Lionel Lindsay’s Maghreb: Orientalism as Anti-Modernism.

Lionel Lindsay still troubles Australian art history. An illustrator and etcher of undeniable skill, he voiced conservative aesthetics, including his anti-modernist and antisemitic polemic <italic>Addled Art</italic> of 1942. However, Lindsay was also philo-Arab, as he demonstrated in his 1929 visit to the Maghreb to meet Etienne Nasr’Eddine Dinet, the Islamophile Orientalist whose 1889 <italic>Snake Charmer</italic> was Lindsay’s favourite painting at the Art Gallery of NSW. During two months in Bou Saada and Kairouan, Lindsay made dozens of watercolours, drawings and meticulous etchings of ‘local character’, studied here as a group for the first time. Drawing on Lindsay’s unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs this article shows that this anti-modernist Anglo-Australian’s ‘Orientalism’ ignored the settlers and chose favourites among the peoples of the Maghreb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]