A L’orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The present volume offers a collection of essays that examines the mechanisms and strategies of collecting, displaying and appropriating Islamic art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many studies in this book concentrate on lesser known collections of Islamic art, situated in Central and Eastern Europe that until now have received little attention from scholars. Special attention is given to the figure of the Swiss collector Henri Moser Charlottenfels, whose important, still largely unstudied collection of Islamic art is now preserved in the Bernisches Historisches Museum, Switzerland.

Contributors to the volume include young researchers and established scholars from Western and Eastern Europe and beyond: Roger Nicholas Balsiger, Moya Carey, Valentina Colonna, Francine Giese, Hélène Guérin, Barbara Karl, Katrin Kaufmann, Sarah Keller, Agnieszka Kluczewska Wójcik, Inessa Kouteinikova, Axel Langer, Maria Medvedeva, Ágnes Sebestyén, Alban von Stockhausen, Ariane Varela Braga, Mercedes Volait.

Les contributions de l’ouvrage examinent le mécanisme et les stratégies relatifs à la collection, la présentation et l’appropriation des arts de l’Islam au XIXe siècle et début du XXe siècle. Elles mettent l’accent sur des collections situées en Europe centrale et orientale, lesquelles ont été peu étudiées jusqu’à présent. Une attention particulière est dédiée à la figure du collectionneur Suisse Henri Moser Charlottenfels, dont les objets se trouvent aujourd’hui au Bernisches Historisches Museum (Suisse) et qui ont été de même peu étudiés. Les textes émanent de jeunes chercheurs comme de chercheurs confirmés, basés en Europe occidentale et orientale, et au-delà.

Francine Giese is director of Vitrocentre and Vitromusée, Romont, Switzerland. From 2014-2019 she held a SNSF professorship at the Institute of Art History, University of Zürich, where she led the research project Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe. She has widely published on Ibero-Islamic architecture, exchange and transfer processes and on architectural orientalism.
Mercedes Volait is CNRS Research Professor at InVisu, Paris, and associated fellow to the Research Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has published extensively on art and architecture in Modern Egypt, and studies islamic art collecting from Egypt and Syria in the nineteenth century (with Moya Carey).
Ariane Varela Braga is a lecturer at the University of Geneva. She was research assistant on the SNSF project Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival (University of Zürich, 2014-2019). She is the author of monographs, edited volumes and articles on nineteenth-century theories of ornament and decorative arts, colored marbles and artistic migrations.