Manazir Journal is a peer-reviewed academic Platinum Open Access journal dedicated to visual arts, architecture and cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
Les trajectoires des artistes du « Maghreb et du Moyen-Orient »
Copyright (c) 2025 Perin Emel Yavuz, Claudia Polledri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Trajectoires artistiques, engagement et héritage du peintre Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985)
In this interview, Samir Abdallah retraces the many trajectories in the life of his father, the Egyptian painter Hamed Abdalla, between Egypt, Europe and the Arab world, as well as his work, which has been the subject of renewed interest since the 2000s. In the background, we can also trace the political tensions and conflicts that have marked relations between the Arab world and Europe, and which have undoubtedly influenced the reception and recognition of the painters of Arab modernism, to which Hamed Abdalla belongs. This exchange was also an opportunity to highlight Samir Abdallah’s political heritage. His documentaries bear witness to his father’s commitment to the Palestinian question.
Copyright (c) 2025 Claudia Polledri, Perin Emel Yavuz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Ahmed Hajeri is a French artist of Tunisian origin who lives and works in Paris. Born in 1948 in the village of Tazarka, in the Cap Bon region, he grew up in a very modest rural family. Orphaned at a young age, he initially trained as an electrician before moving to France at twenty. In Paris, while working as an electrical assembler, he applied for a draftsman position with the architect Roland Morand, who collaborated with Jean Dubuffet. Recognizing Hajeri’s talent, Morand introduced him to art and paved the way for him to become a painter. Following his 1978 debut exhibition at Galerie Messine, Hajeri fully embraced his artistic career. He gained early recognition from both audiences and Tunisian institutions during his first Tunis exhibition at Galerie Médina in 1985, later participating in numerous international shows. His works are now part of French public collections (CNAP), the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the National Fund of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Tunisia, as well as private collections worldwide. Without formal academic training, Hajeri has developed a distinctive oeuvre that transcends trends, existing at the intersection of the real and the imaginary. His compositions feature floating figures, an anthropomorphic bestiary, and elements of Carthaginian civilization. Drawing inspiration from childhood memories and dreamlike states, he creates paintings, drawings, and poems imbued with imagination and mystery. This portrait, based on interviews and unpublished archives, chronicles the artist’s journey between Tunis and Paris, examining the themes and influences that have shaped his work and its critical reception.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nadia Chalbi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Dr. Demir Fitrat Onger, collectionneur du groupe du Gymnase à Paris
After the WWII, Turkish artists of the École de Paris played a significant role in the Parisian art scene, actively participating in the debates between abstraction and figuration. Turkish painters and sculptors exhibited at major salons such as the Salon de Mai and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, asserting their presence within the Parisian avant-garde. Their interactions with influential figures in modern art, as well as participation in key exhibitions, testify to their integration into the French artistic milieu. The long-neglected memory of this generation is today preserved thanks to many players in the art world. Dr. Demir Fitrat Onger, who built up a major collection and maintained close ties with these artists, is one of them. His testimony sheds light on their contribution to artistic modernity, but also on their bohemian lifestyle and lack of recognition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Perin Emel Yavuz, Ekin Akalın https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
This article explores how the Iraqi artist Jamil Hamoudi articulated Western modernity and Iraqi and Arab artistic traditions through his work and writings. By examining his career, it highlights the dynamics of exchange and transformation that shaped the post-war Parisian art scene. Hamoudi developed a unique abstract vision that brought Arabic calligraphic traditions into dialogue with Mesopotamian aesthetic references, creating a distinctive approach to abstraction. His critical and theoretical engagement reflects his desire to integrate Arab artists into a global artistic dialogue without confining them to labels or exoticizing categories. In doing so, Hamoudi navigates a Parisian cosmopolitanism that proves to be less open than it initially seems.
