Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850-1890


Book Description

Early shows and sales of Islamic antiques in Paris -- Expanding trades in late Ottoman Cairo and Damascus -- Conflicted commodification in Cairo -- Fashioning immersive displays in Egypt and beyond -- Guise and disguise before and during the Tanzimat.




À l’orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries


Book Description

The present volume offers a collection of essays that examines the mechanisms and strategies of collecting, displaying and appropriating Islamic art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many studies in this book concentrate on lesser known collections of Islamic art, situated in Central and Eastern Europe that until now have received little attention from scholars. Special attention is given to the figure of the Swiss collector Henri Moser Charlottenfels, whose important, still largely unstudied collection of Islamic art is now preserved in the Bernisches Historisches Museum, Switzerland. Contributors to the volume include young researchers and established scholars from Western and Eastern Europe and beyond: Roger Nicholas Balsiger, Moya Carey, Valentina Colonna, Francine Giese, Hélène Guérin, Barbara Karl, Katrin Kaufmann, Sarah Keller, Agnieszka Kluczewska Wójcik, Inessa Kouteinikova, Axel Langer, Maria Medvedeva, Ágnes Sebestyén, Alban von Stockhausen, Ariane Varela Braga, Mercedes Volait. Les contributions de l’ouvrage examinent le mécanisme et les stratégies relatifs à la collection, la présentation et l’appropriation des arts de l’Islam au XIXe siècle et début du XXe siècle. Elles mettent l’accent sur des collections situées en Europe centrale et orientale, lesquelles ont été peu étudiées jusqu’à présent. Une attention particulière est dédiée à la figure du collectionneur Suisse Henri Moser Charlottenfels, dont les objets se trouvent aujourd’hui au Bernisches Historisches Museum (Suisse) et qui ont été de même peu étudiés. Les textes émanent de jeunes chercheurs comme de chercheurs confirmés, basés en Europe occidentale et orientale, et au-delà.




Gayer-Anderson


Book Description

Based on the personal journals of Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson (1881-1945), Egyptologist, poet, surgeon, soldier, psychic, and noted collector, this candid and charming historical biography tells of Gayer-Anderson's strange and eclectic life in the final days of the British empire. As a child, he crossed an unforgiving America with his entrepreneurial and eccentric Irish parents. As a man, he immersed himself in the Arab way of life as colonials seldom did; he saw ghosts and witches, sailed the Nile, wrestled Turks and crocodiles, fought at Gallipoli, smoked opium, performed surgery in the desert, gathered and cared for artefacts and boys in his Cairene home, survived an assassination attempt and, in the name of science and Henry Wellcome, in flowery glades he boiled the flesh from the skulls of Nuba warriors. His personal journals are filled with frank accounts of his exploits and of the illustrious and colorful people who wandered by: Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon, Kitchener, Conan-Doyle, Eric Gill, and Stephen Spender, among others. Drugs, race, class, family, sex, and selfhood are vividly mixed in this tale of two wars, colonial life, medicine, anthropology, and psychic phenomena. The stiff-upper-lipped ritual of a very British upbringing vied with his Romantic and consuming love of beauty, vividly embodied in the Gayer-Anderson Museum in Cairo, which to this day houses his vast collection of carpets, furniture, glassware, and other curios.







The British Encyclopedia


Book Description




Making Cairo Medieval


Book Description

During the nineteenth century, Cairo witnessed once of its most dramatic periods of transformation. Well on its way to becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city, by the end of the century, a 'medieval' Cairo had somehow come into being. While many Europeans in the nineteenth century viewed Cairo as a fundamentally dual city—physically and psychically split between East/West and modern/medieval—the contributors to the provocative collection demonstrate that, in fact, this process of inscription was the result of restoration practices, museology, and tourism initiated by colonial occupiers. The first edited volume to address nineteenth-century Cairo both in terms of its history and the perception of its achievements, this book will be an essential text for courses in architectural and art history dealing with the Islamic world.




Book Arts of Isfahan


Book Description

In the seventeenth century, the Persian city of Isfahan was a crossroads of international trade and diplomacy. Manuscript paintings produced within the city’s various cultural, religious, and ethnic groups reveal the vibrant artistic legacy of the Safavid Empire. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Book Arts of Isfahan offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the artists of Isfahan used their art to record the life around them and at the same time define their own identities within a complex society.




Reuse Value


Book Description

This book offers a range of views on spolia and appropriation in art and architecture from fourth-century Rome to the late twentieth century. Using case studies from different historical moments and cultures, contributors test the limits of spolia as a critical category and seek to define its specific character in relation to other forms of artistic appropriation. Several authors explore the ethical issues raised by spoliation and their implications for the evaluation and interpretation of new work made with spolia. The contemporary fascination with spolia is part of a larger cultural preoccupation with reuse, recycling, appropriation and re-presentation in the Western world. All of these practices speak to a desire to make use of pre-existing artifacts (objects, images, expressions) for contemporary purposes. Several essays in this volume focus on the distinction between spolia and other forms of reused objects. While some authors prefer to elide such distinctions, others insist that spolia entail some form of taking, often violent, and a diminution of the source from which they are removed. The book opens with an essay by the scholar most responsible for the popularity of spolia studies in the later twentieth century, Arnold Esch, whose seminal article 'Spolien' was published in 1969. Subsequent essays treat late Roman antiquity, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Middle Ages, medieval and modern attitudes to spolia in Southern Asia, the Italian Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, modern America, and contemporary architecture and visual culture.




After Orientalism


Book Description

The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focus from the center to the peripheries, thus analyzing the impact on local societies of a major intellectual and institutional movement that necessarily changed not only their world, but the ways in which they represented their world. World history, which assumes a plurality of perspectives, leads us to observe that the Saidian critique applies to powers other than Western European ones — three case studies are considered here: the Ottoman, Russian (and Soviet), and Chinese empires. Other essays in this volume proceed to analyze how post-independence states have made use of the tremendous accumulation of knowledge and representations inherited from previous colonial regimes for the sake of national identity, as well as how scholars change and adapt what was once a hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. What emerges is a new landscape in which to situate research on non-Western cultures and societies, and a road-map leading readers beyond the restrictive dichotomy of a confrontation between West and East. With contributions by: Elisabeth Allès; Léon Buskens; Stéphane A. Dudoignon; Baudouin Dupret; Edhem Eldem; Olivier Herrenschmidt; Nicholas S. Hopkins; Robert Irwin; Mouldi Lahmar; Sylvette Larzul; Jean-Gabriel Leturcq; Jessica Marglin; Claire Nicholas; Emmanuelle Perrin; Alain de Pommereau; François Pouillon; Zakaria Rhani; Emmanuel Szurek; Jean-Claude Vatin; Mercedes Volait




The Wallace Collection's Pictures


Book Description

This magnificent one-volume catalogue, a revised version of the edition published in 2004, provides a complete survey of the Wallace collection s pictures.