Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.