Can you love a painting and still feel guilty about it? That question hangs over the Metropolitan Museum’s Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy. Since Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, Western art about the Islamic world has often been read as imperial fantasy. Critic Melik Kaylan walked the show and came out delighted. It’s gorgeous, he writes, and it tells a richer story than that critique allows.
Side by side with the sources
About 180 works — textiles, paintings, books, furniture, photographs — sit between the Met’s European galleries and its Islamic galleries, so you can enter from either end. The clever move is pairing Western works with the images and objects that inspired them. It all starts with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. The invasion failed, but his experts glimpsed wonders like the Rosetta Stone, and the fascination spread across Europe and eventually the U.S.
Kaylan argues the traffic ran both ways. Those discoveries helped give birth to Egyptology, and to museums in the region itself. Enter from the Islamic side and you’ll meet a blue-and-turquoise vase made in France but modeled on Alhambra originals, plus a floral Iznik plate and the English Minton counterpart it inspired. World fairs spread the motifs, and European cities even built shopping arcades modeled on bazaars.
The painter who answers back
The paintings are the glamorous part, and the contested one. Artists such as Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme have long been faulted for exoticizing a culture they mostly imagined from afar. Kaylan grants that Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque is breathtaking and plainly inaccurate. The show’s best rebuttal, in his eyes, is Osman Hamdi Bey, a French-trained Ottoman pioneer whose realistic canvases show daily life in Constantinople.
Hamdi Bey’s At the Mosque Door (1891) glows with light and shadow. His Young Woman Reading (1880), sunny and richly colored, is, Kaylan writes, “a joy to look at, like the show as a whole.” It’s on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through Feb. 28, 2027.
An afternoon like that is money well spent. A memorable exhibition often outlasts whatever else the same money might’ve bought, and the art worth owning is whatever your family actually lives with and loves.