists Look At The Middle East

NEW HAVEN — The Yale Center for British Art will be the first and only US venue for the exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830–1925,” which opens February 7 and continues through April 27. This exhibition focuses on encounters between 19th Century British artists and the people and places of the Middle East, and includes approximately 90 paintings, prints and drawings that depict sites and subjects that interested British artists.

Exceptional and rarely seen paintings by John Frederick Lewis, Edward Lear, David Wilkie, Richard Dadd, William Holman Hunt and Frederic, Lord Leighton, will be on view, as well as representative works by less familiar artists. The exhibition explores the major genres, themes and preoccupations of Orientalist painting, including landscape, portraiture, the harem and religion.

“The Lure of the East” will feature portraits of British artists, travelers and diplomats who for various reasons dressed in costumes associated with the Middle East. Also on view will be genre paintings in which the British tradition of portraying everyday domestic life was transposed onto the street life and interiors of Cairo. Genre painting was rethought in Islamic contexts because of the greater segregation of the sexes, perceived in Britain as a fundamental distinction between social practices in Islamic societies and those at home.

This perceived difference was located most alluringly in the concept of the harem, depicted in British art not simply as the “gilded cage” of legend, but also as a place of liberation for women and of sophisticated aesthetic pleasure.

Depictions of landscapes demonstrate how European artistic conventions were challenged and expanded when transposed to the Middle East, often with dramatic results. The final section on religion will include images of the Holy Land and beyond, exploring the sense of religious interchange and overlap found at many of the sites visited by British artists in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

In previous large-scale exhibitions and publications that have explored the theme of Orientalism in the visual arts, British art has typically played a supporting role to that of other countries. In contrast, this exhibition looks at the unique British experience of the “Orient” during various moments of East-West contact, and considers how the traditions of British art were developed in these contexts. It also addresses the reception of Orientalist painting in the wake of Edward Said’s profoundly influential book Orientalism, 1978.

A fully illustrated catalog, published by Tate Publishing in association with Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition and will be available in the museum shop.

The exhibition will tour worldwide after its debut at YCBA. It goes to Tate Britain, London, June 4 to August 31; Pera Museum, Istanbul, October 2008 to January 2009; and then Sharjah Art Museum, United Arab Emirates, February to April 2009.

The Yale Center for British Art is at 1080 Chapel Street. For information, visit www.ycba.yale.edu or call 203-432-2800.