The Living Gallery: How Wynn Al Marjan Island Is Quietly Reversing the Direction of Orientalism

On December 8, 2025, Wynn Al Marjan Island issued a press release that most travel publications read for two minutes and quoted for one. The headline was "Wynn Al Marjan Island Announces Its Museum-Caliber Art Collection." The body covered the three pieces that would dominate the next 48 hours of trade coverage: a 66-million-year-old Triceratops skull, a commissioned sculpture by British artist Marc Quinn, and a 17th-century wool-and-silk tapestry whose counterparts hang at the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Buried six paragraphs deep, in a section attributed to Todd-Avery Lenahan, was a sentence that nobody picked up. It read: "A significant component of the collection is Lenahan's contemporary reinterpretation of the East-West artistic dialogue that shaped 19th-century Orientalism. Instead of Western artists bringing Middle Eastern imagery back to Europe, this collection reverses that journey, returning historically significant works to the region that inspired them."

That is not a marketing line. That is a curatorial position. And it is a position that no major institution in the Gulf has formally taken, despite the existence of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and Mathaf in Doha. A casino resort opening in spring 2027 is making a claim about cultural restitution that the Gulf's museums have not made out loud. This piece is about what that claim actually means, where it sits in 200 years of art history, and whether it survives the scrutiny it deserves.

This is a follow-up.On April 6, 2026, RAK Party published the first consumer piece on Wynn Al Marjan Island's art collection, focused on the three confirmed headline works. This article goes deeper on the collection's curatorial framing — the part that nobody covered.

What Wynn Officially Calls Its Collection

The collection has a name. Wynn calls it "the Living Gallery," and the December 8 press release is the first time the term appears in any public document about the resort. The phrase carries deliberate weight. A gallery, in conventional museum usage, is a contained space that visitors choose to enter. A living gallery is something else: a collection that lives inside the building's circulation, dispersed across public spaces, guest areas, and rooms, encountered as part of moving through the resort rather than as a destination within it.

The press release lists six historical periods the collection spans: prehistoric, ancient, Victorian, Old Master, natural-world, and Orientalist. That breadth is unusual for a single hospitality destination. Most luxury hotels with art programmes commission contemporary work or curate around a single theme. Six periods covering more than 66 million years of object history is closer to a museum's permanent collection than a hotel's lobby installation.

Lenahan's commentary in the same press release explains the integration philosophy. "Wynn Al Marjan Island's approach to art goes far beyond acquisition," he said. "Beauty is a universal language, and by integrating art into the fabric of the resort, Wynn invites guests to discover these pieces in an informal yet engaging and meaningful way. Too often, art becomes forgettable when presented as formal or static. We take the opposite approach, designing moments that encourage engagement across every age and background."

That philosophy is consistent with how Lenahan's 200-person Wynn Design & Development team has approached the entire building. The same "veiling and revealing" principle that governs the architecture (no single vantage point shows the full picture) governs the art deployment. You will not visit a gallery at Wynn Al Marjan Island. You will walk past a 66-million-year-old skull on the way to dinner. The collection is the building's circulation system, not a stop along it.

What 19th-Century Orientalism Actually Was

To understand what Lenahan means by reversing the journey, the journey itself needs context. Orientalism as an art movement began with Napoleon. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and Syria with a force that included over 150 scholars, scientists, and artists. The campaign was a military failure but a cultural detonation. Between 1809 and 1828, the French government published the Description de l'Égypte in twenty volumes, an encyclopaedic record of Egypt's monuments, flora, fauna, and people compiled by Napoleon's expedition team. The publication created a market in Europe for visual depictions of the Middle East, and a generation of painters began to fill it.

The names that mattered are still familiar to anyone who has walked through a major European museum. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), the leader of the French Romantic school, visited Algeria and Morocco in 1832 as part of a diplomatic mission and produced The Women of Algiers (1834), now hanging at the Louvre. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), the most commercially successful Orientalist of his generation, painted The Slave Market (now at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts), Prayer in the Mosque (at the Met), and dozens of meticulously detailed scenes of harems, bazaars, and courtyards. John Frederick Lewis lived in Cairo for several years before returning to England in 1851 to specialise in highly detailed interiors of upper-class Egyptian life. The Scottish landscape painter David Roberts spent eleven months travelling Egypt, Palestine, and Syria in 1838 and 1839, producing architectural lithographs that became enormously successful publications.

