Political correctness overshadows a fine collection of 19th-century paintings of the Middle East, says Richard Dorment
The first and greatest age of Orientalism in the visual arts started in France around the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and peaked as the Romantic Movement swept through Europe.
Works like Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and The Fanatics of Tangier (1838) set precedents for later depictions of the East as a place given to sexual excess, wanton cruelty, mass murder and unbridled sensuality.
But as Tate Britain's The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting makes clear, on this side of the Channel the story was very different.
From the 17th century onwards, British artists were happy to paint portraits of eccentric fellow countrymen and women who liked to dress up in oriental costume, but they didn't actually begin to visit the Middle East until the late 1830s.
At the start of the period, a few exhibited sensationalist subject pictures, such as William Allan's Slave Market, Constantinople of 1838. Later, John Frederick Lewis would occasionally titillate the Victorian public with scenes purportedly showing scantily clad young women being introduced into the harem.
By and large, though, what is remarkable about the work in this show is how clear-sighted the British artistic response to the Arab world was. Unlike their French counterparts, the British did not generally impose their lurid fantasies on Eastern subject matter. You won't find a single British painting at Tate Britain showing a massacre, a beheading or a naked slave girl.
Instead, you'll find descriptive and topographical paintings of a very high order, and David Roberts, Frederick Leighton and Edward Lear are all supremely accomplished artists. However, too often their Eastern landscapes and views of mosques and churches are more accurate than inspired.
By the end of the show, I felt as though I were turning the pages of an album filled with snapshots from other people's holidays. Individual British Orientalist paintings may be exquisite, but the genre as a whole is repetitive and dull. I'll take the full-blooded French Romanticism any day.
Here are a few examples. Whereas Jean-Léon Gérôme is openly lascivious in describing the nudity and degradation of the women he shows in his Slave Market at Cairo, what is striking about William Holman Hunt's full- length portrait Afterglow in Egypt is how careful the British artist is to portray the handsome young woman as personable, confident and healthy.
Likewise, nothing could be more dignified than David Wilkie's portraits of Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt (1841) or Sultan Abdul Mejid, both of whom are shown not as potentates lolling on cushions, but as modern heads of state seated in chairs of European design.
However, the measured, nuanced, respectful approach of most British Orientalists to their subject matter is precisely what the politically correct curators who organised this woefully misguided exhibition can't stand. The very fact that a British artist was inspired to paint a Middle Eastern subject automatically makes him a target for their suspicion and scorn.
And so, we are told the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter Thomas Seddon went to the Holy Land because he wanted to see the Bible land for himself. For this he is taken to task in the catalogue as "an enthusiastic Christian artist… intent on remaking religious art for a modern Protestant audience".
But in his landscape Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat he painted every pebble and blade of grass using exactly the hyper-realistic technique he employed when painting the Swiss Alps. Where is there visual evidence that his religious views inform these paintings? Surely the whole point of the Pre-Raphaelite approach to landscape is that the artist's commitment to "truth to nature" is greater than any subjective feelings he may have.
Those responsible for the catalogue haven't noticed that, if anything, British artists tended to idealise the Arab world at the expense of the European. John Frederick Lewis's virtuoso watercolour A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai (1842) shows the ridiculous Viscount Castlereagh dressed as a sheikh and stretched out under an umbrella as though on the lawn of a country house in Surrey. Surrounded by hunting dogs and dead game, he has obviously come to the Near East for a bit of huntin' & shootin'.
Like a modern traveller on a luxury safari, he wanted to see the desert without really leaving England, for he's brought English newspapers and books, a bottle of Harvey's sherry, and porcelain cups from which to drink his tea. Lewis shows the moment when a local sheikh approaches the camp of the effete European.
Far from belittling the Arab, the artist contrasts his strength and dignity with the play-acting of the English gent. More than anything, Lewis finds the scene richly comical. Why is this not mentioned in the catalogue? Because it is at odds with the show's relentless tone of self-pity, aggrievement and victimhood.
I see these pictures as perfect examples of the West's curiosity about the East. The organisers present them as by-products of colonial oppression.
In a near-hysterical and critically worthless essay in the catalogue, Rana Kabbani accuses British artists who worked in the Near East of being "content to paint a static world of exquisite surface". She is enraged that instead of the sublime landscapes, superb buildings and light-dappled interiors they did paint, these artists somehow forgot to show "strikes, riots, rebellions, repressions and blockades, the impoverishment and famine; the communal punishments, hangings and massacres". And - wait for it - guess who was responsible for these crimes? Right! All were "marks of Britain's colonial moment in the Middle East". Could someone please explain to Ms Kabbani that these paintings are by artists, not by investigative reporters working for BBC news?
I was just as amazed to see that in his introductory essay to the catalogue, Nicholas Tromans resurrects the controversial writings of Edward Said to belittle British artists for ignoring Islamic history in their paintings of the Holy Land. Does he also believe European artists working in, say, India or Japan, had an obligation to include references to the entire history of that country in their work? Or do his strictures apply only when the region in question is the Middle East?
By all means go to this show to enjoy the many superb paintings and watercolours on view. But if you are tempted to fall for its specious arguments, get hold of a copy of Defending the West, Ibn Warraq's demolition of Said's misinterpretations of Western attitudes toward the Middle East - a distortion of historical truth all too faithfully reflected at Tate Britain.
- Until Aug 31