Subscribe

Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.

On a February evening in 1913, New York’s bohemian elite gathered at Tiffany Studios for one of the most dazzling spectacles the city had ever seen. The New York Times reported breathlessly on the event, describing it as an “Egyptian fête” held in a “riot of color.”