A RESEARCH ON ORIENTALISM CURRENT IN WESTERN PAINTING ART

Abstract

The concept of Orientalism in Western painting has been built on the distinction between the West and the East since its first appearance. The separation, which started with a geographical separation at first, has become a tool of domination with the discourses of superiority and the fictional expressions of the artists in the process. Although Orientalism emerged in the 13th century in European painting, it started to make itself felt from the beginning of the 19th century and was described as an art movement. The Orientalism movement, which covers the whole of Asia and the Middle East, is actually framed by the Turkish-Islamic world. Orientalist Western painters mostly tried to alienate the Eastern world, which they perceived as the other, with their egocentric perspective. The concept of Orientalism is an art movement that emerged under the leadership of French artists. Orientalism, which emerged in the early stages of Modernism, started with painting and spread to other branches of art and developed in practice by focusing on "othering". With the West's desire to colonize the East by dominating the East, the idea of ​​Orientalism has turned into the name of the cultural and political power element. The culture and art of the geographical region, which is the subject of Orientalist painting, is generally seen as primitive art. The Orientalist painting of the West appears as a powerful weapon in the representation of the other. Along with the mediation of art in the depiction of the social and cultural world of the Islamic world, it played a very active role in the formation of the West's visual memory and stereotypes of the East. The differences of the places belonging to the eastern geography, together with the preferences of the painters in the representation of the objects on their canvases, took on a homogeneous depiction of the East. In the paintings of Western Orientalist painters, the East is treated in a fairy-tale language as if it were not the real world. In this research, the images, signs, and symbols used by Western Orientalist artists in their paintings will be examined. The meanings of the motifs that Orientalist artists cover in their works and the messages they try to give to the audience in the subtexts will be tried to be revealed. In this research, the discourses of artists on the East in the Western thought of Orientalism that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries will be revealed and the indicators of the image of the East in Orientalist paintings will be examined.