From chinoiserie to japonisme and primitivisme, the European art scene has never been a stranger to influences from abroad, including a 19th-century craze for Islamic art and design, writes David Tresilian in Paris The magnificent setting of the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris is presently the backdrop for Purs décors? Arts de l'Islam, regards du XIX me si cle, a survey exhibition on the influence of Islamic art on late 19th and early 20th-century European artists and designers. Since the exhibition is in Paris, the focus is on mainly French collectors, designers and manufacturers. But the theme of the exhibition -- the ways in which elements from Islamic art and design were appropriated by European artists and designers hungry for new ideas -- has a larger European resonance. While some of the best-known collectors and designers of the period were French nationals, one of the earliest of them was the British architect Owen Jones. The latter's 1856 work, The Grammar of Ornament, contains hundreds of examples of Islamic designs that were used to provide ideas for everything from buildings to tea sets and wallpaper. The Musée des arts décoratifs itself, a sort of French version of the British Victoria and Albert Museum, is housed in the Marsan wing of the Louvre running along the rue de Rivoli. Completely refurbished over the past decade and re-opened to the public last September, it aims to provide a record of the history of French and European design and act as a resource for contemporary designers. Like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it has both a permanent exhibition that takes in matters such as the history of furniture and the development of interiors, and a larger collection, kept out of sight, that records hundreds of years of textiles, fashions, wallpapers, ceramics and other items. There is also an appealing collection of toys and a gallery showing the development of European jewellery. The present exhibition, the first since last year's re-opening, starts with the impact of the Islamic arts of southern Spain on 19th-century European designers. Travelers in Andalusia had long been fascinated by the remains of the area's mediaeval Muslim civilisation, chief among which is the Alhambra palace of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada. The American writer Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra, written in the 1820s, did much to introduce wider audiences to the Muslim history of southern Spain, and art dealers and collectors followed in Irving's footsteps, feeding a growing interest in this civilisation's picturesque remains and in its architecture and design. While Irving contented himself with using the Alhambra as a romantic backdrop for a collection of traveler's tales, Jones published a set of Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra between 1842 and 1846 that was based on a careful study of the building. Focusing on its use of geometric ornament and decoration, these in due course found their way into his Grammar of Ornament. Later works by other writers continued this trend for surveying works of Islamic architecture and constructing a record of their decoration and design, while at the same time extending the scope of such investigations from Spain to Cairo and Istanbul, and then on to Central Asia and Iran. The architectural remains of southern Spain provided a point of entry for Europeans interested in Islamic design. From the 1860s onwards, however, and particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Egypt replaced Spain as the rendez-vous for all those taken up with the growing European craze for Islamic art and architecture. Artists and researchers like the Frenchman Emile Prisse d'Avennes made their way to Cairo's traditional areas, producing plans and pattern books for "Egyptophiles" in Europe. Among such works are Prisse d'Avennes's well-known volumes on the Islamic art and architecture of Cairo, and on Islamic design more generally, published in the later 19th century. Along with artists and researchers came collectors and dealers, and in the decades between 1880 and 1910 Paris became a centre for the sale of Islamic artifacts collected on missions abroad. The 1888 auction held in the Hôtel Drouot of works accumulated by the Paris dealer Albert Goupil, for example, provided core works for the collection of the Musée des arts décoratifs. These works are displayed in the present exhibition. Goupil, in fact, brother- in-law of the orientalist painter Jean-Léon Jérome, seems to have been remarkably active in his quest to collect Islamic artifacts. In the latter's company he undertook a five-month tour in 1868 of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, devoting the family business on his return to the acquisition and sale of Islamic artworks. Among the pieces from Goupil's collection included in the present show are a carved ivory box made in mediaeval Spain that opens the exhibition and several Egyptian Mameluke items, such as an exquisite glass mosque lamp (c.1310) bearing the name of Sultan Baybars II and various items of 13th and 14th-century metalwork. The exhibition catalogue, beautifully produced in association with the Musée du Louvre, includes articles by mostly French specialists, among them an essay on "Passions françaises pour les arts mamelouks et ottomans du Caire (1867- 1889)" by Mercedes Volait. It also contains a final section, "Donateurs et Vendeurs", that looks in detail at the network of 19th-century European dealers and collectors of Islamic art of