Everyone loves labels. Italian Renaissance, French Baroque, Classical Greek—such little conveniences help us understand and comprehend the often tangled and messy reality of artists and art movements, which, like any living thing, are always more complex and fascinating than any label can express. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration, a collection of essays edited by Mary D. Sheriff, chair of the art department of The University of North Carolina, takes on the enduring, monolithic, and inadequate label of “European Art” by questioning what goes into that concept. Rather than completely reject the label, however, Sheriff explains, she and her fellow essayists “aim… to loosen and redraw the boundaries of what has constituted ‘European art’” by focusing on “different contact zones, and in distinguishing different sorts of exchange” between cultures. Sheriff et al. ask us when thinking of European art not to think “locally” but rather to think globally—to recognize just how much the rest of the world contributed to the grand tradition of “European art” that continues to dominate what we consider “fine art.”

“[T]his collection aims to explore cultural contact as a set of dynamic, varied, and continuous processes that have been essential to forming the arts we call European,” Sheriff asserts. She begins with the vivid metaphor of walking through a typical museum separated into the typical categories. Cultural Contact asks us to tear down those walls and reenact the actual porous reality of national boundaries. Working between the time Columbus discovered the New World and the Jazz Age of the twentieth century, these essays focus not only on Eurocentrism, but also on how the cultural contact confirms choices and biases shaped by commerce, such as the separation of “fine arts” from decorative arts and how certain countries (Italy, Holland, France) dominated the art landscape to the exclusion of others, including other European countries, especially those in the denigrated “Eastern” Europe conceived in the nineteenth century.

By breaking down one of the foundational shibboleth of Western art history—the concept of European art itself—Sheriff and her cohorts present well known art in a new context, as well as introduce new, fascinating artists that exemplify cultural contact. The cover of Cultural Contact shows one of Eugene Delacroix’s Moroccan works created during his time in that region, just one example of French artists delving into the exotic to inform their “French” and “European” art. As Elisabeth A. Fraser points out in her essay, Delacroix’s 1830s artistic invasion came on the heels of Napoleon’s military invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798. Napoleon, however, failed, whereas Delacroix triumphed, sort of. Fraser sees Delacroix’s Moroccan works “record[ing] the ambiguities and insecurities of the European traveler in a place where he has little control.” Because of this conflicted relationship, Delacroix, in Fraser’s view, fails to “invade” through his Orientalism and “randomly collect[s] visual artifacts without seeming to discern an underlying essence of place.” Instead of the outworn idea of European art conquering the “other,” this essay presents the idea of the “other” pushing back and, perhaps, conquering in return.