Panel 11: Orientalism and empire

Panel Overview:

Solmaz Kive (University of Oregon, US) Decorated otherness: the making of the Oriental Courts at the South Kensington Museum

Yannick Le Pape (Musée d’Orsay, France) “Yet undecided”: features and failures of Assyrian exposure in the age of European imperialism

Samuel Aylett (Open University, UK) Designing imperial London at the Museum of London, 1976

Individual Papers:

Solmaz Kive (University of Oregon, US) Decorated otherness: the making of the Oriental Courts at the South Kensington Museum

This presentation discusses the creation of the Oriental Court at the South Kensington Museum in terms of its role in framing non-European objects in this early decorative art museum. The South Kensington Museum (today’s V&A) was originally established by the Department of Practical Art in 1852. In 1857, the museum moved out of the few rooms of Marlborough House to a much larger structure at South Kensington Gore. The building gradually underwent many changes. As did the institution, moving away from teaching the “true principles of taste” towards art historical exhibitions. As part of a rearrangement and expansion process in the mid-1860s, the museum created its Oriental Courts to house objects from China, Japan, India, Persia, etc. Its decoration was commissioned to Owen Jones, the renowned author of the Grammar of Ornament (1856), and well-known for his decoration of the Crystal Palace (1851).

Jones decorated the Oriental Courts with “Oriental” motives and geometric patterns. In fact, this decoration was a successful realization of a mid-nineteenth-century interest in communicating the nature of collections through gallery decoration. At the same time, attention to gallery decoration was also important in the context of the museum’s emphasis on “the principles” of ornament. Given the perception of architecture as the mother of all ornaments, the museum building carried the weight of teaching the correct decoration by example. This double function of the Oriental Courts’ decoration mirrored the broader tension in the South Kensington museum between art history and design theory. Discussing the making of the Oriental Courts in the context of the South Kensington Museum, this paper uses Jones’ theory of ornament to explore the interplay of aesthetics and art history in his design of the Oriental Courts.

Solmaz Kive is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. She holds a professional M.Arch. in architecture and an M.Arch. and a PhD in History of Architecture. Her research explores the politics of identity in nineteenth-century exhibitions and histories of design.

Yannick Le Pape (Musée d’Orsay, France) “Yet undecided”: features and failures of Assyrian exposure in the age of European imperialism

Throughout the 19th century, Assyrian artefacts were appreciated by European collectors and museum curators. Until the official excavations by Botta and Layard in the 1840s, little was known about these “miscellaneous objects” (as auctioneers of the time termed them). As a result, no real rules were applied to the preservation and exhibition of such singular items. The history of the types of display furniture that were designed for this kind of collection is still to be written, but sales catalogues, collectors’ testimonies and museum guides provide insight into the special boxes and colourful cabinets that were used. In France as in Great Britain, private and public displays of Near Eastern Antiquity had to contend with the evolution of taste concerning interior design and some collections were damned to temporary showcases for many decades. “The authorities of the British Museum are yet undecided how the Nimroud marbles are to be ultimately arranged”, said James Silk Buckingham in 1851. No doubt that the lack of knowledge about Near Eastern objects did create problems, and could explain the uncertainty of exhibition processes, but this ambiguity also says something more about the way Near Eastern antiques still had to face the old historical dogma inherited from Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) had excluded Nineveh’s objects from his study altogether. In the end, examining exhibition furniture and displays of Assyrian objects will allow us to better understand the objects themselves, but also a part of French and Victorian ideology that emphasised evolution in art, and imperialist, outmoded, exotic visions of non-classical collections.

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Dr Yannick Le Pape is Cultural Heritage engineer at Musée d’Orsay. Published in many scientific reviews, his current research engages with the way Antiquity has been considered by artists and collectors of the second half of the 19th century. Accredited as lecturer from National Universities Council, he has also contributed articles about art history and exhibitions to numerous journals.

Samuel Aylett (Open University, UK) Designing imperial London at the Museum of London, 1976

Comments