which Goupil was a significant part. Even Goupil, however, is overshadowed by Jules Maciet in the roll call of French collectors, the latter's apparently single-minded efforts over a career spanning some three decades being largely responsible for the Musée des arts décoratifs's fine collection of Ottoman and Iranian materials, among them the many carpets on display in the present exhibition. Maciet was passionate about antique Ottoman and Persian carpets, and some four dozen of those in the museum's collection are there as a result of his efforts as a dealer and collector. An article about Maciet by Susan Day in the catalogue reveals the high prices that such items could command in late 19th- century salerooms, as well as the considerable competition to acquire them. All this adds up to a fascinating picture of the cash value ascribed to Islamic art at the time. According to Day, Maciet's collector's "passion for the arts of Islam" should be distinguished from the "phantasmogorical dreams" of orientalist painters like Jérome, as well as from those of writers like Pierre Loti. "Maciet never aimed to become an art historian, unlike most German carpet experts at the time," she writes. "Pragmatic, and blessed with excellent organisational skills, he gave himself over to a strategy of acquisition that lasted more than 30 years." The opening of the Trans-Caspian railway in 1894, which brought urban centres like Bukhara and Samarkand within comparatively easy reach of travelers, and the consolidation of Russian conquests in the same area meant that by the end of the century European collectors had started to bring back Islamic art materials from Central Asia, including the suzani textiles from Turkestan included in the present show. The Maghreb, however, seems to have been of little interest to collectors of Islamic art, at least until the French protectorate was established over Morocco in 1912. As the exhibition materials patiently explain, British imperialism in India meant that Mughal items found a readier European market in London than they did in Paris. Once brought back to Europe, these materials swiftly found both theorists and imitators, the former constructing schemes for the development and interpretation of Islamic art, the later incorporating Islamic motifs into European manufactures. The second part of the exhibition deals with how this came about, showing how Islamic designs were used to rejuvenate and add novelty to the European applied and decorative arts at the hands of designers like Adalbert de Beaumont and Théodore Deck, for example, as well as how Islamic motifs were used in European architecture and manufactured items. Islamic-style enameled glassware, textiles (a fertile source for wallpaper design) and Ottoman-style ceramics crowd the scene in this part of the exhibition, all of them made in Europe. The Ottoman-style dishes and vases on display were made in factories in Nancy or S vres. The exhibition's parting gesture brings in 20th-century fine art in the shape of Matisse, whose "decorative" style of painting, it is argued, owed much to that artist's study of Islamic decoration and represents "not a new style of painting, but a new way of looking". While the European rediscovery of Islamic art in the 19th century is perhaps well known, adding another chapter to the venerable history of orientalism, the present exhibition is of particular value in showing how this determined the shape of a representative collection of the time, which provided inspiration for generations of artists and designers attracted by the geometric features and repeating decorative patterns of Islamic art. European "Islamophilia" was contemporary with the re- awakened interest in Chinese styles at the time, as it was with European interest in the arts of Japan. The present exhibition, its curators write, shows European taste for orientalism and romantic exoticism, strong in the appreciation of the Alhambra and the Islamic arts of southern Spain, giving way to an understanding of "the aesthetic autonomy" of the arts of Islam, whose special feature lay in the idea of "decoration". This idea both "incarnated the Islamic aesthetic and made it a model for a 'renaissance' of western applied arts." While there were of course other models for the design "renaissance" that in fact followed, whether the sinuous shapes and vegetable motifs of art nouveau at the beginning of the 20th century or the pot-pourri of influences -- African, machine age, Egyptian pharaonic, Aztec and others -- that fed into art deco, this exhibition makes a compelling case for the "awakening of a new sensibility to the decorative principles employed by Islamic cultures", while also showing how this new sensibility gave rise to European works loosely based on such principles. It also clarifies how one major European collection of Islamic art was put together in the second half of the 19th century and the roles played in this by prominent travelers, dealers, collectors and auction houses. The "first general exhibition of Muslim art" took place in Paris in 1893, followed by Islamic art exhibitions in 1903, 1907 and 1912, the last of Persian miniatures. These exhibitions "affirmed the role played by Paris as the capital of Islamic arts in the western world" and its superiority over rivals such as Berlin, Vienna or London, while also bearing witness to the integration of Islamic art into the international art market. Purs décors? Arts de l'Islam, regards du XIX me si cle, Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, until 13 January 2008.
