Orientalism in New York City.(Current and coming)(Hajji Baba Club)

The Hajji Baba Club, the country's oldest and most celebrated organization of rug collectors, is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this spring with an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society of a large group of important rugs and other woven textiles owned by the club's members. The objects come mostly from the Near East and Central Asia, and the exhibition explores how they were made and used in their countries of origin, as well as how people in the United States initially understood them. A companion exhibition at the historical exhibition at the historical society, Allure of the East: Orientalism in New York 1850-1930, creates a context for the materials by examining a selection of paintings, prints, photographs, and decorative arts that reveal the rage for orientalism that emerged in New York City during the later part of the nineteenth century.

The advent of the steamship, increased travel opportunities in the Near East, and a burgeoning publishing industry that turned out illustrated travelogues, such as William C. Prime's Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia (1865), as well as fictional accounts of the region, such as Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (1832), were among the factors that popularized the Near East in the American cultural imagination. By the 1870s artists such as Edwin Lord Weeks, Robert Swain Gifford, and Louis Comfort Tiffany began following in the footsteps of the French painter Jean Leon Gerome, who had made his first expedition to Egypt in the 1850s and made orientalist subjects ...