By Marie-Jeanne Berger
It is usually a bad omen to walk into a gallery and find out that the collection on display belongs to the ruler of the country that the gallery is named after. Luckily for the art-going public with access to the new American University in Cairo campus, Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi (member of the UAE Supreme Council and ruler of Sharjah) evidently has in his private collection a series of very distinct and engaging prints.
Showing at the Sharjah Art Gallery, the Prisse D’Avennes exhibit, titled “Arab Art in Cairo through the Historic Architectural Monuments,” is a series of lithographs printed in the 1860s and 70s; a compendium of Islamic design and decorative arts documenting a specific “way of life” distinct to this part of the world, colored in vivid mustard yellows, royal blues, scarlets and forest greens.
The individual leafs of the book, when hung and framed around the gallery, don’t appear so much as an obsessive categorization of the visual landscape of Egypt. Rather, they appear altogether modern and fresh. The individual prints of the book are so diverse that while walking through the exhibition, the viewer has a sense that the pieces are kitschy, nostalgic, ironic and original, all at the same time.
While the images are all representative of different subject matter and styles of illustration, one thing brings them together: Emile Prisse D’Avennes himself. In his desire to isolate and classify the unfamiliar, the viewer is given an insight into the man behind the prints, and the book becomes an oddball scrapbook-memorial that details his obsessions and infatuations during his travels.
The range of objects and arts, both high and low, that intrigued Prisse D’Avennes ran the gamut of visual expression: calligraphy, book binding, mosque architecture, mashrabiya, geometrical patterns and arabesques, carpets, doors, graves, furniture. As if everything around him needed ordering, Prisse D’Avennes ventured to recreate specimens as they appeared to him. Why, though, did he feel the need to document?
Following in the footsteps of those other French classifiers, commanders and commodifiers, Prisse D’Avennes, like Napoleon and his expedition before him, felt the need to comprehend an unusual world around him. As a result, each specimen seems quite lonely on the page, compartmentalized and separated from its larger surroundings. Instead of the whole mosque, the viewer sees part of the ceiling. And instead of seeing the whole book, the viewer sees part of the frame, just a fragment.
The first pieces on view are architectural details of renowned mosques. “Spécimens de Plafonds (ceiling fragments) of the mosque of El-Bordeyni” — the heart of religious worship and veneration — looks retro. The geometric dodecagonal stars use a color palette continued throughout the illustrations that seems straight out of a 1970s soap opera, and it is striking how these kinds of stylistic cues seem to return to us so unabashedly imitated from a prior time.
Burnt golds twist around a nautical color scheme reminiscent of “Gilligan’s Island” and other sun-drenched California classics. Other prints reconstruct fonts and decorative floral patterns in a way that looks unmistakably Art Nouveau from that side of history. Black swooping curves twist around shapes in umber, brown and blood red. All of these shapes and shades seem dismembered from some sort of bigger idea. Alone, they look like patterned wrapping paper, rather than bestowing a sense of movement to these exalted halls.
But the extent of Prisse D’Avenne’s neurotic coupage is most apparent in the “Dome” print and the frieze patterns, the calligraphy prints, mashrabiya prints, ceiling motifs and wall patterns prints. The slightest differences in design are aesthetically arranged on the same page, a guide for the aficionado or connoisseur of Islamic arts. Each specific design is cut from its body and placed on the page within the bounds of its own pattern, before the repetitions begin.
Rather than detailing the whole building for example, under the title “Architecture: Ornaments and Decorations,” design components for grand mosques and homes are broken up into singular elements to be appreciated. On the page they stand arranged, grouped together for the type of decorative art they represent, rather than the monument these elements attempt to honor.
Residents of this part of the world have been and continue to be pummeled and battered with images from a western visual history that claim to document some sort of objective truth about the Arab world. Images most commonly displaying this ‘truth’ revolve around pastoral paintings, people in prayer, photos and postcards of oriental women draped in modest shrouds (or with the occasional nip-slip), men smoking on shisha pipes, men in prayer, people languishing against buildings, door frames, and anything else that could be leaned upon, have directly and indirectly informed our appreciation of history and culture.
These kinds of ubiquitous images have even managed to make their way into the Prisse exhibit. What lends them a sense of greater success than the average oriental hack-job is the attention to detail of the buildings. They are in fact the focus of the prints, and the folks in the foreground merely an afterthought meant to emphasize how majestic these mosques and homes are; the people as a result seem exaggeratedly foreshortened and shrunken.
These images of geometric prints, and mosques, and authentic natives: they are all examples of tropes that have come to represent Islamic art. The viewer can chart these motifs through different media in their varying manifestations. In the bookbinding part, the kufic calligraphic print found on mosque interiors and exteriors reappears in print. Stylized animal forms — rabbits, tigers, deer — highly influenced by Chinese painting, we see them in the bookbinding prints, as we do repeated in ceramics, not so much in this show, but throughout the 8th until 16th century.
For the average orientalist or scrapbooker, the Prisse D’Avennes exhibition is a riot of visual diversions. But what seems so striking about a number of the prints is that as a whole, they seem distinctly private and personal. Despite the high degree of skill undeniably required to construct such accurate portrayals of the Islamic world here in Cairo, you cannot help but imagine Prisse D’Avennes sitting in a boxy office somewhere, making these images as if they were little paper dolls that he could cut out and play with, building this small world for himself out of meager snippets and shreds of this exotic, unexplored realm around him.
“Arab Art in Cairo through the Historic Architectural Monuments” is currently showing at the Sharjah Art Gallery at the AUC Center for the Arts. The exhibit closes on Feb. 26.
Silk fragment preserved in Toulouse, 14th century.