Copyright (c) 2025 Zouina Ait Slimani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Saliba Douaihy, Shafic Abboud, and Saloua Raouda Choucair were three Lebanese artists who traveled to Paris in the process of becoming canonical artists in their home country. But Paris was not their only destination. For all three of these artists, their intercity movements produced an experience of cosmopolitanism that was circulatory and nonhierarchical. This cosmopolitanism did not flow only one way. Rather, it pooled as artists took advantage of opportunities to travel and moved back and forth between different transnational hubs. This article explores how cosmopolitanism operates, as a pattern of movements and a mode of exchange, and questions the connections among cosmopolitanism, modernism, and abstraction. Drawing on recent scholarship to define cosmopolitanism as a mixture of languages and a density of encounters, I argue that artists such as Douaihy, Abboud, and Choucair exemplified the linguistic phenomenon of heteroglossia in the visual arts. These artists approached abstraction not as a style to imitate but rather as a language to use, one easily interchangeable with the others they already spoke fluently. I propose that if we, too, approach abstraction, metaphorically, in linguistic rather than stylistic terms, then we will develop the tools to reformulate modernism as expansively global.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
(Re)producing an ‘Islamic-Byzantine’ Artist
This article challenges the interpretation of Fahrelnissa Zeid’s (1901–1991) mid-century abstract production as influenced by Islamic and Byzantine art. The study analyzes culturalist presentations of the artist’s exhibitions in Paris galleries (1949–1969) and later international exhibitions (1990–2024), comparing them with the artist’s own statements and alternative reviews. I argue that both twentieth century and contemporary interpretations of her abstract practice are orientalist in character. The original elision of her voice reflected mid-century colonial ideology and promoted a new Parisian lyrical abstraction movement, while contemporary interpretations elevate globalized exhibitions’ marketing over scholarship. These culturalist interpretations exclude Fahrelnissa Zeid from modernism’s narratives by framing her practice as a-historic cultural atavism. I argue that Fahrelnissa’s approach to abstraction was shaped by her preoccupation with all-encompassing other-worlds. Her transition to abstraction followed a figurative expressionist phase and was triggered by paradigm-shifting visual shocks, leading to a two-decade gestural expressionist production. Fahrelnissa Zeid’s artistic vision also differs from some Global South modernist artists’ practice who sought to hybridize their national cultural imageries with European visual styles.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adila Laïdi-Hanieh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The artistic itinerary of Nejad Melih Devrim (1923–1995), a Turkish artist who settled in Paris in 1946, raises questions about his relative oblivion in France despite a promising career. An actor in the “new trends” of post-war Parisian art, he often embodied a synthesis between Turkish artistic traditions and the modernity of the École de Paris, an orientalist reading of his work that reduces it to a simple fusion of Western and Byzantine influences. However, his career, marked by his cosmopolitan location and his choice of exhibitions abroad, bears witness to a more personal and independent style. Despite gaining recognition in Paris and taking part in numerous salons, his departure for Poland in 1968 marked the beginning of his oblivion in France. Although his work is being rediscovered, notably at the Centre Pompidou, it remains relevant to reevaluate Nejad Melih Devrim's place in a globalized art history, taking into account his cosmopolitan context.
Copyright (c) 2025 Clotilde Scordia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Les voyages à Paris d’Edgard Naccache, Mahmoud Sehili et Néjib Belkhodja
At the heart of this article is the oblivion of Maghrebi artists, and Tunisian artists in particular, in art historical narratives produced in the West, despite their active presence in Paris after the Second World War. Under the French protectorate and in the aftermath of independence, travel grants enabled these artists to train in Paris, where they discovered the avant-gardes and abstraction, and contributed to the spread of these movements in the Maghreb. The article focuses on the careers of Edgard Naccache, Mahmoud Selihi and Nejib Belkhodja, who, although recognized by some critics and galleries in Paris, remain largely obscured in Western historical accounts. Their contribution to the Parisian art scene has remained marginal in the major narratives of art history, which have often ignored modern North African art. This study documents this erasure, contributing to the reflection on the reasons for the lack of visibility of modern non-Western artists.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alia Nakhli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Reinvention of Padishah-i Islam in the Visual Representations of Ghazan Khan
This article discusses how the visualization of Mahmud Ghazan, the sixth Ilkhanid ruler, was employed to construct and propagate his image as the Padishah-i Islam (King of Islam), thus justifying him both as king of Iranshahr (land of Iran) and the legitimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad. In a quest for visual translations of the Ilkhanid concept of Padishah-i Islam—an inseparable combination of the Persian notion of ideal kingship and prophethood—several illustrations from the Diez albums representing Ghazan or events of his reign have been identified, two of which have become subject to detailed iconographic analyses. Two approaches to the visualization of Ghazan as Padishah-i Islam can be considered here. The first is Ghazan’s birth scene where the visual narrative is covered in various formal and semantic layers; transformed into a symbolic narrative of a holy birth associated with those of the prophets. The second appears in the scene of Ghazan’s enthronement, probably once illustrated as an unknown manuscript’s frontispiece, the images’ composition and components appear as a visual panegyric poem which applies an elaborate visual language that elevates Ghazan to the level of a divine king.
