Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic 9780755610792, 9781848852884

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ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLATES

Illustrations 1 Nakkaş Osman. “Second Courtyard of the Imperial Palace,” Hünername of Seyyid Lokman. 1584. Gouache on paper, 48.5 x 30.5 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.12 2 Anonymous. Landscape Painting in Chamber of Sultan Abdülhamid I. c. 1774−1779. Natural paints on plaster. Photograph, Professor Günsel Renda. p.14 3 Anonymous. Landscape Painting near the Gate of Felicity, Topkapı Palace. c. 1774−1779. Natural paints on plaster. Photograph, author. p.15 4 Konstantin Kapıdağlı. Sultan Selim III Enthroned at a Holiday Ceremony. c. 1789−1806. Oil on canvas, 152 x 206 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.16 5 Konstantin Kapıdağlı. Sultan Selim III Enthroned. c. 1789−1806. Gouache on paper, 37 x 45 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.17 6 Abdullah Frères. Gate of Felicity, Topkapı Palace with early nineteenth century murals. c. 1890−1893. Platinotype Print. United States Library of Congress. p.18 7 Mıgırdıç Givanian. Landscape. Late nineteenth-century. Oil on canvas, 92 x 130 cm. Jeanine Ahsen Böre Collection. p.22 8 Anonymous. Vase, Yıldız Porcelain Factory. Early nineteenth − early twentieth century Porcelain. Parliament of the Republic of Turkey (TBMM) National Palaces Collection. p.23 9 Diratzu Rafail. Portrait of Abdülhamid I. c. 1857−1889. Oil on canvas, 106 x 168 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.24 10 Anonymous. Ottoman Dynastic Tree. c. 1789−1806. Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.24 11 Anonymous. Portrait of Kazaz Artin Amira Bezciyan. c. 1833. Oil on canvas, 44 x 56 cm. Patriarchate of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Istanbul. Photograph, Garo Kürkman. p.25 12 Marras. Portrait of Sultan Mahmud II. 1832. Oil on ivory, 6 cm diameter. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum. p.26 13 Anonymous. Portrait of Sultan Mahmud II. Mid-nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 135 x 190 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.29 14 Anonymous. Portrait of Sultan Abdülmecid. Mid-nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 152 x 255 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.29 15 Yakup of Yenibahçe, fourth year student at the Istanbul Military Academy. (untitled). 1873. Pencil and color on paper, 42 x 25 cm. Zeyno and Muhsin Bilge Collection. p.34 16 Anonymous. The Yıldız Mosque. c. 1890s. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.35 17 Süleyman Seyyid. Forest. Late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 78 cm. Mimar Sinan Academy of Fine Arts (MSGSÜ) Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.59 18 Süleyman Seyyid. Orange. 1904. Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 56 cm. Sabancı University (SU) Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.60

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19 Ahmet Ali. Self-portrait. Late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 86 x 118 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.61 20 Ahmet Ali. Deer in the Forest. 1891. Oil on canvas, 55 x 44 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.62 21 Ahmet Ali. Still-life with Quince. Late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 129 x 89 cm. Türkiye İş Bankası Collection p.63 22 Ahmet Ali. Landscape with Sheep. Late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 130 x 89 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.64 23 Ahmet Ali. Woodcutter in the Forest. Late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas, 181 x 140 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.65 24 Osman Hamdi. Girls Playing Music. 1880. Oil on canvas, 58 x 39 cm. Suna and İnan Kiraç Foundation Collection. p.70 25 Osman Hamdi. Green Mosque of Bursa. 1890. Oil on canvas, 59 x 89 cm. Najd Collection. p.74 26 Osman Hamdi. Fountain of Life. 1904. Oil on canvas. Current location unknown (Cezar 1995). p.75 27 Abdülmecid. Fog. 1895. Oil on canvas, 138 x 98 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.81 28 Abdülmecid. Fog. 1912. Oil on canvas, 142 x 99 cm. Istanbul Municipality Collection, Aşiyan Museum. p.81 29 Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Model. 1909. Oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.84 30 Osman Hamdi. Artist in His Studio. n.d. Photograph from lost original, Sebah & Joiller (Cezar 1995). p.85 31 Halil. Portrait of Mme. X. 1888. Pastel on paper, 100 x 75 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.86 32 Halil. Woman Reclining. n.d. Oil on canvas, 41 x 60 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.86 33 Abdülmecid. Pondering/Goethe in the Harem. 1898/1917. Oil on canvas, 132 x 173 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.87 34 Abdülmecid. Harmony in the Harem/Beethoven in the Harem. 1915. Oil on canvas, 156 x 211 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.88 35 Osman Hamdi, Mihrab. 1901. Oil on canvas, 108 x 210 cm. Current location unknown (Cezar 1995). p.89 36 Ömer Adil. Woman in Thought. c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 116 x 81 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.90 37 Namık İsmail. Reclining Woman/Thought. 1917. Oil on canvas, 180 x 131 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.90 38 Ahmed Ziya (Akbulut). Sultan Ahmet Mosque. 1897. Oil on canvas, 123 x 150.5 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.96 39 Ali Rıza. Landscape. 1904−5. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 54 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.97 40 Hüseyin Zekai. Fountain of Abdülhamid I. c. 1911. Oil on canvas, 78 x 100 cm. TBMM National Palaces Collection p.98 41 Şevket (Dağ). Hagia Sophia Interior. c. 1906. Oil on canvas, 125 x 84 cm. TBMM National Palaces Collection. p.102 42 Halil. Çengelköy Quay. 1890. Oil on canvas, 51 x 69.5 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.103 43 Ömer Adil. View of the Sea of Marmara. 1897. Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 60 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.104 44 Prince Abdülmecid with two paintings. 1912. Photograph. TBMM National Palaces Collection. p.108

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45 Abdülmecid. Advice/The History Lesson. 1912. Oil on canvas, 120 x 164 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum. p.109 46 Abdülmecid. Portrait of Abdülhak Hamid. Early twentieth century. Oil on canvas, 218 x 125 cm. Istanbul Municipality Collection, Aşiyan Museum. p.110 47 Hasan Rıza. Mehmed the Conqueror. c. 1903. Oil on canvas, 125 x 149 cm. Military Museum and Cultural Center, Istanbul. p.112 48 Masthead, Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists. 1911. p.118 49 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Self-portrait with Book. c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 45 x 64 cm. Belkıs Aksoy Collection. p.125 50 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Still-life. c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 45 x 54 cm. Belkıs Aksoy Collection. p.126 51 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Self-portrait with Pipe. c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 65 x 46 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.127 52 Feyhaman (Duran). Group Portrait of Artists. 1921. Oil on canvas, 133 x 162 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.133 53 Feyhaman (Duran). Portrait of Dr. Akil Muhtar. n.d. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Istanbul University Medical Faculty Collection. p.134 54 Hikmet (Onat). From Kabataş. 1924. Oil on canvas, 80 x 90 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.135 55 Halil. Girl Painting. n.d. Oil on canvas, 43 x 41 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.138 56 Belkıs Mustafa. Self-portrait. n.d. Pencil on paper. Lucien Arkas Collection. p.140 57 Sabiha Rüştü. Landscape. n.d. Oil on canvas. Lucien Arkas Collection. p.141 58 Mihri Müşfik. Self-portrait. n.d. Oil on canvas, 99 x 61 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.143 59 Hale Asaf. Self-portrait. 1925. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm. Istanbul University Feyhaman Duran Culture and Art Center. p.143 60 Müfide Kadri. Lute-players. n.d. Oil on canvas, 38 x 55 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.144 61 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Development. 1916. Oil on canvas, 172 x 505 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.145 62 Anonymous. Şişli Studio. 1917. Photograph, Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu Collection. p.147 63 Namık İsmail. Whirlpool of Victory. 1917. Oil on canvas, 106 x 137 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.149 64 İbrahim (Çallı). Wounded Soldier, Night Attack in the Trenches. 1917. Oil on canvas, 175 x 225 cm. Military Museum and Cultural Center, Istanbul. p.149 65 Harika (Lifij). The Entertainment of the Gods. c. 1917. Oil on canvas, 90 x 145 cm. Nilüfer Sayit Collection. p.150 66 Namık İsmail. Typhus. 1916. Oil on canvas, 170 x 130 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.151 67 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Allegory of War. 1916. Oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.152 68 Namık İsmail. Nude. 1917. Oil on canvas, 61 x 52 cm. Lucien Arkas Collection. p.152 69 Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Deployment, from a set of twelve postcards. 1914. 10 x 16 cm. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu Collection. p.154 70 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). A Page from the Times of Nefi. 1922. Oil on canvas. Çankaya Presidential Palace Collection. p.158 71 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Dark Day. 1923. Oil on canvas, 93 x 118 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.159 72 Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak. 1923. Oil on canvas, 166 x 131 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.161

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73 Nazmi Ziya (Güran). Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal. n.d. Oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.161 74 Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Atatürk’s Welcome to Istanbul. 1931. Oil on canvas, 94 x 118 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.164 75 Namık İsmail. Ankara Fortress. 1927. Oil on canvas, 157 x 119 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.165 76 Sami Yetik. Ankara Samanpazarı. 1936. Oil on canvas, 70 x 101.5 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.166 77 İbrahim (Çallı). Woman. c. 1925. Oil on canvas, 56.5 x 97 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.167 78 Melek Celal Sofu. Woman in Parliament. 1936. Oil on canvas, 43 x 57 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.167 79 Nazmi Ziya (Güran). Taksim Square. 1935. Oil on canvas, 93 x 73 cm. SU Sakip Sabancı Museum. p.168 80 Cemal Tollu. The Burning of Manisa. c. 1937. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.171 81 Ali Avni Çelebi. Brothers in Arms. 1937. Oil on canvas, 151 x 100 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.172 82 Şerif (Akdik). Alphabet Reform/Local School. 1930. Oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.173 83 Arif Bedii Kaptan. Gift of the Republic to Youth. 1934. Oil on canvas, 200 x 155 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. p.174

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Plates 1 Sergeant Mehmet. Battle of Lamya. 1897. Oil on canvas, 142 x 92 cm. Military Museum and Cultural Center, Istanbul. 2 Ahmet Ali. Soldiers in Training. 1897 – 8. Oil on canvas, 47 x 61.5 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 3 Osman Hamdi. Man with Tortoises. 1906. Oil on canvas, 117 x 223 cm. Suna and İnan Kiraç Foundation Collection. 4 İbrahim (Çallı). Woman Sewing. 1927. Oil on Canvas. 126 x 97 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 5 Nazmi Ziya (Güran). Sailboats on the Bosphorus. 1924. Oil on canvas, 88.5 x 272 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 6 Ömer Adil. Women’s Academy of Art. c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 81 x 118 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 7 Nazlı Ecevit. Portrait of Keriman. 1922. Oil on canvas, 138 x 101 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 8 Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Collections for the Red Crescent. 1916. Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 9 İzzet Ziya. Girl in Rowboat. 1919. Oil on canvas. 24 x 39 cm. Zeyno and Muhsin Bilge Collection. 10 Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). The Villager Going to War, The Enemy Driven to Sea (Gallipoli) and Return to the Village as a Veteran (Triptych). 1917. Oil on canvas. TBMM Collection. 11 Hikmet (Onat). Letter in the Trenches. 1917. Oil on canvas, 145 x 120 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 12 Namık İsmail. Harvest. 1923. Oil on canvas, 201 x 165 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 13 Ömer Adil. Call to Duty. 1924. Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 125 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 14 Feyhaman (Duran). Girl with Dog. 1925. Oil on canvas, 106 x 96 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 15 Cemal (Tollu). Villagers Reading the Alphabet. 1933. Oil on canvas, 92 x 74 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 16 Zeki Faik (İzer). On the Road to Revolution. 1933. Oil on canvas, 176.5 x 237 cm. MSGSÜ Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

NOTES ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND NOMENCLATURE

Turkish has several alphabetic characters that are not used in English, and which appear in proper names in this text. These are: c = j as in Jim ç = ch ğ = lengthens the preceding vowel i = ee ı = i, as in girl ö = oe, as in French or German ş = sh ü = ue, as in French or German This book ends in 1933, the year before citizens of the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, were required by law to take surnames. Before that time, people were known by their given names, and at times by honorifics (as in Şeker Ahmed Pasha, meaning “sweet” Ahmed Pasha) or epitaphs which often related to their place of origin (such as İbrahim Çallı, meaning İbrahim of Çal). While I have indicated such instances for readers familiar with Turkish, artists are referred to by their formal names, which are often double (as in Osman Hamdi). In these cases, the second name should not be understood as a surname, but rather as a person’s name. Thus Osman Hamdi signed his French letters "Hamdy." A woman’s father’s name generally served as a second name until marriage, when it changed to that of her husband. Thus Mihri started life as Mihri Rasim and became Mihri Müşfik, but later divorced. For women who died before the adoption of surnames, the second name is the father or husband’s first name. As this changed over a lifetime, such names are indexed as Mihri Rasim/Müşfik. After 1934, women adopted the last names of their husbands upon marriage. All of the artists who lived past 1934 acquired last names by which they were later known. Some were even given surnames posthumously: Mehmed Ruhi died in 1931, but has become known as Ruhi Arel. As this book takes place before the formal

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adoption of surnames, I have indicated them in parentheses when first mentioning artists, and have used their given names for events preceding 1934. For example Mehmed Sami (Yetik) is referred to as Mehmed Sami in most of the text, even though in modern Turkey he is most frequently known as Sami Yetik. After the acquisition of surnames, one of the double names was often dropped. To avoid confusion, artists are indexed according to their first names with later surnames in parentheses. Although frequently accompanying names in Turkish, honorifics such as Hanım (Lady), Bey (roughly equivalent to Mr.), Pasha (initially indicating a military officer, but later bestowed by the court as a term of honor), and Efendi (during the Ottoman period, indicating government or aristocratic affiliation) convey little in English. The use of Bey and Hanım where they often appear in Turkish have been excluded, and ‘Pasha’ denotes high state officials such as grand viziers and appears upon first mention of more minor officials including artists. All translations from works in Ottoman or Turkish are by the author.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One of the words used for an artist in the Ottoman Empire was nakkaş. The word’s Arabic root suggests meanings including to embroider, to chisel, and to argue. Metaphorically, it also means to bring forth an image. In all these senses, this book attempts to be a nakış, a layered embroidery of arguments painted together from the chiseled forms of other arguments, works, and ideas. It draws on histories and theories of Islamic art, late Ottoman art, Ottoman history, postcolonial theory, and Western art historiography. My job as the nakkaş of this work was to weave these layers together with the threads of argument, trying to make sense of images, contexts, and lives about which information is often tantalizingly limited. Like any picture, it is one that is constructed from the outside world through the filter of the mind, thus it is inevitably as personal as it is objective. Numerous friends and colleagues have made the layers in this work possible. For their ideas and support, I thank Irene Bierman, Zeynep Çelik, Victoria Holbrook, Gülrü Necipoğlu, and Günsel Renda. For their willingness to share time and information, I thank Ahmed Kamil Gören and Edhem Eldem. I thank Vasıf Kortun for use of his archive of articles related to art that appeared in La Turquie. I owe particular thanks to Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu for generously helping to secure permissions, find images, and contact collectors. For their help in acquiring reproduction rights at their respective institutions, I thank Özalp Birol, Director of the Pera Museum, Ferit Özşen, Director of the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, and Bengi Lostar of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture. For help researching images and articles, I thank Garo Kürkman, Károly Aliotti, and Didem Yazıcı. I also thank collectors Jeanine Ahsen Böre, Belkıs Aksoy, Lucien Arkas, Zeyno and Muhsin Belge, Baha Azer Çizen, and Nilüfer Sayit for their gracious cooperation. I thank Savaş Arslan for helping me work up the underlying drive to develop this project and for providing a constructively critical voice throughout. I thank Ezel Kural Shaw for her financial and intellectual support for this work’s production and publication. Many thanks to my editors at I.B.Tauris and the design support of TB Yayıncılık, Istanbul, Seval Çolakel, Alp Ejder Kantoğlu and İlhan Kantoğlu. I also thank Sevim Sancaktar for photographing and retouching images, to Ayşe Batur and

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Manuel Gerber for their considered readings of late drafts, and to Emily Coolidge, who helped smooth the rough edges of both the manuscript and life. This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved father, Stanford Jay Shaw (1930−2006), whose spirit lives on in the affection for discovery, curiosity about the complexities of the past, and pleasure in research and writing manifest in this book. It is also completed with immense love for my daughter Zoë Elif, who brings new life to everything from the first to the last letter.

INTRODUCTION: THE TRANSLATION OF ART

During the nineteenth century, a new, Western modality of art entered Ottoman visual culture. Inspired by the materials, methods, and practices of viewing of the Western artistic tradition, it adopted the form of Western art while modifying its content. First on the walls and ceilings of Westernizing architecture, then on canvases, painting signaled a new identity affiliated with the West. While this art has generally been called Western painting of the Ottoman Empire, such nomenclature implies that the Ottoman adoption of Western practices replicated its paradigms. This presumes the universal promise of modernity: that a single path of progress can be measured as a set of stages towards a culture represented by a monolithic West (Harvey 1990, 10−38; King 1995). However, such historicism depends on a Eurocentric perspective even as it attempts to decolonize local history (Said 1978, 154; Chakrabarty 2000, 6−7; Eisenstadt 1987). Rather than following a singular path based on the adoption of practices introduced through various forms of direct, indirect, and even self-imposed imperialism, cultures around the world have amalgamated Western and modern practices with local ones. In doing so, they have given birth to a multitude of sibling modernities which might be considered, after Louis Althusser, as differential: a displacement which takes place when, while the modes of production of a society change through external forces such as colonialism (or in the case of Turkey, top−down revolutionary reformism), they do not do so within that society’s own dialectical dynamics (Young 2004, 20). Considered in this light, the assumption that modernization is purely mimetic and that such mimesis can and has been successful, becomes profoundly ideological. In Turkey, the apparent transparency of adoption has served as a metonym for unmitigated success in modernization, despite fascinating inherent contradictions and divergences. Painting in the Western modality as practiced in the Ottoman Empire is not the same as Western painting because it does not contain the legacy of its discourse. Consequently, it often relies instead on metanarratives of modernization and national identity. This creates a unique history which reflects the transformation of traditions reborn through the adoption of foreign cultural practices and their adaption to local circumstances.

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Delineating such a history often has a redemptive cast, reframing critical disdain as a product of biased historiography. Attempting to move away from the modernist affirmation of South Asian Art as a successful imitation of the West, Preminda Jacob points out that artistic influence in the imperialist global context has been perceived as acceptable unilaterally, when the non-West is used as inspiration for the West, but as a sign of creative insufficiency when passing in the other direction (Jacob 1999, 50). Likewise, Partha Mitter suggests a model based on affinity rather than emulation when considering the adoption of modern art outside of the closed system of discourse implied by Western modernism (Mitter 2007, 8). However, such recognition of a double standard implies an ideology of equivalence which does not differentiate between the adaption of foreign forms into existing artistic practices and adoption of the practices themselves. Moreover, in avoiding issues of quality, it neglects the analysis of the contextual factors that affect aesthetic outcomes. Certainly, global hegemonic differences have informed the writing of art histories favoring the West as an originary center and historically distancing the rest of the world. Yet, necessary as it is, such recognition does not explain how artistic modernisms outside the West have adapted and diverged from Western artistic movements predicated on traditions they did not have. It fails to explain how non-Western artists negotiated what Mitter refers to as a paradigm shift “necessitated by the changes in artistic imperatives in a rapidly globalizing world, which prompted them to discard the previous artistic paradigm” (Mitter 2007, 9). While Eugène Delacroix declared, “Some of the most beautiful paintings I have seen are certain Persian carpets,” he did not pack away his paints and brushes for wool and a loom (Peltre 2006, 11). Rather, Delacroix – along with scores of Western artists – opened himself to the influence of another culture on his own artistic practice, firmly rooted in the Western tradition. Conversely, non-Western artists did pack away their local tool kit of arts in favor of oil and canvas. In the Ottoman Empire, this process relegated both elite arts, like calligraphy and manuscript painting, and common arts, like carpetry and ceramics, to a single “traditional” sphere, considered either as “folk” or “Islamic,” and recast as part of a past often perceived as static. Bereft of the creative and interpretive traditions which sustained it in Western cultures, the new art had to forge new meanings in its new home, an old world awash with change. In a process that also has resonance with the experience of other cultures, in Turkey it was structured by the local confluence of an aniconic religious legacy, a geography bordering Christian Europe, a disintegrating multi-ethnic and multidenominational imperial system, and nascent nationalism. More than attempting a redemptive assessment of painting in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, this book examines the processes of negotiation entailed in the paradigm shift through which it developed. During the mid-nineteenth century, the era of state reorganization known as the Tanzimat accelerated Western-inspired modernizing reforms underway for over a century. Rooted in bureaucratic reorganization and coupled with technologies accelerating change, these reforms coincided with and precipitated the transformation of the empire’s visual culture. The introduction of the printing press

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for Ottoman Turkish in 1727, the dissemination of lithographic prints, an increasing interest in European architectural forms, Westernizing dress reform in 1826, and the introduction of photography in the early 1840s all contributed to a changing visual sphere: clothing influenced by Western styles; new use-patterns and furnishings within domestic architecture; and new notions of public space. The empire itself was also changing. In 1800, when this study begins, the Ottoman Empire retained most of its vast provinces, including much of today’s Eastern Europe and Middle East. By the time of the empire’s demise in 1923, it had split into a multitude of nations, including the Republic of Turkey, which took on the imperial cultural legacy of Constantinople even as its capital moved to Ankara.1 This era also brackets a shift from a multi-ethnic to a national state. Whereas in 1893, Armenians and Greeks comprised approximately a third of the population of Istanbul (of which 44 per cent was Muslim), the twentieth century nation-state emphasized homogeneity, rendering everybody nominally Turkish (and by implication Muslim) despite its laicist ideology (Karpat 1978, 274; Kushner 1997). Noting the activities of Christian Ottomans where sources allow, this book focuses on the emergence of art among Muslims in the imperial capital as it evolved into the cultural capital of modern Turkey. Activities in the empire’s other cultural centers exceed the scope of this work. This body of artwork has been left “outside the pale” of art history: neither part of Islamic art, which generally ‘ends’ in 1800 and in which Ottoman art is considered a sub-category, nor part of modern art (Danto 1997, 9; Flood 2007).2 Much as this art falls into neither category, it also partakes of both. Rather than radically disengaging from local precedents and completely adopting foreign artistic practice, artistic practice incorporated Ottoman cultural sensibilities with Western forms. Thus the first chapter of this book examines the gaps between Western practice and its introduction to the Ottoman cultural sphere through landscape murals, the construction of increasingly modern palaces, the rise of imperial portraiture, and the development of oil on canvas painting from photography at the empire’s new, modern schools. The second chapter explores how this process of translation became more sophisticated when Ottomans living and studying in Paris collected and practiced painting in a manner that was reflective of both the Parisian and Ottoman social and political contexts. Yet art could not be what it was in Europe: in the absence of audiences, museums, galleries, and formal interpretive channels, artists had to forge meanings for this new practice in modern Ottoman society. Although Ottoman art in the Western modality emerged during the modern era, it is distinctly not modernist, in the sense of fitting with art movements that aimed to destroy artistic traditions and radically reconfigure perception. As Peter Osborne explains, “art may be called ‘modernist’ in the quasitranscendental sense of gaining its intelligibility from its enactment, within and upon the artistic field, of that performative temporal logic of negation that constitutes the structure of modernism in general” (Osborne 2009, 169). Instead, Ottoman art adopted Western cultural practices as part of the local project of following a path to modernity perceived to have been already laid down in Europe. Chapter three

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explores the new functions that emerged for Ottoman art in the early twentieth century: the incorporation of the human, particularly the female figure, as a sign of modernization; the use of landscape and architectural depiction as a mode of preservation and nostalgia; and the use of landscape painting as a genre to attract audiences. Such formal, rather than conceptual, artistic modernism is rooted in a different sort of innovative spirit, based on following rather than forging a path. Under such differential modernity, the contemporary world can seem ambivalent: on the one hand rooted in modernity perceived as a project of progressive change stemming from a primary experience elsewhere in distant cultural centers lumped together as “the West”; and on the other experienced ad hoc at home.3 Such a sense of doubling has a long history in Turkey. As the mid-twentieth century novelist and critic Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar observed, What makes you suspect not only our works, but the principles from which they gain momentum… is the duality which emerges from passing from one civilization to another. This duality began first in public life, then divided our society in two in terms of mindset, and finally deepened its workings and settled within us… Because of suspicion, our situation before our new institutions has not overcome this duality. We were not able to take the issue of women, nor legislative changes, nor essentially Western culture and art as lifestyles which could not be otherwise. We always lived a duality. Because for us, there was and is always something else present. This is what makes us different from both the Westerner and our forebears (quoted in Duben 1990, 59). Orhan Pamuk expressed a similar sentiment in his acceptance speech for the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature: …my basic feeling was that I was ‘not in the centre’. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside of it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world… there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside of it (Pamuk 2006). In Turkey’s contemporary art world, this duality is reflected by a cleavage between those who address a global market and those who focus on a local, more commercial, and less conceptually informed one (Evren 2008, 39). One might argue that increased exposure to global art through the Istanbul Biennial (established in 1987), international travel, a growing art audience, and the internet’s visual cornucopia might ultimately narrow this gap. However, at the moment that artists and audiences alike turn away from the local legacy and write themselves into the global, they also turn away from the acknowledgement of art as a practice which has also been part of a local legacy and has reflected social change for nearly two centuries. Each generation

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announces its own better and more accurate rendition of civilized/Western/global practices without recognizing that in this self-promotion, they fall into the same trap as their predecessors, acknowledging their segregation from a paradigm even as they claim participation within it. Without a critical interface within the society from which it emerges, many works of Turkish contemporary art tend to adopt local subject matter, but discuss it in an artistic language foreign, and often unintelligible, to local audiences. Conversely, in order to address a global audience, the issues addressed in such works, such as veiling, poverty, or modernity, often lose some of their nuance or become opaque to viewers from other cultures. This contributes to a common perception of “authentic” Turkish art either as part of a static and much mythologized Ottoman golden age, or as contemporary art serving to represent the nation abroad. Unlike the work produced by artists perceived as part of the global “center,” that produced by artists from the “periphery” can become inflected, and thus limited, by sociopolitical geographies. Drawn into service – of politics, of national identity, or of “being contemporary” − art can become an instrument of these metanarratives, and thus sacrifice its expressive freedom. Historically, such service to broader social causes both fostered and limited art in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. On the one hand, art gained a place in these societies because it became a potent means of expressing national and modern identity. On the other, such roles limited the viability of art as a potentially unrestricted ludic practice. Chapters four and five investigate how the context of rapid political and social change during a prolonged war contemporary with the growth of art in the Ottoman public sphere after the Second Constitutional Revolution (1908) affected the meanings and possibilities of art. With the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, artists were faced with the complex task of reconfiguring communal cultural identity for a new political reality. As argued in chapter six, rather than developing as a critical and self-reflexive meta-discourse of thought, perception, and society, painting and sculpture increasingly became signals of modern, Western, and national identity. Although this history clearly diverges from that of European modernism, the traditionally Hegelian historicism of the discipline of art history has largely understood non-Western modernisms as epigonic and thus foreclosed their study. Yet not simply belated, these works address local issues using modern artistic languages divested of their discursive histories and recharged with alternative connotations. In Turkey, such art often serves as a sign of belonging to a civilization always perceived as external, and yet paradoxically integral, to the local. While we may share the present, the perspective on the past from which that present emerges varies: while the person who experiences (through making or through viewing) art in the West perceives the modern as his own, the same subject elsewhere perceives a divergent past, an ideal located in the West and its perceptually imperfect repetition in the local. Such a perspective could be bifocal; instead, it is often simply cross-eyed. This perspective is both literal and metaphorical. The representation of threedimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas through the mathematical construction of perspective has not only been seen as the key shift in art of the modern

