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 Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury

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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.

There’s still a market for the more “exotic” pictures among American and European buyers, who are especially keen for scenes with vibrantly colored rugs and wall fabrics or such architectural details as Ottoman mosaics and mashrabiyya—wooden window screens that let in light through a grille. For the increasingly dominant Middle Eastern buyers, however, obvious errors or elements that indicate a lack of cultural sensitivity are a turnoff, says Brian MacDermot, the chairman of London’s Mathaf Gallery, which has been handling Orientalist paintings since 1975. He points out that “collectors notice incorrect postures in the mosque, subjects wearing leather shoes when they shouldn’t be. I try to avoid those kinds of paintings, anything that might give offense.”

M. Shafik Gabr is a collector in Cairo who owns about 90 Orientalist works, which he began buying in the early 1990s. He says that Said’s analysis does not always ring true: “A lot of the Orientalist painters contributed to reducing the cultural gap. Unlike many Western people who came to the Middle East as exploiters or as invaders, for that matter, these painters came to understand the culture. Some of them may have represented it incorrectly, but they are not the majority.” Many Orientalist artists traveled to the East, made sketches of what they saw, bought fabrics and rugs and then returned to Paris or London to paint their pictures. While the images weren’t necessarily demeaning, modern-day collectors can tell the difference between works rooted in the culture and those composed from a hodgepodge of exported exotica.

“When someone knows a little about the Middle East and North Africa and sees a painting that’s obviously completed in a studio in England, he immediately recognizes it for what it is,” says Ertug. “The results are theatrical. I don’t think today’s Orientalist collectors are chasing theatricality. I think they’re chasing history and national identity.” Paintings that contain some timeless element—a famous landscape or a busy market still operational today—seem to be most sought after, he adds.

Thus a handful of painters who thought of themselves as documentarians, or peintres ethnographiques, are most coveted. Ludwig Deutsch, Gérôme, Lewis, David Roberts and David Wilkie not only traveled to far-flung locations, but often lived there for long periods to produce their works. The Scottish Roberts explored Spain and Morocco in the early 1830s and toured Egypt and the Holy Land at the end of that decade. Wilkie, a fellow Scot, journeyed in the region from 1840 to 1841—a one-way trip, since he died at sea on the voyage home—and Lewis spent an entire decade, from 1841 to 1851, in Cairo. Gérôme, whose works depicting Eastern subjects are thought to be his finest, traveled to Egypt in 1856 and 1861 and back in Paris taught students at the École des Beaux-Arts how to paint Orientalist scenes.

Pictures by these ethnographes sell for anywhere from $300,000 to $4.6 million. The Austrian-born Deutsch’s Leaving the Mosque, 1900, brought £916,000 ($1.8 million) at Christie’s London in June 2007, beating its high estimate of £350,000 ($693,000). Prices are expected to rise. “The works of the great artists who brought Eastern subject matter to the Western world were all undervalued, and now they’re finding their value in this country and abroad,” says Benjamin Aryeh, the owner of New York’s Rafael Gallery. “The problem now is that the great subjects that were painted by the top Orientalists— Gérôme, Ernst and others—are already very hard to come by.” Gérôme’s painting Veiled Circassian Beauty, 1876, sold last summer at Christie’s London for £2,057,250 ($3.8 million), a world-record price for the artist at auction.

Reflecting the heightened interest in the Middle East, Western museums and galleries are paying greater attention to these images. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, last year devoted a new gallery within its expanded 19th- and early 20th-century wing to Orientalist art, featuring Gérôme’s 1871 genre masterpiece Prayer in the Mosque. The Tate Britain this summer held an exhibition in London titled “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Paintings,” which focused on 19th- and 20th-century British painters such as Lewis, Wilkie and William Holman Hunt. The show appeared at the Yale Center for British Art in the spring and is currently at the Pera Museum, in Turkey, through January 2009, when it heads to the Sharjah Art Museum, in the United Arab Emirates.

“The Lure of the East” is the first major exhibition of this genre since 1984, when “The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, the Allure of North Africa and the Near East,” composed of about 100 pictures dating from the Napoleonic era to 1914, ran at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The current show challenges peoples’ assumptions, fed by Said’s critique, that “there was something wrong with Orientalists’ images,” says its curator, Nicholas Tromans. “That was an incentive to do the exhibition—to reexamine some of these issues, to ask these questions: Were these images connected to imperial colonial projects? The answer is, in a strict sense, no.’ ”

Middle Easterners are looking to these paintings for a sense of their heritage. “The Persian Gulf doesn’t have much of a history of art and architecture compared with Istanbul or Jerusalem or Damascus,” says Tromans. “By buying Orientalist paintings, collectors can have a bit of the Dome of the Rock or those Moroccan fabrics and monuments, courtesy of Western artists.”

Until recently, only a couple of galleries internationally focused on Orientalist art—Mathaf, in London, Galerie Nataf, in Paris, Rafael, in New York—while some dealers in 19th-century painting, such as Mark Murray, in New York, and Darnley Fine Art, in London, handled it as a subcategory. Lately, though, new galleries and museums are popping up in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Sharjah, and they are seeking to assemble works that represent the whole span of Middle Eastern cultures. “The market is tending to go for the best things now,” says MacDermot. “The rush to build museums in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia is amazing. They are either borrowing shows, or they are slowly starting to purchase works.”

Christie’s and Sotheby’s are also competing for preeminence in this growing field. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s recruited Ertug to create a new Orientalist department, based in New York, with an active schedule of three dedicated sales annually. By June, the house had added a fourth to its 2008 roster, to be held in New York this month.

For its part, Christie’s announced in late May that it had appointed Étienne Hellman as its new international director of Orientalist art. Hellman, who joined Christie’s Paris in 2000 as a specialist in the 19th-century department, is charged with presenting “an international platform” for Orientalist paintings. The house will hold four dedicated sales in the category a year, with the primary ones in July (in London) and October (in New York). And Christie’s Paris will hold auctions of 20th-century Orientalist pictures, as well as ones by contemporary Arab and Iranian artists, in both June and December.

Coy says that Christie’s, which still appears to be the leader in this market, has made a very aggressive push into the Middle East, setting up an office in Dubai and holding auctions there since 2006 in international modern and contemporary art, as well as in jewelry and watches. Its presence in the emirate also allows its specialists to make inroads into the market for Orientalist pictures in the region.

Most property coming to auction now is from Western collections built in the early part of the 20th century to as late as the 1970s and ’80s, says Ertug. Coy adds that about 75 percent of the pictures come from American collections of 19th-century art that include one or two Eastern-themed paintings. “It’s going to get harder to find the top-quality things,” she says. “These works aren’t bought by dealers; they’re bought by collectors. They go into private collections and don’t come out.”

This month, both houses have auctions in New York. Christie’s comes first, on October 22, with “Orientalist Art and 19th-Century European Art and Bouguereau and the Academic Tradition.” The following day, Sotheby’s holds an afternoon sale that includes Gérôme’s 1888 The Black Bard. This stunning painting of a Nubian man in a coral-colored robe seated in front of a blue Iznick-tiled wall speaks eloquently of the exotic beauty that once so entranced Western travelers and now captivates Middle Eastern collectors in search of vestiges of their cultural and historic identity.

"Welcome to the Bazaar "originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.