In 1893, the French Society of Orientalist Painters was formally founded with Gérôme as honorary president. The movement now had a professional infrastructure. Painters travelled, sketched, photographed, and brought their material back to studios in Paris and London where the actual canvases were finished. Props came from Parisian curio shops. Models came from Montparnasse circuses. Backdrops were copied from Ottoman postcards. The paintings were marketed as eyewitness testimony from the East, and the European middle class bought them in volume.

By the late 19th century, Orientalist work had reached almost industrial scale. Salons in Paris and London were filled with depictions of harems that no European male artist had ever entered, slave markets staged in studios with hired models, and architectural fantasies that combined accurate observation with invented detail. The paintings were stunning, technically virtuosic, and almost entirely about Europe rather than the Middle East. They were artefacts of how Europe wanted to imagine the East, not records of what the East was.

Edward Said and the Argument That Changed How These Paintings Are Read

In 1978, the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said published a book called Orientalism with Pantheon Books. It was 368 pages long, dense, occasionally exasperating, and almost immediately the most influential text in postcolonial cultural criticism. Said's argument, compressed beyond what it deserves, was this: the body of Western academic, literary, and visual work that called itself "Orientalism" was not neutral scholarship or innocent fascination. It was a system of representation that constructed the East as Europe's opposite (irrational, sensual, despotic, frozen in time) and that this construction served Europe's political and economic interests in the region. Said called the result "imaginative geography": a map of a real place drawn in service of fantasy.

The art-historical companion to Said's argument arrived in 1989, when Linda Nochlin published an essay called "The Imaginary Orient" in her book Politics of Vision. Nochlin took Gérôme's Snake Charmer (a painting of a nude boy holding a python before an audience of armed men against a tiled wall) and dismantled it on the basis that the realistic surface concealed a series of imperial assumptions about the East as exotic, primitive, and available for Western consumption. The painting's photographic detail, Nochlin argued, was part of its propaganda. The illusion of accuracy made the fantasy harder to refuse.

After Said and Nochlin, you cannot look at a 19th-century Orientalist painting the same way. The brushwork is still virtuosic. Gérôme is still one of the most technically gifted painters of his century. But the canvas now carries the weight of how it was made, by whom, for whom, and what work it was doing in the world. The paintings did not stop being beautiful. They started being understood.

Lenahan's Reverse Journey

This is the context Lenahan was invoking in his December 8 statement. When he wrote that the collection "reverses that journey, returning historically significant works to the region that inspired them," he was naming a specific art-historical movement (Orientalism), acknowledging the colonial dynamic that shaped it (Western artists bringing imagery back to Europe), and proposing a corrective gesture (returning those depictions to the region they depicted).

The mechanics of what this looks like in practice are not yet public. Wynn has not released a list of which Orientalist paintings the collection includes, which artists are represented, where the works were acquired, or how they will be displayed inside the resort. What we know is that Lenahan and his team have positioned the collection's Orientalist component as a deliberate cultural statement rather than a decorative choice. A Gérôme painting hanging in a corridor at Wynn Al Marjan Island is doing different work than the same painting hanging in the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. In the Clark, it is a study object surrounded by interpretive labels. In a corridor on Al Marjan Island, it is back in the geographical space it claimed to depict, hanging where the people it represents actually live.

Whether this changes the painting itself is a question that art historians will spend a long time debating. The painting does not become more accurate because it has come home. The European fantasies embedded in it do not dissolve when the audience walking past it speaks Arabic. But the relationship between the work and its viewer changes. An Egyptian guest at Wynn looking at a 19th-century French painting of an imagined Egyptian bazaar is in a different position than a French museum-goer looking at the same canvas in Paris in 1880. The viewer is now the subject, not the audience. That reversal is small, and it is also not nothing.

