Blog Post 4

Blog Post 4

The first building block for all our blog posts was the theme of borders.  The “borders” we focused on were between European countries and North or Sub-Saharan Africa in the 19^th and 20^th century.  Each student began their blog by choosing one artwork and selecting one particular aspect within the artwork to research further.  By partaking in these blog posts everyone was able to explore elements of their own choosing and which interested them, yet remain under the same theme.  The topics that were researched in these various posts ranged anywhere from various portraiture to trade, racism, gender, and even social class.  Exploring these topics gave a better understanding and explanation of ideas, which existed within Europe because of these exchanges with outside countries, and are present in these artworks. 

Although most individuals’ posts looked at different artworks, one of the themes I saw across the blog posts was how Europeans poorly represented aspects and people that were outside their own culture.  This is because Westerners were intrigued by this “exoticness”, which is why it was a popular subject when it came to artworks.   For example, my blog post discussed how Africans were placed in portraits of elite women simply as a social marker, their skin color made them different and therefore, they were portrayed at items of luxury.  While another post discussed the misrepresentation of the harems in artworks of the Orient by Europeans.  This occurred because they had never truly seen a harem and created images on what they believed to be and look like. A third blog researched the differences in portraiture of soldiers in the Ottoman army and how the European artists chose to represent each soldier based on their race.     

If a reader is to take anything away from these blog posts it should be the various relationships, between Europe countries and African at this time.  When studying these paintings, one is able to learn much about society and culture of not only Europe, but also Africa.  These societies are not simple and straightforward; instead, they were complex and multidimensional, with many different layers to interpret and study.  While studying this time period paintings allowed researches a visual illustration of what society was like then.  In today’s culture, we use television and newspapers to learn about society and culture; while in the 19^th and 20^th century, paintings were the version of mass media and it was how people developed ideas and opinions of outside cultures.

For the class Royalty to Revolution these blog posts projects granted students the ability to further study visual aspects of European culture just as the course already entails, but also being able to bring in another element of their interest, which was how the European culture changed because of these exchanges and interaction with African countries.  By doing this we were able to see how these cultures interacted and eventually became forcefully meshed together and how this is represented in the art world.