Beauty in the Age of Empire by Raja Adal

Author:Raja Adal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURES 5.3–5.6 Sample from a set of some twenty-five educational drawing cards from the 1910s or early 1920s by the Egyptian artists Yūsuf Kāmil and Rāghib ʿAyyād. The cards are classified into four categories: figure 5.3, natural design (namūdhaj ṭabīʿī); figure 5.4, Egyptian design (namūdhaj miṣrī); figure 5.5, Arab design (namūdhaj ʿarabī); and figure 5.6, Western design (namūdhaj ifranjī). This ethno-regional classificatory scheme is typical of British works like Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament. Unlike Jones’s work, however, these cards did not attempt to survey the world’s artistic heritage in order to improve industrial designs but sought to articulate an Egyptian national art in relation to Western categories of art. Kāmil and ʿAyyād, “Namādhij al-rasm al-naẓarī,” cards 3, 5, 13, 23.

Missing from Jones’s Grammar of Ornament was Japan. It was left out of Jones’s encyclopedic work along with other forgotten regions like Africa, whose ornaments were largely unknown in British art schools and museums. It was only with the 1862 International Exposition in London that British designers discovered Japanese objects. One of them was Christopher Dresser, a student of Owen Jones, whose Principles of Decorative Design (1873) came to include the Japanese arts. Just like Jones’s work from two decades earlier, Dresser’s objective was to create a global typology of ornaments that could help to educate “those who seek a knowledge of ornament as applied to our [English] industrial manufactures.”34

Within a few years of the publication of Dresser’s work, a wave of interest in the Japanese arts known as Japonisme swept Europe and North America, and soon enough, Dresser was on board a ship to Japan. The product of his visit was a work specifically on Japanese ornament entitled Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882).35 Like other Orientalist works, Dresser’s volume contributed to giving Japan an artistic presence in Europe. From that point onward, Japan would rarely be excluded from Western surveys of world ornament or world art, where it found a place within the pantheon of autonomous national cultures.

Art did not just help people living outside of the West to gain subjectivity in the eyes of Western societies. It also helped construct the nation as an independent and attractive subject of history in the eyes of its own domestic audiences. In this respect, the late 1880s in Japan and the 1890s in Egypt were important to the construction of a national subject. In Japan, this period saw a new generation awaken from two decades of restless importation of Western instruments, practices, and institutions to find itself beset by the agonies of cultural alienation. This was a time when what Kenneth Pyle called “the new generation in Meiji Japan” sought to restore Japan’s cultural autonomy.36 Julia Thomas writes that by the 1890s “Japanese culture could begin to love nature without having to look outside itself.”37

This concern for a national culture could also be seen in the visual arts. In 1887 Okakura Kakuzō, one of this era’s leading art critics, began his career by embracing the ideas of Dresser and, more famously, the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa.

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