ART
Islamic sale, which was a longstanding sale, the Orientalists really opened up people’s eyes to Orientalist art, particularly to our Islamic buyers, who have since become real supporters. They now spend more on pictures than they do on Islamic art, when they were introduced to this through Islamic art,” says Piening. It’s not just individuals who are driving the market. “There’s institutional buyers as well active now, such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as other museums that are quietly collecting as well. There are even more museums in the wider Islamic world that are being developed and are acquiring works in the meantime, such as in Southeast Asia. Indonesia has the biggest Muslim population in the world. Even though none of these pictures depict this part of the world there’s an understanding of the world,” says Piening. The Islamic art sale in particular pairs well with these paintings, allowing people to see both the real life artifacts and the way that western artists depicted them. “What’s fascinating also is having the sale in tandem with the Islamic sale is that the pictures depict some of the costumes, ceramics, tiles, metalwork and weapons you find in the Islamic sale, so there is a dialogue between the pictures and the objects,” says Piening. For its 2019 sale, the key pieces are by Gerome, who also is known for his 1896 non-Orientalist painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. “Gerome was a key proponent of the Orientalist genre. He is arguably France’s most famous Orientalist painter of his day. The popularity is not driven by the artist but the subject matter. It’s been interesting to see people not driven by the artists but as by the subject matter. Buyers have come into the field who haven’t heard of what is to me famous artists, but are simply drawn by the compelling subjects,” says Piening. Gerome’s painting Rider and His Steed in the Desert, a rare masterpiece, was sold for $1,494,224. Another one of Gerome’s most famous paintings was also sold in the auction, Evening Prayer, 62
Cairo, which commanded the second highest price of the sale at $950,870. The former was sold to an institutional buyer, while the latter was sold to a private buyer. “Gerome, as you can tell by his proto-photographic style, was very influenced by photography. In fact, his brother in law was Adolphe Goupil who was a publisher of prints after painting and was also a key photographer. He travelled to Egypt with his brotherin-law, as Adolphe took a lot of photographs which Gerome would take back to the studio, study and he would actually work his compositions up from photographs taken from the field as well as sketches he himself made,” says Piening. Gerome traveled to Egypt at least six or seven times. He went up and down the Nile, spent time in Cairo, he also travelled to Turkey, went to Istanbul and Izmir. You can’t expect a westerner to fully understand the culture—how could you—but he made a good attempt to try. He was not an armchair Orientalist, he didn’t attempt to feed off other people’s accounts or pictures. He took poetic and artistic license, and his pictures aren’t always true, they are at least founded upon first hand experience, which is more that could be said for the more exoticising Orientalist, who depicted things such as the harem, who could never have had access to that those spaces.” Rider and His Steed in the Desert is a particularly striking piece. “This picture in particular is not only photographic but cinematic. It was painted in 1872, long before cinema had even been invented, but there’s something in this painting that to me anticipates cinema and I’d like to think that cinematographers took some inspiration from artists, not just the other way around. This is like a shot out of Lawrence of Arabia. It also evokes more modern films—the great desert panoramas of George Lucas, or of Westerns. This is an eastern sea, but it could be the great American west. The contrast between the incredible focus between the horse and the rider and
the more sketched background, which of course is exactly how the human eye perceives, and indeed the camera— you can only focus on one thing,” says Piening. “The reactions I’ve gotten ranged from moving to awesome, in the true sense.” Connecting with history is indeed one of the most important parts of these paintings, for collectors as well as art and history scholars worldwide.