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Western artistic tradition, it has also been understood as the enabling element for the development of the discourse of modernity and art historical discourse within it (Jay 1993, 51−68). However, the reliance of perspectival construction on a single vantage point precludes the ambivalent, multifocal view experienced outside of Western artistic centers. For if we imagine perspective as something happening only inside a painting, as a visual pyramid with its tip at the vanishing point and its base at the surface of a painting, we imagine only half of the process of viewing on which perspectival depiction relies. Perspectival depiction also depends on a second visual pyramid, the base of which again starts at the surface of the painting but the tip of which this time is the eye of the viewer, properly positioned to see the work in its full illusionistic presence (Jay 1993, 54). This propriety of position makes possible a scientific, and thereby disciplinary, approach to art. In this broader sense of perspective, Stephen Melville points out: The Renaissance achievement of rational perspective becomes the condition of possibility of the art-historical discipline, and we are compelled to its terms whenever we look to establish another world view that would not, for example, privilege the Renaissance, because we can neither ‘look’ nor imagine a ‘world view’ without reinstalling at the heart of our project the terms only the Renaissance can expound for us... [Panofsky’s] valorization of perspective forges an apparently nonproblematic access of the rationalized space of the past. We are freed then to imagine ourselves henceforth as scientists of a certain kind, and within this imagination the grounds of privilege become invisible and profoundly naturalized (Melville 1998, 409). Thus perspective becomes both a mode of representing the world and a mode of viewing that representation. This understanding of perspective as a symbol may not be universally accepted by art historians, but its use as a metaphor within general culture as a means of “envisioning” the world, as a “sign signifying a mental state, a culture, or an expressive language” suggests that perspective may have left modern and contemporary art as a tool but remains an important means of conceiving of human consciousness and the unitary presence of the subject, since it relies on the trope of point of view. Thus James Elkins identifies the broader implications of perspective as belonging to the Enlightenment (Elkins 1996, 15−21). Similarly, Erwin Panofsky characterized modernity as “an epoch whose perception was governed by a conception of space expressed by strict linear perspective” (Panofsky 1991, 15). But if perspective relies on a properly positioned viewer, how can we understand an art of the modern that falls outside of this tradition of a single vantage point, outside the trajectory rooted in the Renaissance, art made as though in perspective of art history but nonetheless outside its geocultural frame? From what vantage point can it come into view? In Turkey, the cultural shift indicated by painting in the Western modality was, both in terms of its conception of space and its content, as radical as the cultural revolutions of the Renaissance: humanistic subjectivity and the construction of

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perspectival space. As in many parts of the world, the Ottoman Empire adopted products of Enlightenment thought, including political forms and institutions as well as the promise of progress and modernity. However, it often did not adopt in equal measure the ideological traditions, discourses, and conflicts which underpinned the changing formulations of that thought in the modern world. Reflective of this partial adoption, when perspective came to the empire in the form of painting that made use of spatial depiction – painting in the Western modality – it did so without many of the wider connotations that accompanied it in the West. Even if contemporary art no longer generally uses perspective as an intrinsic structure, it nonetheless depends on perspectivalism in a far broader, cultural sense: a single vantage point from which to understand the history of techniques, practices, and styles, and ultimately the very modes in which art functions. Such a vantage point enables the recognition of absolute originality as the motor of progress which still, even in an era of concept, pastiche, quotation, and virtual reality, underlies judgments of quality and interpretation. If perspective constitutes our view of the world, how are we to view worlds that emerge from a different modernity? Conceived as global, contemporary art has come to include a widely varying range of sources for its practice, but there remains little place within the art historical narrative for the historical contexts and references of these practices in their local, rather than their Western, communicative interfaces. Contemporary art is imagined as having a global geography with an Esperantolike practice which potentially can be expressed equally from any geography, yet the universal modern against which the contemporary exists is one that implicitly denotes the West. The perception of contemporary art as global depends on artistic modernism’s presumed universality. However, as Dipash Chakrabarty points out, “a third-world historian is condemned to knowing ‘Europe’ as the original home of the ‘modern,’ whereas the ‘European’ historian does not share a comparable predicament with regard to the pasts of the majority of humankind” (Chakrabarty 2000, 42). This “everyday subalternity of non-Western histories” applies equally to art: for part of the world, the past of the contemporary is local; for the rest, it is elsewhere. Where it is elsewhere, this past is often perceived as imperialism rather than as a local mediation in which the arts of modernity not come from direct encounter with the West, but through generations of local artists who have brought various elements of Western art to local artistic production. The assertion of the contemporary as global erases this legacy and, in doing so, obfuscates the radical cultural ruptures which make contemporary art appear global. This systematic forgetting helps to produce a politically neutral global art world fully complicit with the universalizing project of modernism and in line with the flattening aspect of globalization (Dirlik 1999). Yet in the Hegelian tradition, art without history is not possible; progress depends on self-reflection, which leads to dialectical transcendence of presence and a revised embodiment of Spirit (Hegel 1956, 95−97). In adopting an “objective” gaze – of perspectival viewing and representation – art made outside the West often comes to see the mainstream artistic canon as its past, and entry into that canon as its ambition. In doing so, it does not render itself objective as this model of transcendent sublation proposes. Rather, this transcendence, which enables innovation through

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the trace-like introjection and surpassing of knowledge (as embodied in experience, or the past), requires a leap from the known into the uncharted; it might be conceived as a disembodiment, where the self leaps away from its body in order to put knowledge far away, in proper perspective for the new to emerge not from, but against it. Yet aware of its foreignness, mindful of its service to social metanarratives, caught in the attempt to belong, all too often art makes itself epigonic, seeking no disembodiment as it looks abroad for a formula of success. Non-western modern and contemporary art implicitly conveys an unstated discourse concerning the modern and contemporary identity of its makers which disavows its own process of cominginto-being. Thus such art avoids the transcendence of Spirit into self-reflection, attempting entry into Spirit which is supposed to already have been transcended elsewhere and foreclosing the possibility of its resolution. Rather than developing a self-reflective history of mediation with locally experienced heterogenous culture, history becomes something perennially adopted from a foreign timeline. Such art becomes obliged to peer through another pair of eyes without borrowing the brain. What alternative might there be to this single vantage point? Bound by the frame, perspectivalism contrasts with a dominant element of Islamic visual culture: the potentially infinite surface pattern called girih. Girih is rooted in neo-Platonic and Islamic mystical traditions which give it meaning as a structuring principle for Islamic art, from objects of daily use such as carpets and vases, to large-scale architectural elements and buildings themselves. Although seemingly disparate traditions, both girih and perspective developed from Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. Considered mathematically, spatial projection onto a surface is not opposed to the geometric patterning of the surface itself, but uses the same geometry to a different end, embodying multiple rather than single vantage points. It thereby opposes the Renaissance conception of the picture plane as a window cutting the spectator’s cone of vision in which rays converge at a vanishing point. Rather than providing an outward view, girih offers inward abstraction, making the picture plane itself a window to an infinity conceived isotropically rather than perspectivally (Necipoğlu 1995, 166, 191−210). In contrast to the European aesthetic tradition, here beauty consists not in the ideal representation of nature, but in discovering nature through conceptualized form. The function of art is not the transcendence of knowledge to achieve progress in outward expression, but the transcendence of self within the consciousness of the universal celestial soul. Rather than the individual viewer who stands in a position of mastery in relation to the perspectival picture plane, here a dispersed subject uses interior vision to look towards transcendence. The art object acts as an inverted lens, projecting not towards the physical eye of the viewer but towards an invisible notion behind the meaning of the viewed. In this sense, art of this tradition inverts that of the West: rather than translating the world, it translates the viewer. After all, within Hegelian art historiography, the purpose of art – the reason that people produce and enjoy it – is the taming of the foreignness inherent in the material world, since it exists outside the mind. As the ultimate aim of history for Hegel was for the mind to make manifest all matter in the world of Spirit, in the Hegelian tradition art has a key role in translating the physical

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world into one that is controlled by the mind as creator. For Hegel, the aim of art is “to strip the world of its inflexible foreignness” – to make the external world into something the mind can recognize as its own product, but not only as its own product but its own image; so that man can “enjoy in the shape of things an external realization of himself ” (Podro 1982, 18). We encounter a double meaning when we consider the doubled foreignness of objects not conceived within the world known by the spectator or analyst. Rather than taming foreignness, such objects reify it, pointing out that the world is not created by the subject, but comes from outside and cannot be comprehended. To make such objects into art – to conceive of them as art and thereby give them a comprehensible discourse with no necessary relation to their original context – and thus to make them legible, would be not only to tame them from matter to spirit, but also to tame the cultural foreignness which they represent. To do otherwise, then, would be to admit the threat that much as we see, we are to the same extent seen, for vision itself is predicated on an asymmetry in the intercourse of the gaze: If it is always someone who sees, it is not always by someone that one is seen or to someone that one is exposed – and that this asymmetry is bound up with our ability to imagine ourselves and the relations amongst ourselves as fully social... The comedy is just that, standing in the light, we remain… invisible to one another, merely lucid one might say, until that lucidity is remarked and restricted, and with that our intimacy with one another appears as lost... (Melville 1996, 107). In this manner, Westerners who began to acquire and exhibit Islamic art during the late nineteenth century were bound to analyze it only on their own terms, initially through tropes of the exotic and the decorative (Peltre 2006, 11; Carrier 2007). Likewise, Ottoman artists could take up Western practices, but could only view them through their own perceptual habits. Looking at each other, the two cultures were mutually out of focus. Ottoman art in the Western modality, art which requires the definition of subjectivity, has been entirely segregated from its local past. Yet it depended on that past in multiple ways. It had its own ways of looking at Western art, based on a limited comprehension of its tradition. Ottoman art in the Western modality established a differential modernity because of its cross-eyed gaze at the two traditions from which it emerged: the one, which it attempted to adopt but could not fully understand, and the other which it attempted to discard but through which it already conceptualized the place and practices of art. Necessarily multiple, this gaze of differential modernity repudiates the perspectivalism of universalist modernism. It instead becomes structured more like girih: multicentered, depending on lateral movement, and admissive of a multitude of spectatorial positions corresponding to the multitude

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of differential modernities on which the contemporary world is based. Conversely, as long as modernity can only be viewed from a single vantage point, it remains a foreign story. Then, not only can local modern art only be derivative and peripheral to its mainstream “parents”, but even contemporary art can only exist as long as it partakes in a universal practice defined through somebody else’s history. It thus runs the risk of an inability to communicate with local pasts and environments, becoming instead a mode of representing the self to the other in a language that is always already foreign – of declaring participation in, rather than actually participating in, a world order. In order to situate contemporary art practice as one that can mediate between the local and the global, one must ground its conditions of emergence in local modern art as much as any other, rather than simply ignore them. To reject the othering of the modern era is only to retain its effects without considering how they have functioned in representing the West as the sole producer of a singular modernity – an effect that may be denied in theory under the guise of pluralism, but is nevertheless replicated every time the narrative of the modern era finds its sole expression in the experience of the West (Elkins 2002). In Turkey, modernity is intimately linked with such a disjunctive representation of past and future. The Turkish national project imagined a modern future, but defined its artistic visual culture based on nationalist tropes of Ottoman/Islamic art which excluded the modern. While historically oriented collections were established during the Ottoman era, the Museum of Painting and Sculpture was not established in Istanbul until 1938, and subsequently received minimal interest, funding, or attention. Likewise in the capital city of Ankara, a similarly underattended Museum of Painting and Sculpture was only founded in 1981. In the 2000s, new private art museums are making efforts to bring the art of Turkish modernity and contemporary art to the public (Shaw 2007). Nonetheless, few means of critically discussing the art within them have developed except in an implicit relation to Western art, of which they often appear to be merely pale and belated shadows. It is not simply that, as Elif Naci (1898−1987) explained in 1933, that the temporal gap between the first French art exhibit and the first Ottoman one rendered the latter an irremediable three centuries “behind” (Elif Naci 1933, 5). Rather, with few terms of analysis, connoisseurship, criticism or interpretation which create a vocabulary or system of signs for understanding it, Turkish art has rarely entered the same kind of discursive sphere as its Western counterparts. The problem is not one of belatedness, but of different social, cultural, and political functions ascribed to art. If there is such a thing as a “national” practice of art, a trope repeated in the identification of artists by place of origin, it emerges not so much from the kind of national spirit sought in the nineteenth century, but from the social and cultural environments within which art perennially emerges. The practice of painting which emerged within the nineteenthcentury paradigm shift in Ottoman culture was a translation, not a transcription, of the artistic languages of the West, thereby inscribing new meanings on adopted practices. This book examines the slippages involved in over a century of translation as painting was transformed from an exotic import to tool of national expression.

1 FROM OLD NICHES TO NEW PAINTINGS

Although it is easy to imagine Ottoman painting in the Western modality as a straightforward import from Western traditions, such new art forms emerged in spaces established through existing practices which might be considered as a prehistory of modernity (Clark 1998, 31). Rather than considering the artwork as an isolated object, this chapter considers the transition from indigenous to imported artistic modalities by considering the work’s environmental niche and its interaction with the viewer. What meanings did painting establish as it situated itself in Ottoman visual culture? Manuscript paintings, the primary site of representational images in premodern Ottoman visual culture, are often cited as precedents for painting in the Western modality.4 They accompanied a wide variety of medical, historical, mythical, military, and even religious texts, although paintings could never illustrate the Qur’an itself. Such paintings did not depict space as an abstraction, since within the representational tradition of Islamic art, there was no more precedent for “empty” space than in the Western representational tradition before the Renaissance. The absence of such spatial abstraction may be tied to a shared mathematical heritage, reflecting the Greek topos, through which space was not conceived as preceding objects. As James Elkins points out, it is not with the Renaissance development of perspective, but only with “Descartes’s and Newton’s insistence on space as an independent ‘object’ of contemplation” that Kant found a scientific basis for his notion of a priori spatial intuition (Elkins 1996, 24). Contrary to common misperceptions, it was not figural representation that was prohibited in such works, but mimesis which could be perceived as imitating the creative act reserved for God, a concern shared in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Flood 2002; Bryson 1981). Above all, manuscript painting did not copy nature or depict three-dimensional form. Instead of indicating space through shading, manuscript painting relies on the contrast of flat areas of color and compositional effects to indicate relationships between both spaces and the things in an image. Realism thus depends not on the mimesis of vision, but on the representation of perceptual reality already processed by the mind through narrative, as would suit an art of the book.

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Such paintings can overlay views of interior and exterior or multiple events to create an effect of complete knowledge akin to the Western use of perspective to create a subject position of visual mastery. For example, in the first volume of Seyyid Lokman’s Hünername (Book of Accomplishments) of 1584, a manuscript painting by Nakkaş Osman depicting the second courtyard and the royal council (Divan-i Hümayun) at the Topkapı Palace shows multiple areas in the palace: all the arcades of the courtyard in front of the imperial council’s chamber; the plants and animals residing in the peaceful garden therein, the high council in session; and even the sultan himself, listening from behind the metal grate of his private chamber in a proto−panoptic manifestation of imperial power (fig. 1). As in the panopticon, power here relies on the presence of invisible power. The Tower of Justice, above the screened chamber of the sultan, functions like the guard tower where the possible presence of authority leads to self-regulation (Necipoğlu 1993; Foucault 1979, 202). In such a painting, realism does not depend on the attempted mimesis of human vision, but on the representation of reality through visible signs. In contrast to perspectival painting, the composite view removes spatial and temporal barriers which would limit vision in the real world. Intended for the court as its primary audience, the painting underscores the sultan’s ability to see without being seen. If panopticism is understood as a secularization of the omnipresent power of God in the form of the eye of the state, then such painting portrayed the ruler as the representative of

1: Nakkaş Osman. “Second Courtyard of the Imperial Palace,” Hünername of Seyyid Lokman. 1584.

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precisely such power−ocular but occluded. Before long, such depictions no longer suited new modes of representation. On the one hand, in the eighteenth century, visibility rather than occlusion began to signify imperial power (Hamadeh 2008, 200). On the other, increasing use of the printing press began to render manuscripts, and the paintings within them, obsolete. Manuscript paintings from the late eighteenth century increasingly adopted tropes of perspectival painting, such as foreshortening and the diminution of distant objects, without adopting the structure of perspective itself (Renda, Erol, et al. 1988, 48−68).5 The tendency to construct the chronology of Turkish painting as rooted in manuscript painting, evident since the first history of Turkish painting written in 1943, stems from a perception of painting as separate from those of broader cultural changes that shut down the production of manuscripts at the same time that new architectural settings required new artistic forms (Berk 1943). Although manuscript paintings do suggest one precedent for the adoption of Western practices, such works were restricted to books, a far cry from the niche occupied by painting. Ottoman perspectival painting emerged not in books, and not on portable canvases, but as murals in the environmental niche of girih pattern on architectural surfaces. Unlike manuscript paintings, which could take on any subject and which were generally figural, murals featured landscape almost exclusively depicting subjects previously expressed through girih pattern. Landscape Murals Painting in the Western modality emerged less as a direct import, through oil on canvas, than as a translation of existing architectural surface designs into forms inspired by Western painting. Representational imagery became increasingly familiar to Ottoman elites, first on walls in the palace and before long in elite homes and even mosques throughout the empire. At the beginning of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid I (r. 1774−1789), wall decoration relied on the depiction of objects such as fruit and flowers in increasingly Western styles. By the end of his reign, murals featuring landscapes had become a fashionable element of palace decor. The first such works, fantastic scenes framed by trompe l’oeil gilt baroque decorative frames, located in the bedrooms of Abdülhamid I and his mother and above the exterior entrance to the rooms of the first vizier near the Council Chamber (Divan-i Hümayun), may have been painted by Italian artists (Davis 1970, 255−6). Their placement in elite, private spaces underscores the novelty of such works (fig. 2). During the reign of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789−1807), similar murals also became common in homes and mosques decorated through private commissions. The location of these paintings on walls rather than on canvas suggests that they were part of the general shift towards Western architecture and fashion which coincided with increasing Ottoman interest in Western political and social forms during this period (Yenişehirlioğlu 2006). Much as landscape murals were the first element of Western art to enter Ottoman visual culture, they diverged from Western practice as much as adopting it, creating both a new means of representing space and a new experience of it. People accustomed to the isotropic space of girih patterning instead became familiar with the mimetic

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function of perspectival space. However, in contrast to the Rococo French murals which partially inspired them, Ottoman landscape murals did not engage the viewer by extending interior space through perspectival illusion. While the style of the paintings was novel and Western, the absence of figures distinguished these paintings from most European counterparts. If, as Gülru Necipoğlu suggests, the girih patterns which covered architectural surfaces were perceived as opening onto space as an infinite mathematical conception not limited to subjectivity and experienced through the confluence of nature with geometry, then landscape imagery as wall decoration was not new to the late eighteenth century Ottoman Empire (Necipoğlu 1995, 166, 191−210). On the contrary, for centuries, Islamic and Ottoman wall tiles, dome decoration, ceiling patterns, and patterned mural had generally depicted landscape through a different representational code. The eighteenth century shift towards the pictorial depiction of this landscape was a change more of modality than of content. Thus landscape painting emerged in the same environmental niche it had always inhabited, on walls, and in materials which were already in widespread use, the natural pigments used as wall paint. Rather than serving as windows onto the real world, they served as windows onto the idea of landscape. Instead of conveying an illusion of presence, drawing the viewer through a perspectival window into a supplementary visual reality, these images serve as reminders rather than representations of pleasurable escapes. The new practice seems to have been adopted by local artists who simplified the work of the foreign artists. Such scenes occupy a band under the awning cornice under the Gate of Felicity [Bab üs-saadet], and in the courtyard of the favorites in the harem area of the palace. Stylistically similar ornate medallions also surround

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simple landscapes in the spandrels of the portico on the inner side of the Middle Gate of the palace, which delimited the space into which only those with official business could pass. In contrast to the paintings with more complex medallions, these paintings replace the fantastic architecture of the earlier works with architecture more closely resembling Ottoman seaside wooden pavilion architecture, fashionable sites of leisure during the eighteenth century (Hamadeh 2008, 200−215). Paintings located in the chambers associated with Selim III, the upper walls of the Council Chamber, and around the porticos of the Gate of Felicity and the Middle Gate constructed with an accurate use of perspective replaced the mannerist trompe l’oeil decorative elements of the earlier capriccios with neo-Classical elements such as columns or curtains (fig. 3). Their increased virtuosity, characterized by the complex spatial layering of a variety of foreign and local architectural elements, such as bridges, pavilions, and ruins, is complicated by the poor foreshortening of the buildings. While the paintings may have been executed by foreign artists, they may also have been created by Ottoman artists influenced by contemporary works such as the painted and engraved architectural capriccios popular in Europe during the mid-eighteenth century, or the idyllic scenes on porcelain imported from Europe. For example, the image on the outer wing of the gate shows European-style buildings with pedimental doorways grouped together in an isolated landscape on the shores of a calm sea. Similarly, the painting on the interior wall of the same wing shows a European-style, two-story building abutted by a smaller building located on an island in an isolated, idyllic landscape. A rough-hewn wooden bridge built of branches over a small waterfall leads to the buildings, while a volcano mimics its triangular form in the background. All elements of the image are foreign to Ottoman imagery. Similarly, the painting on the other interior wing of the gateway shows a building beside a ruin with arches supported by a Corinthian column. A crescent moon and star finial on the top of the building marks it as Ottoman, presumably a pleasure pavilion. As in the earlier landscapes, no people populate these images, in contrast to picturesque European landscapes of the same era. Although all of these landscapes depict three-dimensional pictorial space, they do not use perspectival construction, and thereby do not construct the viewing subject in the same manner as European paintings. In contrast to murals in the French

3: Anonymous. Landscape Painting near the Gate of Felicity, Topkapı Palace. c. 1774−1779.

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Rococo tradition, which depend on the position of the subject to create an illusion of continuity with the image, located high up on walls, these images are not adjusted for the viewing position of the spectator and thus do not create a spatial illusion. Although this difference may have resulted from copying engravings or porcelains designed to be seen at eye-level, it may also reflect existing representational practices which did not position the viewer perspectivally in relation to the picture plane. Nonetheless, a small group of paintings suggests that the issue of the viewer emerged during the reign of Sultan Selim III. Attributed to the Greek-Ottoman court artist Konstantin Kapıdağlı, the most complex of these depicts the sultan enthroned before the Gate of Felicity (fig. 4). Two marble fountains behind the sultan flank the gate. Above them, the eves of the gateway are decorated with the landscape scenes discussed above. Depicting a holiday ceremony centering around the sultan who sits under the gate, central to all these landscapes, the painting represents a particular moment in the adoption of three-dimensional pictorial space in the empire. One of the first oil on canvas works by an Ottoman artist, the unmodulated use of color and light and the uniform depiction of detail suggest a lack of familiarity with the medium. Like the Flemish artist Jean-Baptiste van Mour, who had depicted palace life in the early eighteenth century, Konstantin Kapıdağlı constructs his paintings with a spatial compression that renders figures disproportional to each other: they are all the same size because they are depicted as though they were seen from an infinite distance although they are relatively close to the viewer. This elongated perspective gives the sensation of looking down on the image in the foreground, straight at the

4: Konstantin Kapıdağlı. Sultan Selim III Enthroned at a Holiday Ceremony. c. 1789−1806.

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image in the center, and upward to the left and the right on either side. Seen as an isolated work, this painting suggests an unproblematic experiment with perspective as a modern means of representing Ottoman ceremonial. However, the similarity between a gouache study of the sultan enthroned, presumably by the same artist as the oil painting, and a mural that once flanked the gates of the Gate of Felicity, suggests otherwise. The study depicts the sultan enthroned within an imaginary arcade. A checkerboard floor emphasizes the use of mathematical perspective as a structuring device (fig. 5). Similar arcades, without the figure of

5: Konstantin Kapıdağlı. Sultan Selim III Enthroned. c. 1789−1806.

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the sultan, were also painted onto the walls flanking the Gate of Felicity (Bab üsSaadet), replacing the fountains in the first painting (fig. 6). These murals created an imaginary extension of the real courtyard architecture of the palace, suggesting the illusion of passage from the official to the private courtyards of the palace. This was one of the few times in the empire when perspective was used to draw the viewer into a fictive space. The sultan is indicated in absentia through the placement of a carpet where he sits enthroned in the gouache study. Contrary to the mastering subject position upon which perspectival representation normally relies, here the sultan is represented through his absence within the perspectival murals, and turns his back on the perspectival images during the ceremony, where he sits before them. In contrast to the Western use of perspective, granting mastery to the viewer, here the sultan underscores his mastery both through the occlusion of his image and the illusion of access which the painting provides. Although adopting perspectival techniques, the relationship between vision and power remains wed to an invisible subject hinted at through the presence of a screen. Yet like the grid of the screen between the royal lodge and the council chamber depicted in the manuscript painting by Nakkaş Osman, the perspectival grid of the mural symbolizes power without representing it. Such a radically novel mural in such a ceremonially central space reflects the delicate balance at the heart of Sultan Selim III’s programs of westernization. On the one hand, Western techniques of perspectival representation were adopted and displayed as a mark of modernization and participation in Western culture. And

6: Abdullah Frères. Gate of Felicity, Topkapı Palace with early nineteenth-century murals. c. 1890−1893.

