In the wake of well-received exhibitions of French and European orientalist painting, an intriguing new show draws renewed attention to Russian orientalism, writes David Tresilian in Amsterdam Ever since the publication of Orientalism, an overview of western perceptions of the Arab world by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, some 30 years ago, there has been growing interest in the work of 19th-century European orientalist painters, men like the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme or the Englishmen John Frederick Lewis, along with many others. These painters, specialising in feeding western appetites for images of the Arab world, established a familiar orientalist repertoire of harem scenes, ruined buildings, "native types" and military or non-military violence, reinforcing, according to Said, a western way of seeing the Arab world that focused on its exotic otherness, as well as, through western eyes, its decadence and cruelty. Long neglected by mainstream art historians and consigned to a second or third tier of the art- historical record, the orientalist painters have returned to favour in recent years with major exhibitions being mounted of the work of Gérôme at the musée d'Orsay in Paris last year and of 19th- century European orientalist painting as a whole at the musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels, reviewed in the Weekly in November and December 2010, respectively. This new interest has been partly fueled by a broadening of the scope of conventional art history, with new generations of art historians investigating both the art-historical underworld, the history of image-making that had previously been excluded from the regular canon, and the fate of once-celebrated and later almost forgotten painters whose work, viewed by the standards of modern taste, had fallen out of favour. However, this process of change and discovery, laudable though it has been, has nevertheless tended to leave certain areas unexamined, focusing instead on French painting because of its importance for Europe as a whole throughout the 19th century. Yet, as an unusual recent exhibition of 19th- century Russian orientalist painting at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands shows, other countries also developed their own ways of seeing the orient, expressing these in sometimes full-blooded and intriguingly different ways. Many people will be familiar with the oriental, or orientalist, strands in Russian music, this serving to differentiate the Russian musical tradition, and more broadly Russian culture, from western European models. Composer Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite Scheherazade is among the best- known examples of such work, which employs orientalist musical markers like minor keys, denoting melancholy or nostalgia, or highly coloured orchestral effects, giving the impression of luxury or magnificence. The great value of the Groninger Museum's exhibition, entitled Russia's Unknown Orient, Orientalist Painting 1850-1920, is that it allows visitors to examine the ways in which 19th-century Russian painting also used orientalist markers in order to find subject matter and forms of treatment significantly different from western European models in order to explore developing conceptions of Russian identity. At a time when the Tsarist Empire was expanding southwards to the borders of the Ottoman Empire and Persia and eastwards through the Muslim khanates of Central Asia, incorporating vast swathes of territory as it did so, Russian painters developed their own form of orientalism, turning out images of the Muslim societies that Russia was encountering, colonising and absorbing into the growing Russian Empire. As David Schimmelpennick van der Oye puts it in his contribution to the useful exhibition catalogue, "to art historians, orientalism is a school of painting that flourished in western Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, [its followers] depicting an exotic realm where decaying monuments that hinted at a glorious past coexisted with the poverty, barbarism and cruelty of the present." However, unlike western European painters "Russians did not have to travel abroad to find inspiration for their canvases," particularly after the mid to late-century Russian conquests and the building of the Trans-Caspian Railway had opened Asia up to land travel. "By 1900, the Romanov tsar ruled over more Muslim subjects than the Ottoman sultan," Schimmelpennick van der Oye writes, and Russian artists had long been developing ways of depicting Russia's Asian conquests in their paintings. The difference between this Russian form of orientalism and that practiced by western European and particularly French artists was that despite Russia's "sentiments of kinship with the West," notably expressed in 18th-century attempts to make Russia into a European nation, there remained a strong conviction that Russia's specificity came from the country's Asian, or eastern, roots. While the country's "progressively minded intelligentsia" often saw these roots, in Schimmelpennick van der Oye's words, as being the cause of Tsarist Russia's own particular "despotism and stagnation," other Russians saw them as being the source of its vitality and some of its deeply held traditions. It is from here that flows what Schimmelpennick van der Oye calls the "paradox of Russian orientalism": while European orientalism was more often than not about depictions of otherness, Russian orientalism, at least in part, was about extending and deepening a sense of self. The exhibition opens with paintings that introduce some standard ways in which the Russian orient was viewed in the mid to late-19th century, before going on to show how these were built upon and reinforced by Russian conquests and the development of a native school of Russian orientalist painting. Coming across here is the drama and theatricality that seem to have attached themselves to the orient in the Russian 19th-century imagination, with painters such as Stanislav Chlebovski or Vasily Vereshchagin, both of whom studied in Paris with Gérôme, taking over the French painter's habit of seeing the orient, in his case mostly Egypt, as a source of dramatic scenes played out against a set of splendid backdrops. Chlebovski's Drama in the Harem (1870), for example, opening the show, has Gérôme written all over it, showing what the exhibition notes describe as a "typical western European depiction of the orient [as] mysterious and full of erotic tension." The painting, lent by the State Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, depicts a moment of abduction, with a young woman being either stolen or rescued from a harem. In addition to the drama, illustrative of a western European commonplace of the time, there is also an attention to architecture and staging that very much recalls Gérôme. As is well known, the latter painter collected hundreds of photographs of Middle Eastern landscapes, towns and buildings on his various progresses through the region, later using these as