Orientalist Aesthetics

by Roger Benjamin

"Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade's research in untapped archives, introduced many paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging wide, from the decorative arts to colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers. Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a rich body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists whose careers have never before been discussed in English.". "The painter-critic Eugene Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim revised the tradition of the Persian miniature through his knowledge of Western perspective. Benjamin considers armchair Orien