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yet these new practices were simultaneously rejected in that the subject central to the scene, the sultan, was framed by and thereby excluded from the position of subjective mastery normally implied by perspective. The scene was not constructed for the sultan’s ocular control, but to illustrate the illusion of mastery implied in the perspectival access beyond the wall indicated by the picture behind him. Thus the earliest Ottoman use of perspective to create an illusionary space conveys a mistrust of the type of subjectivity implied by this structuring of vision. By the end of the eighteenth century, far simpler depictions of landscape became a common element of wall decoration both in Istanbul and in the provinces. Such decoration was soon used not only in elite homes, but also in mosques. In contrast to the paintings within new palaces, which became increasingly dependent on perspectival spatial construction, paintings outside of the palace, particularly outside of Istanbul, relied more on modes of constructing space reminiscent both of those used in manuscript and market paintings (Arık 1976; Renda 1988, 73−86). While these works suggest that the modality of representing landscape did not go hand in hand with perspectival technical knowledge, it does suggest that the mode of viewing enabled by landscape was integral to the cultural changes taking place in the empire during the early nineteenth century. Murals denote an essential embarkation on a path of modernization, in that they involve a “deliberate putting behind of the past by distancing the artwork from an earlier set of artistic tastes, in which process all the monuments of that past are reordered, and in which a dialogue with tradition may be achieved via technical exploration and the expression of new subjects” (Clark 1998, 29). In replacing and thereby distancing Islamic practices of girih patterning with new perspectival technology, mural painting served as a first step in categorizing “tradition” as distinct from the modern. These paintings represented a new, cosmopolitan gaze that laid the groundwork for Ottoman elites to imagine themselves as European. Yet in contrast to the European gaze turned outward through the proliferation of illustrated travel literature during the nineteenth century, the Ottoman gaze turned inward, using foreign modes of representation to depict the familiar. By recreating the readily available exterior view within the home, elites interiorized their own environment. In their murals, Ottomans represented an idyllic reflection of their reality, as though constructed on the other side of a mirror, and an ideal image of nature, not conceptually far from the mathematical idealization of nature inherent in girih-based design. They tamed the foreign by incorporating it into familiar artistic practices. New Palaces, New Arts Although mural painting continued throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in the provinces, in Istanbul oil on canvas paintings came to supplement increasingly illusionistic murals commissioned from European artists as part of the new architectural environments through which elites expressed their interest in participating in modern culture, defined through its affiliation with European forms. In the eighteenth century, the construction of over three hundred palaces along the Istanbul waterfront had reflected cultural syncretism and a growing desire

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to emphasize Ottoman strength through urban form (Hamadeh 2008). Likewise, the increasingly frequent construction of monumental palaces during the nineteenth century might be seen as symptomatic of the rapidly changing needs and mores not only of the imperial family, but of the rapidly changing city and the empire itself (Çelik 1986). The Ottoman imperial household had lived, at least officially, at the Topkapı Palace for nearly four centuries. In keeping with Turkic practice, this household included not only the sultan, his mother, the harem, children, and their servants but also a large portion of the imperial administration. One consequence of the Tanzimat was the bureaucratization of Ottoman administration and its transfer to new buildings located at the Sublime Porte [Bab-ı Ali], located across from the Gülhane gate of the palace, resulting in a reorganization of the imperial household. In addition, modernization made traditional domestic spaces quickly outmoded, resulting in the frequent relocation of the imperial family. Between 1829 and 1832, Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808−1839) commissioned the royal architect Krikor Amira Balyan to rebuild his summer palace at Beylerbey. By the end of his reign, the Çırağan Palace, which had been a favored retreat for Sultan Selim III, was increasingly used as a long-term summer residence; in 1834, Sultan Mahmud II had its old buildings razed to make way for a new edifice, which was completed in 1841, after his death (Can 1999). Although his son Sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839−1861) used this palace for fourteen years, it was soon supplanted by the Dolmabahçe Palace, designed and built by the Armenian-Ottoman architects Garabet Amira Balyan and his son Nigoğayos Balyan. When the imperial family moved there in 1856, the Topkapı Palace became officially relegated to the use of the family of the previous sultan. While still divided into a public section, the selamlık, and a private section for the family of the sultan, the harem, the Dolmabahçe Palace rejected the pavilion-style architecture exemplified by the Topkapı Palace. Instead, it introduced monumental, Western-style architecture decorated with elaborate stuccowork characteristic of neo-Baroque Ottoman architecture, inspired by the elaborate decoration of the French Rococo. The following year, Nigoğayos Balyan drafted plans for a new Çırağan Palace in a neoMoorish style. Sarkis and Hagop Balyan oversaw the construction of the new palace between 1863 and 1867 under Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861−1876), who began using it in 1872. The palace was based on European Orientalist fashions, and its gardens even included a greenhouse for growing lemons dubbed the “crystal pavilion.” After the deposition and controversial death of Sultan Abdülaziz, Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876−1909) found existing palaces too vulnerable, and built a new palace composed of multiple pavilions among landscaped gardens overlooking the Bosporus. Sarkis Balyan built the first two (Şale (Chalet) and Ihlamur (Linden)) pavilions of the Yıldız Palace in 1879−80 and 1889. The third portion for ceremonials was completed in 1898 by the Italian architect Raimondo d’Aronco. The pavilionstyle architecture of the palace suggests a return to an idealized Ottoman past, in which the monarch would have ample grounds in which to enjoy nature. However, as in other nineteenth-century palaces, the lifestyle within was largely Western,

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bringing together anachronistic Ottoman forms, such as girih ceiling patterns in some rooms, with Western ones, such as landscape and still-life murals and oil on canvas paintings. Western and Eastern traditions apparently merge in spaces such as Abdülhamid II’s private bathroom, where Art Nouveau tilework produces a girih-like effect. The new palace interiors required new decoration, and Ottoman rulers were quick to commission numerous foreign artists to work on mural, oil on canvas, and even sculptural commissions. The first known art exhibit in the Ottoman Empire, an exhibit of landscape paintings by an artist named Odeker, took place on December 28, 1845, at the Old Çırağan Palace (Cezar 1992, 45).6 The following year, artists were brought to the palace from Prussia and Russia. The Ottoman-Armenian artist Diratzu Rafail (?−1780) received a passport to study abroad in 1849.7 In appreciation of his interiors for the Beylerbey Palace, the Polish artist Stanislow Chelebowski (1835−1884) became palace artist under Sultan Abdülaziz in 1864, receiving apartments in the palace and executing images of important historic battles and portraits of the sultan before his return to Poland in 1876, when the sultan was deposed (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 111).8 Probably inspired by the emotive rendition of battles in Chelebowski’s works, the palace also commissioned several works from the Italian artist Alberto Pasini in order to celebrate the defeated uprising of 1868 in Crete (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 102).9 The French artist PierreDesiré Guillemet, who arrived in Istanbul in 1865, executed a portrait of the sultan in 1873 (from the same photograph as Chelebowski, but set at the new Çırağan instead of the Beylerbey Palace), and received imperial patronage to found an art academy in Beyoğlu. Likewise, Sultan Abdülaziz commissioned the English sculptor Charles F. Fuller to execute a portrait bust and tabletop equestrian statue during his visit to Istanbul in 1869. These first sculptural commissions in the empire were only displayed in private after the equestrian statue was poured as a bronze and placed on display at the Beylerbey Palace, the sultan’s favorite residence, in 1872 (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 99). The Russian-Armenian painter Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, who visited Istanbul on numerous occasions between 1857 and 1890, received a medal for his portrait of the sultan in 1858, an honor Chelebowski would share in 1864. During his extended stay in 1874−1875, he stayed with the Balyan family, and thus was in very close contact with the palace. Like Chelebowski’s narrative battle scenes designed to glorify Ottoman history, Aivazovsky utilized his romantic landscape style to depict scenes such as that of the Ottoman fleet in military formation in front of the Çırağan Palace with a romantic, fiery sun setting behind the historic city (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 103). Through the palace connection, he also met the young Armenian Mıgırdıç Givanian (1848−1906), son of Sultan Abdülmecid’s court violinist, who studied art at Guillemet’s academy and became a renowned painter of nocturnal and romantic landscapes (fig. 7). As this summary suggests, European artists invited to the palace may have had a limited audience, but they nonetheless did have some broader cultural contact and influence. Inspired by the ceramics of Sèvres and Limoges, Sultan Abdülhamid II also encouraged the development of Western-style tastes through the institution of the

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Yıldız Porcelain Factory on palace grounds. Established in 1890, its opening was delayed by an earthquake until 1894. Initially importing not only technicians but also materials, by 1897 it used clay from a local source. A student named Halid was sent to Sèvres in 1893 to become head painter for the new establishment (Küçükerman 1998, 10−21). Many palace artists and renowned outsiders (including the famous landscapist Ali Rıza (1858−1930)) produced porcelain designs. Although based on French vessel forms rooted both in the neo-classical and art nouveau styles, Yıldız porcelains were designed to suit the taste of an Ottoman market. Early vessels used girih patterns, not from Ottoman ceramics, but from other sources such as geometric ceiling patterns (fig. 8). Less specifically Ottoman than broadly Islamic, such patterns resemble those in contemporary European sources such as Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament (1856), which transformed the art of other cultures into patterns for use on diverse European products. In contrast to French products, Ottoman porcelains often excluded or minimized the use of the human figure, preferring landscape (particularly of Istanbul) and still-life genres executed in naturalistic styles. Some portrait porcelains, such as a set of coffee-cups with dynastic portraits, were also produced. Marketed towards Ottoman elites enjoying modern lifestyles in homes with increasingly European architecture, ceramics translated an existing culture of use and display into a Westernized aesthetic form. Indeed, new palaces created an exemplary architectural environment in which Western furniture and decoration became normalized within traditional practices of domestic architecture (such as the presence of multiple domestic spaces for

FROM OLD NICHES TO NEW PAINTINGS various wives). Painting came to fill an environmental niche that had not been part of earlier Ottoman homes. As the elite began to build new kinds of houses, they too wanted framed paintings to decorate their walls and serve as markers of modern identity. For the most part, this very small new market preferred the types of images – landscapes and still-lifes – which would least offend Islamic sensibilities concerning representation, making these the first genres widely practiced by Ottoman artists at the end of the century. However, the needs of the palace were unique. While imperial portraiture developed as a means of creating a new, externalized imperial image, a new practice of painting from photographs emerged as a means of representing the palace to itself. Imperial Portraiture During the same period that murals increasingly replaced girih pattern on architectural surfaces, imperial portraits reflected the decreased occlusion of the sultan from the public gaze and harnessed representation to augment power. Although long part of the tradition of manuscript painting, imperial portraiture in line with the European tradition first emerged during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid I, who commissioned several Europeanstyle portraits of himself as gifts to European rulers. One such portrait attributed to Diratzu Rafail underscores the syncretism of this transitional period (Pamukçiyan 1987). Although executed in oil on canvas, the flat backdrop, foreshortened throne, and traditional seated pose reflect aspects of earlier portraiture traditions (fig. 9).

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OTTOMAN PAINTING According to the Letterature turchesca (Venice, 1787) of Father Giambatista Toderini, Rafail’s son Menasi Menas subsequently produced imperial portraits of earlier sultans, including Murad I, Osman III, Mustafa III, and Abdülhamid I (Kürkman 2004, 586). Reflective of this interest in producing a Europeanstyle dynastic gallery, during this period, the Tree of Jesse became a model through which to represent Ottoman genealogy in painting (fig. 10). Although unsigned, one such genealogical tree from the reign of Mahmud II in the collection of the Mikhitarist Monastery in Vienna is accompanied by a note indicating its creation by Zenop Menas, the first secretary and interpreter at the Ottoman Embassy in Vienna in the 1840s (Kürkman 2004, 593). Although the attribution of similar works in the collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum is unclear, the work suggests how this central European trope came to enter the Ottoman sphere. Medallion portraits were probably inspired by the type of miniature portraits which were fashionable in Europe, and which formed a type of visiting card within elite circles (Pointon 2001). Associated with Westernizing cultural practices, one of the earliest surviving examples of such miniature portraiture, today in the Bowood House collection, depicts Sultan Selim III framed by diamonds on a box given to Lord Keith, one of the British naval commanders serving under Admiral Lord Nelson. An anonymous portrait of Kazaz Artin Amira Bezciyan, superintendent of the mint between 1819 and 1833, suggests the use of the medallion, depicting the sitter as wearing a diamond-studded portrait medallion on his gold-brocaded waistcoat, underneath

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his open jacket (Kürkman 2004, 33−35; fig. 11). Portrait medallions continued to be produced and used as gifts through the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, and were produced as sets incorporating the entire dynasty as late as 1922 (Renda 2000, 524, 538−9). Although many are unsigned, Sebuh Manas (1816−1889) was an important artist of such medallions during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid, while Antranik Allahverdi

11: Anonymous. Portrait of Kazaz Artin Amira Bezciyan. c. 1833.

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produced them at the end of the Ottoman era (Kürkman 2004, 133, 587−591). It became an honor to receive a medallion of the imperial portrait, the Tasvir-i Hümayun, one of which was even awarded to the Sheikh ul−Islam, the administrative head of Islam in the Ottoman state, in 1832 (Halil Edhem 1924, 23). In 1835, ambassadors were appointed to distribute the portrait in Europe. In the early 1840s, portraits of Sultan Abdülmecid were given as gifts to foreign emissaries and sent to European courts, including those of France, Germany, Russia, and Spain. In 1848, boxes with the imperial portrait were approved for sale, indicating that it had entered wider circulation, as suggested by the decreasing status of those receiving the imperial portrait as a gift over the course of the 1840s.10 During the last decade of his reign, Sultan Mahmud II not only commissioned his portrait, but hung it in public places. The portraits emphasized the Western cast of his reign both through their medium and by portraying him in the modern clothing introduced during the dress reform of 1826: a Western-style military coat instead of a kaftan and a fez instead of a turban. Several surviving medallion portraits depict Sultan Mahmud II with a flat style, slightly disproportionately large head, and stylized eyes bring to mind Qajar imperial portraits of the same era, suggesting a possible confluence of artists (Diba 1998; fig. 12). One surviving portrait of Mahmud II suggests a very similar stylized format for the large-scale paintings intended for public spaces (Kürkman 2004, 37). His portrait was hung in several public places: the School of Military Sciences,

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the Sublime Porte in 1835, and at the Rami and the Beyoğlu Cannoneer Barracks in 1836.11 Elaborate ceremonies marked the public installation of the portrait, described by the chronicler Ahmed Lütfi (1817−1907): The imperial portrait was sent to several military and administrative locations. Spectacular parades of pomp and circumstance were undertaken for the official hanging of the picture. In the morning, the chief and commissioned officers of the military, their medallions and uniforms brocaded with silver, and rowboats with banners of the new painting gathered at the seaside mansion of the Marshal of the Bodyguards. A group of naval soldiers and two private battalions with three cannons each and excellent music gathered behind the Beylerbey Palace… With breaks of forty paces, regiments of the cavalry and private police went from the imperial palace to the barracks. As they came in sight of the picture, the high officials and sixty men each from the cavalry police and the imperial guard and privates marched in formation and brought the carriage carrying the picture to the mounting stone in front of the carriages of several officials. The portrait was placed in the Selimiye Barracks. The sultan himself honored the seaside barracks to watch the parade. After sacrifices were slaughtered, prayers said, and twenty−one cannons fired… all the soldiers assembled before the picture. That night the interior and exterior of the Selimiye Barracks were decorated with lamps and fireworks. A few days later the parade of the picture as it was taken to the Sublime Porte was also spectacular… (Ahmet Lütfi 1999, 882−3). Thus elaborate ceremonial invested the portrait with meaning, identifying it with the presence of the sultan through an encounter between the man and his image. The soldiers, standing at attention before the visit of the real sultan, then turned towards the portrait and celebrated it in his stead. It was only after the installation of the image at the barracks that a far more modest ceremony brought it to the new seat of administration. Powerfully expressing the spirit of Sultan Mahmud II’s reforms, the paintings proved controversial. The traveler Julia Pardoe reported that many of the soldiers cursed the sinful representations of a man (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 86). Nonetheless, the streets were lined with both men and women eager to catch a glimpse of such shocking representation of the sultan. Ahmed Lütfi addresses the controversy by justifying the permissibility of the portrait: In order to understand and examine former times using perception and judgment, it is wise to gather knowledge and its representation. It is wise to respect old works. This foundation enables the representational paintings of image-makers like Mani and Bihzad which constitute the beginnings of works of art [to be respected and remembered]. Some people’s pictures are made and remembered for the purpose of hearing the name and receiving meaning from

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Thus he cunningly links the paintings both with those by famous Persian manuscript artists like Mani and Bihzad and with the decisions of one of the most celebrated sultans in Ottoman history. Referring to him as a renovator of the state, he not only points to the empire’s claims to continue the Roman Empire, but also links the innovations of Mahmud II with Mehmed the Conqueror. To this end he points out that, like the angels left on the dome of Hagia Sophia by Mehmed II, the imperial portraits were not intended for worship but for memorialization. He continues by associating the rejection of the portrait with societies perceived as less civilized, particularly Arabs and contrasts this with various poetic celebrations and eulogies for the portrait written between the 1830s and as late as the 1890s (Kürkman 2004, 36−37). Writing late in life, it seems that the historian had the opportunity to reflect on the changes in the reaction to the image brought about by the spread of photography and with it, portraiture. He ends his account with an explanation of how the image became more acceptable: “Later, as the science of representation progressed, having a picture made entered the category of fashion, and since it was not set up with prayers and praise, it did not disturb the views of the men of pure hearts so much.” Nonetheless, when the sultan passed away, his portraits were covered in order to ensure that they would not become objects of worship, and no large scale portraits of the sultan remain that can be definitively dated to his reign. Although the use of full-scale oil on canvas portraits suggests a shift towards the Western practice of representing power through the image, it did not continue after the reign of Sultan Mahmud II. Until after the Second Constitutional Revolution in 1908, portraiture remained limited entirely to the palace. Portraits of Sultans Abdülmecid and Abdülaziz executed by foreign artists reflect Western practices of portraiture, and were accomplished in several sittings and utilizing familiar poses reflective of high status. Among these, the most technically sophisticated is a pair of unsigned works depicting Sultan Mahmud II and his son, Sultan Abdülmecid. Although often attributed to the Ottoman-Armenian brothers Rupen and Sebuh Manas, both of whom had some training abroad, their virtuosity and iconography suggest a foreign artist. The first painting presents Sultan Mahmud II at a Westernstyle palace, probably the Çırağan, with a cityscape in the background, shaded by a curtained window in deep shadow and pointing towards the future, as directed by the unfurled decree of reform hanging from his left hand (fig. 13). The image is striking not only for its use of familiar European iconography – a ruler before his dominions, pointing the way forward – but even more so for the less easily adopted techniques of effective spatial construction and chiaroscuro. Likewise, the stylistically similar but somewhat larger standing portrait of Abdülmecid depicts

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him before a curtained portico with a landscape in the background showing the disused Topkapı Palace (fig. 14). The sultan, holding white gloves that emphasize his European demeanor, points to a map trailing off the table beside him. The intended use of these works is unknown, however their large size and similar composition suggest that they were intended for use in large interior spaces such as those of the Dolmabahçe Palace, where they could affilliate the reigning sultan with the reforms instigated by his father. The depiction of Sultan Mahmud II with the decree indicates that it is indeed a posthumous work, since he died suddenly before he could actually announce the reforms. Stylistically, these works closely resemble portraits by the German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a favored portraitist of European royalty, one of whose specialties was to use light in modeling portraits against a darkened backdrop. In particular the pose of Abdülmecid and his position between a table and a balcony closely resembles a 1852 portrait of Napoleon III, copies of which are located today at the Museo Napoleonico, Rome, Italy, and the Musée Ingres, in Montauban, France. Supporting this attribution, the painting of Sultan Mahmud II was cited as the work of Winterhalter in an article in the newspaper La Turquie in 1874, when a copy of this portrait of Mahmud II was presented in one of the first art exhibits in Istanbul (Cezar 1995, 435). However, since no record of Winterhalter visiting Istanbul exists and Sultan Abdülmecid never left the country, the attribution of both portraits (presumably by the same artist) remains unclear. The portrait of Abdülmecid was later copied without the chiaroscuro and signed by Rupen Manas,

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presumably resulting in the attribution of the other work to him. A similar copy was also sent as a gift to the Drottningholm Palace in Sweden, and an 1859 document orders him to copy a portrait of the sultan hanging in the Paris embassy for the London embassy (Renda 2000, 435).12 In contrast to landscape murals, which quickly spread beyond the palace to elite homes throughout the empire, imperial portraiture was designed for a niche not intrinsically part of Ottoman culture. Perhaps for this reason, it played a role circumscribed to new imperial palace settings and as a communicative device within adopted codes of European culture. Oil on canvas Painting By the nineteenth century, portable, oil on canvas paintings began to supplement and replace landscape murals in both palaces and the elite homes of Ottoman Muslims. As painting moved from walls to canvases, it competed with other framed works hung on walls, particularly calligraphic panels. Not only was calligraphy ubiquitous in books and documents, it was also a frequent element in architectural adornment and as independent panels, collected in albums or framed and hung on walls. Even though Arabic script was discarded in 1928, calligraphy continued to be part of Turkish visual culture through wall-hung panels. While calligraphic panels did not disappear, they began to share their environmental niche with paintings and photographs, marking an important shift in visual culture. Paintings were considered through the vocabulary of fine workmanship, through the term nakkaş used for embroiderers of both thread and of lines, and the painter, embroiderer of an image. Writing in 1924, Halil Edhem (1861−1938) discusses the lack of vocabulary for art: The terminology concerning the fine arts is not yet established and consistent in our language. For example, we refer to every type of picture [resim; musavvıra− tasvir], even increasingly photographs, as a “picture”. Perhaps this is generally correct, and to a certain extent equivalent to the French image and the German bild. However, to call the makers of pictures in oil paints, pencil, maps, technical drafting, and architecture [all] “painters” (ressam) is not appropriate. He goes on to cite the work on terminology in the arts, published in 1915 by Mehmed Vahit (1873−1931), who considers the words nakış and nakiş as equivalent to resim and ressam for painting and painter, respectively. Thus as late as the twentieth century, painting could be conceived through the same vocabulary as embroidering−working a surface with an image rather than projecting space onto a surface, as conceived in Western painting (Halil Edhem 1924, 18). Indeed, the first collection of paintings organized by Halil Edhem in 1910 was called the Collection of Embroidered Panels [Elvah-i Nakşiye Koleksiyonu], better translated as decorated panels, and did not differentiate between the calligraphic and the painted panel. Similarly, Sultan Abdülhamid II bestowed the title “His Majesty’s Artist” [Ressam−ı hazret−i şehriyari] to the Abdullah Frères, his court photographers (Kortun 1988).

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Thus the word ressam was applicable to any maker of images, not only to painters. Indeed, in modern Turkish, the word for picture and painting, resim, is the same, and there is no way of designating an artist (sanatçı) without specifying medium which does not connote participation in the performing arts, particularly singing. The terminological confusion is readily understandable in light of how slowly ordinary people, and even the empire’s first artists, became acquainted with painting. Western painting was very distant from the everyday life of even an extremely cosmopolitan elite family in the late nineteenth century. In his memoirs, one of the Turkish Republic’s first parliamentarians and art historians Celal Esad (Arseven; 1875−1971) describes the rarity of Western-style images during his childhood. He was the son of Ahmed Esad Pasha, who served as grand vizier in the mid-1870s after serving as director of the Ottoman School in Paris in the 1860s. Despite his privileged position, Celal Esad’s childhood recollections point to the cultural gap between late Ottoman and European visual culture. He explains that in the early 1880s, most conservative Istanbul families still ate dinner not at a table, but seated around a metal tray. At that time, enameled trays made in Europe for the Ottoman market were fashionable, and often were decorated with flowers and sites around Istanbul such as the Ortaköy Mosque, the Dolmabahçe Palace, the royal fleet, the fire tower, or the Göksu Stream. These were the only paintings of his early childhood – even portraits of kings and queens on round, imported matchboxes were scratched off by the fundamentalist matronservant of the house. Only calligraphic works were hung on the walls of the home. When he was older and allowed to attend shadow-puppet shows at the local coffee house, he had the opportunity to see lithographic prints on the walls, which featured important sites in the city.13 He also was able to buy stickers featuring European pastoral landscape scenes (Arseven 1993, 10, 28−29). Thus in young Celal Esad’s world, Western art existed through reproductions of two genres: landscape, which was permissible, and portraiture, which was forbidden. The images he saw came largely from European sources and resembled the kinds of images used in landscape murals. There were no large or original works; thus style, color, and iconographic conventions remained unfamiliar compared to the magical novelty of representation. Unlike that of most people of his generation, the development of Celal Esad’s artistic awareness did not end there. While in most schools all forms of drawing were forbidden, it was integral to the curriculum of the modern military primary school he attended. After several years of copying geometric drawings from the blackboard into their notebooks, students began to copy flowers, animals, people, and landscapes from European lithographs. They were not allowed to draw from nature, and watercolor and oil paint were only part of more advanced curricula at select secondary schools, where some of the best known artists of the day − including Ahmed Ali (1841−1907) Pasha, Ali Rıza, Süleyman Seyyid (1842−1913), and Şevket (Dağ; 1875−1944) − taught. Through the complimentary processes of military and educational reform, a growing number of young Ottoman subjects gained exposure to Western representational forms. Since the eighteenth-century modernization of the Ottoman

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military, training in visual representation had become part of strategic training for military personnel. The first illustrated book printed in the Ottoman Empire, Tableaux des nouveaux règlements de l’Empire Ottoman (1798), designed to provide foreigners with information about Ottoman military reforms, even included a perspectival image of the Imperial Naval Engineering College [Mühendishane-i Berri-ye Hümayun], founded in 1795 as the first Western-style military school in the empire. Only a few years after similar educational reforms in France, geometry and geography were included in its curriculum (Cezar 1995, 92).14 Art classes were approved for the program of the military school that same year, but they only entered the curriculum in 1847 when a Spaniard named Shirans was hired as a teacher (Yetik 1940, 6−7). During the same period, a wider array of subjects including French, topography, military history, and painting also became a required part of architectural education (Cezar 1995, 116). The distinction between technical and artistic education in drawing often goes unnoted as surveys of Turkish art use such early beginnings to extend, and thereby naturalize, the development of Western artistic practice in the Ottoman Empire. An oil on canvas illustration of The Battle of Lamya (1897) illustrates this difference (pl. 1). In this work, signed by Sergeant Mehmet, landscape provides a ground for a play-by-play depiction of military movements across a valley where each event, site, and important character is labeled. While the layering of figures in the foreground recalls manuscript painting, the overall three-dimensionality of the image suggests an artist who knew about perspective but did not know how to place people within it. As a result, the painting seems to partake in no clear artistic tradition. Instead, it represents events and figures as in a diagram, thus creating a realism of military pragmatism more than artistic ambition. What, after all, is does it mean to depict reality? In the absence of conventions for the medium of oil on canvas, The Battle of Lamya is realistic; its realism is, in fact, confirmed by the inclusion of text which attempts to ensure a one-to-one correspondence between what is depicted visually and what is to be understood strategically. Like images from medieval Christian narrative art, legitimized by the condition that the image acts as a window not onto the world, but onto the Word, the Ottoman military use of the image in this painting legitimizes representation by eschewing elements such as style and composition which would grant it visual presence beyond its textual content. Perceptions of reality are related to social codes more than to universal experience (Bryson 1981, 3). Radical as the changes undertaken by the military were, their aim was not to revolutionize visual culture, but to adapt techniques of Western culture for military objectives. This painting may reflect one aspect of instruction at the military academy, yet few examples of such literalism survive. Rather, most surviving works from such academies reflect a close relationship between painting and photography and evince a strictly uniform style designed to suppress individual expression. As Arseven explains, even in the most advanced studios where oil painting was taught, images of people were never executed and a live model was never used. Instead, students copied prints and photographs, and paintings tended to represent a narrow range

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of subjects, including the Yıldız and Beylerbey Palaces, the Göksu stream, the Kağıthane entertainment grounds, and the Tower of Leander. Arseven explains how closely controlled the production of these images was: Sitting before the painting begun by the student in order to make his corrections, Mr. Ali Rıza would generally sit in front of it for many hours, thereby completing it. For this reason, most of the paintings looked so alike that they might be considered the work of a single artist. Every year, select paintings would be placed in a gilt frame bearing the medallion of the sultan and presented to the sultan. The owners of these works, signed with the phrase “his servants” [kulları] would receive money from his highness (Arseven 1993, 46−47). In the service of the sultan, artists used oil on canvas to enlarge photographs for palace use. Although these paintings may have conveyed the same visual information as the original photographs, their medium connoted a Western cultural identity. Signed with an affirmation of loyalty in lieu of or in addition to an individual signature, the paintings acted as thanks for the monarch’s patronage rather than as interpretations of his domain.15 Featuring images of Istanbul, they relied on photographs in order to produce a circumscribed self-image for the appreciation of the Ottoman palace. In an effort to construct an essentially true copy of nature on a scale and in a medium appropriate for inclusion in a palatial setting with new, Western architecture, interior design, and furniture, the paintings suppressed style in favor of a literal realism devoid of the effects of any visual tradition, such as oil painting, photography, or Ottoman practices. Emerging from a military environment with no tradition of visual production, these paintings repressed the possibility of subjectivity implied by the concept of style (Bryson 1983, 7). After all, what empowers a soldier is his ability to exist not as an individual subject, but as the executor of state will. In the earliest cohort of Ottoman paintings, the artist was not there. Ottoman artists appear to have copied lithographs, enamel paintings, and even postcards coming from Europe. Yet both the military academy and the palace had already begun to acquire works by Western artists. Whereas by the nineteenth century the European landscape tradition had combined observation with idealization from nature as informed by the work of earlier artists, Ottoman artists copied neither from nature nor the work of earlier artists (Taylor 1987, 5, 23, 106). What they created was less art than painting. It aimed not to tame the foreignness of objects, but the foreignness of culture, not through imagery but through their presence in newly created Western-style domestic environments. Many of the works bear no signature, and thus there is little trace of how or why they were made. Many also have no date, and can often only be dated to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Early Ottoman landscape paintings might be roughly divided into two groups: those copied from drawn images imported from the West (particularly as prints) and those copied from photographs. Paintings that appear to be copies of European landscapes are numerous in the Military Museum

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collection. More numerous, paintings copied from photographs had a very limited subject matter − that of Yıldız Palace and occasionally other Ottoman palaces − and a limited audience, that of the palace itself. Such paintings are today located largely in the collection of the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Landscape paintings copied from European examples are characterized by scenes that depict mountains, a river, and trees, allowing for a distant horizon, a middleground, and a foreground. Not only do they bear no signs of representing specific places, either through the title or through the inclusion of recognizable buildings, people wearing distinctive costumes, or vignette settings, they often include the kinds of houses more typical to central Europe than to Turkey (fig. 15). The numerous paintings copied from photographs reflect the Ottoman interpretation of Islamic representational practice as a prohibition against copying from nature. Rather than reconceptualizing photographic images as scenes from nature, introducing conventions of depiction from the European landscape tradition, or using them to produce conventional perspectival constructions of space, these artists used paintings to create flat and precise color renditions of photographs. These paintings might be considered in multiple ways: as a means of understanding arts instruction; of examining a new relationship with the making of land as a formed and visual space; of understanding how photographs could be perceived in the absence of a painting tradition; of considering how different photographed space indeed is from space constructed on canvas perspectivally (and how conditioned we are to reading the latter, not the former, as space within a painting); and as a way of considering the different values and uses ascribed to oil painting as opposed to photography in the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire (Shaw 2009). Nearly all these works are of approximately the same size and use the same materials. Most depict the Yıldız Palace using photographs from the albums of

15: Yakup of Yenibahçe, fourth year student at the Istanbul Military Academy. (untitled). 1873.

