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By Nadia von Maltzahn and Monique BellanThe ArtSalon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making discusses the emergence and role of theart salon in the Arab region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,focusing on Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq. The book examines thesalon’s impact on the formation of taste and debates on art, and discusses thetransfers and cultural interactions between the Middle East, North Africa andEurope. Following the institutional model of the Paris salons, art salonsemerged in Algiers, Tunis and Cairo starting in the late 1880s. In Beirut, thesalon tradition reached its peak only after independence in the mid-twentiethcentury. Baghdad never had a formal salon, but alternative spaces andexhibition formats developed in Iraq from the late 1940s onwards. As in Paris,the salons in the region often defined the criteria of artistic production andpublic taste. The impact of the salon also lay in its ability to conveyparticular values, attitudes and aspirations. At the same time, the values andattitudes promoted by the salon – as well as the salon itself – were oftensubject to debate, which led to the creation of counter-salons or alternativeexhibition practices. The art salon helps us to understand changes in the artsystems of these countries, including the development of art schools,exhibition spaces and artist societies, and gives insight into the powerdynamics at play. It also highlights the networks and circulations that werepresent between the Arab region and Europe.Nadia Maltzahn and Monique Bellan (eds.), The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making, Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018.This book isthe result of a series of conversations and discussions that have taken placeat various forums. It started when we were brainstorming about a topic that wecould work on together at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Within her longer-termresearch project on aesthetic reflection and the way art is debated anddiscussed in various media in Lebanon and Egypt since the early twentiethcentury, Monique was at that point focusing on the avant-garde group Art et Liberté in Egypt, who challenged theaesthetic and political order of the late 1930s and 40s. Nadia had just startedworking on her case study of the Sursock Museum in Beirut, within the scope of herproject on the relationship between cultural policies, cultural production andthe public sphere in Lebanon. Since the Sursock Museum was known for its Salon d’Automne, and since the salon wasone of the exhibitions formats the Art etLiberté group rejected in Cairo, we started thinking about the role andimpact of the art salon on the formation of public taste and debates on art inthe Arab region, as well as on cultural interactions between the Middle Eastand Europe. Art salons emergedunder Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France as the official exhibition of theAcademy of Fine Arts in Paris. The Academies of Art in Paris and London andtheir annual salons soon became the most powerful institutions in the Europeanart world of the time, patronising art and directing public taste. Only in thenineteenth century did artists start to oppose the monopoly of the academy,resulting in the creation of new exhibition forums or independent salons, suchas the Salon des Refusés, the Salon d’Automne or the Salon desIndépendants in France. Initially guided by questions of the migration ofinstitutional patronage from Europe to the Arab region, in particular questionson how the salon, as an exhibition format, developed &#160;in North Africa and the Middle East, we organiseda panel on the art salon in the Arab region in multiple &#160;parts. The first part was held at the annualconference of the Italian Society of Middle Eastern Studies in Cataniain March 2016. The second part took place at the Middle East StudiesAssociation’s annual meeting in Boston in November 2016. A third paneldiscussion took place in January 2017 at the Sursock Museum. This event washeld within the frame of the Sursock Museum’s 32nd Salon d’Automne, which the newly-renovatedmuseum had just relaunched after many discussions on the function of the salonformat today. As we could see that the topic resonated both in academic and artcircles, we decided to partner with the Sursock Museum to bring everyonetogether in an international conference to discuss the emergence and evolutionof the art salon in the region in a comprehensive way. The conference tookplace in October 2017 at the Orient-Institut and the Sursock Museum, and was fundedby the Volkswagen Foundation. Conference poster: 'Contextualising the Art Salon in the Arab Region', Orient-Institut Beirut and Sursock Museum, October 2017.This book isa result of all of these discussions. It is divided into four thematic parts.The first two parts focus on early salons and the institutional construction oftaste, with case studies from North Africa (Part I) and Egypt (Part II). AlainMessaoudi analyses the emergence and evolution of the Tunisian annual artsalons, classifying the Salon tunisienas a provincial salon in a colonial