Challenging Orientalism: New questions of perception and

reception

This paper is an analysis of the Neoromanian or National Romanian Architectural Style from
a post-colonial perspective. Recent authors have identified similarities between European
overseas colonies and recently emerged nation-states in South-Eastern Europe in the 19th
century focusing on the cultural, economic and even political dependency of states such as
Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro to Western European Empires. Less explored has been
the way in which numerous Western artists engaged with and reinterpreted the artistic
heritage of these countries for a Western audience, creating quasi-colonial art works. More
so, local-born artists, members of upper classes, and trained in Western universities, have
used and reinterpreted ‘their’ artistic heritage in the same orientalist manner, that was
essentially a way for the bourgeois upper class to consolidated their social status. But if local
artists shared the attitudes, techniques and thinking of their Western counterparts, what does
this say about the European artistic scene of the late 19th century? What was the influence of
South-East European artists and of the artistic heritage in these new countries in the Western
world? The paper will explore these questions by taking a specific artist phenomenon as case-
study: the emergence of the Neoromanian architectural style at the end of the 19th century.
The style is commonly seen as the patriotic endeavour of a group of Romanian architects who
wished to continue the traditional ‘national’ architecture and reinterpreted the historical
heritage to create national artworks. But the style was part and parcel of nation-building
efforts, reinforcing and even defining concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘national art’, ‘national
heritage’. Regional or ethnic identities were obscured in the process while a romantic image
of the country’s history and artistic legacy was defined.