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Sultan Abdülhamid II, taken between 1890 and 1900 (Allen 1984; Woodward 2003). The works were produced by students and teachers of the Darüşafaka High School and at the Yıldız Palace in a building dedicated to fine art and decorated with reliefs of drawing tools, such as rulers, compasses palettes, and brushes (Giray 2000, 112−20). This location underscores the departure from Western practice as, rather than copying from nature in the environment they both inhabited and depicted, they used photographic intermediaries. Featuring the newest and most modern imperial palace, these paintings not only focus on a new architectural style that combines Turkish domestic architecture with European decorative elements, they also feature the carefully groomed landscaping that identifies these buildings as part of a new relationship with nature. For example, a black-and-white photograph of the barren, newly planted park of the palace becomes transformed into a lush environment of paths winding into the distance (fig. 16).16 Seen from within the conventions of landscape painting which this painting presumably tries to emulate, the evenness of treatment of the foreground and the background, the uniformity of light, the lack of effects to call attention to any particular moment in the image all suggest that this is less a landscape in the expressive tradition of European art than a painting of a photograph of land that has been landscaped: a painting, oddly enough, which might be considered, like a photograph, as a message without a stylistic code (Barthes 1977, 19).

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Yet clearly such paintings did have a message, as much in their medium as in their content. They reflect a new use of the Ottoman tradition of commissioning artistic works within palace ateliers rather than the adoption of a contemporary European artistic practice, increasingly driven less by patronage than by market forces driven by criticism. Students, freshly educated in the use of Western media, were commissioned to produce a new type of work that represented the palace to itself, for the first time not in manuscripts or on walls, but in the portable format of oil on canvas more appropriate to increasingly Western styles of interior decoration. Rather than aiming at artistic expression, these paintings operated as cultural signage. Art signifies, and yet its signification is always in motion: referential both through medium and form to all preceding uses; as well as through the selection and portrayal of content. Yet art also steps beyond its linguistic referentiality, beyond a semiology representable through the structure of language. Meaning resonates beyond description or analysis. In contrast, these paintings act as signs, denoting with a literal vocabulary the unstylized, mechanical, photographic reproduction of places they represent; and connoting, through their medium and format, an equally literal perception of a Westernness made into a singularity that can be contained by forms − of architecture, landscape, and painting itself. Discussing the Western painting tradition, Norman Bryson considers the gap between the discursivity and the figuralism of an image, suggesting that images are more affective the more they veer towards non-textual (discursive) modes of persuasion in favor of figural (based on the language of the visual) expression (Bryson 1981, 5−15). These paintings introduce a third term; beyond the discursivity of the literal image and beyond the figuralism of the language of representation, they communicate less through an artistic language within the picture frame than through the extrinsic language of medium. As a result, they do not depend on the perspectival view of the art historical subject; the viewer need only glance at them to see what they point towards − a culture pointing like a compass ever Westward. Bryson suggests that paintings exist along a scale that ranges from the discursive to the figural, and yet both these perceptions depend on the perspectival viewer. The anamorphic viewer who looks from the side could perhaps only emerge from a culture not accustomed to positioning itself perpendicularly to the picture plane it must look through. These paintings have often been called “primitive” in histories of Turkish art, a categorization related to French art historical periodization. In the late nineteenth century, “primitive” referred to pre-Renaissance, particularly manuscript, arts which, like early Turkish painting, were not informed by the representational rules through which the Western tradition was defined after the Renaissance. It also refers to French artists of the late nineteenth century who, like Henri Rousseau, used a naive painting style characterized by meticulous attention to detail which superficially resembles the uninflected use of paint in copied photographs. The use of such a label has enabled Turkish art historians to construct a narrative of Turkish art that resembles the progressive narrative of its Western counterpart − it too has its primitives, romantics, realists, Impressionists, and cubists. And yet like the significatory structure of the paintings, which function anamorphically rather than perspectivally, the art

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historical discourse also mimics its Western counterparts without looking deeply into its content. Manuscript painting would correspond more closely to the first meaning of ‘primitive,’ but Turkish art historical discourse has considered it within the segregated category of Islamic art, foreclosing any intercourse between these practices in a manner antithetical to the relationship assumed between medieval and Renaissance painting. Conversely, modern French artists described as primitive were not simply naive in their handling of paint, but also interested in the idea of the primitive as encountered through colonial exploits. Primitivism was not simply a style, but a mode of cultural encounter with the non-West which integrated the Other into existing Western cultural perceptive and expressive practices, in effect taming its foreignness within a global context of colonial hegemony. In contrast, in their concern for literal, verifiable depiction through the meticulous copying of a mechanically produced image, these early Ottoman paintings take on the affect of the West rather than integrating and subsuming painting into a language of existing cultural forms. They reflect not an inclusion of radical otherness through its sublation into local media, but a repression of Ottoman and Turkish culture’s own foreignness from its adopted Western paradigm. Much as these paintings must be considered as distinct from the ‘primitives’ of early twentieth-century French painting, a broader analogy cannot be made between the Orientalism of the West and the Occidentalism of the East. Orientalist painting adopted forms referencing exotic lands by incorporating them into existing systems of representation and using new symbols within existing communicative and ideological representational systems. On the contrary, Ottoman Occidentalism took on the art of the West as a formal structure, neither incorporating it into existing expressive systems nor considering the contexts within which Western expressive systems functioned. Far from partaking in any tradition, most of these were amateur student works. As such, they make an odd foundation for a national artistic tradition. Rather, they might be considered as a beginning not of Western art in the Ottoman Empire, but as a practice selected retroactively to function as artistic roots for Muslim Turks within a broader spectrum of cultural change. After all, religious painting was integral to the culture of Greek and Armenian Ottomans, who began to adopt secular painting earlier than their Muslim counterparts as part of closer contact with Western cultures during the mid-eighteenth century (Kürkman 2004, 16). Far closer to European culture than Muslims, Christian Ottomans did not share the reservations that complicated the adoption of painting among Muslims. As early adaptors of oil on canvas painting, they helped create Ottoman artistic culture as the majority of students at art academies, as art teachers, and as exhibiting artists. Not only were Armenian artists the first to study abroad, they often received state support through scholarships and medals.17 The first artist to study abroad appears to be Kozmas Gomidas Kömürciyan/Cosimo Gomidas Carbognano (1749−early nineteenth century), who studied in Italy before his appointment as an interpreter for the embassy of the Kingdom of Naples in Istanbul, where he also served as the ambassador’s private painter and, in 1778, did engravings of historical buildings which

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were published in his 1794 Descrizione topografica dello stato presente di Costantinopoli (Kürkman 2004, 262−3). The court portraitist of the era of Sultan Ahmet III, Diratzu Rafail (1715−1780), may also have studied in Italy. Graduating from the Murad Rafaelian School in Venice in 1857, Melkon Diratzouyan (1837−1904) painted for Armenian Churches in Istanbul and taught at several Armenian schools (Kürkman 2004, 349). Armenian artists figure prominently among the many, mostly Western artists, whom archival documents record as having received medals between the 1850s and 1909. Most notably, imperial portraitist Rupen Manas, chief interpreter at the Ottoman Embassy in Paris in 1847, received a Mecidiye medal in 1854, while his brother Sebuh Manas, also an imperial portraitist, received one the following year (Kürkman 2004, 587, 589).18 Likewise, artists like Osfan, who worked for the Imperial Factory of Hereke (Hereke Fabrika−i Hümayun) and Narsis and Antranik, who worked at the İmperial Porcelain Factory at Yıldız Palace, received medals in 1896, 1899, and 1906, respectively.19 Most famous among Armenian artists of the late nineteenth century, Osgan Yervant (1855−1914) studied at the Murad Raphaelian School in Venice before continuing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he studied with the sculptor Monteverde before continuing his studies at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Returning to the empire in 1881, he became the first teacher of sculpture at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, and was awarded a fourth-class Osmani Order in 1894 (Kürkman 2004, 677−8). Bogos Tarkulyan (Paul Tarkoul), owner of the Phébus photographic studio, was awarded a Mecidiye medallion in 1898. The public recognition of Christian artists in the empire underscores their full participation in Ottoman society, even during a period when interethnic strife was disturbing the provinces. Their longstanding activity in the arts points to the fact that the reforms that led to drawing instruction in schools did not bring an absolutely new practice to the empire. Rather, such pedagogical practices secularized a practice that Muslims associated with Christian worship, enabling elites to incorporate it into a broader world-view admissive of cultural Westernization. While Western art is rooted in practices of mimesis of the world perceived as real, Ottoman art in the Western modality was rooted in the mimicry of Western art. Homi Bhabha argues that in the colonial situation, mimicry – the production of behaviors, codes, and other modes of discourse as though they were those of the other – functions not, as it would appear, as a means of deference, but as a means of tactical defiance in which difference and the resistance entailed in it survives and even develops by finding subterfuge through mimicry (Bhabha 1994, 85−101). By linking imitation with its biological counterpart of camouflage, Bhabha suggests that it may possess a defensive, even deflective function beyond that of absorbing hegemonic principles. Yet this differs from the role of imitation in art at the heart of the Western aesthetic tradition as established by Emmanuel Kant, where imitation plays an ambivalent role in the production of art: on the one hand enabling learning, but on the other, limiting the originality which underlies true artistry. Every art presupposes rules, which serve as the foundation on which a product, if it is to be called artistic, is thought of as possible in the first place. On the

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other hand, the concept of fine art does not permit a judgment about the beauty of its product to be derived from any rule whatsoever that has a concept as its determining basis.... Hence fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring about its product. Since, however, a product can never be called art unless it is preceded by a rule, it must be nature in the subject (and through the attunement of his powers) that gives the rule to art: in other words, fine art is possible only as the product of genius (Kant 1987, 175). Ottoman painting in the Western modality emerges as a copy of European art without the kind of intellectual leap at the heart of Western aesthetics − without what Kant might term “genius”. Understood from this perspective, there is nothing to analyze in Ottoman painting: it is derivative, always epigonic, and does nothing to further the discourse of art. This might have been the case if Ottoman painting succeeded in its imitation, producing artworks indistinguishable from Western originals. However, it fails to replicate the Western tradition; its camouflage is weak and readily discernible. In contrast to the sly civility taken on by the native civil servant of the British Empire discussed by Bhabha, Ottoman artists imitated the West insufficiently to affect mimesis. This failure, however, is similar to the failure of camouflage in nature: as Jacques Lacan, on whose work Bhabha builds his argument, points out, “one finds in the stomach of birds, predators in particular, as many insects supposedly protected by mimicry as insects that are not” (Lacan 1998, 73). He suggests that while mimicry may not function as protection, it produces an effect in the viewer: camouflage which resembles eyes is not impressive simply because of successful verisimilitude, but because it gives the impression of looking at us. In this manner, the imitation of art from one culture to another inverts the process of looking. Early Ottoman painting changed the position of the viewing subject from one rooted in perspective to one mobile within architectural and cross-cultural space. These paintings are less windows onto the world than windows onto a process of cultural adaptation; they are designed to be seen, but not necessarily looked at. Just as in evolutionary theory, a species becomes increasingly viable through the mutations that enable it to succeed in a particular environmental niche, painting in the Western modality adapted to the new environment of an Ottoman world in flux. By taking on the act of looking, art made in the Ottoman Empire did something that was structurally original even though its product was work designed to do nothing other than follow the rules.

2 DIGESTING WESTERN ART: THE ACADEMY AND REALISM

The first Muslim Ottoman artists educated abroad arrived in Paris around 1860, during the initial florescence of modern Parisian culture. The attractions of studying art in Paris included the opportunity to be part of this environment through close contact with French masters, other students, and salon exhibitions. In contrast to other artistic centers in Europe, Paris fostered an integrated environment in which people of numerous nationalities mingled and participated in a communal art world (Fink 1973, 32). Paris was experiencing the novelties brought about under Emperor Napoleon III. Between 1853 and 1870, Eugène Haussman transformed the medieval city to its modern form with its wide boulevards and lively culture of social spectacle. In 1857, Charles Baudelaire published the Fleurs du Mal, defining the wandering observer, the flaneur, as the premier character of this modern city. The immediate censure of his work reflects an aspect of his observations that is nearly forgotten today: not everybody was celebrating the effects of this modernity. On the contrary, the seedy underbelly of Paris in which the artworld was reveling was condemned by an establishment intent on maintaining propriety. For Baudelaire, however, it was the artist’s duty to take up and record the fleeting and evanescent mode of the modern city, a role he defined in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” published in 1863. While the academy continued to define mainstream standards of art, increasingly the art world split between this academic mainstream and the dissenting voices which comprised the avant-garde. This split was key in determining the social functions of art not only in Europe, but also in regions undergoing top-down modernization along European lines such as the Ottoman Empire. In 1825, Olinde Rodrigues’ essay entitled “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel,” appeared in a volume of essays elaborating the utopian socialist philosophy of Henri de Saint-Simon. Likening the role of the artist to the role of a military battalion, Rodrigues recognized that artists should serve as the people’s avant-garde, adding that: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid; when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas…

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This concept of the artist as a driving force behind revolutionary change became associated with a bohemian, anti-bourgeois lifestyle through Honoré de Balzac’s 1838 novel, Un grand homme de province à Paris (Egbert 1967, 348; Nochlin 1989, 2). While the term avant-garde thus came to represent a force with the potential to undermine the social and thereby political status quo, in countries with state-driven revolutionary ideologies, such as the Ottoman Empire, Meiji Japan, and later the Soviet Union and the Republic of Turkey, the idea of the artist as an proponent of state policy cleaved closer to Rodrigues’ original vision of the social function of the artist. By mid-century, artists in Paris had begun to use their art in an avant-garde rejection of the social norms and political hierarchies represented by the arts establishment. In 1850, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans had shocked Paris by rejecting both academically approved subject matter and methods. When his works were banned from the salon, Courbet took the radical step of opening his own exhibition across from the Universal Exposition of 1855. He supported the independence of artists, forging ties with several colleagues, including Théodore Rousseau, Camille Corot, and Jean-François Millet, who lived at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau in the town of Barbizon and produced paintings that focused on direct portrayals disregarding academic genre conventions. Although unrecognized during their early years, in the 1870s their work would have a profound effect on the Impressionists. By the 1860s the dissent within the art world had become so loud that in 1863, Napoleon III established the Salon des Refusés, where many of the milestones of modernism were exhibited, including Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) and Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1873). Thus by the 1860s, the Parisian art world was divided into opposing camps: the conservative, bureaucratic and traditionalist world of the academy, and the radical world of the avant-garde. The choices between these approaches made by the Ottomans in Paris would ultimately reflect on the Ottoman, and later Turkish, relationship with the arts. On the one hand, Halil Şerif Pasha (1831−1879), an official of the Ottoman government in Egypt developed an art collection including a surprising selection of avant-garde works. On the other, the artists training in Paris − Ahmet Ali, Osman Hamdi (1842−1910), and Süleyman Seyyid − learned and brought home a strict academism subtly informed by the debates surrounding them in Paris. The Development of a Public Sphere in the Ottoman Empire Like Paris, the Ottoman Empire of the 1860s was in flux, and many of its changes influenced by political movements articulated in Paris. Between 1865 and 1878, the empire experienced the rise of new, private forms of intellectual discussion concerning new political theories. For the first time in Ottoman history, governance

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left the realm of the state and developed a private component − individuals began to support political perspectives in new ways through new media, resulting in discussions that often led to censorship and exile. This heightened political context informed Ottoman artists as they created personal approaches to their work. While reform of the Ottoman Empire had been a pressing issue since the eighteenth century, the empire’s ever-increasing failure to maintain its provinces was, by mid-century, put in high relief by its dependence on European allies during the Crimean War (1853−56) and the ever-increasing power of nationalist secessionist forces in provinces including Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria. The answer was reform, but the question was how. As had long been the case, conservatives were wary of external cultural influence and sought technical solutions to the problem of decline. Such a position had been central to the main body of reforms under Sultan Mahmud II as led by his Grand Vizier Mehmed Hüsrev Pasha, a former admiral who engineered the abolition of the often rebellious Janissary Corps in 1826 in favor of a modern army, but believed that reform should stop with the military and not extend to the social sphere. Nonetheless, reform inevitably included a cultural component. Although a Translation Bureau, which would ultimately become an important venue for the education of Ottoman officers, was founded in 1822, most newly published texts during this era were not translations of French texts bringing fresh post-Enlightenment ideas to the empire, but printed versions of much earlier Turkish texts. This reflected a conservative approach to reform which might be summarized as looking to the West for technical achievement, but seeking cultural identity in an increased awareness of Turkish and Islamic roots. Nonetheless, Mehmed Hüsrev Pasha believed that Western education was central to reform. He expressed this imperative by sending four of his sons, orphans adopted during the Greek War of Independence (among them İbrahim Edhem, future father of Osman Hamdi), to Paris in 1829 for approximately ten years. Several years later, Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Pasha, often considered the father of the Tanzimat, took a far more liberal, cosmopolitan approach to reform. After establishing the first parliamentary consultative body of the empire in 1837, he convinced the recently enthroned Sultan Abdülmecid to declare the Imperial Edict of Gülhane in 1839, establishing civil liberties and equality among all religious groups of the empire. Later, he drafted the Imperial Edict of Reform of 1856, reiterating the declaration of 1839 and blocking foreign interference in internal matters. He believed that these reforms would put the empire in line with “civilization” as it had developed in modern Europe, with a new understanding that states gauged their power not through the extent of their territories but through their ability to provide an environment of well-being between states and subjects such that both individuals and their states could flourish (Mardin 2000, 180). As his protégés and successors, Mehmed Emin Ali Pasha and Keçecizade Mehmed Emin Fuad Pasha shifted their model of inspiration from London to Paris and promoted gradual reform. Believing that the empire was not yet ready for constitutionalism, Ali Pasha wanted to introduce an entirely secular, French-inspired civil code for the new civil courts established in 1868, and to split the consultative body into legislative and judicial branches. The

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two viziers maintained the precepts of the Tanzimat, but opponents believed that their reforms were insufficient for the modernization and fortification of the empire. Their conservatism led to dissent from both constitutionalist and cosmopolitan liberals seeking a Western conception of progress through emancipation from all remnants of a bygone age, and from conservatives seeking a constitutionalist road to a more Islamist and Ottomanist understanding of identity. In this context, in 1865 several men working at the Translation Bureau came together for a picnic in the Belgrade forest just outside of Istanbul in order to establish a secret society, the Alliance for Freedom [İttifak-i Hürriyet], which, along with looser circles of sympathizers, came to be known as the Young Ottoman Society, a name and organization (revolutionary enough to have a cell-structure) crystallized at a meeting in Paris in 1867 (Mardin 2000, 45). Although the Young Ottomans agreed on the need for constitutionalism under the monarchy, they not only differed in their opinions of how this was to be best achieved, but in what types of laws such a constitution ought to espouse. The Young Ottomans were initially led by a man named Mehmed who after some time at the Ottoman School in Paris (where he may have met Osman Hamdi, who was among its first students) had begun to work at the Translation Bureau.20 They used the newspaper Tasvir-i Efkar, established in 1862 by Şinasi (1827−1874), poet and ardent supporter of Mustafa Reşid Pasha, as their organ of discussion. When Şinasi fled the country for Paris in 1965, he left the paper to the young poet Namık Kemal (1840−1886). The state minister Mustafa Fazıl Pasha (1829−1875), the grandson of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769−1849) of Egypt, began to patronize the organization upon his exile to Paris in 1866. As governor of Egypt between 1805 and 1848, Muhammad Ali had driven out foreign occupiers and had subsequently carried out reforms similar to those later decreed as part of the Tanzimat. His dynasty became largely independent, transforming the governorship of Egypt into a semi− independent government (called the Khedivate) in 1867. Mustafa Fazıl was not the heir apparent for this position, but he appealed to Sultan Abdülaziz to change the khedival law of succession on his behalf. Mustafa Fazıl was also the cousin of the first Ottoman collector of European art, former ambassador Halil Şerif Pasha. The Young Ottomans debated how to conceive of Western political reform in relation to Islam. Although unified in opposition to Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha’s belief that the empire was unprepared for constitutionalism, they were not of a single mind. Some supported a constitutionalist, cosmopolitan, universalist position inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, while others supported progress through a return to a mythic Ottoman-Islamic past. It would be misleading, however, to imagine a simple binary divide between secularists and religionists, since the issue of secularism did not emerge until debates begun by the Young Ottomans reemerged during the Young Turk movement nearly thirty years later. On the contrary, religious forms and Western ideals and practices often merged in the attempt to popularize change. The original leader of the movement, Mehmed, espoused the precepts of liberty, equality and fraternity. However, in order to gain popular support for these ideas, every Friday he dressed in the robes of a cleric, preached at various mosques, and was later executed for this impersonation (Mardin 2000, 23). Likewise, Namık Kemal

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used theater, an artform adopted from the West, and a stage run by an Ottoman Armenian, Güllü Agop, to encourage patriotism and propound constitutionalism as emerging not from Western thought, but from the notion of consensus inherent in Islam. Similarly, Şinasi responded to concerns that the adoption of Western values would threaten Islamic traditions by interpreting the opposition of the philosophes to the church as specifically targeting Christianity rather than religion as a whole (Enginun 2000, 12). While the Young Ottomans thus acknowledged the importance of religion, more cosmopolitan thinkers among them also favored using Western ideas to develop a synthetic approach to what might today be called civil society and national sentiment. Şinasi believed that literature, particularly the newly adopted form of the novel, should be an instrument in public education, addressing the public right to know about world events. A leader in the movement to simplify the Turkish language, he developed a realistic voice which moved away from the complexity of literary Ottoman towards a journalistic language relying on an understanding of Islam through reason. Like Şinasi, Namık Kemal espoused the clear use of language, but to more patriotic ends. Indeed, while the word vatan was already in use as a translation of the French patrie, he not only popularized the notion in his 1873 play, Homeland or Silistria [Vatan Yahut Silistre, which led to his imprisonment and exile], but also extensively pondered its relationship to the various conflicting identities a postimperial Ottoman state would need to adopt. He was particularly well situated to do so. On the one hand, by age seventeen he was translating the works of the philosophes at his post at the Translation Bureau. On the other, as the son of the last court astronomer, his family had provided him with close intellectual links to the religious leadership (ulema) and classical poetry. He espoused an Islamic approach to the problem of government, believing along with other conservative Young Ottomans that the primary cause of Ottoman decline had been the indiscriminate adoption of superficial aspects of European culture without sufficient respect for and development of Ottoman and Islamic practices which, if revived and practiced as in a mythologized golden age, would provide succor from contemporary decline (Mardin 2000, 115). Namık Kemal sharply critiqued the espousal of Western ways, particularly by those around Fuad Pasha, instead searching for elements of Islamic law in which to root modern political philosophy. He wanted to ground his imagined Ottoman nation in Turkish and Islamic identity grafted onto a celebration of the successful early Ottoman synthesis of the two. His search for such a synthetic approach proved popular, suggesting a road towards rebirth without the construction of the ideological vacuum which could result from the personalization and interiorization of Islam that could emerge from its segregation from political change (Mardin 2000, 118). With their elite educations, Mustafa Fazıl and Halil Şerif espoused ideas close to Western notions of constitutionalism. Their views were summarized in a letter, signed by Mustafa Fazıl but probably either written by or co-authored by Halil Şerif. Since Mustafa Fazıl was banned from Istanbul, it was Halil Şerif who returned from Paris to Istanbul to circulate it in 1867. The letter was the draft of a reform

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movement that would demand a complete rearrangement of the government in order to promote a state appropriate to “the lofty sentiments inherent” in “the Turkish race” (Mardin 2000, 28−33, 282).The ultimate outcome of the unrest fomented by the Young Ottomans was the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz. In 1876, he was removed in favor of his brother Murad V, whom the Young Ottomans hoped would take a more progressive stance towards a constitution. However, it soon became clear that he was mentally unfit to rule. By then Abdülaziz had already died during imprisonment at the Çırağan Palace.21 To the chagrin of the coup conspirators, the heir to the throne was Sultan Abdülhamid II, known to be shrewd, conservative, and opposed to the constitution to which he agreed in 1876, but repealed almost immediately in 1877 using the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War as an excuse. Well aware of the perils of rule, he exhibited a constant concern for security which took the form of minimal personal contact with the world beyond his palace, as well as an ever-increasing practice of spying and censorship during his reign. The germinal debates for these revolutionary upheavals largely took place in Paris, where Şinasi lived between 1865 and 1869, Namık Kemal between 1864 and 1870, and Mustafa Fazıl between 1866 and 1867. The most inflammatory newspapers were published in Paris and only filtered into the empire illegally. Far from being excluded from the politics of their times, Ottoman students in Paris had a far greater likelihood of coming into direct contact either with the people fomenting change or with their publications, which could circulate freely in Paris but not in Istanbul. Between the turbulent cultural debate in Paris and the tumultuous political milieu among Ottoman intellectuals, none of the highly educated Ottomans living in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s would have been far from new political ideas or unable to express them in their work, whether professional or artistic. In the absence of the type of explicatory documents − autobiographies, letters, interviews, critiques, etc. − which would aid a complete analysis of the art of this period, it is the works and actions of these Ottomans, both in Paris and back in the empire, which must speak for them. While such sources are less direct than expository writing, they express both political opinions and uncertainty about how to put forward often conflicting ideals at complex political and cultural crossroads.22 The First Ottoman Collector of Western Painting Perhaps nothing embodies the subtle relationship between French culture and Ottoman politics more than impressive, if ephemeral, art collection of the first Ottoman collector of European art, Halil Şerif Pasha. Although an eminent statesman highly engaged in contemporary political debates, he has more frequently been characterized as a lascivious and wealthy Eastern dandy eager to enjoy Paris nightlife. Among the first students at the Egyptian School in Paris, he returned as commissioner to the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition, and stayed for a year. He served as the Ottoman delegate to the 1856 Paris Peace Conference, and subsequently as ambassador to both Athens and St. Petersburg. He settled in Paris in 1865. Through his cousin Mustafa Fazıl, Halil Şerif was intimately involved in the patronage of the Young Ottomans and played an active role in the dissemination of their ideas. He

