The British Museum’s new exhibition, Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, attempts to present orientalist art as not only one where western artists traded in cliche, but also to show how portrayals of the east in the west were more than just racist pastiches. It attempts to present orientalist art as a sort of cultural exchange, rather than plunder, more of a long-term interaction between east and west that influenced not just paintings but also ceramics, travel books and watercolour illustrations of Ottoman fashion. It also presents orientalism as an effort to understand other cultures at a time when there was not much travel, and perhaps an idealised longing for a life in an Islamic world that had not yet been untethered from the familiar by industrialisation and secularisation.

The exhibition succeeds in achieving some of this. There is little here along the lines of The Snake Charmer, the painting famously used on the cover of the first edition of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which dominates discourse on the topic. In this tasteless depiction, a naked snake-charmer draped in a python entertained turbaned, cloaked men sitting on the ground. There is a mix of the dramatic romanticism of the early orientalists and the more iconoclastic realism of daily life, albeit still restricted broadly to the settings of the bazaar or the street throng.

In the classic 19th-century introductory section of the exhibition hangs The Prayer (1877), an imperious work by Frederick Arthur Bridgman. It is an imposing oil painting of an elderly man standing in prayer, his face upturned towards the skies as another worshipper half prostrates behind him. The depiction is respectful, attention is paid to details that are not melodramatic but honestly reflect the scene of worship. At the praying man’s feet sit two slippers stacked so that their bottoms do not touch the prayer mat and sully it.

Respectful … The Prayer by Frederick Arthur Bridgman. Photograph: British Museum

Prayer is a common theme in orientalist art, as common as the trope of the harem. The exhibition’s selections also tease out another element of prayer that perhaps appealed to a certain nostalgia among western artists – the exclusively male nature of it. Whether it is in individual or group prayer, men are portrayed in a sort of windswept nobility, pausing in the middle of life to look upwards in suppliance, face Mecca or prostrate themselves to a higher power.

This is the most striking aspect of the exhibition – that there was a time when images of Muslims and Islam were not toxic, when Islam was seen as exotic and religious observance something to long for. It is a sad observation that the west has gone backwards in its respect for and appreciation of Muslim culture and faith. If the orientalism of the past was patronising fetishisation, it is still a far more respectful perspective than the fearful one that predominates today.

This point is further brought home by the inclusion in the exhibition of artists who not only were intimately familiar with the Muslim world, but in instances moved there and converted to Islam. There is also an effort to illustrate that orientalism in art was not limited to marquee European 19th-century artists or artists who painted the east from afar. Featured is Jean Baptiste Vanmour, a Flemish artist who moved to Istanbul with the French embassy in 1699 and spent the rest of his life in the region. He gained access to Topkapi palace and painted what became the template for the depictions of diplomatic interactions.

Artists who followed him would simply swap out nationalities in the scenes at the court. Those who did not have the interest or commitment to embed themselves like Vanmour, the exhibit shows, used physical props such as swords, Ottoman scribe boxes, belts and tiles as background to stage paintings. The range of how artists sourced their material is well illustrated, showing that where some went native for their art, others were content with derivatives, using photographs and sketches as the basis for their material.

The orientalist ceramics part of the exhibition is the one most shorn of value judgment and the most supportive of the purpose of the exhibition, which is to show that eastern and Islamic styles were simply appreciated as a trend. Ceramic plates were mostly attempts at mimicry to satisfy what was during the 19th century a popular taste for eastern style plates and glaze technology from the Middle East but also from China and Japan.

Shorn of value … a bottle in the Persian style, from France, late 1800s. Photograph: British Museum/Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

So commercial were these items that Arabic inscriptions were often not Arabic at all, but a sort of decorative pseudo Arabic that used the script to lend authenticity, but is in fact a clumsy imitation of loops and lines that are unintelligible. The trend was so popular it gained a name – Persianware, even though the ceramics did not come from Persia, nor were even inspired by Persian aesthetics but the designs under 13th- and 14th-century mamluks in Egypt and Syria.



The curation of the exhibit is perhaps responsible for some gaps. Any showcase of orientalist art would be expected to feature unrestrained images from the harem, but Inspired By the East was conceived and developed in collaboration with the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, where the type of orgiastic, sapphic orientalist images of Muslim women would perhaps not fit in with Malaysian cultural tastes and sensitivities. There are, therefore, no depictions of nudity and few insights into how the world of women was perceived, apart from a very small number of respectful renderings of the harem, one from a bird’s eye architectural perspective by architect Antoine Ignace Melling which, although interesting, suggests a too heavily curated editing of the genre.



There is a journey dimension to the exhibit. In the section before last there is an attempt to show that there was a similar dynamic from the east towards the west. It is a brief pitstop that feels rather forced. Maps of Persian cities rendered in European style are shown to illustrate how there was a sort of occidentalism as well, but they seem to be merely illustrations of how the east began to adopt the techniques of more developed industrial bureaucracies towards the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th when travel to Europe became easier. It is hardly an occidentalism that fetishises the west or its people, or mimics their art for popular tastes. It could have been a meatier, much more thought-provoking section.

The last part of the exhibition journey is contemporary and aims to flip the perspective and show how modern artists from the Muslim world took the theme of orientalism and inverted it, using stereotypical images and overlaying them with subversive ones. This, along with the section that precedes it, is the weaker part of the exhibition despite having real potential. The images are exclusively those of women by Muslim or Arab women artists (perhaps in an attempt to redress the balance of a male dominated orientalist genre), and the choices, again, are too restrained, centring on the burqa/hijab with some nods towards themes of agency and violence associated with Islam.

Risk-taking approach … Who Will Make Me Real? (2003) by Raeda Saadeh. Photograph: courtesy of the artist and Rose Issa Projects/V&A Museum

One piece shows Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh, clothed in torn pages of Arabic newspaper print while looking straight at the viewer. It’s an interesting commentary on the politics of the region but feels slightly orphaned. The contemporary section, like the inspired by the west one that precedes it, could have benefited from a more risk-taking approach to show how Muslims also can portray others and themselves in ways that are problematic or reductive. These last parts of the journey feel like footnotes and counterintuitively enforce the orientalist theme, which is that the east is passive and benign, not capable of having its own superior attitudes or longings for a different way of life in the west.

The high-impact pieces remain the 19th-century orientalists but overall – and this is made clear in the introductory notes to the exhibition – this is an attempt to reclaim orientalist art from its sinister connotations and strip it back to what the exhibition nudges you towards thinking it was: curiosity and interest in a different culture when the west was beginning to pass from one era to the next.

In the current political climate, where prejudice against and suspicion of Muslims is commonplace, this is a refreshing initiative. But should we really be grateful to the orientalists for depicting Muslims as just a little bit more human than how they are often portrayed today?

• At the British Museum, London, until 26 January.