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ORIENTALIST PAINTING dates back at least to the Renaissance but was especially popular from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, a period that tellingly coincided with the heyday of colonialism. Intent on displaying “Oriental” (read: Ottoman and Arab, mostly) life in all its strangeness and colorfulness, artists working in this subgenre of academic painting espoused a number of thematic categories that accounted for most of their output. These included portraits of Oriental stereotypes (tribal chieftains, guards, or mystics), street views or interiors, sun-drenched picturesque landscapes, and biblical scenes. But the most popular subject was the harem, which allowed artists to parade female nudity in safely distant foreign settings, thus projecting Western lasciviousness onto the exoticized East.
Dismissed from the annals of modern art and ignored for most of the twentieth century, Orientalist painting lay dormant in provincial museums or neglected private collections. Then, in the 1980s, it suddenly burst onto the art market. Paintings that had hovered around a $5,000 valuation for decades shot up into the millions. (In 1990, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bathsheba, 1889, sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s.) The trend slowed after the 2008 financial crisis, since, after all, there can only be so many good specimens of a genre that ceased production around a hundred years ago. But the October 2019 sale of thirty-six of the 155 choice Orientalist paintings belonging to the deliberately mysterious Najd Collection (whose owner, Saudi billionaire Nasser al-Rashid, had previously been anonymous) invigorated the market anew.
Exhibitions in major Western museums and, later, in Islamic institutions had accompanied the initial market explosion. The first wide-ranging survey of the genre, “The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse,” went on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1984 and traveled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The most recent, grandiloquently titled “Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art,” ran at the British Museum, London, from October 2019 to January 2020 and, before the coronavirus crisis, had been scheduled to open at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM) in Kuala Lumpur in June. The paintings in the show came primarily from the rapidly growing collection of the latter institution, which is headed by Syed Mohamad Albukhary. (His brother is the...