Painting the Oriental Landscape and the Narratives of Modern Artists

doi:10.7176/jep/11-7-11

Abstract

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to critique the phenomenon of representing the Orient in western modern painting. In this context, the author negotiates the iconographies of the Orient and its conceptual constructions from critical perspectives. Painting the Orient, as an artistic practice in the modern era, is a consequent result of the cultural impacts that occurred between the west and the east when the modern painters traveled across the seas to North African and Arab landscapes to explore new warm colors within the oriental panoramas. Such cross-cultural experimentation evoked novel representations in the Art of Modern Painting, where the oriental fashions, scenes as well as urban and rural backdrops manifested in the modern movements of western art. Therefore, the orient appeared in the western painting as a new visual discovery in the pictorial composition through its vibrant colors and wide-open landscapes. The simple compositions of such painting practices manifested new waves of abstract art in the painting experimentations and delivered new realms of painting expressions. Furthermore, this paper presents an argumentation between scholars on the subject such as Clarke and Said, not to evoke any political, cultural or social bias toward any western or eastern ideology, but to present the notion of academia in contextualized manners toward the criticism of the creative practices of the art of modern painting. Keywords: The Art of Painting, Modern Art, the Orient, the Development of Modern Painting Movements. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-7-11 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

Highlights

This paper proceeds to manifest Oriental Influences on Painting, as a practice-led investigation to illustrate some of the trans-cultural influences on visual arts, regarding the cultural visual impacts that the orient made on western and modernist painting
By concluding the central issue of this study to evaluate the eastern visual culture with the western painting we notice that the western painters, who were called Orientalists, represented the orient by their western figurative styles, relying on their skills in depicting lighting and shading, anatomy, perspective, detailed representations of mass and space
Such painters applied in their artistic practices the pictorial traditions that emerged from the Renaissances and passed all through the modernist phases

Summary

Introduction

This paper proceeds to manifest Oriental Influences on Painting, as a practice-led investigation to illustrate some of the trans-cultural influences on visual arts, regarding the cultural visual impacts that the orient made on western and modernist painting. Such a cross-cultural investigation points out that the human perception of visual art is overlapping through many different cultural backgrounds. This critique manifests the Oriental motives, influences, and themes within the western modernist painting through a grounded framework of formal and contextual analysis, which conceptualizes and reconstructs the pictorial values of the visual artwork. Following the consequences of the curious west, the encounter of the term ’Orientalism’ took place while breaking through various studies and several arguments depending on many points of views, that brought dialectic issues referring to the variety of cultural backgrounds addressed by arguing scholars, who based their arguments on subjective observations or objective findings (Clarke, 1997)

The Argumentation

Visual Review of Modernist Perspectives

Conclusion