Welcome to the Bazaar

Courtesy Sotheby's

Ludwig Deutsch’s "Leaving the Mosque," 1900, defied expectations at Christie’s London in 2007 when it brought £916,000 ($1.8 million), nearly tripling its high estimate.

Andy Warhol Jean Leon Gerome Ludwig Deutsch Walter Gould Holman Hunt J F Lewis David Roberts Yippee, We're All Going to Die

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

On May 30, an auction at Sotheby’s London devoted to what some might once have called B-level genre painting earned an incredible £8.06 million ($15.92 million). On the block were a group of 90 Orientalist works: Victorian paintings, mostly by Western European and American artists, depicting scenes from southwest Asia and North Africa, an area then referred to as the Near East. The sales total fell at the high end of the auction house’s estimate of £6.2 million to £8.6 million ($12.2–$17 million), with a single painting—A Lady of Constantinople by the Turkish artist Osman Hamdy Bey, which embodies the genre’s most wonderful qualities—fetching £3.38 million ($6.7 million). For perspective, one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings sold at Christie’s New York that month for about the same price.

Contrast those results with what was happening in the market for Orientalist paintings in 2001. On Halloween that year, less than two months after the attacks by Middle Eastern terrorists on the World Trade Center and a day after a rash of anthrax-laced letters had claimed a victim in New York, Christie’s mounted an auction of “Important Orientalist paintings from a European Collection” at its Rockefeller Center location.

No one wanted to touch the pictures. The sale comprised 19 works by such Orientalist masters as Jean-Léon Gérôme and John Frederick Lewis and was expected to bring in $10 million to $12 million. Lot after lot went up, but the salesroom was virtually silent. The final tally for the evening was $2.3 million, with only four pictures sold. “That was the market crash,” says Ali Can Ertug, who was the Orientalist specialist for Christie’s at the time and now runs the department at Sotheby’s.

The category has recovered with astonishing speed over the past seven years. At the Christie’s New York sale of 19th-century European and Orientalist art on April 12, 2007, 12 auction highs were set for Orientalist works. The April 19, 2008, Sotheby’s New York auction dedicated to the genre also triumphed, selling 63 of the 90 works offered for a total of $9.02 million and establishing records for at least five artists—among them, Rudolf Ernst, one of the leaders of the Orientalist movement in his native Austria, and the American portrait and genre painter Walter Gould, known for the clarity and stillness of his pictures.

Orientalist paintings today generate about $50 million in worldwide auction sales annually. Driving the market is a new generation of Middle Eastern collectors and American and British connoisseurs who are more aware of, and fascinated by, images of the region. “The world’s focus is on the Middle East at this moment and not only for the bad reasons,” says Ertug. “There’s a political and economic interest in the region as well as a human interest.” Deborah Coy, head of the Christie’s New York 19th-century European-art department, which includes Orientalist paintings, adds that Western buyers have started to take a backseat to those from the Middle East, who are deploying the area’s new wealth to purchase representations of their heritage.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, British, European and American painters traveled to the Middle East to capture landscapes and scenes—street life in Constantinople, the Cairo slave market, prayer in the Holy Land, the interiors of harems—for a Western art market craving lush, colorful depictions of that little-known corner of the world. The prime period for these works, says Coy, is 1850 to 1920. The Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature Edward Said argued in his famous 1978 book, Orientalism, that the genre’s portrayal of the East was often eroticized or inaccurate, and sometimes demeaning. These days, critics and scholars are less convinced by Said’s criticism, arguing that many of the Orientalist painters in fact created images that gave their audiences their only accurate view of these countries and their inhabitants.