The Original InsightWynn Al Marjan Island is the first major institution in the Gulf to embed reverse Orientalism as a collection-wide curatorial principle. Individual Gulf museums have collected Orientalist works as part of broader holdings. Individual artists, most notably the Moroccan-born photographer Lalla Essaydi, have made entire bodies of work in conversation with Orientalist imagery. But no institution in the region has formally framed acquisition as restitution. A casino resort, of all things, is the first to put it on a press release.

The Precedent Wynn Is Not Acknowledging

Lenahan is not the first person to think about reversing Orientalism. He is the first to embed it in a hospitality collection, but the artistic conversation has been happening for over two decades, and at least one artist has done it more rigorously than any institution.

Lalla Essaydi, born in Morocco in 1956, is a photographer whose work makes the reversal explicit. Beginning in the early 2000s, she produced a series called Les Femmes du Maroc, in which Moroccan women are photographed in poses directly drawn from 19th-century harem paintings. The compositions reference Delacroix and Gérôme with an art historian's precision. But the women in Essaydi's photographs are not passive odalisques. They look directly at the camera. Their skin and clothing are covered in Arabic calligraphy, applied by Essaydi herself in henna, often quoting women's writings that the original Orientalist painters would never have read or recognised. Essaydi's work is in the permanent collections of the Met, the Smithsonian, and the British Museum. It is the most sustained and serious example of an artist doing what Wynn now claims to be doing institutionally.

There are also institutional precedents that complicate the "first in the Gulf" framing. The Sharjah Art Foundation has been commissioning and exhibiting work that interrogates Orientalist imagery for years. Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (opened in 2010), holds significant Arab modernist work that engages with Orientalist tropes. The Louvre Abu Dhabi (opened 2017) has Orientalist works in its collection, and its founding curatorial premise was already about cross-cultural dialogue, although not framed specifically as restitution.

What distinguishes Wynn's framing is the explicitness. The Sharjah Art Foundation operates within a contemporary art world that takes postcolonial critique as a given. It does not need to write "reversing the journey" into a press release, because that is already the assumed frame. Wynn does need to write it, because the audience for the press release is a global luxury hospitality market that does not assume postcolonial framing. Lenahan put the curatorial position into language a non-academic reader could parse, and in doing so, he made a claim that institutions which hold deeper credentials in the same space have not bothered to make publicly. Whether that is courageous or simply unaware of its precedents is a question worth asking.

Why a Casino Resort Is Doing What Gulf Museums Have Not

There is a structural reason a private hospitality company can make a curatorial claim that a state museum cannot. State museums in the Gulf operate under cultural diplomacy constraints. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a partnership with the French government. Its founding agreement specified the use of the "Louvre" name in exchange for loans, expertise, and curatorial guidance from a network of French museums. The institution cannot easily frame its Orientalist holdings as cultural restitution from France, because France is the partner that helps it operate.

Wynn has no such constraint. It is a private American company building a private resort with a private collection. It can position the work however it wants. The risk of a press release framing Orientalist acquisition as a return to the source is small because the audience is hospitality consumers, not museum trustees. The upside, in narrative terms, is significant. A collection that costs the same as another collection but tells a culturally meaningful story is worth more in editorial coverage and brand positioning. Whether the story is also true is a separate question, and one that the collection itself will eventually answer.

There is also a less generous reading. A casino resort claiming a cultural-restitution position can be a way of laundering the activity that pays for the building. The casino floor generates the revenue that funds the art. The art generates the editorial coverage that softens the casino. This is how Las Vegas has worked for decades. Steve Wynn collected Picassos in part because he understood that a Picasso in the lobby changes the way the casino in the basement is perceived. Lenahan inherited that lesson and is applying it to a more sophisticated cultural register.

The honest reading sits between the two. Wynn is making a real curatorial choice that has real cultural weight. It is also making a marketing choice that has real commercial value. Both can be true simultaneously, and the work in the collection is the same regardless of which motivation is foregrounded. A Gérôme painting hanging in a corridor at Wynn Al Marjan Island is back in the geography it depicted, regardless of why it ended up there.

