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Reviewed by:
  • Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean
  • Luca Somigli (bio)
Vojtěch Jirat-Wasiutyński, editor. Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean. University of Toronto Press. x, 252. $85.00

Growing out of a conference held at Queen’s University in 2002, this collection of ten essays provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the [End Page 290] representation of the Mediterranean region in modern art and is one of the most interesting results in the increasingly crowded field of Mediterranean studies. In his introductory essay, the editor traces the history of the ‘idea of Mediterranean’ from the eighteenth century, when it began to take shape, to the present. He argues convincingly that its elaboration was an almost necessary component of European modernity, as it provided an ambiguous space, linked to modern Europe yet outside it, upon which Europe itself could project its fantasies of both otherness and origin – a space, that is, characterized simultaneously as pre-modern and therefore archaic or even barbaric, and as the mythical site where Western civilization was born. The implications of such a construction are eloquently demonstrated by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s study of the representation of modern Greece in nineteenth-century Northern European art and photography. The interpretation of Greece as a primitive land disconnected from its ancient past and open to the ‘civilizing’ influence of the European powers served not only the imperialistic aims of Britain, Germany, and France in the area, but also their construction of a self-image as the ‘true’ heirs of Hellenic civilization. To this, the author opposes the works of Greek artists who, in rejecting ‘the classical mirage cultivated by the colonial imagination,’ turned to ethnography and history to articulate a counter-discourse of the country as historically and culturally multiple and yet unified. Another example of the manifold uses of the Mediterranean as cultural signifier is Anne Dymond’s essay on Paul Signac, in which she demonstrates how the French painter could overturn the nineteenth-century view of the south of France as a site of pre-modern backwardness by refashioning it into a symbol of the anarchist ideal of natural harmony.

Most of the essays are concerned with how, between the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, European artists visualized the Mediterranean as Other, even when coming themselves from regions abutting on it. (In addition to the contributions mentioned, they include John Zarobell’s study of the relationship between landscape painting and colonial land policy in Algeria under the Second Empire; André Dombrowski’s essay on Hans von Marées’s new classicism; and John Klein’s analysis of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs as the expression of an idyllic vision of the Mediterranean as refuge from the horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath.) Other essays take a more theoretical perspective. In ‘Allegories of Modernity,’ Francesco Loriggio engages closely with Edward Said’s works and with recent accounts of modernism and postmodernism to articulate a notion of the Mediterranean as chronotope, a particular configuration of the relation of time and space – an interpretation supported by a remarkably perceptive reading of Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. Through the study of a series of [End Page 291] portraits by Amedeo Modigliani and of the painter’s posthumous reception, Emily Braun reflects on the unstable nature of some of the oppositional categories – ‘Christian and Jewish, civilized and primitive, classical and Orientalist’ – upon which the discourse on the Mediterranean has been structured.

The last two essays complicate the otherwise fundamentally Eurocentric perspective of the volume. Alla Myzelev considers the representation of Islamic art in the L.A. Mayer Museum in Jerusalem in relation to Israeli nationalism, and argues that, by confining Islamic culture outside the realm of everyday life, the museum furthers the division between Arab and Jewish culture within Israel. David Prochaska’s essay on the contemporary Moroccan-French photographer Yasmina Bouziane offers an example of an artistic practice that challenges the Orientalism of Western popular art (postcards in particular) from a distinctly post-colonial point of view. This essay is an important reminder that cultural relations are never simply one way, and...

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