audiobook The Art of Shaping the Metropolis (P/L Custom Scoring Survey) by Pedro Ortiz in Arts-Photography

Description

Until now; the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings; largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders; the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo. As invited guests; these Europeans were ldquo;intimate outsidersrdquo; within the womenrsquo;s quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time; elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers.Roberts draws on a range of sources; including paintings; photographs; and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain; Turkey; Egypt; and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis; a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s; whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis; British women were able to visit Ottoman harems; and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues; they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guestsrsquo; misapprehensions about harem life; and a number of them exercised power as patrons; commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.