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purchased a high-profile apartment in the heart of Paris and took on the high-profile life of a dandy. While he was said not to drink, he was eager to use his wealth to attract Parisian high society and was an avid gambler and womanizer. One of his first social coups in Parisian society was his alliance with Jeanne de Tourbey, one of the most well-connected and beautiful women in Paris and a previous mistress to Napoleon III. Through her, Halil Şerif met a wide range of French intellectuals, including Gustave Flaubert, Ernst Renan, Théophile Gautier, and Jeanne’s teacher, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In Paris, Halil Şerif quickly developed an art collection reflecting his social stature. Among his first purchases was a copy of Titian’s Venus of Urbino executed in 1822 by Dominique Ingres, a seminal early work which would influence his later Orientalist themes. In addition to two other paintings of women reclining (which have since been lost), Halil Şerif also purchased Ingres’s famous roundel, The Turkish Bath (1859−1863).23 Benefiting from the recent death of Delacroix, Halil Şerif was also able to purchase an unusually large number of his works before their value increased. However, with the exception of the Horses at a Fountain, Morocco (1862), his collection featured the artist’s historical and mythological rather than his Orientalist works. Among numerous older landscapes and genre paintings, he also owned several works by Jean-Léon Gérôme, including The Carpet Seller (1867), and several by Théodore Rousseau, including the Forest Road with Chestnut Trees (1837). By 1868, Halil Şerif had amassed a collection of approximately a hundred paintings, some of which may have been forgeries, but most of which were either original historic or radical contemporary works. Particularly strong in modern French painting, his collection included many works with Oriental themes, including not only those listed above, but also Théodore Chasseriau’s Battle of the Arab Cavalry (1853) and Prosper Marilhat’s Street in Cairo (1840). While an emphasis on Orientalist works might have expressed the collector’s identity through Europeanized nostalgia, consideration of his full collection tempers such interpretation. He also owned illustrious works such as Gérôme’s Louis XIV and Molière (1863), Gerard Terborch’s Officer dictating a letter while a trumpeter waits (1658), and Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717). The diversity of Halil Şerif ’s collection may have served to remodel the image of an ‘oriental’ in the West. An article concerning the sale of his collection in L’Artiste, explained that he “has collected a magnificent gallery of pictures despite the law of the Prophet which forbids the representation of figures… now he has had the entirely Oriental fantasy of sending his collection along to the auction rooms” (Haskell 1982, 45). The collection provided an alternative to a cultural and representational world controlled by Western patrons. As Haskell points out, “his picture gallery could not in essence be distinguished from that of any other rich man living in Paris at that time” (Haskell 1982, 46). Yet it was hardly a mainstream collection. Rather than choosing a conservative art dealer, he bought from Paul Durand-Ruel, who had recently gained stature when he inherited his father’s gallery in 1865. Since the 1850s, Durand-Ruel had been an early champion of the Barbizon painters, and would, in the 1870s, play a similar role supporting the Impressionists. Not only was he one of Courbet’s main supporters,

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he had been Millet’s only source of financial support during the 1850s and had purchased many works by Théodore Rousseau in 1848 even though they had no apparent buyers. Durand-Ruel sold Halil Şerif numerous mainstream works, but he may also have helped direct Halil Şerif away from strictly academic taste. Among the most surprising elements of the collection were the works by Barbizon artists and by Courbet, whose work influenced that of the Ottoman artists Ahmet Ali and Süleyman Seyyid. Not simply a renowned artist, Courbet was a famous radical, and it would have been very difficult for Ottomans collecting and emulating his works to avoid political implications. Far from arbitrary, the correspondence between Courbet’s work of this period with Young Ottoman thought suggests that the Ottoman interest in Courbet had political implications. Although Sainte-Beuve was at this time a good friend of Courbet and probably recommended that Halil visit his studio, Halil Şerif already seems to have been familiar with the artist’s work before he moved to Paris. His earliest purchases of Courbet paintings seem to have been the Fox in the Snow (1860), acquired through state auction in 1861, and his first rendition of a hunted stag, the Death of the Stag (1857).24 Like many visitors to the 1855 Universal Exposition, Halil Şerif may have visited Courbet’s private exhibition, intended to provide an alternative to the academic salon while relying on the exposition for a large number of visitors. By 1867, Courbet had developed an increasing penchant for controversy. At the salon of 1865, Courbet scandalized the art world with his Jealous Psyche Chasing Venus, banned for its lesbian overtones. Halil Şerif wanted to commission a copy of the work, but instead received one conceived as its sequel, The Sleepers, depicting two intertwined sleeping naked women with overt lesbian overtones (Haddad 2001, 40−47). Building on Francis Haskell’s suggestion that Halil may have commissioned this work as a modern counterpart to Ingres’ oriental fantasy, Zeynep Çelik suggests that this painting may also represent Halil Şerif ’s “deliberate gesture to resituate the scene depicted in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Turkish Bath to a European setting, thereby evacuating the bath from Ingres’ Orientalist implications” (Çelik 2002, 22). Similarly, his commission at this time of Courbet’s infamous Origin of the World (1866), a supposedly secret commission which was later acquired by Jacques Lacan and only became public when it entered the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, suggests a complex engagement with the analytical subtext of art (Haddad 2001, 53−58; Nochlin 1986). Soon after he added it to his collection, the entire collection was sold at auction in January, 1868 due to bankruptcy from gambling debts. Or was this the reason? The collection was sold immediately after his 1867 trip to the Ottoman Empire to circulate Mustafa Fazıl’s inflammatory letter. It may be true that he had debts, but it is also possible that such a story masked the rapid acquisition of funds supporting a coup d’état. Indeed, given his intellectual sphere in Paris, his selections would have been less shocking for their prurience than for their politics. Halil Şerif ’s collection needs to be seen less as the whim of a conceited dandy trying to show off than as a politically inflected act. It united the most progressive elements of contemporary Parisian art in a manner appropriate for the state as envisioned by his Ottoman intellectual circle.

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After all, Courbet was famous not simply for his artistry, but for the highly charged socialist Realism of his intertwined art and politics. For Realism, as developed by Courbet, was not simply a means of representing the world, but also of reflecting it through the Positivist philosophy and inflecting it through art’s social relevance as emphasized in the work of his close friend the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Egbert 1967, 341, 345). Like Şinasi, both the Barbizon artists and Courbet sought a realistic language divested from academic conventions which could communicate directly with and even represent the people. Thus Origin of the World would have comprised a perfect, if not unironic, symbol for the reformed, constitutionally based, egalitarian Ottoman Empire that the cosmopolitan Young Ottomans were promoting. Although Sleepers and Origin of the World were private commissions, it seems naive to imagine that Halil Şerif ’s patronage of an artist with political concerns so close to his own would be merely coincidental. Much as these works were titillating, the Sleepers and The Origin of the World are also part of Courbet’s politically−informed artistic practice. The assumption has always been that an Easterner could not have understood the complex implications of the art he owned. From the beginning, the painting became intimately associated with the desire of its patron, mediated through a racist stereotype of the lascivious oriental. As Maxime du Camp described the work in 1889, To please a Moslem who paid for his whims in gold… Courbet… painted a portrait of a woman which is difficult to describe. In the dressing room of this foreign personage one sees a small picture hidden under a green veil. When one draws aside the veil one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life−size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed, reproduced con amore, as the Italians say, providing the last word in realism. But, by some inconceivable forgetfulness, the artist, who copied his model from nature, had neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the neck, and the head (Nochlin 1986, 81). Similarly, a century later, Michael Fried suggests that in The Sleepers, “enjoying the security of working for a collector he knew wouldn’t be shocked, Courbet gave free rein to a fantasy of total corporeal presence that had never before been allowed to erupt so dazzlingly in his art” (Fried 1990, 207). He thus repeats the nineteenth century characterization of Halil Şerif as the master of a harem, nonplussed by a female licentiousness which, in fact, would have been deplorable according to Islamic mores. Yet with his European education and decades in Europe, he probably did understand the art he commissioned, making probably its links with his own political agenda. As Fried points out, while later interpretations of The Sleepers focus on its lesbian theme, contemporary critics and advocates of Courbet, Jules Castagnary and Proudhon “interpreted his depictions of lesbianism as political commentaries on the Parisian society of his time, …saying to the Bourgeoisie, here are the women that the

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Empire is in the process of forming” (Fried 1990, 206). Halil Şerif might not have seen the Venus and Psyche, but would have been party to discussions alerting him to the complex subtexts at hand. The Origin of the World expresses Courbet’s ambition of stripping art from artifice to address the core of truth. In contrast to more traditional nudes, coy like Titian’s Venus of Urbino and even Manet’s Olympia whose legs are still firmly together, hiding her sex, The Origin, conflates the sites of birth and male sexual desire. Much as Courbet was invested in stripping away layers of academic convention and beauty to reveal a deeper truth, Şinasi wanted to strip away the poetry of Ottoman language to convey information. These interests come together in Halil Şerif Pasha’s commission too completely to consider the work entirely as a form of elite pornography. As Linda Nochlin suggests, Origin is one of several paintings through which Courbet meditates on the source of art itself, the beginnings of desire through which all art ultimately emerges (Nochlin 1986, 82). What could be a more fitting initial commission for the first Ottoman collector? To imagine a man from the liberal elite of Egypt, educated in Paris from the age of six, as not having the cultural capital with which to recognize the radicalism of Courbet’s work, understand contemporary discussions and critiques of it, and seek expression of his own political aims through his collection would be to essentialize him as an Oriental, unable to fully understand Western thought. Ottoman Artists Back in the Empire: Exhibits and the Academy While the residence of Osman Hamdi, Ahmet Ali, and Süleyman Seyyid in Paris overlapped with that of Halil Şerif, their experience of the city was probably far more circumscribed. Over the course of a decade, the three artists studied informally at the École des Beaux Arts, Osman Hamdi and Ahmet Ali in the studios of JeanLéon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger, and Süleyman Seyyid in that of Alexandre Cabanel.25 As a result, all three young artists must have gained proficiency in spatial and figural representation, as well as facility with the traditional categorizations of genre and subject required by the academy. All three appear to have succeeded in their studies, partially bolstered by the civilizing French desire to support young artists coming from an Islamic country where representation was forbidden (Eldem 2004, 55). Ahmet Ali exhibited a charcoal portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz, who had visited Paris in 1867, at the Universal Exposition of that year, and several oil paintings at the Salon of the French Academy in 1869. He won a scholarship for three months to study in Rome following his graduation the following year.26 He then exhibited at the 1870 Salon, where he won another three months in Romania. Likewise, Osman Hamdi won a medal for three paintings with Orientalist subject matter, entitled Resting Gypsies, Zeybek Lying in Wait, and The Death of the Zeybek, displayed in the Ottoman Pavilion of the 1867 Universal Exposition (Cezar 1995, 210, Kürkman 2004, 56).27 Although his choice of subject matter appears to reflect Ottoman themes, it is probably also closely associated with Gérôme’s Orientalist interests of the time.28 Süleyman Seyyid also received an award for his paintings of lilacs, and later became known in Turkey for his technical proficiency.

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After their return, the activities of these three artists were seminal in creating a public understanding of an art form which constituted a radical break from local traditions. Süleyman Seyyid, who became an art teacher at both the military and medical academies, helped to inculcate some knowledge of the arts among professional elites. Osman Hamdi founded the Academy of Fine Arts and became the first Ottoman director of the Imperial Museum, which he developed from a small collection of archaeological artifacts to a sizable institution. Ahmet Ali not only organized the first public exhibits of artworks in the empire, he also sold photographic reproductions and acted as liaison between the sultan and Paris in the development of collections for the new imperial palaces. Paradoxically, such conservative activities functioned in a socially avant-garde manner, acting as the vanguard of state−sponsored cultural revolution. For the Ottoman Empire, even the most traditionalist practices in Western art constituted an avant-garde representing comprehensive social change even when not engaging in an artistic vanguard. As the first Muslim Ottoman artists educated in Paris and the founders of the empire’s first art institutions, these three men are often credited with establishing Western-style painting in the empire. Turkish art historians have hailed them for bringing “true” Western practices learned directly from the academy, as opposed to earlier imitations and foreign infiltrations perceived as false. While their Parisian training did increase their comparative expertise, painting had been a part of the visual world of the elite for several generations, and had been promoted as part of the modernization of the army for nearly as long. The commercial studios in Beyoğlu of Telemak Esergian (1840−1894), purveyor of lush Orientalist fantasies, Mıgırdıç Givanian (1848−1906), an artist of romantic landscapes, and Simon Agopian (1857−1921), known for landscapes and portraits, attest to a market for painting as early as the 1880s, during the earliest stages of Ottoman Muslim involvement in art (Kürkman 2004, 362, 405). In addition, not only did foreign artists frequently work at the palace, but during the reign of Abdülaziz several soldiers trained in painting at the military academies had already been appointed as attendants to the sultan in order to direct arts for the court. Such artists received the post-Tanzimat title (not limited to artists) of Yaver-i Şehriyar-i Hümayun, indicating close personal service to the sultan. While many of these artist-aides remained very limited in their artistic production, others took the opportunity to develop their skills far beyond the bounds of their office. Appointed to his post as a fourth year student at the Military Academy in 1856−7, Osman Nuri Pasha (1839−1906) rose to the status of general during his service to Sultan Abdülaziz, who granted him gifts of works by foreign artists to serve as examples for his own work and for his instruction at the military schools where he taught. Yusuf Ziya Pasha (1840−1908) was appointed as a yaver, probably primarily as an assistant to European court artists. Mustafa Vasfi Pasha (1857−1905) became a yaver immediately after his 1883 graduation from the Engineering Academy, and from this position worked as an illustrator both at the imperial publishing house and at the Yıldız Porcelain Factory, of which he became director in 1905. Although Ahmet Emin Pasha (1845−1892) received training as a painter, it was as a photographer

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working on images of Anatolia for the Abdülhamid Photographic Albums that he received the title of yaver. Several artists gained far greater success and renown−Halil Pasha (1857−1939), who served as yaver from 1872−1878 before being sent to the academy in Paris; Ahmet Ali Pasha (1841−1907), whose long tenure as yaver between 1881 and his death was the most fruitful; and Hüseyin Zekai Pasha (1860−1919) who worked first under Ahmet Ali, and later came to direct many of the art-related activities of the palace (Öner 2001). Not all developments were limited to the palace. In 1849, the public viewed the artistic activities of the Military Academy at an exhibition which included, along with paintings by the young cadets, other fine arts such as calligraphic panels, examples of fine book binding, books, and letters. A similar mode of exhibition was followed at the Ottoman Exposition of 1863 and at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867. Similarly, in 1871 an exhibit at the Teacher’s College for Women [Dar al−Muallimin] included Western-style paintings next to embroideries and sewing (Gören 1998, 34; Cezar 1995, 422−3). This juxtaposition suggests a close identification between existing and imported visual cultures and their overlapping environmental niches. While the environment to which the three students returned was thus not devoid of art, the absence of public institutions devoted to art − art academies, galleries, and museums − limited access to elites, the military and non-Muslims. Pressed to leave Paris as a result of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the subsequent defeat of France, these artists had to balance a desire for the integration of Western art forms into Ottoman culture with personal concerns about artistic expression. They faced shared issues: how could the Western pictorial tradition be integrated with Ottoman Islamic arts, not yet even fully defined as an art historical tradition? What was the role of Ottoman artists in representing their country, and how should this be related to its representation by Western Orientalist artists? How could the academic tradition and anti-academic movements in Paris be meaningfully reformulated in the Ottoman context? How could this new modality of art be integrated into public visual culture, and what were the restrictions on such integration? How would these new visual arts be related to other creative forms in the empire, including not only the visual arts, but traditional literary forms like poetry and newer forms like the novel? Each artist of this and subsequent generations brought nuances to Ottoman art through reflection on such issues. Born with a far closer relationship to the court than his colleagues in Paris, Osman Hamdi bore a complicated relationship with Young Ottoman thought and ultimately developed a very different expressive style from his fellow students. Unlike them, he had neither emerged from the middle classes through the military school system, nor had he been sent to Paris to bring European art back to the empire. Rather, his father İbrahim Edhem Pasha had been French tutor to Sultan Abdülmecid between 1847 and 1851 and served as minister of education and then of trade during the 1860s. Sent abroad to study law, by 1864 Osman Hamdi was begging his father for his approval to study art; by 1868, he almost rebelled against his father’s request that he return, explaining, “I will return [to Paris] no matter what… I definitely do not want to quit painting. Painting is not something one can learn from books; one

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must follow masters, old and new… and I cannot do this in Istanbul. I am making progress; the entire art world knows me and talks of my paintings” (Eldem 2004, 56). With such a powerful father, association with the Young Ottomans was no doubt ill advised, and it is impossible to know whether he met any of them while in Paris. Regardless, he encountered reformist politics when, upon his return to the empire, he was posted to Baghdad, under the administration of Midhat Pasha, who had been attempting to preserve the empire through provincial reform since the 1850s. To defend the integrity of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the 1856 Imperial Edict of Reform, his Provincial Law of 1864 had introduced regional representative institutions. Having served as governor of the Danube Province, Midhat was in charge of introducing similar reforms in Baghdad. A cosmopolitan constitutionalist working within governmental administration, Midhat was a key actor in the events that led to the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz, and was one of the primary authors of the short-lived 1876 constitution (Shaw and Shaw 1977, 68). Midhat Pasha’s work for reform from within seems to have proven inspirational for Osman Hamdi (Eldem 2004, 57). Developing a patriotic zeal to uplift his country comparable to the imperialist paternalism of European empires, Osman Hamdi spent his life developing the two primary state-supported institutions for the understanding and promotion of art: the Ottoman Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun), of which he became director in 1877, and the Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), which he founded and became the first director in 1882. Osman Hamdi’s rapid rise to prominence may have been at least partially based on his father’s power during the early years of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign, including a brief tenure as grand vizier (1877−1878) and as minister of the interior (1883−85), after which he fell into disfavor (Shaw and Shaw 1977, 219). For many years, Osman Hamdi became more involved in arts administration than creation. In 1872, he was appointed Assistant Director of External Affairs at the palace (Cezar 1995, 212). Through this position, he became the Ottoman commissar at the Vienna Exhibition of 1873, overseeing the preparation of goods taken to the exhibit as well as the construction of Ottoman pavilions there. He was in charge of security for the valuable works from the imperial treasury placed on exhibit, and also assisted in the preparation of two catalogues for the exhibit, L’Architecture Ottomane and Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873, both of which included text in German, French, and Turkish (Ersoy 2007). After the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz in 1876, Osman Hamdi was appointed to the Directorate of the Foreign Press, then in 1877, as director of the Sixth Municipal District of Beyoğlu (also known as Pera, the district with the highest concentration of Europeans). The same year, following the sudden death of Antoine Déthier, director of the Imperial Museum, Osman Hamdi was appointed as its first Ottoman director. Taking advantage of a tip concerning the Sidon necropolis on the Mediterranean coast, in 1879 he directed the first Ottoman archaeological expedition, impeding European attempts to export works and acquiring a large enough collection of valuable sarcophagi, including one misidentified as that of Alexander the Great, to persuade the sultan to build a new Imperial Museum building in 1881. While initially devoted primarily to

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archaeological artifacts, the museum also included numismatic collections, Islamic collections (which developed after 1891), and unrealized plans for a natural history collection. As part of his concern with preservation, Osman Hamdi not only directed the museum, but in 1884 and 1906 wrote increasingly restrictive laws concerning the identification, processing, and export of antiquities to replace the initial law of 1874. Despite his artistic training, the museum did not address the institutionalization of modern visual arts in the empire, and did not include a painting department. Rather, the museum was an institution where archaeological artifacts were used as a means of conceptualizing a nascent national identity within a context of Europe’s identification with the classical world partially situated within Ottoman territories (Shaw 2003). As Osman Hamdi developed Ottoman visual culture through archaeological patrimony, fine art was also entering the public sphere. In 1870, Sultan Abdülaziz sent men to hang thirteen paintings depicting battle scenes at the Military Academy and Military Preparatory School, making painting available for the non-imperial (albeit elite) gaze of its young student body (Halil Edhem 1924, 41).29 In 1873, Ahmet Ali, who had begun teaching at the Military Academy, opened the first exhibit in the empire devoted solely to fine arts at the School of Industry (Mekteb-i Sanayi). Advertised in newspapers such as Hakaik-ul Vakai, Basiret, and La Turquie as a juried exhibit modeled after the Paris salon, the exhibit had an entry fee and proceeds went to the school. Located near the hippodrome in a Muslim quarter, the venue attracted a new audience who probably had little or no experience with Western art. Visits of high−ranking government officials, including the young Prince Yusuf İzzettin, indicate the importance of the exhibit. The exhibit included works by Ahmet Ali, his students, and Guillemet; portraits of the prince, three seascapes by Lieutenant Staff Colonel Mesut Efendi, and even a nude by Hayette, an art teacher at the Imperial School of Medicine. La Turquie, a French-language newspaper published in Istanbul, reviewed the exhibition. While the anonymous author likened the exhibit to a college guestroom decorated with student works so as to please the parents, he also commented that Eastern artists had a good sense of composition and color. However, they lacked the kind of direction which an audience and regular exhibitions would provide, an absence which could only be addressed by making the salon annual, as the organizers intended (Cezar 1995, 430). On July 1, 1875, an exhibit originally planned by Ahmet Ali for December of 1874 opened at the future Istanbul University [Dar ül-Funun] in Çemberlitaş. The exhibit was announced six months ahead of time, and advertised as a means of developing taste and culture in the country. Although advertised only in French, paid tickets were printed in both French and Turkish (Dürrüoğlu 1962, 6). Of the thirty artists participating in the exhibit, five were Ottoman Muslims− Ahmet Ali, Ahmet Bedri, Halil, Osman Hamdi, and Osman Nuri; the rest are unknown and may have been Christian artists living in the empire or members of Christian minorities. Although a newspaper commentator criticized Ahmet Bedri for submitting an uncited copy of a battle scene by André Masson, he was not alone in submitting copies. Like him, Ahmet Ali submitted two copies (deemed

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acceptable because the originals were cited): of a river crossing by his teacher, Gustave Boulanger, and of a portrait of Sultan Mahmud II attributed to Winterhalter (as already discussed). Ahmet Ali’s other works at the exhibit included a scene with Arabs, a still-life with fruits and flowers, and three landscapes: a morning scene, a view from the stream of Küçüksu, and a view of the Alemdağ forest. Osman Hamdi contributed a bust portrait of a woman and landscapes from Baghdad. The young yaver Halil presented a Swiss landscape and cows at a trough, typical scenes for a military artist. Aware of his role in introducing the public to art, Ahmet Ali in particular was careful to include a range of genres. The fact that he chose not just any portrait but that of Mahmud II suggests an attempt to allay concerns about the appropriateness of such images by affiliating the aims of the exhibit with those of the Tanzimat. Impressed by Ahmet Ali, Sultan Abdülaziz appointed him as yaver and commissioned him to purchase European paintings and arrange them in the palace. Ahmet Ali began a correspondence with his teacher, Jean-Léon Gérôme. He had married into the family of the art-dealer Adolphe who specialized in the sale of academic art. This gallery ensured a mainstream, academic collection for the palace and affiliated it with conservative French society which rejected the innovations of modernism. Goupil was also seminal in expanding art audiences through the production of the first artistic reproductions. Inspired by this practice, Ahmet Ali’s work became well-known through photographs taken and disseminated by the photographic studio Foto Sebah (Dürrüoğlu 1962, 12). While some paintings purchased at this time remain within the Dolmabahçe Palace collection, most burned during the 1910 fire at the Çırağan Palace. Artworks could sometimes also be viewed at independent venues. An exhibit of Ottoman and Levantine artists took place at the Municipal Theater of Petit Champs in 1877, but was unable to become annual due to lack of funds (Thalasso and Şerifoğlu 2008, 113 n.6). In 1880, the Elifba Club, founded to encourage the arts and even including a few female Muslim artists, staged an exhibit of 150 artists at the girls’ school in Tarabya, a town on the Bosporus where foreign embassies had summer residences. In 1881, the club hosted an exhibit at the Municipal Building at Tepebaşı, in Beyoğlu, increasing the artistic presence in the city. The 220 works included some by Osman Hamdi, Ahmet Ali, and Süleyman Seyyid. For the first time in the empire, paintings at the exhibition were offered for sale. In 1887, a collection of over two hundred works by artists as renowned as Rembrandt, Teniers, and Lorrain in the collection of the Baron Fay was brought from Pest and exhibited at the Municipal Theater of Petit Champs.30 It attracted approximately 200 visitors a day, including both Ottoman notables like Ahmet Ali and Osman Hamdi, as well as delegations from local embassies.31 Store-fronts frequently served as exhibition spaces. Beginning in 1883, the Abdullah Frères photographers periodically exhibited paintings at their studio in Pera, including a large work by Osman Hamdi. In 1892, soon after his arrival in the empire, a Venetian landscape by the Italian Fausto Zonaro was exhibited in the store front of the Maison Rosenthal, in Pera.32 The practice of exhibiting in store

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fronts was already well established by 1894, when a visiting orientalist artist by the name of Svboda refused such an exhibit, and opted instead for an exhibition in the home of a sheikh at the Petit Champs de Morts, a district near modern Taksim.33 In 1896, three former students of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts – T. Cavanossian, S. Agopian, and M. Mardighian – exhibited Orientalist works, with subjects like a historical quarter, a bohemian type, and a fountain, in a space above the Angelides store.34 In 1897, the visiting French artist Prieur-Bardin exhibited his paintings in the store-front windows of the Baker store, in Pera; in 1898, E. Della Sudda exhibited a pastel entitled ‘altar boy’, the proceeds of which were to benefit the church of the Monastery of Kenophobias on Mt. Athos.35 In 1906, a Mr. Raghib hosted an exhibition of European paintings in his stores at the Cité de Roumélie, in Pera.36 The same year, a portrait of Osman Hamdi by the visiting artist Labany was exhibited to great acclaim in the storefront of the Magazin Leduc, next to the Lycée de Galatasaray.37 The informal exhibition of works enabled amateurs as well as professionals to exhibit their works. For example, in 1902, a note in La Turquie enjoined “those whose flanerie conducted them towards the sidewalks of the Rue de Pera” to peruse the three drawings by a precocious fifteen-year-old girl named Hellé Patriano, exhibited in the window of Confortable, the proprietor of which was her father. The frequent advertisements for such small exhibitions of landscape, orientalist, and romantic paintings in the pages of La Turquie point not only to a nascent art market, but to the segregation of that market within the cosmopolitan zone of Pera. However, such exhibitions nonetheless eventually developed patriotic overtones. In 1906, Fausto Zonaro (who had risen to the post of Imperial Painter) exhibited a new painting called La Coda del Diavolo, depicting women picnicking in a field, in the vitrine of the Imperial Factory of Hereke, which specialized in carpet manufacture, thus linking the modernization of traditional crafts with the modern practice of Western artistic production. Similarly, in 1910, Jules Ratzkowski arrived in Constantinople with a collection of French works which were exhibited under the patronage of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for the profit of the Red Crescent.39 Studios of Ottoman and foreign artists were also open to visitors, both for lessons and for selling works. The Maltese artist Amadeo Preziosi (1816−1882) spent the last forty years of his life in Istanbul depicting picturesque scenes of everyday life. The Italian Leonardo de Mango (1843−1930) took up residence in Istanbul in 1883, teaching oil painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and participating in the organization of early exhibitions. Fausto Zonaro (1854−1929) arrived in Istanbul in 1891 as an independent artist and received the title of court painter in 1896, along with a fully equipped apartment and studio in the modern apartments of Akaretler in Beşiktaş, built for the elite staff of the nearby Dolmabahçe Palace (Germaner and İnankur 2002, 72). While at this post, he executed historic and contemporary images of imperial glory, including his painting of an assault at the recent Battle of Domeke, for which he was awarded his apartments; the Parade of the Ertuğrul Cavalry across the Galata Bridge in 1901, and several images executed rather quickly in 1908 depicting Mehmed the Conqueror’s Entry into Istanbul.40 With Sultan Abdülhamid’s deposition in 1909, he lost his position as court painter (Öndeş and Makzume, 2003; Zonaro 2008).