Copyright (c) 2023 Latifkar Azadeh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Sacred King in the Shah Tahmasp Shahnama
This paper aims to trace the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian concept of “royal divine glory” (farr) through its visual translations within the Iranian manuscript cultures in the Safavid period, specifically in the illustrations of the Shahnama-yi Shahi in the 16th century. Reviewing the longue durée idea of Iranian kingship perceived within the Safavid royal ideology in the reigns of the first two monarchs, we delve into the Shahnama paintings to see the artists’ assets for showing the divinity and dignity of Iranian kings and how they managed to mark a difference between the profane and Shiite iconographies. We took as case studies nine illustrations of Zahhak’s story, the most tyrannical legendary King in Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama. Indeed, to analyse the artistic manifestations of the Royal farr, we examined the scenes where the “true” king is literally absent.
Copyright (c) 2023 Negar Habibi, Shervin Farridnejad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Iranian kings, or those who reigned in lands under Persian linguistic and cultural domination, followed the idea of a Just Ruler: a pious king who looked after his subjects’ divinity and spirituality in parallel to their earthly lives and needs. The Just Ruler extended righteousness and peace among his people while patronizing the construction of palaces, gardens, and new towns. The idea of a Just Ruler may be found in Sassanid monumental rock reliefs and written texts and then enriched and elaborated upon in the Islamic era by philosophers, poets, authors, and artists. This issue of Manazir Journal focuses on how art and architecture served the representation of the Just Ruler in Persianate societies from Central Asia to Eastern Anatolia from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Illustrated books, architecture, and photography show how different kings and rulers referred to the Persian ideas of the Just Ruler by patronizing new constructions, richly illuminated books, and in the modern era, employing mediums such as photography and lithography for nationalizing the king’s image.
Copyright (c) 2023 Negar Habibi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
This contribution is a commented portfolio of images gathered during fieldwork in Baghdad (February 2020). It aims to provide an overview of the murals which have been concentrated on Tahrir Square since the revolution of October 2019. These murals share some iconographic topics in common with the thawra (revolution) in Syria, Tunisia, Egypt and Beirut. Nevertheless, some semantic and iconographic registers are specific to Iraq, and divided into two main categories. The first one recreates “a city within the city” (ville en abyme) through composite unrealistic images of real places known to all; the second relates to the martyrology of Shiism, with portraits of historical imams, but also of “martyrs” killed during the repression in Autumn 2019. Contrary to the well-known official iconography since the 1958 Iraqi revolution, this new figurative expression is that of a young population predominantly Shiite (due to demography in Iraq), and it stems from a cultural and political substrate prone to rebellion—that of Hussein, long repressed by power. The style is often naive, at the antipodes of the concomitant Beiruti thawra street art, although crossing with other globalized graphic codes. It constitutes a vibrant popular culture and also signals a “Shiitization” of public space. Beyond traditional divisions, it finally proves to federate, in reaction to the iconoclasm of Daesh but also to the corruption that strikes the daily life and the future of millions of citizens.
