The Lure of the East at Tate Britain

The Lure of the East at Tate Britain

21 July, 2008
by: Tom Jeffreys

Edward Said once said, 'Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric'. The problem with Said's thesis, as has since been pointed out a number of times, is that he is himself guilty of the same sweeping cultural generalizations as the apparently monolithic 'West' that he so vehemently damns. And if we're nitpicking, Said here conflates thousands of years of heterogeneous European culture into the masculine singular pronoun: it is as if he is subconsciously trying to prove his point that Europeans saw themselves as masculine, rational and conquering in opposition to the feminine, mysterious and increasingly conquerable Orient. For somebody who writes so much about representation, Said's lack of self-awareness is occasionally startling.

Said, and Orientalism in particular, loom large over the big new show at Tate Britain. 'The Lure of the East' examines paintings by the British Orientalists, those painters who from 1780 to 1930 travelled all over the Near, Middle and Far East painting what they saw. There's certainly an element of what Said identifies in several of these works. Cultural differences are at the centre of some artists' focus, and one effect is indeed to (perhaps artificially) emphasise the otherness of this strange new Orient. Girls in veils, bejeweled robes, bustling souks, strange arid landscapes: all of these are observed like the strange new sights that they must have been to British eyes.

Artists like William Holman Hunt are most susceptible to Saidian criticism: his brutally bright palette, dislike of the Pyramids, and the exaggerated features of his subjects constitute a slightly simplistic interpretation of the culture of the other, despite what Dr Qudsia Mirza argues in the revisionist commentary that accompanies The Lantern-Maker's Courtship. The vogue for British artists and sitters sporting traditional Oriental dress (most famously, Thomas Philips' 1814 portrait of Lord Byron) also demonstrates the power inherent in acts of appropriation: as if all the complexities of the 'East' can be reduced to an item of clothing, conquerable simply by putting it on.

But there is much diversity in these works, diversity that Tate Britain does well to draw out and examine. Having short paragraphs of analysis by a host of different critics, for example, helps to emphasise the importance of multiplicity of interpretation by both artist and viewer. And the giant animated map in room 4 helps to demonstrate both the huge geographical scale of the subject and how it changed so considerably over time.

Works like Richard Dadd's multiracial The Flight Out of Egypt go far beyond some simplistic us-and-them dichotomy. Similarly, the harem, so often figured by Westerners as some mysterious site for exotic sexuality, becomes in room 5 and in John Frederick Lewis' Hhareem Life in particular, an exemplum of domesticity and strong familial connection. Edward Lear's quasi-sci-fi landscapes, Frederic Leighton's gentle architectural studies and the intense scholarly concentration of Lewis' Commentator on the Koran all display elements of the Orient that are not simply different from the West but different also from each other.

Rather unusually for an exhibition at Tate Britain, one room has been reworked to resemble one of the paintings on display. The chocolate-brown lattice-work and honey-hued lighting reminiscent of Arthur Melville's An Arab Interior (1881) are an interesting addition to the show and it's always quite fun to see a gallery doing something a bit different. In the terms of the Said debate however this could be viewed as a slightly glib and belittling appropriation of the multifarious architectures of the East: 'Just paint the wall brown, that'll capture it'. But that's just being miserable. Exhibitions on this kind of scale often need a bit of breaking up, and this is a light and effective way to do so.

The great thing about 'The Lure of the East' is that it manages not only to judge these artists according to the cultural climate that they inhabited but also to understand them now, with all the 'benefits' provided by post-colonialism. In a time of facile references to 'a period of global unrest', tentative analysis of personal experience is far superior to the grandly sweeping statement: this is the place to start.


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Tom Jeffreys