location. Jessica Gerschultz examines thefoundational role played by the Salontunisien in the development of artistic categories and networks amongTunis-based artists, with the Salon serving as the earliest institutionalframework for delineating the concepts of “fine” and “decorative” art under theFrench Protectorate. In a similar vein, Nancy Demerdash-Fatemi inquires intothe nature of the salon in French colonial Algeria, reconsidering the powerdynamics at play and underlining the processes of taste-making in Algeriansalons of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.In Cairo,Maria-Mirka Palioura sheds light on the archive of the Greek Orientalist painterTheodore Ralli, one of the co-founders of the first Cairo Salon, examining theproduction of art and its reception by the communities of the Europeanbourgeoisie in colonial Cairo. Focusing on the annual Cairo Art Salon of theSociety of the Lovers of Fine Arts and the rival La Chimère Salon, Nadia Radwandiscusses the Egyptian art salon as a space of cultural transfer in which tasteand canon were established but also challenged in the early-twentieth century.Challenges tothe official salon and the creation of alternative exhibition practices, whichNadia Radwan starts to discuss, is the subject of the third part of thisvolume. Monique Bellan considers resistance movements to the art salon, particularlyin the form of the historical avant-garde in Egypt. She discusses how theexhibition catalogues and invitation cards of Art et Liberté were media that defied established taste and modesof perception. Amin Alsaden argues that domestic spaces in mid-twentieth-centuryBaghdad represented alternative salons, a hybrid model that acted as, whatRancière termed, a “community of sense” that fostered exchanges, circulatedideas and formulated aesthetic taste among middle- and upper-class Baghdadis. The fourthpart focuses on circulations between Europe and the Arab region and oninstitutional guidance. While the migration of institutional patronage is anaspect present in all chapters, this section highlights the movements ofsystems and artists. Camilla Murgia concentrates on the artistic exchangesbetween North Africa and France that were determined by the systems of rewards,scholarships and subsidies of North African salons, revealing how the systemaffected the rise of a national art and how this art became progressivelydifferent from the French model. Catherine Cornet scrutinizes the nexus betweenthe Cairo Youth Salon and the international arena. She shows how participationat the Cairo Youth Salon was instrumental in being admitted to the EgyptianAcademy in Rome and also in selection for the Venice Biennale as part of thestate-sponsored art circuit. Nadia von Maltzahn’s chapter revolves around the Salon d’Automne at Beirut’s SursockMuseum in its cultural context. It examines the influence of the museum’s Salonin patronising art, and contextualise the role of the museum as an institutionin shaping the artistic landscape in Lebanon.The final contribution is an edited transcript of a conversation with British artist and Royal Academician, Eileen Cooper, which illuminates the selection process and organisation of the Summer Exhibition, drawing parallels to the Sursock Museum’s Salons d’Automne. The volume offers insights into the evolution of the art salon in selected countries in the Arab region. Further research is needed, for instance on the impact of European art salons on Arab artists’ careers,&#160; as well as research on other salons in the region such as the Salon d’Automne in Damascus or the salons in Morocco. We hope that this book will stimulate further research. Monique Bellan (left) and Nadia von Maltzahn (right), Book Launch of The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making, Sursock Museum, 12 January 2019. Source: Sursock Museum.Nadia von Maltzahn is the Deputy Director of the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB). She is the author of The Syria-Iran Axis: Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2013/2015) and other publications revolving around cultural practices in Lebanon and the Middle East. She holds a DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research interests include cultural policies, artistic practices and the circulation of knowledge. Her current research project deals with cultural policies in Lebanon, in particular cultural institutions and their role in the public sphere.Monique Bellan works as a Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB). She holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin and an MA from the University of Bonn. She has worked at the collaborative research centre ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’ &#160;of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Her current project examines aesthetic reflection in twentieth-century Lebanon and Egypt. She is the author of dismember remember: The Anatomical Theatre of Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué (Reichert, 2013).Citation: Nadia von Maltzahn and Monique Bellan, The Art Salon in the Arab Region, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 01.04.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18282.