Copyright (c) 2022 Caecilia Pieri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Ce que l’art fait à la ville en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen-Orient
Copyright (c) 2022 Marie Bonte, Marion Slitine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
When asked to provide his son Nasrallah's genealogy during his marriage to a Mughal princess, Nader Shah replied, “He is the son of the sword, the grandson of the sword, the great-grandson of the sword, and so on for seven generations.” Nader and his successors, emerging from humble backgrounds and ending the prestigious Safavid dynasty's rule in Iran, faced a daunting challenge in legitimizing their rule. Unlike the Safavids, they couldn't rely solely on lineage or religious authority. While military victories played a role in their rise to power, it doesn't explain the enduring changes in Iran during this period. Art, architecture, and material culture became potent instruments in their quest for legitimacy. Palaces, ceremonial displays, and the adoption of Safavid customs conveyed regal status. Simultaneously, the construction and restoration of religious monuments portrayed devotion and highlighted distinctions from Sunni restoration and Turkish influences. Through grand structures, inscriptions, opulence, and generous gifts, rulers like Ashraf, Mahmud, and Nader embedded their legitimacy in the physical landscape, aiming to leave a lasting imprint in people's minds and assert their rightful sovereignty on the world stage.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mélisande Bizoirre https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
In 1566, after Sultan Suleiman’s death, Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-1576) sent condolences and congratulations to Sultan Selim II (r. 1566-1574) along with several gifts, including a magnificent Quran and an exquisite illustrated Shahnama copy, noteworthy in Iranian art history. However, the letter accompanying these gifts has often been overlooked, perceived as containing mere courtesies. This letter marked a significant exchange between Safavid kings and Ottoman sultans, with participation from secretaries across Iran. Its authors aimed to portray an idealized king and their notable characteristics, demonstrating that the actions of these rulers (Sultan Suleiman, Sultan Selim, and particularly Shah Tahmasp) aligned with this ideal. Art-related activities were among these characteristics. The authors detailed the Safavid king’s palace, garden, and the artistic gifts to highlight their connection with the king’s ideal image. This article explores the letter as a literary and artistic medium, delving into its intricate rhetoric as a tool for representing royal authority. Additionally, it addresses how the authors’ descriptions of artworks as integral to the king’s image conveyed political meaning, illustrating how art reflected royal power in public and political spheres.
Copyright (c) 2023 Amir Maziar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Idea of the Just Ruler and the Art Patron in Persianate Calligraphy
Jaʿfar Tabrizi (1383–1455) is one of the most famous Timurid calligraphers and was the chief of prince Baysonqor’s (1397–1433) library. Under his supervision, some of the most prestigious Herati manuscripts were created. Muhammad Hussein Shirazi (1825-1900) is one of the Qajar calligraphy masters, honored with the title Katib al-Sultan (the King’s calligrapher). He copied some of the most prestigious Persian masterpieces during his lifetime. In the colophons of their numerous manuscripts, both calligraphers praised their respective princes and kings, providing a resource from which one may learn about the ideas of the just ruler as the governor and as the patron of the arts in the Timurid and Qajar periods. In reviewing these colophons, this article aims to identify the idea of kingship, especially in the patronage of the arts of the book and calligraphy, narrated and praised in two different historical and social contexts in the Timurid and Qajar periods; widely considered the golden ages of Persian calligraphy. This study shows how the tradition of patronage did endure for some five centuries.
Muhammad Hussein Katib al-Sultan Shirazi
Copyright (c) 2023 Hamid Reza Ghelichkhani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Azade Latifkar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Reflection of Identity in the Mirror of Narrative Images
The concept of “Just Rule” historically served to shape a king’s image and bolster the monarchy’s structure, often emulated by courtiers seeking to be part of the inner circle and perpetuating the idea of a Just Ruler. Influenced by the king’s interests, figures like Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-1896) fostered monarchic strength through praises and art, particularly in the Nasiri era. These illustrations, blending literature and visual art, became sought-after for adorning manuscripts and enhancing printed books during this period. This study examines Nasir al-Din Shah's portrayal in the One Thousand and One Nights manuscript (1852-1859), overseen by Abul-Hassan Ghaffari, Saniʿ al-Mulk (d. 1865). Characters resembling Nasir al-Din Shah appear throughout the manuscript. The study aims to analyze these images in relation to the manuscript’s content and their role in the discourse on portrait illustrations. Additionally, it explores how the idea of Just Rule was perpetuated by the patrons and artists involved in creating this manuscript.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ali Boozari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Visualizing Kingship in a Time of Change