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Opportunities to study art increased alongside its public availability. In 1874, Sultan Abdülaziz supported Guillemet in opening an Academy of Drawing and Painting in the Pera district of Istanbul. Advertised in newspapers, the school was open from eight to five daily except for Sundays, with Tuesdays and Saturdays reserved for girls. It attracted local Armenian and Levantine students. In 1877 plans were drawn up for Guillemet to direct an Ottoman Academy of Fine Arts, but he died of typhoid before they could be realized (Halil Edhem 1924, 36; Germaner and İnankur 2002, 36). In 1881, Osman Hamdi applied to the government to open the academy beside the museum, within the grounds of the Topkapı Palace. Although for him, this must have followed a pedagogical logic of instructing students in traditional techniques through the proximity of classical sculptures, for foreigners the proximity with the palace was said to give “quite a strange impression to the visitor who penetrated it, since this exhibition of recently produced works has a bizarre effect on the imagination as it takes place within this fortification which for so long was dominated by the formidable warrior force of the sultans.”41 Under Osman Hamdi’s directorship, classes began in March of 1883. The activities of the school were kept public through exhibition of student works, including the competition works of successful applicants.42 By 1885, the Academy of Fine Arts began to host annual exhibits, the only ones in the city until the turn of the century. Replicating the structure of the Paris École des Beaux Arts as the Ottoman art students had observed it immediately after it had gained independence from the king in 1863, the academy was structured through the studios of the artists teaching in it (Weinberg 1981, 69). In addition to belonging to a studio, students participated in lecture classes on a variety of subjects, such as theories and history of art and techniques of perspective, and competed for an annual prize. Although open to all, for many years the academy catered largely to religious minorities. In 1890 only four Muslim students attended the academy: Celal Esad; the calligrapher İsmail Hakkı (Altunbezer); the painter Galip; and the first Muslim-Ottoman sculptor, İhsan (Özsoy; 1867−1944). Similarly, a January 12, 1891 article in La Turquie notes the preponderance of non-Muslim, mostly Armenian, signatures at the academy’s annual student exhibition. Celal Esad’s family’s fierce opposition to his vocation, perceived as beneath his social station, indicates some of the prejudices of the era (Işın 1989, 9). In the absence of other arts institutions, the school fulfilled functions taken on by museums in the West. The founding document of the school stipulated the creation of a collection of painting and sculpture which would form the basis for an art museum with the express purpose less of public edification than of providing models for art students. The idea was probably rooted in the Museum of Copies in Paris, instituted by Charles Blanc in 1867 (Schiff 1984, 42). The desire for such a collection, at both its 1881 conception and its realization between 1910 and 1913, reveals an intention to develop an academic practice mimicking that of the West and reliant on classical models both pedagogically and artistically. Rather than emphasizing copying from nature along the lines of the Realists or the Impressionists, and rather than engaging more experimental modes of representation that gained currency with the rise of modern art, the empire remained wed to an academic model of art production which

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had been falling out of fashion in the West since the middle of the nineteenth century. Meaning in Painting: Implications of Style and Subject One of many vehicles through which Western culture could be injected into the Ottoman world, painting reflected the political debates of the era. In keeping with early Tanzimat reforms, the official position of the Ottoman state under Sultan Abdülhamid II was that technology could be adopted without the concurrent adoption of Western culture. In 1889, an opposing view emerged with the formation of the Committee for Union and Progress, a secret oppositional political party founded at the Imperial School of Medicine [Mekteb-i Tıbbıye-i Şahane], where Süleyman Seyyid had been teaching since 1884. Affiliates came to be known as the ‘Young Turks’. Their leader, Abdullah Cevdet, was influenced by Young Ottoman thought, replacing its Islamist leanings with faith in European materialism. He believed that “science is the religion of the elite, whereas religion is the science of the masses,” and that Islam should be used not as a goal but as a tool with which to frame positivist and materialist ideas for the Ottoman populace (Hanioğlu 1997, 135). When the Committee for Union and Progress successfully led the Second Constitutional Revolution in 1908, his views became increasingly strident, advocating a wholesale replacement of Islamic practices with Western ones, and even suggesting that “every learned and virtuous person is a Muslim. Any ignorant or immoral person is not a Muslim even if he comes from the lineage of the prophet” (Hanioğlu 1997, 138). Difficult as it is to conceptualize the ramifications of the visual arts in a society where visual literacy for painting was low and overt political expression suspect, the affinities between Ottoman and French painting suggest political undertones even in works that have been considered naive imitations of Western genres. While the work of Süleyman Seyyid and Ahmet Ali evinces an attraction to French Realism with potential political implications, after their return to the empire they followed different intellectual, social, and political paths. Less influenced by French Realism and the Young Ottomans while in Paris, Osman Hamdi produced work in line with political views of the Young Turks. During his youth, Süleyman Seyyid was known as a liberal, had difficulties receiving his scholarship money, and even is said to have given his paintings as bribes in order to stay out of trouble (Arsal 2000, 66). As a teacher, he was known as “the meteorologist” for his interest in art as technique, particularly in perspective, and also nicknamed the philosophe (Yetik 1940, 69). While he was trained in the studio of the academic, figural and allegorical painter Alexandre Cabanel, his work rarely features human subjects. Rather, most of his works are still-lifes and landscapes which resemble the work of the Barbizon artists and of Courbet of the 1860s. He followed the tradition of the Barbizon by breaking with the Ottoman avoidance of copying from nature, encouraging his students to work outside while preparing landscape paintings. In his teaching, he emphasized geometric, perspectival construction, expressed in his unpublished work “The Science of Perspective” (Fenn-i Menazir). Working at the Imperial School of Medicine, Süleyman Seyyid developed a conception of representation which relied on a foundation of science, in

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keeping with the positivist and materialist approach of the Committee for Union and Progress. His work, then, could be understood as political in the same manner as that of Courbet: an approach to painting in line with a radical political position of his era (fig. 17). Indeed, he was known for regaling his students with his oppositional ideas during their drawing classes (Yetik 1940, 65). Seen in this light, Süleyman Seyyid’s still-lifes appear not simply as genre paintings within the Western tradition, but political statements concerning the mode of modernization he espoused. While his paintings superficially resemble Western still-lifes, in quoting from that tradition, they also eschew the Orientalist tropes common in such images, such as carpets, Chinese vases, and fruits and flowers valued for their exoticism. In contrast, all of the natural objects in Süleyman Seyyid’s works are local – oranges, lilacs, figs, quince, watermelon, and tulips were all common parts of the Ottoman experience of nature.43 Among his best known works is his still-life of a peeled and segmented orange, of which he executed several versions (fig. 18). The delicacy of the peeled orange; the red seeds bursting through the skin of a ripe fig; or the dewiness of a cut melon all point to the theme of vanitas adopted from the West. His choice to emphasize subjects such as fruit and flowers, already common within the Ottoman artistic tile and fabric traditions, using spatial and lighting techniques from the West suggests a political point of view which emphasized positivism

17: Süleyman Seyyid. Forest. Late nineteenth century.

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but grounded its terms in symbols which could be understood through Ottoman traditions. Within the context of modern still-life, the humility of his subjects echoes the mid-century working class implications of the genre, of which Süleyman Seyyid would probably have been aware. Otherwise, he would have been no different from the hapless hero of Champfleury’s satirical novella, published in 1859, which ridiculed an artist preoccupied with the “the formalistic play of color and shape, only to discover to his dismay that these pictorial values were freighted with social meanings” (Przyblyski 1996, 34). Despite shared experiences in Paris and similar social status as youths, after their return from Paris, Süleyman Seyyid remained a modest and comparatively obscure art teacher while Ahmet Ali rose in society. He and Ahmet Ali harbored such mutual animosity that in 1880, after several years teaching together at the Military Academy, Süleyman Seyyid resigned and began to teach at the Kuleli Military High School, which he left in 1884 to teach at the Imperial School of Medicine (Boyar 1948, 42−44).44 Like Süleyman Seyyid, Ahmet Ali eschewed much of his academic training in favor of a far more naive style informed by the work of the Barbizon artists. Nonetheless, he also created an academically oriented interface for the sultan’s interest in art which contradicted the ideals of the artists he emulated. Ahmet Ali’s academic training is most apparent in his undated self-portrait, probably from the 1880s (fig. 19). He stands palette in hand, the embodiment of a

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modern Ottoman gentleman, clad in a Western suit topped with a fez. In contrast to this work, the only one showing skill in realistic figural representation, Ahmet Ali’s work generally bore the strong influence not of his teachers Boulanger and Gérôme, but of Courbet and Rousseau, particularly in his paintings of forests and deer. Indeed, while Ahmet Ali was in Paris, Courbet had exhibited several forest scenes featuring deer, and Rousseau produced many scenes of the Fontainebleau forest. One of Ahmet Ali’s early works juxtaposes a view of the long road of the forest, probably inspired by Rousseau, with a deer pasted, or even floating over it, as though remembered from works of the Barbizon school. Like the studies from the Fontainebleau Forest he exhibited in Paris salons in 1869−70, in 1885−6, Ahmet Ali executed an image of a deer in the forest again strongly influenced by Courbet’s works (Gören 1998; 32, Duben 2007, 134; fig. 20). Although his landscapes recall the representation of forests by Courbet and by the Barbizon artists, their small scale and relatively poor execution make it difficult to discern whether his works reflected a formal or a substantive reflection on Courbet’s work, which depended in large part on his contravention of conventions that did not exist in the Ottoman context. Yet why would an Ottoman artist, trained at the academy and charged with the purchase of academic paintings for the palace, choose Courbet as a model for his work? For example, Ahmet Ali’s Landscape with Quince might be interpreted either as a simple still-life, or as a reflection of some of Courbet’s most deceptively benign-

19: Ahmet Ali. Self-portrait. Late nineteenth century.

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looking political painting (fig. 21). Flouting academic conventions of perspective and composition, the work depicts one bunch of fruit hanging limply from a tree while another group is scattered at its base, as though sitting on a flat table. The forest in the background appears flat, as though it were a backdrop in front of which fruit had been arranged in a studio. This may simply reflect his studio practice. In contrast to Süleyman Seyyid’s adamant adherence to naturalist depiction, once in the service of the palace, Ahmet Ali had little time to spend wandering in the forests and copying from nature, so he created a natural environment in his studio, replete with potted plants and caged birds (Dürrüoğlu 1962, 8). Yet the disassociation of foreground and background is remarkably reminiscent of Courbet’s still-lifes of the 1870s, executed in response to his imprisonment after the Paris Commune. Although Ahmet Ali would never have seen these works, they were extensively discussed by critics of the era (Przyblyski 1996).45 Thus while espousing a pro-academic position in terms of purchasing works for the palace, Ahmet Ali persistently rejected academism in his own work, possibly even maintaining an esoteric affinity with Courbet’s ongoing critique of state corruption which few Ottoman observers, except perhaps Süleyman Seyyid, would be able to comprehend. In later works, Ahmet Ali increasingly moved away from the technical aspects of Western painting, instead creating a hybrid cultural form which used oil painting as a medium but made visual reference to earlier manuscript painting. His late works began to mediate between the figural exigencies of Western art and the Ottoman

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spatial tradition. This began with those works most closely inspired by the Barbizon painters – particularly landscape scenes of the 1870s reminiscent of Millet’s barren landscapes with incidental figures, and his scenes of flocks of sheep (fig. 22). Not only the subject, but also the compositional construction of many works violates representational conventions. Dark forest makes the left side of the image, divided down the middle rather than according to the golden mean, heavy and lop-sided. In other paintings, the forest gets lighter, rather than darker, as it deepens. Such inversion of space is nowhere more obvious than in Woodcutter in the Forest (undated) and Soldiers in Training (1898), where minute figures populate a broad vista (fig. 23, pl. 2). The lack of perspectival construction makes the figures appear placed against a flat landscape with coloration similar to that of the Barbizon artists, but spatially more reminiscent of manuscript painting. With very little background concerning Ottoman art, John Berger suggests that the elements that make the work perspectivally awkward are academically speaking, a mistake. More than that, they contradict for any viewer, academically minded or not, the logic of the language with which everything else is painted. In a work of art such inconsistency is not usually impressive – it leads to a lack of conviction. The more so when it is unintentional. And the rest of Şeker Ahmed’s work, though it does suggest that

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he may have been unusually spiritually illuminated, does not suggest that he would ever so consciously question the visual language he had learnt so hard in Paris (Berger 1980, 80−1). Berger goes on to suggest that in moving from the tradition of manuscript painting towards the Western intellectual tradition of perspective, Ahmet Ali had been unable to adopt the Western mode of looking onto a landscape as an outside viewer, and had therefore instead painted the forest as though it were coming onto him. He bases his argument in the Easterner’s inability to execute Western perspective due to a perceptual difference rooted in culture. Similarly, Ahmet Gören suggests that despite the gains of his education, Ahmet Ali “was unable to save himself from being vanquished by his ontological memory” (Gören 2008, 19). On the contrary, the disparity between his self-portrait or his early forest scenes and the Soldiers in Training suggest that his movement away from the technical aspects of representation could indeed have been a conscious choice. Moreover, Ottoman student soldiers did not have access to manuscript paintings in the nineteenth century. They were in books in libraries to which few had access or even, probably, interest. Rather, with their increasing valuation by Western collectors, as well as the increasing desire to reify national identity through identification with historical art forms, manuscript paintings became equated with the Ottoman past via Europe’s nascent interest in so-

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called ‘Muhammedan’ art. Within the Ottoman tradition, they were part of books, not part of the newly adopted tradition of “art”. Ahmet Ali would have been more likely to see them identified as part of his culture in Paris than in Istanbul (Vernoit 2000). If Ahmet Ali used manuscript painting as inspiration for his paintings, then he did so not out of visual habit, as suggested by Berger, but out of a conscious attempt to create a hybrid artistic language. While Berger interprets him as a passive, naive innovator, stuck in his cultural essence despite years of artistic education, he can also be understood as having agency in interpreting his position as a modern translator of the Western tradition into an aspect of Ottoman culture recovered through processes of modernity such as the collection and identification of manuscript paintings as Islamic. In contrast to Süleyman Seyyid’s emphasis on the materialist, positivist elements of Western art applied to subjects which could be interpreted through Islamic traditions, Ahmet Ali seems to have taken a position that involved a more synthetic national identity informed by European and Ottoman cultural forms – an identity much closer to the position taken by the state. What, then, might such images mean? What does a woodcutter in a forest, or soldiers in training represent? Rather than assuming that their strange appearance emerged from a lack of foresight and knowledge, what if we assume the opposite: that these were carefully considered subjects executed with painstaking care? Both wood gathering and sheep herding were popular subjects among the Barbizon artists,

23: Ahmet Ali. Woodcutter in the Forest. Late nineteenth century.

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particularly for Jean-François Millet, who used them as symbols of the nobility of labor in the light of Christian humility. Ahmet Ali may not have known the connotations of these tropes, but his adoption of them is clear. Thus rather than simply presenting a man in a forest, The Woodcutter in the Forest suggests a reprise of the French modern relationship with the countryside in an Ottoman context, indicated by the woodsman’s costume. In contrast, although stylistically similar and probably executed after Woodcutter, Soldiers in Training (1897−8) addresses an entirely unprecedented theme. The painting depicts a regiment of soldiers in modern uniforms marching up a road flanked by shrubs on a hill. In the foreground, soldiers beside the two white tents watch grazing deer. Unlike earlier works in the Ottoman repertoire, the image relies more on narrative than on the emulation of genre. Perhaps more importantly than technical aspects that recall manuscript paintings, it is this narrative quality – the sense of representing a specific moment or event through an image – that resembles earlier practices. However here, no text informs the reader. Narrative painting functions as long as the viewing subject knows the story and can therefore appreciate the interpretive cast of its visual rendition. Here, what the contemporary viewer is left with instead is a code without language: a mystery. What we do know is that somehow, that code did communicate with Ahmet Ali’s Ottoman audience, making him the most popular artist of his era. Although today, Osman Hamdi is probably the best known of these three early painters, most of his works were displayed abroad or never exhibited at all. In contrast, Ahmet Ali not only organized the two group exhibits already mentioned, but also set up solo exhibitions. The first, located at the Pera Palas Hotel in 1897, used an entry fee of five piasters, two for students, to collect money for the families of soldiers lost at war. The exhibition had many visitors, garnering 5820 piasters the first week, and 4844 the second.47 Special dispensation was requested by and granted to students of the Greek Zappion school, which led Ahmet Ali to make the exhibition free for all students of the fine arts. Nonetheless, the School of the Israelite Alliance voluntarily made a contribution equivalent to the price of entry of their students.48 He opened a second exhibit, featuring paintings of fruit, at a store near Taksim in 1898.49 A third exhibit, mostly of works depicting the Fontainebleau Forest, took place at the Pera Palas 1900 (Thalasso and Şerifoğlu 2008, 92). Although his Ottoman audience would have had little interest in any affinities with the work of Courbet, it remains significant that he chose not the dominant aesthetic of his era, academism, but instead chose the same alternative as that in the collection of Halil Şerif Pasha and the work of Süleyman Seyyid. İpek Duben suggests that Courbet served merely as an aesthetic model, casting Ahmet Ali as having “a mindset bound on the one side by mysticism, and on the other by Islamic law and interpretation that determined his system of thought and morality” (Duben 2007, 134). However, Courbet’s famous association with anarchism renders such an unwitting relationship unlikely, particularly in light of Ahmet Ali’s consistently conservative purchases for the palace collection. This seeming contradiction can be contextualized in its relationship with Young Ottoman thought. In his paintings,

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Süleyman Seyyid applied European painting techniques to subjects that were often already part of the Ottoman culture of images. In doing so, he took a position close to that of Namık Kemal, essentially translating existing Ottoman visual traditions such as the illustration of grouped flowers or fruit into a new form through the application of artistic technologies. Similarly, Ahmet Ali also often explored still-life. Going still further, he incorporated the Ottoman tradition of manuscript paintings, only recently repackaged as heritage through the European practices of collection and exhibition, creating a synthesis of Eastern and Western modes of art production. Just as Namık Kemal sought the roots of European natural law in Islamic law, and hoped to thereby create a synthesis appropriate for the Ottoman state, Ahmet Ali searched for an Ottoman modality of Western painting rooted in existing visual traditions. Nonetheless, in his professional capacity, Ahmet Ali favored both the academy and the sultan, betraying the politics of Realism and of the Young Ottomans in favor of close relations with the palace. This ambivalence might explain the rift with Süleyman Seyyid after their return to Istanbul.50 The confluence of Osman Hamdi’s preference for academism and his professional affiliation with the state supports a connection between artistic and political establishmentarianism. Closely connected with the state through familial ties, stylistically he never strayed from academic conservatism. Duben suggests that, “because of his reformist personality, it can be said that Osman Hamdi chose Gérôme as an example because he was not interested in the great artists of the time, such as Courbet” (Duben 2007, 43). On the contrary, it is only in retrospect that renegade Courbet has acquired greater renown than Gérôme, one of the most esteemed artists of his era. Osman Hamdi’s elite roots, not his penchant towards reform within existing structures of power, seem to have informed his interest in the genre of Orientalism. While Gérôme’s fame relied on his success in Romantic and neo-Classical works, his Ottoman students entered his studio during the apogee of his Orientalist studies, soon after his return from his first Middle Eastern voyage in 1856. These works influenced Osman Hamdi the most. No doubt, his teachers would have encouraged him to represent the Orient from a native point of view. Indeed, he first appeared in the French salons not as an artist, but as the subject of a portrait by Gustave Boulanger. The exhibit catalogue described the work as, “… a true masterpiece. This swarthy youth, his head wrapped in a turban of similar color, leans against a window looking out upon a forest…” (Eldem 2004, 54). Thus the first well-known Ottoman artist was transformed into an object of the image before he could become its subject, his suit and hat replaced with a turban, his urban roots replaced with a mysterious forest. Osman Hamdi could behave as a Westerner in his everyday life; however, to succeed as an artist, he recognized that he had to use his identification as an Easterner to his best advantage (Eldem 2004, 56). Trapped within the Oriental fantasy, who could better represent it? Indeed, in 1910, the first historian of Ottoman painting, the Levantine Adolphe Thalasso defended him as more authentic than European Orientalists (Thalasso 2008, 38). Yet by the early twentieth century, the waning hierarchy of the genres in late nineteenth century Paris had rendered Orientalism outmoded (Duro 2005). This was

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noted frequently in the early republican period: in 1940 the influential poet and critic Ahmet Münip Dıranas described Osman Hamdi’s work as ‘decadent,’ while in 1943, the artist Nurullah Berk (1906−1982) contrasted him with the unsullied perspective of Ahmet Ali and Hüseyin Zekai, whom he saw as the founders of a clean and pure Turkish painting. Berk disparaged Osman Hamdi’s work as “full of a thousand and one knick knacks from antique shops in the covered bazaar, and fabrics, decoration, and weapons taken from paintings” (Berk 1943, 23). Similarly, the republic’s first art historian Burhan Toprak wrote that his works “excite us as little as the désenchantées (fallen women) of Pierre Loti” (Toprak 1958, 220). As late as 1987, Vasıf Kortun cites a critic as denigrating the painting Mihrab for “having spread the pages of the Qu’ran beneath the feet of an Armenian girl”. The same year, Duben defended him against the slander of calling him an Orientalist, instead interpreting his work as an expression of national pride (Duben 1987, 47). Eldem (2009) points out that far from being shameful, Osman Hamdi’s Orientalism is simply a natural product of his environment and part of the Turkish history of modernization. Indeed, such adoption of European practices can easily be understood “not as poor imitations of colonialist mannerisms but as a kind of victory over the imperium, one which is subversive in the long run of the imperium’s claims to cultural dominance over its own styles” (Clark 1998, 24). However, as Nochlin explains, Orientalism as a genre cannot be fully disassociated from its academic practice and is therefore subject to a similar critique (Nochlin 1983). Thus Osman Hamdi’s usurpation of European Orientalist tropes cannot be understood simply as repetition, but as a form of tactical mimicry that redefines the terms of Oriental imagery in a manner parallel to the empire’s adopted tropes of European imperialism to define their own Oriental Other in Arab lands (Makdisi 2002). Rather than using Arab provinces (often denigrated among Ottoman elites) as the site of the Oriental encounter, Osman Hamdi instead creates a glorified past. Although Orientalism has often been considered as denigration of the Orient, the tropes of Orientalist representation – violence, despotism, the harem, and extravagance – attracted Western viewers through their enactment of fantasy, their ability to provide the kinds of pleasures and passions from which civilized people were supposed to refrain. One could interpret it as much a sign of desire as one of racism, not only for lascivious harem life, but also for the unchanging pace of a languid East that contrasted with the modern world. Osman Hamdi’s depiction of Oriental characters, particularly women, as actively engaged in intellectual rather than sensual activities has been interpreted as a response to Orientalist practice, taking possession of and dignifying the representation of the Orient. However, his representation of Ottoman identity through the depiction of a timeless past and his realism, grounded in museum objects from various eras and photographs of his models wearing period costumes, also repeats the essentializing tropes of Orientalist painting. As Nochlin points out, the perception of narrative realism in Orientalist painting depended on “an affect of the real,” in which ethnographic detail supplied by photographic verisimilitude contributed to the believability of even the most fantastic scenes. Likewise, Osman Hamdi’s inclusion of his own image within many

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of his paintings suggests his own entry into a realm of an idyllic Ottoman past much like the idyllic Eastern realm entered by European artists dressed as natives. His initial portrayal as a native, as well as his self-depiction as a figure from a timeless past, underscores his unique position in the relationship between desire, the gaze, and power of constructing images. Whereas a Western artist might be considered as reflecting on the world from a neutral position outside of the image, a non-Western artist bears predetermined visual codes of his or her own cultural identity. What Simone de Beauvoir suggested as limiting the ability of woman to be an artist might be considered for the non-Western artist performing under the humanist presupposition of equality predicated nonetheless on essential cultural difference. Just as her hypothetical woman artist, accustomed to being objectified and needing to prove her worth in a man’s world, becomes unable to let go of the self and continues to examine the world, thereby becoming unable to recreate it, the nonWestern artist can find his personal and artistic identities conflated (Beauvoir 2008, 82). Rather than simply being the subjective agent of the gaze, such an artist also becomes its object. Lacan explains such a phenomenon by suggesting that the gaze of others disorganizes the field of perception because it is not simply the rational mind that looks, but desire that frames vision. For him, the image develops an anamorphic aspect in which the viewer always remains aware of his own subjectivity (Lacan and Miller 1998, 89). Having become the subject of European Orientalist fantasy, Osman Hamdi reprised the desire of the European Other for the Ottoman context, creating images that appeared to present the Ottoman past as they actually refracted a contemporary Ottoman desire for an ideal, immutable tradition embodied by the Orientalist imagination. Despite exhibiting Orientalist works during his student years, Osman Hamdi did not return to the empire as an Orientalist painter; it was his experience in the empire that made him turn increasingly to Orientalism. During the mid-1870s, he executed several landscapes and at least one still-life, and continued to paint portraits, often of family, throughout his life. Osman Hamdi’s earliest Orientalist works made in the Ottoman empire seem to have been executed between 1879 and 1883. In contrast to some paintings of outdoor scenes depicting women in contemporary garb, those of interiors depict domestic harmony among characters in anachronistic costumes and settings. The frequent use of the same clothing in several paintings suggests that, like his French teachers, Osman Hamdi acquired a set of costumes for his models to wear for the paintings. The artifice of the costumes is underscored through their contrast with his family photographs, which feature his French wife and numerous children dressed in European-style pinafores and suits, sitting in front of a Victorian-style ornate wooden house in Gebze, a suburb of Istanbul (Cezar 1995, 225). At first glance, the domesticity of the scenes suggests a historicized fantasy world akin to European dreams of the East. A wife delicately serves her husband coffee from a pot simmering in an old, tiled Turkish stove as he sits, staring into the distance, his long trusty pipe at his side. A girl prays beside a window, the interior light even more scintillating than that outside. A woman arranges flowers on a wall sconce, or collects lilacs in a garden. A man prays at an ornate tomb. Two girls play instruments

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in an interior. Yet as in many European Orientalist works, realism collapses as soon as the viewer looks beyond the verisimilitude of the objects. For the girls are not in a home, but in a mosque, made clear by the shoe niches immediately beside them. Their location in the main prayer space, their casual attitude, and above all their playing of instruments would be sacrilegious (fig. 24). While Duben suggests that his use of women in religious settings was particularly radical for the era, contemporary criticism that she sites indicates otherwise. Rather than addressing the content of the image, like many critics of the era, Süleyman critiques the image on aesthetic grounds, complaining of the excessive use of blue and yellow and of the inappropriate situation of furniture within the scene (Duben 2007, 41, 187). For a Western audience, Osman Hamdi’s use of Orientalist tropes was designed to subvert more conventional stereotypes of the East. In contrast, unaccustomed to the interpretation of meaning from visual sources, his Ottoman audiences instead could only critique formal aspects of the works, using standards of verisimilitude and harmonious beauty as a guide. Osman Hamdi’s extensive inclusion of classical Ottoman settings enabled him to incorporate existing aesthetic practices into his paintings, rendering the images pleasing to local audiences. While Süleyman Seyyid translated Ottoman content through a Western technical format onto his canvases, and Ahmet Ali adopted a flattened, non-perspectival spatial structure mixing Islamic and Western visual traditions, Osman Hamdi incorporated masterpieces of the Ottoman tradition into works that emphasized their beauty and their relationship

24: Osman Hamdi. Girls Playing Music. 1880.

