Art on the 2nd Floor...

 

 

Visual artists seem to have a penchant for travel. Whether to seek out fresh subject matter or experiences, many leave their studios and countries behind to explore new worlds. In Pursuit of the Exotic: Artists Abroad in 19th-Century North Africa, Egypt and the Holy Land, focuses on select group of 19th- century European artists, written into art history as “Orientalists,” who depicted exotic lands that had existed on the edge of European consciousness until their rediscovery in the 18th century. Come to the 2nd floor of the main library any time during February to see the display.

What North Africa, Egypt and the Holy Land Offered 19th- Century Artists
According to Dr. David Farmer, Director of the exhibitions at the Dahesh Museum of Art, “Nineteenth-century artists, whether they lived in France, England, or Germany, faced a number of challenges unknown to their predecessors. To compete for sales, patronage, space and attention in the marketplace, they needed to balance tradition with innovation and offer something new, which would set themselves apart from their colleagues. The Middle East and the Holy Land promised all of that and more. Leaving the confines of Europe, they could become artist/adventurers, cultural explorers. Travel to these areas put them on the cutting-edge, and their work was in demand.”

North Africa & Egypt offered a mysterious culture and monumental environment, while the Holy Land contained sites of Biblical history, religious connection to the source of Judeo-Christianity, and an extraordinary visual “otherness.” Their work revealed these cultures to a European audience in the most direct way, both satisfying and stimulating an increasing taste for exotic sights, including landscapes, monuments, social types, and daily life.

Let us praise the artist who travels -- providing us with personal records of places we cannot visit or will know better if we could. Visually documenting exotic cultures has immeasurably enriched and broadened our awareness and appreciation of world diversity. While there are records of such travel since early times, transformation from the isolated, often amateur, sightseer with sketchbook to the trained, professional, and surely adventurous artist is a distinctly 19th-century phenomenon.

Important ingredients contributed to this extraordinary movement: academic training that taught the ability to draw and paint a subject objectively from life, as well as the related late - 18th-century innovation of plein-air (on-site) representation, first as an academic training technique and then for its own sake. These circumstances combined with the desire for new destinations -- parts of the world that were exotic in extremis -- and improvements in transportation in those parts of the world (although early 19thcentury travelers could only be called intrepid pioneers). This exhibition celebrates those artists who helped rediscover North Africa, Egypt and the Holy Land, cultures known mostly through literary accounts before the 19th-century “art rush.”