Despite artistic engagement with photography in Iran almost immediately after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, the field of Islamic art history has had difficulty accepting the modern period and the medium of photography as part of its discipline. Studies on painted Iranian portraiture have often stopped before the introduction of photography, and only in more recent years has photographic portraiture and its influence on painting been examined. Due to this nascent state of the field, large gaps exist even on more traditional topics, such as the question of royal portraiture. This article presents the first examination of photographic royal portraiture and the visualization of kingship during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). This topic, in comparison with earlier Iranian painted royal portraiture, has received considerably less attention. Photographic portraiture, together with printed and painted examples, from the reigns of the Qajar rulers Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896-1907), Muhammad ʿAli Shah (r. 1907-1909), and Ahmad Shah (r. 1909-1925), will be analysed in connection with social and political developments in order to better understand the development of royal image making during a time of political turmoil.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mira Xenia Schwerda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Samarqand’s Congregational Mosque of Bibi Khanum as a Representation of Timurid Legitimacy and Rulership
The Bibi Khanum Congregational Mosque is the largest Timurid monument in Samarqand. Commissioned by Timur himself after his military campaign in India in 1399, the architecture of the mosque can be interpreted as a visual representation of Timur’s ambitions to surpass the architectural achievements of the preceding Islamic dynasties. Striving for political legitimacy beyond the legacy of Chinggis Khan, Timur imitated and even exceeded the monumental scale of the architectural ensembles in the Ilkhanid capitals of Tabriz and Sultaniyya. In an attempt to ensure the continuity of the Timurid dynasty, Timur’s successors adopted Yuan iconography and visual vocabulary so as to forge an ancestral and artistic genealogy that directly related the Timurids with the Mongols via the aesthetic legacy of the Ilkhanids and the Yuan. Their cultural production thus secured the continuity of the Timurid royal patrons as just successors of Chinggis Khan.
Copyright (c) 2023 Elena Paskaleva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
An Encounter with the Architecture of the Islamic World as Turning Point in the Transformation of Artistic Expression
One of the most important Latvian artists of the early twentieth century, Jāzeps Grosvalds (1891-1920), was interested in the “Oriental” world since his adolescence. His first real meeting with the imagined Oriental atmosphere took place in 1913, when he traveled to Spain and visited Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada. The trip impressed him by the versatility of colors, light, ambience, and architectural forms, and was depicted in a sketch book. Nevertheless, the real transformation of Grosvalds’ artistic expression occurred during his travels through (then) Persia. Due to the circumstances of World War I, at the end of 1917 he joined the Mesopotamian Front under the English Command. The campaign took place in 1918, and he crossed Iran and Iraq. Despite at times very difficult conditions, throughout his travel Grosvalds captured his impressions in sketch albums and watercolors, being interested in architectural, scenic, and anthropological studies. His oeuvre from this period shows a certain level of abstraction, and almost nothing of the idyllic and luscious depiction, characteristic for many Orientalist painters. One of the most interesting evaluations of his Persian artworks was provided by the famous French artist Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) in 1940, when he published an article on Grosvalds’ art. Among other things Ozenfant emphasizes that Grosvalds had not depicted picturesque scenes, had not copied what he saw in front of his eyes as many others have done. Grosvalds’ watercolors have a special effect and power; they are fruits of creativity, being not superficially loaded with exotic charm, but synthesizing and transforming its magic.
Copyright (c) 2022 Ieva Kalnača https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Wassily Kandinsky at the Exhibition "Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst" in Munich, 1910
In 1910, Wassily Kandinsky attended the Munich exhibition Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst and subsequently wrote a review of it for the Russian literary journal Apollon. His review, which almost exclusively discussed the Persian paintings on display, provides insights into Kandinsky’s way of seeing and understanding these objects at a significant moment in his artistic development. The most compelling aspect of his review is his repeated articulation of the sense of revelation that he experienced in front of these works. Conveying a sense of revelation through his own paintings was Kandinsky’s primary goal in this period, and was a concept he struggled to formulate in his art. I argue that Kandinsky developed one of his primary artistic strategies in response to a specific practice that he had first encountered at the Meisterwerke exhibition: the Persian artist’s practice of painting hidden forms within a composition. This article looks closely at a work from the exhibition, Sleeping Rustam (attributed to Sultan Muhammad, 1515-1522), which incorporates hidden figures in its rock formations, a practice described as demanding careful and sustained scrutiny by the viewer before the faces and forms reveal themselves. Kandinsky himself wrote later that his works from 1910, “dissolved objects to a greater or lesser extent within the same picture, so that they might not all be recognized at once and so that these emotional overtones might thus be experienced gradually by the spectator, one after another”; a process that the author believes he may have adapted from Persian paintings.
