lishers, 1994); Richard G. Hovannisian, ed. The Arme-
St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
ing his signature to it. Swiss painter Paul Klee
absorbs nutrients from the roots to produce a dif-
ferent image in the branches and leaves, making
the artist the intermediary between nature and
culture. During the 19th and early 20th centuries
some art historians still championed Academic
painting, which codified styles and stipulated that
they had to coincide with content, resulting in art
that was edifying as well as aesthetically pleasing.
These Euro-American views tell us that art is a
changeable concept; its definitions differ accord-
ing to time, place, and school of thought. Whether
we consider medieval Europe or modern China,
we should expect art to reflect the perceptions of
its creators, consumers, and scholars.
From the 19th century on, the Islamicate
world produced art that is part of the general
history of modern art. Historically, however, the
definition and material of what we know as
Islamic art are different. Indeed, only in moments
of tension is there a sense of an art that is consid-
ered primarily Islamic in its content and inten-
tions (as, for example, in the case of
calligraphy
in 10th-century Iraq), and in those cases it is
because the visual formulas followed rules that
were viewed as more “orthodox” than others. As
elsewhere in the world before the dissemination
of the idea of the artist as creative genius, art itself
was not understood in the same ways in the past
as it is today. Rather, artistic value was seen in the
expenditure of surplus—whether surplus skills
and talent or money and material—to produce
objects that performed beyond their immediate
uses (for instance, ceramic plates) by eliciting
pleasure from the viewer or user. As such, a vari-
ety of richly decorated objects in different media
(as opposed to canvas painting and three dimen-
sional sculpture), wall paintings (properly also
part of
architectUre
), and illustrated books form
the bulk of historical Islamic art.
Islamic art is first of all a subdiscipline of art
history concerned with the study of a variety of
visual cultures collected under the rubric Islam.
The designation of the field was in place by
1900 when the first publications titled Islamic
Art replaced ones dedicated to the ethno-racial/
regional categories a
rab
, Persian, Turkish, Mor-
esque, and Indian art. The earlier trend followed
the model of the Napoleonic invasion and explo-
ration of e
gypt
in 1798, with its agenda of know-
ing, ordering, controlling, and colonizing. Recent
scholarship has made great strides in overcoming
this legacy and its Orientalizing offshoots, but its
effects continue to dominate views of the field and
its contents.
Despite excellent work by archaeologists, pale-
ographers, epigraphers, and historians, Islamic art
was understood up to the mid-20th century as
the material reflection of unchangeable religious
essences and racial characteristics. Among its ste-
reotyped features was the supposed Semitic-Arab
abhorrence of the representation of living beings,
which coincided with Islamic injunctions against
Ceramic artist, Turkey
(Juan E. Campo)
K 64
art
the making of images. The infinite
arabesqUe
,
with its floral, geometric, and calligraphic variet-
ies, compensated for this lack while repeating the
formula of the essential oneness of God. The orna-
mented objects, and especially the rugs and carpets
that were much in demand by collectors and muse-
ums, reflected the Arab Muslim’s nomadic desert
heritage, which did not encourage great works of
painting or sculpture, the types of work that popu-
lated European art. An updated version of such
Orientalist views surfaced in London’s World of
Islam Festival in 1976. The films, exhibitions, and
publications that accompanied the festival ensured
the wide dissemination of its views, and some of
these were adopted by some young Arab states in
constructing their national identities.
Islamic art is now conventionally defined as
art made for Muslims by Muslims in primarily
Islamic contexts. The new definition allows for
possibilities of differentiation in place and time
and facilitates the organization of the material into
the chapters of survey books. Nonetheless, it is not
without problems. It locates Islamic art outside
the processes of art production and consumption
studied by art historians. And it endorses chrono-
logical and regional divisions at the expense of
intellectual, philosophical, economic and other
(including religious) developments. Some of these
problems arise from the huge amount of material
in different media studied in the field and from
its temporal and geographic scope: India to Spain
from 650 to 1800 (which still leaves out large
areas with an Islamic presence and interrupts the
temporal range at the point when the field came
into being).
These problems may begin to dissipate once
we realize that Islamic art is a modern Euro-Amer-
ican construct based on otherness and difference.
Once that happens, the material will be opened up
to new theoretical and critical considerations that
will place it more properly within the processes
and histories of human creativity.
See also o
rientalism
.
Nuha N. N. Khoury
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