Orientalism: At The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum Of American Art

Winter Park, Fla.

:As technology, trade and politics advanced in the mid-Nineteenth Century, exotic distant Middle and Far Eastern countries and their mysterious cultures became readily accessible to a new and emerging class of style-conscious Americans — via travel for the affluent, the imagination for everyone else. In homes and galleries alike, chic imported decorative objects from these far-off lands became all the rage. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, Orientalism, as the new style had been coined, was everywhere, its influence permeating popular culture.

A new vignette-style exhibition, "Orientalism — An Eye for the Exotic," now open at The Morse Museum, is a lush installation of decorative objects that express Western fascination with the art and design of the Orient during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It will remain on view through August 2008.

The vignettes at the Morse are a longstanding tradition established by the museum's founder, the late Jeannette Genius McKean. An accomplished artist and interior designer, McKean fashioned small room-sized displays featuring creative, themed interiors in which objects from the collections were utilized as complementary decorative elements.

In 1942, prior to her marriage, Jeannette Genius founded The Morse on the campus of Rollins College, naming it the Morse Gallery of Art in honor of her grandfather, Chicago industrialist and Winter Park philanthropist Charles Hosmer Morse. Hugh F. McKean, then a Rollins art professor, was appointed as its director. Soon after that, in 1945, McKean and Genius were married.

Jeannette grew up in the gracious Kenwood section of Chicago in the Richardson Romanesque-style mansion her grandfather had built and later presented to her parents as a wedding gift. The home was richly detailed with stained glass windows and carved mahogany cabinetry, and her artistic mother, Elizabeth Morse Genius, bought American Impressionist paintings to hang on the walls. Many of the paintings from the original collection remain in the Morse's troves of artworks today. As with many wealthy families of the period, the Geniuses also collected Tiffany glass.

With a rekindled fondness, 13 years after she founded the Morse Gallery, Jeannette McKean, remembering the satiny, iridescent glass in her family home and still regarding Tiffany's work as exceptionally elegant, staged the exhibition "Works of Art by Louis Comfort Tiffany." Having fallen from public favor decades earlier, the exhibition quickly became recognized as the first serious examination of Tiffany's work to have been presented by a museum since the turn of the century.