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to history. Nonetheless, Osman Hamdi’s willful juxtaposition of unlikely characters and settings suggests that more complex themes underlie many of his works. In From the Harem (1880), four girls sit against an ornate tile wall, as though engaged in conversation. On the one hand, the image is reminiscent of the listless characters of Delacroix’s 1834 Women of Algiers, the quintessential representation of Oriental laziness as well as Western desire and dominion (Çelik 1997, 190−2). On the other, the awkward arrangement of the characters, the objects, and the direct gaze of one of the girls suggest a response to, as much as a reprise of, its Orientalist approach. On the left edge of the image, we see a carpet leading to a step and an entryway, also covered by a hanging carpet. The girls sit on woven reed flooring of the type commonly used outside of mosques or underneath carpets. The background is the wall of a space usable for prayer, indicated by the niche-shaped tile panels behind the girls. Like the mosque where the girls play music, the setting resembles mosques in Bursa, not an arbitrary choice since l’Architecture Ottomane of 1873 had emphasized such structures as the seminal moment of the entire Ottoman architectural tradition. Thus by incorporating mosques into his work, Osman Hamdi engaged in a mode of viewing the past as heritage, and of imagining that heritage as part of a modern identity indicated by the medium of painting.51 However, the mosque here has been transformed into a domestic space. Towels hang from a rod affixed to the wall, and a basin of water sits in front of the girls, suggesting a bath although the girls are fully clothed. Osman Hamdi took the tropes of Orientalism – women, bath, and mosque – and removed them from their syntax within the Orientalist genre. The female figure gazing from the image is not unlike Manet’s Olympia, yet her role is diametrically opposite. Just as Olympia’s gaze shocked audiences as a frank announcement of her blunt nakedness and her matter-of-fact control of her prostitution, here an Eastern girl looks out, alert and clothed, redeeming the personhood that was so often taken away from odalisques in the Orientalist genre. As Osman Hamdi’s relationship with the palace became increasingly strained during the last two decades of his life, the tenor of his paintings began to shift from a resuscitation of heritage through respectful reveries of an idyllic Ottoman world towards a far more complex deployment of Orientalist tropes as critical metaphors for contemporary issues. During the 1890s, Osman Hamdi often objected to the actions of the sultan, who saw himself as above the law when giving gifts of antiquities to European rulers or turning a blind eye to foreign archaeological expeditions. Although officially in charge of overseeing archaeology throughout the country, he was forbidden from leaving Istanbul for over a decade because Sultan Abdülhamid II suspected him of sympathizing with the Young Turks (Marchand 1996, 201; Shaw and Shaw 1977, 256). Yet only one of his paintings was overtly political, and it expressed a radical political identity in relation to France rather than the Ottoman Empire. His 1899 portrait of Tevfik Fikret, poet and editor of the literary journal Servet-i Funun [The Wealth of Knowledge], depicts him reading a French newspaper with the headline, “Dreyfus, the hero” and includes an inscription dedicating the painting to the poet

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from his fellow Dreyfussard (Eldem 2004, 59). Although none of his writings or publicly exhibited paintings express similarly radical politics in the Ottoman context, this is hardly surprising given the environment of censorship during the last years of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. This work expresses political leanings suggested more subtly elsewhere. Edhem Eldem comments that it is debatable whether “as enough of an administrator and a man of science to have neglected his art, and as somebody who had left his mark through exceedingly important breakthroughs, he would have had to resort to painting to express his reformist and ideological identity” (Eldem 2004, 66). However, for an artist, painting is neither less expressive than text or politics, nor merely supplementary; its expressiveness differs from other modes. During the last decade of his life, Osman Hamdi recognized the power of imagery to raise issues in the mind of the viewer in a way that could be difficult to censure, in particular because the message was not clear. Although the increasingly complex imagery of these works begs elucidation, the precise meaning of their content remains undetermined. The most famous of these late works is known as The Tortoise Trainer (Pl. 3) and was the subject of extensive discussion in the Turkish press in 2004, when rivalry between the Istanbul Modern Museum and its ultimate buyer, the Pera Museum, led to an unprecedented auction price of five million liras (Özlüer 2004). Originally exhibited at the 1906 Paris Salon as L’Homme aux tortues, the painting shows a figure modeled after the artist, dressed as a dervish, holding a flute in hands folded behind his back, with a switch hanging from his neck, and standing beside a window in an upper floor of the Green Mosque in Bursa (Demirsar 1989, 147). A group of tortoises munch lettuce at his feet, while the Arabic inscription, “Closeness to the beloved, healing to the heart” is inscribed on the tile wall above him.52 What could be meant by this enigmatic image of a man with a heretofore unheard of profession in the unlikely location of a mosque’s hidden recesses? As Eldem points out, manifold interpretations have obfuscated as much as explicated the work’s message(s) (Eldem 2009). Not only is the intended audience of the work – French or Ottoman – unclear, it is impossible to know what associations the figure and his environment might have conveyed a century ago. Nonetheless, Eldem’s discovery of a clear source for the image provides a stunning indication of the level of esoteric metaphor that may have been imbedded in Osman Hamdi’s work. In one of Osman Hamdi’s letters to his father, he mentions receiving and reading an 1869 issue of the journal Le Tour du Monde, a popular journal among the Ottoman elite, which his father sent to him in Baghdad. The issue featured an article by a Swiss traveler about Japan illustrated with a front-page engraving of a Japanese “Charmeur de tortues.” Far from referencing an obscure Ottoman entertainment, as many Turkish interpreters had suggested, the figure in Osman Hamdi’s painting thus is revealed as a translation from traditional Japanese culture as depicted in European travel literature. This is particularly noteworthy as in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman culture, Meiji Japan was heralded as the premier example of modernization for an Eastern country. It provided a model which could both help the Ottoman Empire escape the binary of Western dominance and Eastern

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subservience, and also serve as a guide for the maintenance of tradition within the adoption of modern technologies (Worringer 2004). Preceding this perception, the 1869 article, which described a voyage of 1863−4 (before the Meiji Restoration of 1868), used a discussion of the tortoise charmer as an example of the kind of activities, particularly practiced by Buddhist priests and enjoyed among the commoners, that pervaded traditional Japanese society and which made the author “fear for the future of the Japanese people” (Humbert 1869, 406). It is, of course, impossible to know why İbrahim Edhem sent this particular issue of the journal to his son, or why Osman Hamdi reprised the image so many years later. Nonetheless, given his distaste for the excesses of religion, it seems likely that Osman Hamdi might have remembered the image as a synecdochic symbol for the failures that might be embedded within the Japanese success story as it unfolded in subsequent decades. Rather than working directly from the image, which he clearly did not, he may have considered the tortoise charmer a metaphor for the shortcomings which he, like the Swiss interpreter of the Japanese social malady, observed in the Ottoman common man. Ottoman Hamdi expressed such a patronizing view in letters to his father from Baghdad, where he critiqued the Ottoman artisan as, “miserable, covered with rags, nothing but a pious shadow! No industry, no commerce, nothing! Nothing but patient fatalism!” (Eldem 1990). Just as in the Tour du Monde article, where the image of the tortoise charmer served as a metonym for all the ills of Japanese society brought on by Buddhist priests that threatened potential modernization, in Osman Hamdi’s painting, the dervish figure in a mosque might serve a similar function. Such a transposed meaning makes perfect sense, yet no contemporary audience would be likely to recognize the reference any more than viewers today, who puzzle over the unlikely relationship between the setting, the figure, and the animals. While the discovery of a source sheds light on Osman Hamdi’s likely inspiration, it does very little to elucidate either his authorial intent or the interpretations of his audiences. How, then, can we understand such an image? Similar issues emerge in the interpretation of several works in which Osman Hamdi used himself as a model. The earliest of these depicts him in the Green Mosque of Bursa (1890), sitting in a situation analogous to that of the female musicians of a decade earlier (fig. 25). A second figure, also modeled on the artist, stands to his right reading from a book with his arm raised. The categorization of Ottoman architectural tropes in l’Architecture Ottomane enabled him to change architectural details, such as the stone and tilework, without compromising the apparent authenticity of the setting. Works from the recently growing collection of Islamic Art at the museum become more evident in his works: a giant candle holder (which, because of its incorrect perspectival depiction, appears pasted into the scene and was probably copied from a photograph) and a lamp suspended from the ceiling (Demirsar 1989). A similar trope appears in his Fountain of Life painting of 1904, where the figure stands reading a book before a fountain (located in the Tiled Pavilion of the Topkapı Palace), surrounded by works of Islamic art from the Imperial Museum (fig. 26). Dervish at the Tomb of Children (1908) depicts him standing before two Islamic cenotaphs inside the sixteenthcentury tomb of the children of Ibrahim Pasha, a very important Grand Vizier at the

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apogee of Ottoman power. The tomb is furnished with a glass lamp and a wooden door most likely modeled after those in the museum collection. In contrast to his earlier images of people (modeled after his son and daughters) visiting tombs, he does not show the figure in a position of prayer, but raising his hand, as though taking an oath. Likewise, The Sharp Side of the Sword (1908), known today as The Weapons Merchant, depicts him sitting on a classical capital, surrounded by weapons and helmets from the museum’s collection of Islamic art. He declaims to a young man before him (modeled after his son) who faces the spectator and examines the sharp blade of the sword he holds in his hand. In the background, we see a second figure modeled after the artist sitting in the same position as in the Green Mosque of Bursa and a third, also bearded, holding a cloth and talking to him.53 All of these paintings indicate drama through the juxtaposition of figures and objects and leave the viewer to interpret the connections between them. Although it is not clear whether the paintings should be considered self-portraits, in contrast to many other works, Osman Hamdi made the choice to use his own features on the figures with full knowledge that doing so would color his audiences’ interpretations. While Eldem astutely points out that name changes have colored the interpretations of the works in ways not implied by their original titles, the common reading of the man with tortoises as their trainer suggests that the meaning of the source image (the tortoise charmer) was conveyed by the painting. Likewise, no more sophisticated than spectators today, the original viewers of these works would very likely have understood the images as self-portraits, and thus would have wondered

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why this suit-wearing, very modern and famous artist, Osman Hamdi, director of the Imperial Museum and of the Academy of Fine Arts, would dress up as a tortoise trainer/dervish/old-fashioned Ottoman with weapons. By establishing his image in an anachronistic setting, and indeed at times communicating with his double as though talking to a mirror, Osman Hamdi projected his own identity into settings rife with contradictions. Tortoises do not belong in mosques. They are intractable and they do not respond to the kind of instruments carried by the dervish – they do not communicate, and they cannot be trained. Thus the figure, and by extension the artist, expresses himself as engaged in an exercise in patient futility somehow associated with religion. The painting comes to express a very effective translation of Humbert’s critique of Japanese progress into an Ottoman setting. Its interpretation needs no recourse to the source image and is ultimately not altered by its discovery. Similarly, given that Osman Hamdi is not a dervish, his establishing himself as one within the fictive space of a painting constructs a metaphoric relationship between his real and fictive identities. His showing himself taking an oath before cenotaphs suggests a very particular relationship with history – one of reverence for the past from which it is not a great leap to understand the passion for the preservation of patrimony which played such a central role in his career. Indeed, his last painting, The Sharp Side of the Sword, suggests a similar message, proposing that historical artifacts, engaged through the museum, can be as effective as swords in the development of a national identity (Shaw 2003, 166−9). Criticizing the current practice of interpreting Osman Hamdi’s work in the

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absence of any written texts from the period, Eldem writes, “What really weighs on me is that by loading this person with all these meanings and symbols, we transform him into a message machine, somebody who was not able to paint a single picture without meaning, symbols, and metaphors” (Eldem 2009). To the contrary, it would seem far more surprising to me if somebody who so dominated the cultural institutions of his era, who led his nation in the recognition of patrimony, the development of museums, archaeology, and the instruction of art, did not, in addition to his smaller landscape studies and portraits, ensure that his master works were laden with as much meaning as his administrative endeavors. If not artists themselves, images are, in effect, ‘message machines’; what makes art unique among images is that it creates messages that can resonate beyond singularity and that ultimately have no absolute interpretation. As Roland Barthes points out, “Verisimilitude does not necessarily correspond to what was once the case (that is a matter for history) nor to what must be (that is a matter for science) but simply to what the public thinks is possible, which can be quite different from historical reality or scientific possibility” (Barthes 2004, 3). Contemporary criticism depends on such an aesthetics of readership – that a knowledgeable critic, informed of the language(s) of art, has the ability, freedom, and perhaps even duty to interpret beyond the intention of the artist as the work becomes independent from its author. Such criticism has been nearly absent from Turkish art historical discourse, which focuses largely on biography, reproduction of historical sources, and close description of works; or alternatively, on musings of the critic with very little direct consideration of the work. Through the language of money, The Tortoise Trainer became the first work to become well-known among a large portion of the Turkish populace, and thus the first Ottoman work to publicly reflect interpretive concerns. Perhaps what is most striking is that although Turks are often all too eager to make accusations of Orientalism and racism when it comes to their representation from abroad, they are no less willing to accept the comfortable fantasy of the Oriental stereotype that makes Osman Hamdi’s paintings popular in Turkey today. Just as they did a century ago, they Westernize the native viewer by enabling him to differentiate himself from an Oriental fantasy while finding comfort in a romanticized past. The first Ottoman artists educated in the West not only brought home with them increased technical competence in image-making, but also an understanding that art is an expressive tool akin to literature or theater. As painting developed, new meanings and connotations soon became linked to art, which thereby accrued local meanings. Such subtlety of expression in late nineteenth century works may be understood in the context of the primary literary movement of the era, Servet-i Funun. Founded in 1891 and highly influential for a decade, Servet-i Funun moved away from the Realism of the empire’s first wave of modern literature, epitomized in the adopted form of the didactic romantic novel, and towards a rebirth of art for art’s sake, expressed through highly metaphorical poetry using complex literary forms laden with obscure Persian phrases that were difficult for censors to understand. Although the movement used a complex language, it often adopted themes from Western, particularly French, poetry. At the same time, it continued the legacy of

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traditional Ottoman Divan poetry to gain inspiration from earlier artistic examples rather than directly from nature, paralleling the practice of early Ottoman artists to copy and later mimic existing images and styles (Kolcu 2005, 29). The nonliteral, highly metaphoric and even esoteric production of meaning in the works of the first Ottoman artists parallel both the cultural syncretism and the complex interpretation of the era’s literary forms. Contemporary modes of expression required that highly charged political content be conveyed through metaphor. The complexity and ambiguity of the Servet-i Funun style made it less accessible to the masses, and thus less dangerous in the eyes of censors. This leaves meanings open to multiple interpretations, a central element of the visual, and indeed all expressive, arts. However, in the face of obscure meanings, to assume that these paintings had no meaning, and should or cannot be interpreted because no definitive meaning can be deduced, would be to deny the inherent ability of Ottoman artists to adopt the intellectual practices of art along with its techniques. The first generation of Ottoman artists bore the complex task of making an entire cultural practice part of their own culture. Far from being naive executors of a new skill, they were well aware of the complexity of their task of cultural, not simply technical, translation.

3 A NEW WORLD OF ART

The emergence of the art academy, the increased engagement of the palace with Western art, the rise of exhibitions, and the increased availability of images through lithography and photography in the early twentieth century led to new issues and opportunities related to art. Whereas several new institutional forms would create a more centralized, unified artistic voice during the otherwise turbulent period between the Second Constitutional Revolution of 1908 and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, art around the turn of the century was characterized by divergent artistic practices. During this era, artists emerging from various backgrounds, informed by education abroad, military service, and religious traditions used their work to define roles for the new art of painting in the Ottoman context. As making art became a career which, if not economically viable, could at least be conceptualized, artists became increasingly engaged in producing art that could communicate with audiences, conveying meaning and instilling affection for art. Emerging from the Fog As the Committee for Union and Progress gained footing among the growing bureaucratic elite educated in accord with Western traditions, the later years of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II was often perceived as increasingly repressive. This sense is perhaps best expressed in the poem “Fog” by Tevfik Fikret, first published in Servet-i Funun in 1899. A stubborn smoke has wrapped your horizons yet again, Such a white, swelling darkness that rises bit by bit. As though bodies have been erased under its weight, All that is visible is a dusty thickness A density so dusty and frightening that The gaze dare not penetrate it for fear! But this deep dark cover suits you well, This cover suits you, o field of oppression! O field of oppression… yes, o gaudy arena,

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As in many landscapes paintings, the city of the poem is characterized as a peninsula marked by the signs of history. However, in contrast to European authors, who found the dilapidation of the city charming and picturesque, Tevfik Fikret adopts the metaphors of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen in order to recast Oriental charm as contemporary failure (Kolcu 2002, 132−68). Where Baudelaire takes pleasure in the decadence of modern Paris, looking at its grime from on high as a form of salvation from the pristine falsity of stultifying traditions, Tevfik Fikret sees grime as reflecting decline; he sees no salvation through the fog. Prince Abdülmecid – the younger son of Sultan Abdülaziz who spent his uncle Sultan Abdülhamid’s reign under close surveillance – was a close friend of the poet and executed two works concerning fog, creating the earliest link between Ottoman poetry and oil painting. The more well-known rendition of “Fog” (1912) was signed as a gift to the poet and is displayed today at Tevfik Fikret’s house-museum, Aşiyan. However, it actually reprised a subject the prince had taken up in a smaller painting of 1895 (figs. 27, 28). The earlier work shows an Ottoman caique, common on the Bosporus, pulled by eight rowers, with a figure seated at the helm and several more riding behind. Behind the boat, a large ship (probably based on nautical works by

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Aivazofsky in the palace collection) emerges from a fog so thick that it renders the sun itself a pale circle. The ship threatens to crush the smaller vessel, crowded with rowers and passengers. In contrast to the nostalgic celebration of progress in a work such as J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up (1838), here signs of progress – or of the West – threaten to crush the past (or the local). Rather than taking place at twilight, indicating the passage of time in a day or in history, the scene takes place in a fog so thick that it erases the sun. Tevfik Fikret’s poetic use of the same trope may reflect inspiration by the prince’s painting, or simply a shared metaphorical language. Prince Abdülmecid’s reinterpretation of the theme soon after the Second Constitutional Revolution suggests that in engaging critique, the poem acted as a beacon out of the era of fog: the large vessel has disappeared, and the figure at the prow of the smaller boat stands up, facing forward, leading the boat out of the fog. In contrast to the Orientalist trope of Constantinople, marked by its skyline teeming with domes and pointed minarets, in this painting, the historic city appears as a ghost on the horizon as the boat moves towards the future. As painting became an expressive form in the empire, Abdülmecid no doubt hoped that, like poetry, it would become a vehicle of civic expression. Problems of the Figure and Female Form One of the first issues artists faced in introducing art to the empire was that of realistic figural representation. As Ottomans developed a taste for Western practices, new

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practices often contradicted Ottoman mores. For example, soon after the Crimean War, Princess Fatma, daughter of Sultan Abdülmecid, commissioned her portrait from Mrs. Walker, a female artist visiting the empire. Not only did the princess require multiple repaintings reflecting changing fashions, but the final product was hung on a wall, then covered with a silk curtain in order to hinder the inappropriate gaze of men outside the family (İnankur 2001, 4). Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that one of the prime features of Western art, the female figure, was absent from Ottoman painting. As late as 1914, by which time many social barriers to Western painting had been overcome, an article in the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists (Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi) entitled “Womanhood in the Art of Painting” argues that one of the reasons for the weakness of Ottoman painting was the absence of female forms to serve as either model or muse for male artists. The fine arts of the West shine in the purity and light of woman and womanhood’s beauty… even lingering over her nudity. In contrast, our women are as ethereal and imperceptible as fog on the horizon, their effect both attractive and repulsive, strange compilations of the law of opposites. While [Westerners], through all moral and immoral motivations, achieve genius, we are left with those pure virgin mountains, forests and oceans, the quiet shapes and colors of which these lifeless scenes (or if not lifeless, allowing very few into their hearts) can persuade very few to sensitivity and a withdrawn life of romance, where large things are shrunk and squeezed into a small frame across from which the art of painting could not, has not, and will not progress (Zihnioğlu 2007, 181). Although the article only poetically breaches the issue of sexuality, the implication is that without the figure of woman as inspiration, art lacked the power to motivate artists or inspire the interest of audiences: it lacked passion. Not only were female figures in short supply, but even male models contravened social mores. As the newspaper La Turquie pointed out concerning the exhibit of 1875, Reasons rooted in local education and custom frown upon the entry and exit of both male and female models into the apartments where the artist’s family also reside. In a place where the notion of studying the figure counts as a scandal, models are even themselves impossibly shy about their professions to an extent the bourgeoisie would not believe (Cezar 1995, 435). The situation hardly improved with the establishment of the Academy of Fine Arts. While Osman Hamdi’s own depiction of the human figure was based on student studies of human anatomy and the nude, back in the empire, he used (clothed) members of his family as models and made extensive use of photographs. He recognized that the already scandalously foreign nature of the academy’s program

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rendered the teaching of life drawing impossible. In 1890, responding to the absence of life drawing classes, Celal Esad joined with his fellow students Paulidis, Basmacidis, and Alektoridis in establishing a night studio in Beyoğlu where they could work from the figure (Işın 1989, 9). In deference to public taste, the 1902 salon included no nudes.54 The reminiscences of the artist Hikmet (Onat; 1885−1977) of his years as a student at the academy between 1904 and 1909 underscore the sluggishness of change: I must emphasize that painting was a very difficult occupation back then. There were neither male nor female models, and even the ugliest male models did not want to undress. The school was accused of immorality and atheism because it taught painting and sculpture. They told us that a few years before we signed up, a few zealots forced their way into the school, broke statues, and tied wraps around the waists of the antique statues… Our models were a bunch of bearded and mustached porters wearing turbans. We were only able to make portraits and busts. One day we got sick of drawing porters and decided to go find a woman model, even if she had to be dressed. Having arranged a girl we brought from the gypsy neighborhood in a dance−like pose, we had just set to work when Osman Hamdi summoned us to his office. ‘Boys, are you crazy, where do you think you are?’ He yelled, “this is Turkey, it doesn’t support this type of thing. Go tell that gypsy to go away. God willing you will go to Europe soon, there you will draw plenty of women, naked women!” (Giray 1995, 28). Several years later, Nazmi Ziya (Güran; 1881−1937) solved the problem by enlisting wrestlers (whom he knew through his own participation in the sport) as models (Gören 1998, 42). Mehmed Ruhi (Arel; 1880−1931)’s 1909 painting of a male figure standing on a Turkish carpet and leaning against a draped pillar shows one of these young wrestlers (fig. 29). The image takes a trope of exoticism familiar from Western painting, the Oriental carpet, unites it with the classical figure of a wrestler in a contrapposto pose, leaning against a pillar as though a Roman marble statue made after a Greek bronze and thereby needing support. Whereas in the West, the figure was common and the carpet foreign, in Ottoman art, such a figure was a novelty, the column a sign of Western cultural affiliation, and the carpet, a mere prop to keep the model warm. Like Osman Hamdi, Ottoman artists often drew family members, particularly their wives, as a remedy to the paucity of models. In doing so, they redeemed the troubling representation of the harem that dominated European fantasies of the East. In his 1895 work A Tour of Europe, Ahmed Midhat (1844−1912) explains, Until now, Europe has looked upon our Eastern lands with a gaze appropriate for a pleasant painting… According to their assumptions and depictions, the symbol of the East is a beloved sprawled on a couch .... Since her clothing reveals more than it conceals, just as her legs hang from the couch spread apart, her belly and her chest are only half covered with transparent gauzy fabrics as

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thin as a dream. …However much contact with this image gives the pleasure of beautiful things to the eyes, it is not a reality but a dream, a poem… For one would think that this body is not the wife of her husband and the mother of her children, but perhaps only a plaything to serve the pleasures of the man who owns the house (Findley 1998, 50−51). Images which responded to such concerns by depicting non-sexualized reclining women became a relatively common element in the few figural compositions executed by Ottoman artists during the later years of empire. An early work by Osman Hamdi not only projects the artist and his wife into a fictive, idyllic past, but in doing so also projects the act of painting backward in time, as though contemporary with the traditional arts in the room and the archaic clothing of the figures inhabiting it (fig. 30).55 Rather than presenting a sexually charged view of the harem to lascivious Western eyes as in many Orientalist paintings, Osman Hamdi presents a calm, domestic scene. In contrast to the odalisques who populated European visions of the harem, this woman turns her back on both the viewer and the artist, refusing the sexual or colonial gaze.56 She grants the power of the gaze only to her husband, an Eastern man. Ottoman portraits of women generally portrayed them in domestic environments with no hints of sexuality. While most upper-class men of the era had multiple wives, their view of the role of women, at least as evidenced in painting, was a far cry from the image of the harem in the West. This is apparent in Halil’s pastel Portrait of

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Mme X, which received a Gold Medal at the Exhibit of French Artists in 1888 (fig. 31). Having served as yaver for two years and taught as an art teacher at a military high school, Halil Pasha (1857−1939), son of Ferik Selim Pasha, the founder of the Military Academy (Mekteb-i Harbiye-i Şahane), received a scholarship for study in Paris in recognition of his talent (Başkan 1991, 48). Between 1880 and 1888, he studied in the studio of Gérôme. Halil’s use of the title Portrait of Mme X, made famous by John Singer Sargent’s scandalous portrait of Madame Jean Gautreau exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, underscores his desire to contrast the demure seated figure of his work with the sexuality implied by Singer (Sidlauskas 2001). No doubt aware of representing an Ottoman perspective at the exhibit, he chose to depict a woman as conservatively as possible. Similarly, Halil’s earliest known work done in Istanbul depicts a woman reclining on a couch: Aliye, one of his wives and sister of the writer Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem (İnankur 2001, 5; fig. 32). Where Osman Hamdi seeks to elevate the image of the Orient by depicting himself and his wife as timelessly Eastern, Halil disposes of the Orient entirely, simply depicting a woman at home. An 1898 work (retouched in 1917) by Prince Abdülmecid similarly inverts the Western image of the harem. His recently betrothed first wife Şehsuvar is shown reclining on a settee (fig. 33). The room’s furniture and décor reflect the cultural eclecticism of the era: the setee is Western, the inlaid table, Ottoman; a calligraphic panel, carpet, and framed photograph decorate the wall. Letters on the table and a book in her hand emphasize Şehsuvar’s education, while her direct gaze suggests