backdrops for paintings done in Paris with figures arranged dramatically in front of them. Many of the pictures done by Gérôme's Russian pupils recall this emphasis on theatre and theatricality, with Chlebovski investing as much effort in rendering the detail of the architectural setting as he does in reproducing the human figures and Andre Roller and Grigor Sharbabchian underlining this emphasis on architectural and human spectacle in The Gardens of Chernomor (1842), a fantastic orientalist stage-set for a production of Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, and Celebration of Quinquagesima in Old Tiflis, respectively. The exhibition's following rooms, recalling the opening of the Trans-Caspian Railway in 1888 that followed Russian conquests of Central Asia and connecting Moscow to the cities of Merv, Ashgabat and Samarkand, provide essential historical background. However, it was only with the work of Vereshchagin, active from the late 1860s onwards, that Russian orientalist painting seems really to have come of age, and it is Vereshchagin's work that forms the centrepiece of the exhibition and perhaps also its greatest interest. Originally destined for a naval career, Vereshchagin trained at the Imperial Russian Art Academy in St Petersburg and later at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied with Gérôme. According to the informative catalogue essay on Vereshchagin contributed by Inessa Kouteinikova, one of the exhibition's curators, the artist's career, coinciding with the vast eastwards expansion of the Russian Empire, was marked by a desire both the break away from the rigid exercises of the St Petersburg Academy and to explore the new Russian domains, "too vast and too diverse to fit any western definition of a country," creating a visual record of the new Muslim territories and their incorporation into the Russian Empire. Like the western orientalist painters, Vereshchagin was drawn to picturesque architectural forms, and many of his pictures depict the ruined or dilapidated mosques, mausoleums and madrassas he visited on his travels through the region, notably in the city of Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan. In these pictures, including Sher-Dor Madrassa on Registan Square in Samarkand and Shah-i-Zinda Mausoleum in Samarkand, both done in 1869-70 after visiting the city, Vereshchagin focuses on the architectural forms and decoration of these buildings, notably their decorative tiling, neglecting human figures. However, in other works from the same period Vereshchagin also uses architectural decoration as a backdrop for groups of human figures almost in the manner of Gérôme, his Doors of the Mosque (1873), now in the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and The Doors of Timur (1872) in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow both focusing as much on the gorgeously appareled warrior figures as on the architectural detail. His interest in the human figures he came across in his travels is attested to in the set of accomplished pencil drawings included in the exhibition, showing that Vereshchagin, whatever opinions might be entertained about his oil painting, could certainly draw, though his skill in rendering fabrics and textures in oils, much like Gérôme's in carpets and tiling, is amply demonstrated in paintings such as Dervishes in Festive Clothes, Tashkent (1870), where the focus is on the dervishes' fantastically coloured outfits, and Politicians in an Opium Den, Tashkent (1870). Adding context to these pictures are 19th-century photographs, lent by the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg, that show street scenes and human figures from what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and what were then parts of the recently conquered khanates. This process of the conquest and subsequent incorporation of the khanates in the Russian Empire is represented by Vereshchagin in a series of paintings on military themes inspired by the Russian General Cherniaev's capture of Tashkent in 1865 and General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman's slightly later subjugation of Bukhara and Samarkand. The exhibition ends with materials made between 1910 and 1920, on the very cusp of the transformation of Russian, and Soviet, art and culture that took place over the decade that followed. From the Russian centre of the Empire, they include designs for Moscow's Kazan Railway Station, the gateway to the eastern provinces and curtain-raiser for these regions' arts and cultures. Commissioned from architect Alexei Shchusev, who imagined a sort of fantasia of national and vernacular forms, the Kazan Station was to include frescoes and decorations by members of the Mir Iskusstva Group, among them The Peoples of Russia by Evgeny Lanseray, included in the present exhibition. This is a monumental design for the walls of the director's conference hall that explicitly blends western and eastern themes in an expanded account of imperial Russian identity. Bolshevik rule saw the destruction of what remained of the traditional cultures of the formerly Tsarist Empire's Central Asian provinces. However, before this destruction took place, late Tsarist and early Soviet artists were exploring alternative forms of artistic renovation, the "New Orient" movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s exploring ways in which eastern traditions of miniature painting, ornament and applied arts could be developed to yield a forward-looking form of art reminiscent by turns of western European fauvism, expressionism and cubism. In her catalogue essay on this little-known movement, based in Uzbekistan, Kouteinikova says that the artists associated with it were marked by "an extraordinary freedom of spirit," soon to be crushed by Bolshevism, "that was one of the most important aspects of the Uzbek school of orientalist painting." Lent to the present exhibition by the State Fine Arts Museum of Uzbekistan in Tashkent, such works were little known throughout the Soviet period and their rediscovery since has deepened knowledge of the artistic and cultural experiment that went on throughout the Russian Empire before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia's Unknown Orient is an exhibition that impresses on many levels, not least for the research that has gone into tracking down and arranging loans of materials that have rarely if ever been shown before in Europe. Russian experts have been commissioned to comment in the catalogue essays, and public collections in Moscow, St Petersburg, Samarkand and Tashkent, among other places, have been approached for loans. The result is an exhibition, put on at a provincial museum, that would not be out of place in a larger institution in a capital city. At a time when many of the latter institutions seem content to serve simply as venues for ready-made traveling shows or for blockbuster-type exhibitions of familiar materials for the tourist market, the Groninger Museum is to be congratulated for its work in organising this intriguing and unusual exhibition.
