Fantasies Reframed - Orientalism and its Contexts

Overview

What you will study

• Orientalist paintings are complex works with a contentious history: a popular genre in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, they have been variously described as historically significant snapshots of life in ‘the Orient’ and as ideologically constructed fantasies created in the minds and studios of the European artists who painted them. 
• Recent exhibitions, and the growing private and public collections of Orientalism throughout the Islamic world, demonstrate that these works continue to find new audiences. 

• This Fantasies Reframed - Orientalism and its Contexts course offered by The Courtauld Institute of Art shall identify and scrutinise recurring motifs (horsemen, harems, odalisques, palm trees, alleyways, arches) and common themes (idleness, sensuality, violence) in the works of Orientalism’s most renowned artists and in early photography and popular culture. We shall trace Orientalism’s shifting forms and renewed purpose in early modernism. 
• Throughout the course we shall also discuss how artists and intellectuals from Turkey and the Levant region responded to Orientalism in painting, expanding notions of the cultural flows that existed between Europe and the lands it referred to as the Orient.