Doha, August 21 (QNA) - Qatar Museums announced Wednesday a thought-provoking exhibition on the art and legacy of the French painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904), marking the 200th anniversary of the artist's birth; on view from Nov. 2, 2024 to Feb. 22, 2025, Seeing Is Believing: the art and influence of Gerome unfold across three separate yet interconnected sections, each one presenting, questioning or reevaluating Gerome's artistic output through different perspectives, artistic mediums and points in time.
The exhibition is organized by the future Lusail Museum in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which will host the presentation.
The exhibition features nearly 400 works, drawing extensively from the future Lusail Museums unparalleled collection of Orientalist art, including European depictions of the MENASA region spanning the 16th through 19th centuries. It also includes significant loans from Qatar Museums General Collections and prestigious institutions worldwide such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia. New works commissioned from artists including Babi Badalov (b. 1959, Azerbaijan) and Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b. 1978, Tunisia) will reinterpret Gérôme for the 21st century.
One of the most famous and commercially successful European artists of the 19th century, Gerome was heralded in his own time as a history painter and a visual storyteller, bringing the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome to life. Yet it was as a chronicler of the modern cultures and peoples of North Africa and the Middle East that he made his greatest impact. Traveling repeatedly to Egypt and Turkey and making many other stops in the region between 1855 and 1880, Gerome created some of Orientalism's most enduring images and themes. His depictions, at once fancifully imaginative and faithfully naturalistic, played a major role in defining the MENA world for Europe, America, and Britain. Since 1978, his work has been the subject of critical scrutiny by art historians including Linda Nochlin, who famously read his paintings as part of a larger and more disturbing colonial plan.
Seeing Is Believing: the art and influence of Gerome presents new and more wide-ranging interpretations of the artist, without ignoring the contributions of these scholars, or of Edward Said's groundbreaking book, Orientalism.
The exhibition is curated by Emily Weeks, Guest Curator, Lusail Museum; Giles Hudson, Curator of Photographs, Lusail Museum; and Sara Raza, Guest Curator, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. It is organized as a legacy of Qatar - France 2020 Year of Culture, a year-long program of collaborations between institutions across both countries. (QNA)