Orientalist Aesthetics
Subtitle: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Book)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: February 3, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9780520222175
Subjects: History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Orientalism; Painting & paintings; 20th century; c 1800 to c 1900; General; Art & Art Instruction; Subjects & Themes - General; Art; North Africa; History - General; Criticism; Art / General; 19th century; Africa, North; France; Orientalism in art; Painting, French
First sentence: Few writers did more to suggest a psychology for European exoticism than Charles Baudelaire.
Description: "Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade's research in untapped archives, introduced many paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging wide, from the decorative arts to colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers.

Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a rich body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists whose careers have never before been discussed in English.".

"The painter-critic Eugene Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim revised the tradition of the Persian miniature through his knowledge of Western perspective.

Benjamin considers armchair Orientalists concocting dreams from studio bric-a-brac, naturalists who spent years living in the oases of the Sahara, and Fauve and Cubist travelers who used the discoveries of the Parisian Salons to create decors of indigenous figures and tropical plants."--BOOK JACKET.