What the Collection Has Not Yet Revealed

The Orientalist component of the collection is the least documented part. The press release named the period but listed no specific works, artists, or acquisition sources. Whether the collection includes a Delacroix, a Gérôme, a David Roberts lithograph, or a less famous painter is unknown. Whether the works will be displayed with interpretive labels acknowledging the historical context is unknown. Whether non-guests will be able to see them at all is unknown.

What we know is the framing, and the framing is the article. Wynn has chosen to position its Orientalist holdings as a corrective gesture rather than a decorative tradition, and that choice will be visible regardless of which specific paintings hang where. The 22 restaurants and lounges across the resort will provide the spaces. The design team will determine the placements. The original art collection piece covered the three confirmed headline works. The Orientalist component, when it eventually goes public, will be the part that historians and critics actually argue about.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Living Gallery at Wynn Al Marjan Island?

The official name Wynn has given to its art collection, announced in a press release on December 8, 2025. The collection spans six historical periods (prehistoric, ancient, Victorian, Old Master, natural-world, Orientalist) and is integrated into the resort's public spaces, guest areas, and rooms rather than housed in a dedicated gallery.

What is reverse Orientalism?

A curatorial and artistic position that takes 19th-century Western depictions of the Middle East (Orientalist paintings, photographs, and lithographs) and returns them to the region they depicted. The artist Lalla Essaydi has been working in this tradition since the early 2000s. Wynn Al Marjan Island is the first major institution in the Gulf to embed this position in a collection-wide curatorial framing.

Who was Edward Said?

A Palestinian-American literary critic (1935-2003) whose 1978 book Orientalism, published by Pantheon Books, became the foundational text in postcolonial cultural criticism. Said argued that Western academic and visual representations of the East formed a system that served European political and economic interests. The book remains required reading in art history, postcolonial studies, and cultural criticism.

Which Orientalist painters might be in the Wynn collection?

Wynn has not released specific names. The major 19th-century Orientalist painters include Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, John Frederick Lewis, David Roberts, William Holman Hunt, Théodore Chassériau, Frederic Leighton, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The French Society of Orientalist Painters, founded in 1893 with Gérôme as honorary president, included many additional names.

Is Wynn the first Gulf institution to do this?

Wynn is the first to formally frame its acquisition strategy as a cultural reversal in a public press release. Other Gulf institutions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and Mathaf in Doha have collected and exhibited Orientalist works for years, but typically within broader curatorial frames rather than as explicit restitution.

Will guests see Orientalist paintings at Wynn Al Marjan Island?

Yes, based on the December 8, 2025 announcement that confirms the collection includes Orientalist-period works displayed throughout the resort. The specific paintings, locations, and viewing arrangements have not been disclosed.

Why is a casino resort doing this and not a museum?

Private hospitality companies have no diplomatic constraints. State museums in the Gulf often operate under partnerships with Western institutions (the Louvre Abu Dhabi works with French museums, for example) that complicate framing acquisitions as restitution from the partner countries. Wynn is private and can position its collection however it chooses.

How does this compare to the rest of the collection?

The Orientalist component is one of six historical periods in the Living Gallery. The other periods include prehistoric (the Triceratops skull), ancient, Victorian, Old Master, and natural-world. The 17th-century tapestry is from the Old Master period. Marc Quinn's commissioned sculpture represents the natural-world / contemporary component.

In December 2025, Wynn issued a press release that was read for two minutes and quoted for one. The headline travelled. The Triceratops skull travelled even further. But the sentence buried six paragraphs deep, the one about reversing the journey, has so far gone almost completely uncited. That is a strange thing for a sentence that describes the most ambitious cultural claim a Gulf hospitality property has ever made. It is also, in a way, a perfect example of how the Living Gallery is supposed to function. You walk past the most important thing in the room because the room is so full. Then someone tells you what you walked past, and you go back, and the painting is still there. It was always there. You just had not yet been told to look.