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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2020
This essay situates the publication of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents in the context of an expanding global interest in modern Arab art as well as the study of modern Arab art as an academic discipline. The essay first examines the implications of the cultivation of a new museum and gallery infrastructure for modern Arab art in the Arab Gulf. It then considers how the academic study of modern Arab art has faced institutional barriers, due largely to the overwhelming academic focus on Ancient Studies and Islamic art. Finally, it suggests that Modern Arab Art in the Arab World provides scholars with a comprehensive textual archive that calls for a historicized approach to theorizing the emergence of modernist aesthetics in Arab visual cultures.
1 The question of what it means to decolonize Art History remains an ongoing and unresolved discussion within the discipline, merging with the global turn in art history. See Elkins, James, ed., Is Art History Global? (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar, Newall, Diana, Barker, Emma, Carter, Warren, Christian, Cathleen Wren, Dohmen, Renate, eds., Art and Its Global Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)Google Scholar and Singh, Kavita, “Colonial, International, Global: Connecting and Disconnecting Art Histories,” Art in Translation, 9:1 (suppl, 2017): 34–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Thyacott, Louise and Arvanitis, Kostas, eds., Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For essays on the ways that this new focus on culture and the museum has been used to cultivate new notions of nationhood and citizenship in the Gulf, see Erskine-Loftus, Pamela, Hightower, Victoria Penziner, Al-Mulla, Mariam Ibrahim, eds., Representing the Nation: Heritage, Museums, National Narratives, and Identity in the Gulf States (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Exell, Karen, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Exell, Karen and Wakefield, Karina, eds., Museums in Arabia: Transnational Practices and Regional Processes (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 The term “architourism” has been used to describe this phenomenon. See Ockman, Joan and Frausto, Salomon, eds., Architourism: Authentic, Escapist, Exotic, Spectacular (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture with Prestell, 2005)Google Scholar. Examples of these iconic architectural sites in the Gulf include Jean Nouvel's National Museum of Qatar and the Louvre Abu Dhabi; Rem Koolhaas's Qatar National Library; Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (construction in progress); Norman Foster's Zayed National Museum (construction in progress); and Zaha Hadid's various projects, including the stalled Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi.
6 Despite the globalization of the art market and the emergence of increasingly globalized art and museum infrastructures in cities outside the traditional European art centers, such as Beijing, Istanbul, Sāo Paolo, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi, and despite what has been described as a more porous network of exchange between artistic center and periphery and circuits of exchange characteristic of a globalized, borderless art world where “works of art travel without friction,” it remains that European art maintains its aesthetic autonomy and hegemony, financial and otherwise, over non-European traditions. See Velthuis, Olav and Brandellero, Amanda, “Introduction to Special Issue on Global Art Markets,” Poetics 71 (December 2018): 1–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Winegar, Jessica, “Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East,” Cultural Anthropology 21:2 (May 2006): 173–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See Bardaouil, Sam, Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017)Google Scholar.
9 There are notable exceptions to this observation. See, for example, Shabout, Nada, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Sheehi, Stephen, The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860–1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Khatib, Lina, Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Esanu, Octavian, ed., Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude (New York: Routledge, 2018)Google Scholar.
10 Modern Art in the Arab World, 21.
11 See, for example, Colla, Elliott, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bernhardsson, Magnus, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
12 Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches,” Journal of Art Historiography 6:1 (June 2012): 1 https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/necipogludoc.pdf. Originally published in Benoît Junod, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf, eds., Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Saqi Books, 2012). See also Avinoam Shalem, “What do we mean when we say ‘Islamic Art’? A plea for the critical rewriting of the history of the arts of Islam,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (June 2012), https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/shalem.pdf .
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 12.
15 Ibid, 13.
16 Ibid., 14
17 An illustration of the problematic consequences of the disciplinary trend to read the artistic forms produced in the modern Middle East through a broadly Islamic civilizational category can be found in Alex Dika Seggerman's Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt Between the Islamic and the Contemporary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Seggerman argues that “Islam” was constitutive of the formation of modern Egyptian art, beginning her book with a description of a painting by the Egyptian artist Mahmoud Said which features a naked peasant woman leaning against a boat, looking downward. Behind this central figure, peasant women gather water in jugs and “a small white mosque peeks through in the background” (1). For Seggerman, the presence of a mosque in a painting's background thus becomes emblematic of a broader trend characteristic of modern Egyptian art. Seggerman argues not only that the “Islamic” is constitutive of modern Egyptian art, but that this is representative of what she terms “non-doctrinal Islamic culture,” which is described as the “everyday, embodied experience of being Muslim or living in a Muslim society” (13). Such a nebulous extrapolation, whereby the “everyday” experience of being Muslim becomes the basis of interpreting the cultural effects of a period with no discursive presence of an “Islamic” art tradition, has the effect of re-Orientalizing the Middle East and misreads the ways that artists adapted the local into new vocabularies of visuality.
18 Modern Art in the Arab World, 20.
19 See Hassan, Waïl, “Toward a Theory of the Arabic Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, ed. Hassan, Waïl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Gajarawala, Toral, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 71Google Scholar.
21 Nada Shabout, “Huroufiyah: The Arabic Letter as Visual Form,” in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, 142–43.
22 Ibid., 143
23 Ibid., 142.