Copyright (c) 2022 Emily Christensen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
This article has no intention to deconstruct the now classical Saidian idea that Western Orientalism was a global system of misrepresentation and control of non-Western cultures, particularly in the nineteenth century, when the colonial expansion spread over most of the regions marked by the cultures of Islam. Instead, It intends to reflect upon the fact that during this period, the Orientalist system established itself in the broader context of a modern condition which was (and still is) felt and conceived as a general “state of crisis.” This critical dimension of modern Western culture explains both the extreme degree of violence of the Orientalist enterprise of capture and its internal criticism by its own perpetrators. The same duality characterizes the modern production of visual images: the crisis of the Western mode of mimetic representation is responsible for both the paroxysmal multiplication of images, in the nascent “society of the spectacle,” and their implosion, in the experiments of the so-called artistic avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some decades earlier, such a radical critique of representation had been developed at the crossroads of applied arts and architecture, in debates on the nature and function of ornaments. We know how central the reference to the arts of Islam and their aesthetics, which were conceived in opposition to the contemporary Orientalist fancies, was for these debates. How did these two positions—the critique of Orientalism and of visual representation—interact? To what extent did they reinforce each other? In order to illustrate this question, This article will conjure up a most revealing episode: Henri Matisse’s trip to Algeria in 1906 and the works that immediately followed this early “Oriental” encounter for the artist.
Copyright (c) 2022 Rémi Labrusse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Starting Point of the Arabic-Andalusi Influence in Gaudi’s Ornamental Ceramic
Between 1884 and 1887, Antoni Gaudí built two rather modest constructions for his patron, Eusebi Güell: a stable for the horses and a porterhouse for his country house in Les Corts. In these constructions, he makes an important step in relation to his previous works, El Capricho (Comillas, Santander) and the Casa Vicenç (Barcelona). The tiles used in both, featuring lines of color that contrast with the brick and stone, derive from an original system of using ceramic, the trencadís. He takes as a reference point the Arabic or Mudejar building system to embed ceramic pieces in the walls and in the coronation railings of the buildings, but adds a brilliant contribution by converting it into “broken” ceramics. We call this ornamental resource trencadís, since trencar means broken in Catalan. This technique is one of Gaudí’s more significant decorative choices with brilliant examples of this being the façade of Casa Batlló and the dragon and banc-balustrade in Park Güell.
Copyright (c) 2022 Mireia Freixa, Marta Saliné https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Oriental influences present in Polish culture since the Middle Ages and incarnated by the idea of “sarmatisme” were re-evaluated or outright rejected by the young modernist generation. In fact, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century the traditional Polish “Orientality” was replaced by a wave of interest for the aesthetics of Islamic art, a reflection of the European “Oriental renaissance”. The Polish imaginarium had long associated the art and culture of Islam uniquely to the Middle East and its craft. The romantic epoch brought with it a new interest for medieval Spain, Granada in particular, its history and monuments, reflected in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz and the museographic realisations of Izabela Czartoryska at Puławy or Tytus Działyński at Kórnik. If architectural projects, principally of “Moorish” synagogues and internal decorations for aristocratic and bourgeois palaces still belong to a nineteenth century oriental current, they do however already reveal a will typical of pre-war decades by virtue of granting significance to Islamic decorative principles. In the first decades of the twentieth century, “à l’orientale” motifs recurrent in fashion and the visual universe, as witnessed by contemporary novels, found a sort of counterpoint in propositions made by representatives of the Polish applied art revival movement, successful hybridization of European, oriental and popular models: fabrics, carpets, metal and leather objects of artists from the Warsztaty Krakowskie (Cracow workshops, founded 1913) such as Józef Czajkowski, Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Bonawentura Lenart, and Karol Tichy, “javano-cracovian” batiks of young workshop apprentices or even the glazed ceramics of Stanisław Jagmin. Displayed at the 1925 Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, the Cracow Workshop adherent’s productions draw the attention of the European public and critics on this peculiar breed of national “primitivist” style tainted with Orientalism.
