Far from giving rise to nostalgic reverie, the Islamic arts could have been the foundation of an 'oriental renaissance' in 19th century Europe, writes David Tresilian in Lyon Closing last month after a three-month stint at the Mus��e des beaux-arts in the southern French city of Lyon, Le g��nie de l'Orient, l'Europe moderne et les arts de l'Islam was an ambitious, wide-ranging exhibition that invited visitors to rethink much of what they might have been told about the relationship between Europe and the Islamic world in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including about the sometimes thorny topic of European orientalism. While the exhibition included materials from the fine and visual arts, notably from the orientalist picture-making associated with the French painter Jean-L��on G��rome, the emphasis of the exhibition lay with the European decorative arts and particularly with what European designers, architects and decorators may have been looking for in the arts of Islam and what they may have taken from them. Curated jointly by Salima Hellal and R��mi Labrousse, the exhibition included loans from institutions across Europe, notably from London's Victoria and Albert Museum, itself originally a resource for designers and architects. Labrousse, a professor of contemporary art at the University of Paris X Nanterre, wrote the immense catalogue for the exhibition apparently single-handedly. He also curated an exhibition on similar themes, Purs d��cors? Arts de l'Islam, regards du XIX��me si��cle at the Mus��e des arts d��coratifs in Paris some years ago, reviewed in the Weekly in November 2007. The present exhibition had a clear argument, aiming to try to convince visitors that the image of the Orient promoted by G��rome and other 19th-century orientalist painters �ê" in the main, decadent, sensual and cruel �ê" was only part, and a subsidiary part, of Europe's relationship with the Islamic world. The other part of that relationship, argued in the exhibition as being the real "lesson of Islam," was what European designers and architects took from the arts of Islam, in other words "answers to their questions about the role of the arts in the modern industrialised world." Islamic ceramics, glassware, textiles, metalwork, woodwork, decorative schemes and architectural designs suggested new ways of thinking about the relationship between the fine and decorative arts and particularly about the function and meaning of decoration itself. As a result, the exhibition suggested, 19th-century European artists developed two ways of looking at the arts of Islam �ê" as a backdrop for orientalist fantasies �ê" "the palaces and harems of the Thousand and One Nights producing an effect of timeless reverie"�ê" and as "models for a union of art and science, rigorously harmonious forms that called into question western forms of representation." European borrowings from the Orient moved between these two poles, it was suggested, with much of what was most interesting in them moving towards the second. The use made of Islamic decoration by artists working within the orbit of the English Arts and Crafts movement, itself an attempt at improving the quality of British manufactures and at promoting a new understanding of the relationship between art and design, was one example of such borrowings. French "decorative rationalism," a quest for a language of abstract forms that could ally the "geometric representation of the world with the freedom of creation," was another. A final section of the exhibition looked at how the French painter Henri Matisse and the Swiss artist Paul Klee had been inspired in their search for a decorative form of art, one allying art with design or art with decoration and moving away from representation, by visits to Algeria and Morocco, in the case of Matisse, and Tunisia, in the case of Klee. At least some 19th and 20th-century European artists and designers, inspired by the idea of an "oriental renaissance" to replace that brought about by the classical arts of ancient Greece and Rome centuries before, saw the possibility of artistic rebirth in the Islamic arts, welcomed as providing new sources of inspiration for the art and design of an industrialised, modern age. Comparing the work of G��rome with that of the French designer Jules Bourgoin, who worked in Cairo at much the same time, Labrousse suggests in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition that whereas viewers were invited to lose themselves in the paintings of the former in a kind of other-worldly reverie, itself a way of looking structured by a hierarchy of domination and subordination, in the presence of Bourgoin's "radically aniconic compositions" viewers witnessed a visual system "foreign to any form of narrative and closer to musical variations than to propositional statement." Bourgoin's experiments in tessellation, developed out of the Islamic decorative schemes he sketched in Cairo and elsewhere, saw motifs "decontextualised and freed from material form in order to suggest universal values" that pointed away from figuration and towards abstraction. According to the exhibition, an early defender of this "lesson of Islam" was the British architect and designer Owen Jones, whose search for a "grammar," or set of rules, to guide decorative design stood as a declaration of war on the historicising image-making favoured by orientalist painters like G��rome. Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856), a book of decorative schemes for use in designing mass-produced goods, was a way of going beyond the styles of the past, Labrousse writes, and of approaching the underlying principles thought to govern the visual arts, much in the way grammatical rules might be thought to govern utterances in a verbal language. Jones spent years studying the architecture and decoration of the Alhambra in Spain, eventually producing the first modern set of plans of this mediaeval Arab complex in his Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra (1842-45). In addition to the architecture, he was particularly interested in the ways in which the Alhambra's designers had used tessellation, the covering of planes with interlocking shapes, giving rise to decoration of startling complexity and apparently infinite extension. The Islamic arts had excelled in this form of decoration, Labrousse notes, "the rigour with which the ornamentation was generated from a limited number of simple forms reminding the viewer of the principles of syntax [in a verbal language] and of music generated from the seven notes of the musical scale." The exhibition included original plates from the Grammar of Ornament, among them those illustrating "Arabian,�--ê�Moresque,�--ê�Turkish,�--ê�Indian" and "Persian" designs, together with examples of the decorative schemes Jones produced out of them. Labrousse comments in the catalogue that Jones's debt to the arts of Islam, from what he calls the "grammaticality that is intrinsic to Islamic ornamentation, whether in the form of the geometrisation that is natural to 'Arab' art or the naturalism that can be found in 'Persian'," was a matter of lessons to be learned rather than models to be copied from. While Jones and the other English designers included in the exhibition would perhaps have been familiar to many visitors, those collected under the heading of "French decorative rationalism" later on the itinerary might have been less so. However, it was here that the exhibition's argument was presented with perhaps the greatest clarity, particularly in the work of Edmond Duthoit, Leon Parvill��e and Jules Bourgoin, all of whom worked at least initially in the shadow of architect Eug��ne Viollet-le-Duc, researching Islamic art and architecture in Algeria (Duthoit), Turkey (Parvill��e) and Egypt (Bourgoin) in the second half of the 19th century. Bourgoin's Les Arts arabes, published in 1868 with a preface by Viollet-le-Duc, pushed the "geometrical elucidation of Islamic forms" to its limits, Labrousse says, describing him as "the most singular of all the Islamophile grammarians." Bourgoin developed his "universalist project of pure abstraction into a 'science of figures' or 'graphics' amid general incomprehension" before dying in what appears to have been penury in Cairo in 1908, one of the European fous de Caire ('Cairo crazies') described by art historian Mercedes Volait. However, before descending towards this sorry end Bourgoin was able to pursue an ambitious programme that aimed to unite mathematics, found in the geometry of Islamic design, with art. He extended the search for first principles found in Jones's work on ornament to the pursuit of a grammar underlying art as a whole. In the few highly charged pages that Labrousse is able to give Bourgoin in the exhibition catalogue, he draws attention to the latter's writing, eaten up by neologisms and syntactical convolution, and to the "obsessional and microscopic graphic schemes, awash with abstract signs, that [Bourgoin] combined in endless arrangements on hundreds of pages." Bourgoin's ultimate failure, Labrousse suggests, was due to a fundamental contradiction in his work. While he wanted to reduce the "kaleidoscope" of Islamic art to its underlying "grammar," he could not see, or at least could not see clearly, that this form of scientific reductionism could also strip that art, "so different from ours and from every other," as Bourgoin put it, of its enchantment and sense of freedom. As if Labrousse's account of French decorative rationalism did not provide more than enough food for thought for any single exhibition, Le g��nie de l'Orient continued with a foray into 20th-century European painting and its relationships with the Islamic world by investigating the lessons of Islam as these were absorbed and worked over by Matisse and Klee. In their search for a non-representational, decorative form of art, both painters turned to the arts of Islam, Matisse visiting the important exhibition of Islamic art held in Munich in 1910 and then traveling in Algeria and Morocco on his path away from fauvism, and Klee visiting Tunisia in 1914 and "becoming a painter," as he famously put it, as a result. According to Labrousse, these two painters' relationships to the oriental subject-matter they encountered on their travels in North Africa were different to those of earlier European artist-travelers, for whom "the route to self-consciousness [also] came via a detour through exotic locales." Everything was different since their relationship to temporality was "no longer marked, as it had been earlier, by the tension between a desire for renewal and a panicked concern to safeguard" the past. Moreover, their relationship to otherness no longer moved between the twin poles of attraction and repulsion but instead "followed a single law of fascination." What this seems to have meant in practice was what Labrousse calls the "deconstruction of orientalism," in which "the force of painting was not to be found in the seductive character of its subject-matter," as it had for the orientalist painters, dealt with from the outside as a spectacle before the foreign gaze. Instead, for both painters what took place on their visits to North Africa was an "interiorisation to which orientalist theatricality had had no access," together with "the deconstruction of western representation and the invention of a new way of seeing." Sometimes fearsomely intellectual in the best French style, but held together by force of argument and the pertinence of its illustrative examples, Le g��nie de l'Orient, l'Europe moderne et les arts de l'Islam was an exhibition from which few could fail to learn. Labrousse's immense catalogue essay in particular throws out sparks in all directions, suggesting other exhibitions to come on similar themes. Checking English-language accounts of Jones and the English Arts and Crafts Movement, one discovers that many of Jones's designs, though admired, were not accepted by those who commissioned them, suggesting that there were limits to European interest in Islamic design. Moreover, the intellectual influence who exercised the greatest power over those involved in the Movement, the art historian John Ruskin, was known for his detestation of Islamic art and design, seeing in it a kind of anti-Gothic. Labrousse has some dense pages on this aspect of Ruskin's thought in his catalogue essay. Perhaps these could serve as the germ for another fascinating exhibition. Le g��nie de l'Orient, l'Europe moderne et les arts de l'Islam, Mus��e des beaux-arts de Lyon, April to July 2011
