Metropolitan Museum of Art Orientalism

Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy takes a fresh look at the ways nineteenth-century European and Ottoman artists portrayed and promoted the Middle East through interpretations and emulations of Islamic art and design. Known as Orientalism, the genre inspired by Islamic cultures relied equally on fact and fantasy to create iconic images both celebrated and interrogated today. This book tells a new, multifaceted story, taking into account how major figures ranging from the French painters Ingres, Delacroix, and Gérôme to the Ottoman statesman and artist Osman Hamdi Bey shaped an understanding of their world by incorporating Islamic motifs into their pictures. Addressing manifold questions about ethnic and racial difference, gender, power relations, and colonialist attitudes, the publication reinterprets beloved works of art such as Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.

The exhibition runs from June 12, 2026 to February 28, 2027