Orientalism in Western Art and Music

Paper Summary:

This paper stresses that, even though Western artists are looking for new ideas when they seek Oriental input, they can only interrupt the Orient through their own Western culture. The author explains that French painter Eugene Delacroix' "Death of Sardanapalus" and Austrian artist Leopold Carl Muller's "The Market in Cairo" are examples of orientalism in Western art. The author states that the Beatles, seeking the teachings of India's gurus, brought orientalism into modern pop culture.

From the Paper:

"The Western World that Delacroix knew lay on the brink of the Victorian age. Painted in 1827, the Death of Sardanapalus speaks to a people already grown accustomed to the strictures of middle-class morality. As older and wilder days ended, North Americans and Europeans were already entering into a new era of strong religious devotion, clean living, and sexual repression. The wanton abandoning of oneself to pleasure like Sardanapalus seemed to be something that was still possible only within the hidden corridors of the seraglio, a place where leering, bearded despots sought freely to satisfy their carnal lusts. The fact that Sardanapalus's world is about to be consumed in fire is but a fitting moral judgment. Though he can gape at the writhing, sensuous forms of the King's doomed attendants, the European or North American man can only dream of what he cannot have the pleasures of the flesh are condemned hellfire."

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