Copyright (c) 2022 Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Islamic colored glass windows (qamarīyāt) have long been disregarded by scholarship despite their popularity with nineteenth-century travelers. Their vibrant light and bright colors have sparked the enthusiasm of artists, architects, and collectors who depicted, recreated, and displayed this fragile art form. By focusing on the British architect James William Wild, the eccentric traveler and art collector Karl von Urach, and the iconic American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, this contribution will highlight the artistic and cultural significance of qamarīyāt as an expression of the intense colors of the East.
Copyright (c) 2022 Francine Giese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Traditionally related to concepts of luxury, fancy, and uncontrolled sensuality, color has in Western culture long been considered an unsteady component. On the contrary, and as often noted by travelers, Eastern cultures frequently demonstrate a particular talent for the harmony of color and ornament. In the nineteenth century, a number of architects and artists tried to rationalize the properties and use of color, ornament, and the Islamic arts in various ways, relating them to contemporary experiments in optics. This article examines the relationship between color theory, Islamic arts, and architecture, taking as a starting point the invention of the kaleidoscope by David Brewster and its relationship to Nasrid ornament. It then considers how Islamic arts and color theory dialogued in the work of British architect and decorator Owen Jones and Tuscan amateur architect Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona.
Copyright (c) 2022 Ariane Varela Braga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
One of the most formative narratives of the reform movements around 1900 was a departure from earlier creative principles of imitation, now defamed as an inadequate approach. Thus, artists, architects, and designers were called upon to formulate freer approaches to artistic design. Precisely because this narrative of the new and the free, which had become a myth, excluded art of the later nineteenth century—which supposedly only imitated older styles—little attention was paid to how exactly the ornamentation of Islamic art was taken up and artistically exploited in the decorative arts around 1900. Yet, what else can be classified as stylistic imitation and what as freer abstraction? After all, the geometric derivation of Islamic ornamentation offered rich material for abstractions in the sense intended by the reform movements, before it was radically, and very lastingly, banned from the discourse a short time later along with all other ornament. It will be shown that the abstraction of Islamic ornamentation around 1900 was not only triggered by the objects that were increasingly accessible in exhibitions and as holdings of ethnological or applied arts museums at the turn of the century but was already influenced by scientific research and by the textbooks with historical models as they appeared in the course of the nineteenth century.
Copyright (c) 2022 Elke Katharina Wittich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Persian-Punjabi/Urdu Identities of Traditional Geometrical Patterns Lost During the Colonial Rule of the Punjab (1849–1947)
Annexation of the Punjab by the British in 1849 brought about major modifications to the local visual culture. Expecting Indian crafts to remain frozen in time (for several reasons), the colonial administrators and art critics disapproved the changes employed by the craftsmen in their wares to cater to the new ruling class. Among the corrective measures adopted by the government to revive the ‘dying’ Indian art and craft, art schools were set up and surveys were conducted to publish illustrated monographs on individual crafts bringing once strictly guarded trade secrets out in the public. By the late nineteenth century, the ‘native craftsmen’ or mistrīs themselves emerged as authors of illustrated craft manuals carrying instructions in all three important vernaculars, Gurmukhi, Urdu and Sanskrit mixed with some English terms and designs. The most interesting among these publications are a few woodcarver’s manuals that laboriously enumerate a wide range of geometric designs for both architecture and furniture. Each shape, its construction methods and titles are given in an interesting mix of the three vernaculars. These terms were also mentioned by John Lockwood Kipling, the first Principal of the Mayo School of Industrial Art (1876-1893) in his essay on wood carving but abandoned by the time Percy Brown (1897-1909) took over. Except for some, today most of these terms and construction methods are unknown even to the traditional craftsmen of the Punjab. This paper aims to trace the history of traditional geometrical patterns going as far back as Mughal times (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), their references in manuals published by local craftsmen during the colonial rule and the role of British art educators on social memory.
Copyright (c) 2022 Nadra Shabaz Khan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0