When 19th-century European and American painters traveled to Arab lands, many canceled their return trips. They settled into studios on medieval streets overlooking tiled fountains and palm trees and within earshot of mosques’ call to prayer. Enlarge This Image Christies Images Limited 2013 The French painter Étienne Dinet spent decades in Algeria. His “Girl at the Window” (1906) goes on the block this month at Christie’s in Paris along with other Orientalist artworks The besotted expatriates collected local artifacts and learned Arabic. They sneaked glimpses of harems and posed their wives in colorful concubine outfits. Then the artists fumed as fresh incoming Westerners spoiled the scenery. “I draw and take notes on this beautiful and singular country so close to losing its originality and becoming completely French,” the Paris-trained Creole painter Théodore Chassériau wrote to his family in 1846, while living at an Algerian military camp. The foreigners’ Orientalist artworks have attracted specialty scholars and collectors. On June 20 Christie’s in Paris will offer around 45 paintings and sculptures (with individual estimates into the seven figures) from an unnamed owner, depicting landscapes, villagers and soldiers in North Africa and the Middle East. Two-thirds of the works are by Étienne Dinet, a Parisian who spent decades in an Algerian oasis town. He changed his first name to Nasreddine, converted to Islam and opposed the abuses of French colonial rule. Christie’s is offering his tableau of aged men marching to protest French Army conscriptions and a portrait of a newly drafted Algerian soldier bidding farewell to his mother. “Dinet was completely immersed in the culture,” said Sebastian Goetz, a specialist on Orientalism at Christie’s. The unnamed auction consignor also focused on paintings by Frederick Arthur Bridgman, an Alabama native who trained in New York and Paris and spent years in Egypt and Algeria. In one work, Bridgman depicted writhing tribesmen dancing in a courtyard. It was painted in a haze of skepticism: the artist suspected the performers were exaggerating their throes to impress tourists and artists. “This emotion seemed genuine, and we were assured that it was, although other parts of their religious services, or rather feats, appear to be accompanied with jugglery and deception,” he wrote in an 1890 memoir. Orientalist painters sometimes misunderstood what they witnessed or intentionally fudged costumes and poses for pictorial effect. “Masterpieces of Orientalist Art: The Shafik Gabr Collection” (ACR Edition/Antique Collectors’ Club), published last year, describes about 130 works that the Egyptian investor Shafik Gabr has acquired since 1993. The text notes the artists’ cultural inaccuracies here and there. For example, the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, an expert visitor to the region who had outwitted robbers and sandstorms, depicted a crowd at an Istanbul mosque praying in various seated, standing and bowed positions. “Gérôme certainly knew that in the mosque the worshipers in communal prayer prayed and changed positions and gestures in unison,” yet instead he added rhythmic contours and documented the range of local customs, the art historian Gerald M. Ackerman writes in the book. The book gives detailed provenances, so the purchase prices are easy to uncover online. In 2010 at Sotheby’s in London, Mr. Gabr paid about $620,000 for a Gérôme portrait of a Cairo muezzin and $205,000 for a Bridgman painting of lovers chatting at a Tunis souk. The collection now contains about 150 pieces, Mr. Gabr said in a phone interview. On April 23 he spent about $300,000 at Sotheby’s in London for Dinet’s scene of men mesmerized by a dancer. Mr. Gabr has commissioned more research about Orientalism for publications and exhibitions. The intrepid artists should be better known, he said, and their compassion and open-mindedness can set an example for others. “They created links and built bridges and good relations,” he said. Another major buyer in the field, the Dahesh Museum of Art in Manhattan, is seeking permanent gallery space for its growing collection. Over the last year it paid about $176,000 for a Dinet panorama of Cairo minarets and $46,000 for a Bridgman portrait of a bejeweled dancer at Sotheby’s in London. The Dahesh lends its Middle East scenes widely, to institutions including Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan and the Baker Museum in Naples, Fla. A show of Nile landscapes by the American artist and designer Lockwood de Forest organized by the Sullivan Goss gallery in Santa Barbara, Calif., has been traveling. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, France, are collaborating on a retrospective for the Parisian muralist and portraitist Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, who depicted his own Moroccan artifacts in his works. The art historian Ellen K. Morris is compiling a catalogue raisonné for the artist Edwin Lord Weeks, a Bostonian who narrowly survived outbreaks of disease as he painted in the Middle East. Next year Yale University Press will publish “Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and the Art of Orientalist Painting,” by the art historian Emily M. Weeks. Lewis, a Londoner transplanted to Cairo, embedded self-portraits in his scenes, disguising himself as a rug dealer, mosque worshiper and harem master. Throughout the realm of Orientalist art, Ms. Weeks said in a phone interview, “There’s so much you can learn even from the falsehoods in these paintings.” THE ART DECO LUXE LIFE Stephen E. Kelly, an ophthalmologist in Manhattan, examines patients a few yards away from millions of dollars worth of Art Deco antiques. After 30 years of collecting, he has converted half of his Upper East Side town house into the Kelly Gallery. Labels on the walls and shelves identify furnishings and accessories, from cuff links and bookends to limestone sculpture and wrought-iron tables. Previous owners of the pieces include Karl Lagerfeld, Barbra Streisand and Andy Warhol, and prices start at a few hundred dollars. “Basically everything’s for sale,” with a few exceptions, like a sharkskin bedstead, Dr. Kelly said during a recent tour. From Wednesday to Sept. 6, the gallery is offering about 40 pieces from the 1910s and ’20s by the French metalworkers Jean Dunand and Jean Goulden, who collaborated and exhibited together. Dr. Kelly has brought out their vessels, boxes and tables with lacquered and enameled stripes and mottling. Last year, at Christie’s in New York, Dr. Kelly paid $1.87 million for the nightclub impresario Steven A. Greenberg’s 1920s lacquered screen, incised with zigzags and arcs, by Eileen Gray. He lent it this spring for a Gray retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin will borrow it this fall, so he has not yet had to make room for it at the town house.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 10:46:18 +0000
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