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personal confidence. Since she is holding Goethe’s Faust, the work engendered surprise when perceived as propaganda beneath the station of a prince during its 1918 exhibition in Vienna (Gören 1997, 67). However this was probably not the intent behind the portrait, executed many years earlier. The 1917 reworking may have involved adding the book’s title so as to emphasize the idea of an Ottoman woman partaking of Western culture. While Abdülmecid may have chosen it simply as the apogee of the Germanic literary cannon, it suits the situation well. Faust presents a parable about an irrevocable choice. Here, an Ottoman woman ponders a choice between East and West that already surrounds her, through which her identity as a woman of the East has become ambivalent. While the painting is known as Goethe in the Harem in accordance with the title used in Vienna, the original title in Turkish was Pondering [Mütala’a]. Abdülmecid addressed the issue of women again in a 1915 work, also exhibited in Vienna, titled Beethoven in the Harem in foreign languages, but Harmony in the Harem in Turkish (fig. 34). The painting depicts Şehsuvar playing the violin as one of his Circasian consorts, named Hatidje but known as Lady Ophelia, plays piano. His son Ömer Faruk plays cello as two other women, one of whom may be his third wife Mehisti, listen with rapt attention at his summer palace in Bağlarbaşı, given to him in 1895 by Sultan Abdülhamid shortly before his first marriage in 1896. The figures are surrounded by Western furniture in a room decorated with a bust of Beethoven, an 1873 painting by Aivazovsky, and watched over by Fuller’s equestrian statue of Sultan

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Abdülaziz in the central recess of the room. Surrounded by the accoutrement of a Western lifestyle, including sculpture, painting, furniture, and clothing, the image of multiple wives becomes domesticated within Western cultural practices. Far less subtle than Abdülmecid’s works, Osman Hamdi’s Mihrab (1901) uses the image of his wife to characterize the ongoing shift in visual culture as nothing less than revolutionary (fig. 35). Wearing an antique gown, she sits on a Qur’an stand, books scattered at her feet in front of a giant tiled prayer niche (mihrab) with a giant candle beside it and an incense burner in the foreground. Smoke from the wick suggests that the candle has recently been extinguished. Although many of the objects, mostly from the collection of the Imperial Museum had appeared in his earlier works, their conjunction here within a Western-style painting and with a female form uses a western artistic modality to render a common theme in Islamic mystical poetry, in which the image of the beloved represents a vision of the divine (Barry 2004, 18,123−124). The painting may also allegorize the museum, an institution which displaces works of devotion and resituates them as works of the gaze, thus secularizing them. The painting’s use of perspective organizes this secularization. Like someone performing ritual prayers, the spectator looks at the mihrab from a low angle. But something comes between him and his worship, less a woman, and less Osman Hamdi’s wife, than a personification of a new order: that of the gaze, and that of the West. During the war years, several artists personified the era through images of women, caught between a pre-inscribed authentic east and European fashions inspired by the

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Orient. A 1917 work entitled Woman in Thought by Ömer Adil (1868−1928), who began his artistic career in the army, trained in Italy in the late nineteenth century, joined the faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1902, and became the principal of the Academy of Fine Arts for Women in 1914, presents a woman deep in thought, surrounded by letters and books. Her environment is Oriental, and yet less in a traditional Ottoman sense than reflecting contemporary European fashion in fabric, dress, and décor. In 1917, Namık İsmail (1890−1935) also took up the theme of the woman in a private space (figs. 36, 37). A calligraphic panel (bearing the common prayer, “in the name of God”) hangs above the figure on the wall. Behind her, a bookshelf laden with bound and gilt volumes indicates both her class and educational status. To the side, a vase rests on a small side table, and a cup of Turkish coffee and the sleeve of the cup sit on a tray in front of her.57 Although the setting reflects an Oriental environment, the woman wearing a black dress and a black cloche hat obviously follows Western fashion. Yet unlike the reclining women depicted in earlier works, the artist’s wife appears despondent and listless. She has not been reading books, but reading her fortune in a coffee cup, as one she was still sipping would still be in its sleeve. It is only after the coffee has been drunk and the cup inverted and cooled that it would be again set aright in order to be read. Apparently, the future does not look bright; indeed, there is little reason to imagine it would in a country at war. The original title for the work when it won an award at the 1917 Galatasaray Exhibit was Contemplation [Tefekkür], suggesting that the artist saw the work not as a simple portrait, but as symbolic of a broader state of mind (Şerifoğlu 2003, 39). As

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37: Namık İsmail. Reclining Woman/Thought. 1917.

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in the work of Ömer Adil, the sorrow of the image seems to reflect more the sorrow of the times than the problem of Western art, or that of the figure, suggesting that for these artists, the figure had become more an expressive tool than a controversial issue. Such utilization of the image of women as symbolic of modernity reflects approval of modernization, but fails to transform the social agency of women. In contrast to contemporary cartoons which reflected fears associated with the participation of women in the public sphere, paintings of women tended to circumscribe the modernization of woman through symbols such as dress (Brummett 1995). In contrast to Western tropes of viewing Oriental women, which combined titillation with approbation in keeping with the civilizing mandate of imperialism, Ottoman artists dignified the image of the Eastern woman. However, although clothed, such women are still relegated to the private sphere and portrayed as “cultural symptoms” more than as agents of social change (Gouma−Peterson 1987, 338). In these works, the issue of women’s agency was largely submerged in the struggle against Orientalist representation. In becoming a counter-sign to the odalisque, women became subaltern to the representation of the nascent Ottoman nation. The broader aspect of this issue, whether women’s rights emerged in Turkey for its own sake or as an instrumental sign of modernization, has remained controversial in the Turkish Republic (Arat 1997, 95−6). Religiosity, Perspective, and Patrimony Even after figural painting entered Ottoman artistic practice, depictions of the female form were uncommon. Rather, paintings of landscape and architecture, rooted in a growing appreciation of perspectival construction, remained the predominant mode of artistic exploration in early twentieth century Ottoman painting. Landscape painting began to take on a traditional function of the genre – a desire to use the image to celebrate the nation and to give structure to a changing world (Schama 1996). On the one hand, the form could be used as a means of bridging the gap between Ottoman visual traditions and European painting. On the other, European− educated artists who often developed close links with the academy used landscape as a forum through which to consider issues of artistic language in a manner deeply informed by European debates over academism. Like Süleyman Seyyid, a younger generation of artists – including Ali Rıza, Hüseyin Zekai, and Ahmed Ziya (Akbulut; 1869−1938) – established artistic practices dependent on spatial depiction, using figures only incidentally within landscape and architectural scenes. Their general omission of the figure, coupled with hints about their lives, habits, and interactions, suggests a possible attempt to integrate religious culture with the Western artistic forms they were adopting while also using these forms as a means of creating national patrimony. In contrast to Ahmed Ali and Osman Hamdi, both of whom dedicated themselves to public service, the life of Süleyman Seyyid is relatively mysterious. This might be simply because little is known of him, but it may also be that in writing the early histories of Turkish art, those who remembered him omitted overt references to religious aspects of his life which were considered inappropriate during the early years

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of the republic, when art became ideologically affiliated with the state’s secularist precepts. Biographical descriptions, rooted in Mehmed Sami Yetik’s 1940 work on military painters, emphasize that he lived in Üsküdar, one of the most traditional districts of Istanbul, replete with tombs of holy leaders and adjacent dervish lodges. Süleyman Seyyid lived in the Nuhkuyusu neighborhood, where Abdülfettah-ı Bağdâdî Akrî, one of the three most important sages of the Bektashi dervish order, is buried. Yetik describes a pious lifestyle, saying that Süleyman Seyyid lived very modestly and, “like Ali Rıza, kept away from material rewards and lived and died in the spiritual pleasure and silence of art” (Yetik 1940, 44). Religious interests are suggested as well by his repeated depiction of mendicant dervishes, a common trope in Orientalist depictions of urban life. However, in light of the absence of any other Orientalist tropes in his work, as well as his relatively rare depiction of figures, this subject may also suggest a reappropriation of dervishes as religiously significant, rather than exotically evocative, figures. Not only did Süleyman Seyyid’s emphasis on the genre of landscape continue in the work of his students, but hints about their relationship suggest more traditional affiliations than that between teacher and student. In 1879, as students at the Kuleli Military High School, Ali Rıza, Hüseyin Zekai and a few of their friends requested that art classes be added to the curriculum. The yaver Osman Nuri was soon appointed to the post, but presumably was busy at the palace, so Süleyman Seyyid was appointed the following year. During this period, Süleyman Seyyid forbade Ali Rıza from working from a model. Ali Rıza focused instead on landscape and architectural depiction which only included incidental figures. When Süleyman Seyyid died, Ali Rıza, also remembered for his enjoyment of discussions of religion and mysticism, inherited his easel as a memento (Ünver 1949, 8). As in his description of Süleyman Seyyid, Yetik’s discussion of Ali Rıza hints at religious affiliations. He praises Ali Rıza, a talented draughtsman, for having remained in Turkey, receiving his instruction from nature rather than being ‘corrupted’ by foreign influences (despite his intentions to study in Naples, unrealized due to a cholera epidemic). Discussing the debt his students owe him, Yetik adds the following statement: This must be kept in mind: our soldier artists recognized the new profession and movements brought by the young artists I mentioned above as natural and saw them as deserving of respect and affection, and have now ceded their position to the Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1913, the studios of Süleyman Seyyid at the Imperial School of Medicine and of Halil Pasha and Hoca Ali Rıza at the military school have become covered with cobwebs. They have now spent their most mature and productive days working calmly and silently to the end of their lives under the pure and clear sky of Istanbul staying away from any sort of untoward display along with friends who had faith alongside them (Yetik 1940, 80). Thus he memorializes the practice of these artists as separate from the European

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practices of the academy, linked beyond an institutional relationship and bound by faith. This raises the possibility of a shared religious affiliation, which would have been very common in the Ottoman period. Indeed, Ali Rıza’s copious sketches of everyday life include several of a turban on a stool before a hanging calligraphic panel honoring a Nakshibendi Sheikh, and even including one such image resembling a coat of arms (Şerifoğlu 2005, 233−35). In an era when the symbolism of the state had, for nearly a century, been underscored by the development of an elaborate coat of arms, such a portrayal of sectarian symbols suggest a potential alternative symbolism of collective identity modeled after the coat of arms format developed during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (Deringil 1993, 6−7, Shaw 2003, 196). The subtlety of Yetik’s suggestions concerning religiosity may reflect the culture of enforced secularism dominant in early Republican Turkey. In the drive towards secularism, dervish lodges were outlawed in 1924. Particularly among upper classes, affiliation with them was seen as backwards and unsophisticated. In most aspects of culture, from dress to literature, modern Turkey’s identity was inscribed in a program of erasure of past forms through a series of what Victoria Holbrook has described as “semiotic revolutions” which shifted the signage of the modern nation from the Islamic tradition to one identified with modernity and the West (Holbrook 1994, 123). Deeply intertwined with this reinscription of culture, painting and its discourse were bound to a sharp division from the past. In 1940, there may well have been a memory of religious affiliations, but strong social incentives to couch them in secular terms. Despite the secularist cast which art later acquired, even the definition of technical aspects of artmaking, such as perspective, encountered inflections that hint towards a need to translate Western practices of representation into terms admissible in Islamic practice. In 1896 (1312), Ahmed Ziya, a military and academy-educated teacher of perspective at the Academy of Fine Arts, published an instructional manual entitled, Practical Perspective [Ameli Menazır], and a second, quite different, manual entitled Techniques of Practical Scientific Perspective [Usul-u Ameliye-i Fenni Menazir] in 1920 (1336).58 The range of his writing, including works entitled Cosmography (1314/1898), For the Sake of the Constitution (1327/1909), Lessons in Religious Information for Children (1338/1921), Trade Legislation (1928) and Islamic Coins (1910), evinces a very broad set of interests, affiliating the science of perspective with modern cosmography, but not segregating it from interest in religion and constitutionalism. Prepared for use in the fine arts programs of both the Military Academy and the Academy of Fine Arts, Practical Perspective of 1896 suggests how the seemingly straightforward matter of technical perspective encountered hurdles of cultural translation which rendered it conceptually distinct from Western models. The work begins with definitions that identify the viewing subject not as an objective witness of a scene, but as a subjective perceiver of an image: Perspective: A practice which allows the drawing of an object as it is or would be upon paper.

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His definition of perspective merges with a definition of seeing. Perspective is not something mathematical, as in the point-projection theory of the picture characteristic of the Western tradition (Gibson 1971). It is also not metaphorical; sight transcribes light, not space, onto a surface. This connection with experience makes perspectival representation differ from forms of image-making already familiar in the Islamic context. However, rather than relying on sight as viewing an objective space of the world (for which no word actually exists, requiring the use of hava, meaning air), Ahmed Ziya redefines sight itself as a process projecting out of the individual. He does so through the surprising confluence of conflicting theories of sight and light. On the one hand, his definition of sight relies on extramission, the Euclidian and Ptolemaic notion of light rays emerging from the eyes, an understanding of light which had already been disproved in the eleventh century by the Persian scientist al-Hazen (Jay 1993, 9). On the other, he immediately resituates the source of light as external to the body, reflected from the object to the eye, and even suggests possible awareness of contemporary debates in physics by referring to light as both a ray and a particle. The definition is tautological: perspective enables the drawing of an object not as it is in an abstract, mathematical reality external to the subject, but as it “is or would be upon paper” – a drawing of a drawing produced through the extramission of rays from the eye, which subsequently produce the object as a solid form. The artist using perspective becomes a scribe of perception rather than of predetermined, external, and objectifiable reality. In contrast to the objective viewer of the perspectival order, his subjectivity remains dispersed, as with the viewer of girih pattern, perceiving the image not as a window onto the world, but as a mental screen onto which it is projected. This differentiation between perception and reality is not only reminiscent of Platonic thought, but also of mystic associations in which form and spirit exist in binary opposition, as in the story of the fortress of form in Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s thirteenth century Mesnevi, one of the most important works of the Persianate literary canon.59 In this story, a shah prohibits his three sons from approaching a fortress called the “Robber of Consciousness,” which is actually a Fortress of Form, filled with thousands of pictures. Disobediently entering it, they fall passionately in love with the image of a girl in the fortress. (Holbrook 1994, 41−46). The Chinese princess, the muse of the Fortress of Form, offers beauty, but only through the loss of articulate meaning, as indicated both by her muteness and in the idea that form

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robs consciousness – that representation is dangerous because it mimics reality and thereby fools the senses. Ironically, in the modern world, the exotic trope of China as home to the Fortress of Form was realized in the museum, the institutionalization of representational art in the equally exotic West. According to an oft-cited and debated Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), on judgment day the hell-bound creator of images will be called on to breathe life into the forms he has made and, failing to do so, his hubris in imitating the creative power of God will be revealed. Such beliefs raised suspicions against the Western modality of representation among Ottoman Muslims. Yet if perspective makes no claims to represent external reality, then the danger of artist as creator disappears. No matter how representational a perspectival image may appear, through Ahmed Ziya’s definition it always remains imaginary in a manner reminiscent of manuscript painting. Beyond simply an Islamic context, the misapprehension of perspective suggested by Ahmed Ziya’s definitions may also reflect the non-Cartesian subjectivity of the Ottoman viewer, whether as the artist witnessing a scene or as the audience reading it from a picture. In his deconstruction of the Cartesian implications of the perspectival viewing cone, Lacan proposes a radical critique of the equation of the perspectival mapping of sight and space, and by extension of the perspectival subject as master of domain of the gaze. Having pointed out that perspectival viewing depends on the geometric representation not of space, but of light, Lacan explains: That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted… something that introduces what was elided in the geometral relation – the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, which is in no way mastered by me. It is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape… (Lacan and Miller 1998, 96). As much as he sees, this non-Cartesian subject is seen. Like Ahmed Ziya’s subject, the external world is not available as an absolute form, but only within the bounds of its perception. Rather than obtaining a position of godlike mastery, the subject remains within the tautology of drawing a drawing that can never represent an external and absolute truth. In moving away from dominant models of subjectivity as constructed in Western philosophy and reflected in perspectival representation, Lacan and Ahmed Ziya used surprisingly similar corrective models to refashion the cultural implications of representation. While Lacan’s analysis was part of a broader strategy tied to the poststructural deconstruction of Western thought, Ahmed Ziya’s might be understood as stemming from a non-Cartesian standpoint determined by a subject position outside of the Western tradition. Ahmed Ziya’s understanding of perspective as a constructive, rather than a representational, device differed from the dominant teachings at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art. In his painting of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, a subject assigned by his teacher Osman Hamdi and completed as a project for his 1897 graduation

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from the academy, he chose to add a window to the building beside the mosque’s gate (fig. 38). He lost points on the project for having tampered with nature, changing what was seen for what might be seen using the laws of perspective. Whereas Osman Hamdi, wed to a scientific worldview, expected visual veracity, for Ahmed Ziya, representation was no more than a fortress of forms that could only be constructed at will in the mind’s eye, and thus allowed for variance with objective verisimilitude. Despite undercurrents of secularism among the Young Turks, the vast majority of people in the empire remained religious, making it essential to vest the tropes of modernity with an Islamic identity. Representing an organization clearly affiliated with the positive ideals of the Young Turks, even Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, editor of the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists, concluded the journal’s introductory article of 1911 by enjoining God to support their progressive efforts in promoting the principle that “Nature is a picture.” Referring to God not as the more usual Majesty of Righteousness (Cenab-i Hak) but as the Majesty of Creation (Cenab-i Halik), the editor diffuses the religiously questionable nature of creation by acknowledging God as its ultimate master (Zihnioğlu 2007, 2). In such a climate, the artists who most effectively integrated their work with the visual culture of the general public during this era were those who constructed an interface between art and tradition. Among artists focusing on accurate depictions of nature, Ali Rıza (often known

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with the honorific Hoca, meaning teacher), a specialist in sketches and watercolors as well as larger oil paintings, was the most prolific. His stated aims reveal his interests in formulating a timeless national identity: While it is natural for somebody of my profession of landscape painting to be informed in the other requirements of the art of painting, since my primary joy and objective is to make the emerald landscapes scattered under my country’s sweet skies that speak the life of a national language of the Ottoman homes, neighborhoods, landscapes, seas, high and historical works live, to not kill them, I make many sketches of both pencil and watercolor and oil, all of which are my remembrances and legacy that increase in number day by day (Ünver 1949, 9). For him, the purpose of art was as a mnemonic device for patrimony that was in danger of being lost, presumably to modernity. Despite the era of rapid change in which he lived, Ali Rıza’s work presents an idyllic Ottoman world replete with natural beauty – one which provided both an attractive mode of envisioning the past and of escaping from the present. The vast majority of his paintings feature Italian stone pines common throughout Istanbul on a hillside by the water’s edge (fig. 39). These images of unsullied yet tractable nature can be interpreted as a mode of escape from rapid urban and cultural change in Istanbul, paralleling the impulses behind the development of the Forest of Fontainebleau as an escape from Paris (Green 1990, 120). Indeed, the small figures who occasionally populate his

39: Ali Rıza. Landscape. 1904−5.

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scenes often wear caftans and the headgear of a far earlier age, suggesting escape into an idealized history. Even contemporary scenes, which Süheyl Ünver praised as recording the country for posterity, generally feature traditional and residential parts of the city. Ünver suggests that a museum of his works would serve as a museum of “each corner of Turkish and Muslim Istanbul” (Ünver 1949, 1). While his works sometimes include modern figures, they appear as solitary, almost touristic visitors among historic sites. If Ali Rıza’s oeuvre was intended as a means of preserving memory, this memorialization projected of Ottoman spaces as perfect, natural, and outside of time rather than documenting the living and modernizing city. As such, they bear more in common with Orientalist timelessness than with the progressive urges of modernism. In contrast to both his watercolor and oil paintings, his sketches are populated by people wearing modern clothing, military uniforms, riding modern carriages, children, cats and dogs, and represent far more of the world in which he lived. The paintings, publications, and committee assignments of Hüseyin Zekai, also a student of Süleyman Seyyid, reveal a very similar attitude towards the function of art in Ottoman society. His early works include landscape vistas and his later works some still-lifes, but most of his paintings present minutely executed studies of historical sites based on photographs. In contrast to Ali Rıza, whose works represented a tranquil memorialization through the depiction of modest neighborhoods, Hüseyin Zekai’s paintings often represent historic monuments restored in the early twentieth

40: Hüseyin Zekai. Fountain of Abdülhamid I. c. 1911.

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century, including the Fountain of Ahmed III, outside the first gate of the Topkapı Palace; the Shrine to Ertuğrul, founder of the Ottoman dynasty, located in Bilecik; and the Courtyard of the Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque. His painting of the 1777 Fountain of Abdülhamid I typifies his concern with providing a photographic record of urban change. Around the time of the painting, in 1911 the fountain was relocated to the Zeynep Hatun Foundation across from the gate of the Gülhane gardens when its original site was destroyed in the construction of the Fourth Vakıf Han (fig. 40). Hüseyin Zekai’s and Ali Rıza’s shared interest in heritage emerged not only in their paintings, but also in their participation in heritage-related state projects. In 1891, Ali Rıza was appointed to a commission investigating early Ottoman capital cities in order to collect Turkish-Islamic works of art, and in 1893 he aided Mehmed Şevket Pasha in his documentation of historical military uniforms. Likewise, in 1898 Hüseyin Zekai was the head of the Military Construction Committee which accompanied Kaiser Wilhelm II and documented military buildings. Both were members of the committee for the establishment of a new Armory Museum, led by Mahmud Şevket Pasha in 1903. In 1909, Hüseyin Zekai was also appointed to the Fine Arts Council. In light of these activities, his paintings were clearly only one part of a far broader project of conceptualizing artifactual and architectural heritage for a budding Ottoman nation. An avid collector of Islamic artifacts, Hüseyin Zekai expressed his desire to combine Western artistic practice with Ottoman and Islamic traditions in Holy Treasures (Mübeccel Hazineler, 1913), a book published after the deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1909 forcibly ended his association with the palace. In contrast to Celal Esad’s approximately contemporaneous works, Old Istanbul Monuments and Buildings from the Establishment of the City to the Ottoman Conquest (Eski Istanbul Abidat ve Mebanisi Şehrin Te’sisinden Osmanlı Fethine Kadar, 1909) and Old Galata and Its Buildings (Eski Galata ve Binaları, 1910), prepared as the research for the St. Louis World Fair of 1904 and published first in French and later in Ottoman, Hüseyin Zekai’s works addressed a local audience and focused on monuments through a frame of contemporary local concerns (Işın 1989, 10). Holy Treasures can be read as a lament over the decay of traditional architecture and art due to the absence of preservation measures. Hüseyin Zekai appeals at once to values of religious, nationalist, and humanist patrimony by explaining traditional architectural forms as belonging to the apogee of Islamic civilization, the legacy of national ancestors, and the contribution of Ottoman society to the civilizations of the world. In order to convince his audience of the need for preservation, he provides what may be the earliest discussion of Istanbul’s architectural monuments seen from an aesthetic, rather than chronological, perspective. The esoteric order and themes of his discussion personalize the value of these monuments. He begins in his hometown of Üsküdar, with the fountain of Saadüddin at the tomb of the Bektaşi leader Karaca Ahmed, perhaps indicating personal religious affiliations. After discussing another architectural monument in Üsküdar, the Tiled Mosque of the Queen Mother Kösem Sultan built in 1640, which he cites as a miniature version of the more famous and centrally located Rüstem Pasha and

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Sokollu Mehmed Pasha mosques, he proceeds to a more general consideration of the Arabesque and Ottoman styles of décor. He cites the Arabesque as an early form of Arab derivation, contrasting it with ‘more developed’ Ottoman decoration, and lamenting its fashionable replacement by ar nouveau. Hüseyin Zekai praises the traditional Ottoman arts of plaster and wood carving, particularly as frames for the more modern practice of landscape murals which, while done in watercolor and not following the rules of perspective, were nonetheless beautifully framed by such carvings. Thus he supports preservation in a context of innovation, including not only work from the Ottoman past that would become classicized in the republican era, but from more recent memory. While cautioning against allowing foreigners to remove treasures from Ottoman buildings, he also uses their words to express the value which civilized cultures give to human patrimony. He cites European practices of valuing even the most minute reflection of this patrimony within their own cultures to object to the wanton destruction and dilapidation taking place around him. Thus he mentions a Swiss architectural expert he recently met (presumably Le Corbusier, who visited Istanbul in 1910−11) who looked at the eighteenth-century New Mosque in Eminönü and cautioned him that plants growing on the building would damage the building and should be removed. He also relates the case of a carved Ottoman ceiling at the former French embassy in Tarabya which he had hoped to buy, but which was instead sold to rag collectors while he looked for a means of transporting it home. By the time he returned, the rag collectors had already burned the ceiling in order to collect its gold leaf decoration. Throughout the work, Hüseyin Zekai argues for a relationship between art and patrimony. For him, patrimony must be seen as the confluence of the local and the immediate – fountains and houses in one’s own neighborhood which, perhaps due to their familiarity, or perhaps through a lack of recognition of their value either fall into disrepair or are destroyed by the predatory hands of foreign collectors, rag pickers, and the vagaries of fashion. He constructs a notion of heritage which unites the famous monuments of both the Islamic and Ottoman legacies, spanning from Andalusia to Bursa, as well as more ancient ones, embodied by the recently excavated cities of Troy and Baalbek. Thus his narration weaves between the personal and the monumental, the local and the exotic, the relatively new and the exceedingly ancient, all of which become part of shared patrimony. Much like Ali Rıza, Hüseyin Zekai perceived art as a means of preserving that which has been lost to history. In this sense, one might consider the role they designated for painting as comparable to that of the Museum of French Monuments established soon after the French Revolution in response to the orgy of destruction and the growing perception of modernity as erasing history. In contrast to the encyclopedist conception of history embodied in that institution, however, Hüseyin Zekai was much more concerned with the practice of realistic depiction as a mode of memorialization and documentation rather than of collection and categorization. As he explains in his chapter entitled “On Painting,” he sees painting as a clear, universally available language, a type of writing. “It would be appropriate,” he adds,

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“to say that painting is the completion of writing and maybe its perfection. For it is clear that there is a need for painting to document and witness the works of civilization and the remains of early civilizations” (Hüseyin Zekai 1913, 146). For him, the appeal of painting to the finest senses aids in the desire to preserve the fine expressions of humanity found in historical works. Thus painting is not only a form of preservation, it is – like his book – a means of providing knowledge about the value of historical works and thus encouraging their preservation. Yet such idealism may have seemed insufficient to persuade his readers. He also proposes that painting also has a pragmatic economic value in reducing waste materials, particularly among professionals such as building contractors and tailors, who must both learn techniques of perspective and of depicting the human form in order to best execute their professions in the modern world. Thus Hüseyin Zekai considers art as a form of literacy, a connection made particularly noteworthy because of the shared environmental niche of calligraphic panels and the oil paintings which came to hang beside and ultimately replace them in modern Turkish settings. Indeed, many of the paintings from this era depict oil paintings and calligraphic panels side by side as part of contemporary interior decoration. By conceiving of painting as a means of preservation particularly of historical and religious buildings, Hüseyin Zekai gives such paintings a utility very similar to that of a calligraphic panel: both are framed in terms of practices of veneration (of God on the one hand, and heritage on the other), yet one uses the word and the other uses the image; one relies on sound as represented by letters and the other on form as represented by visuality. Thus a Western practice of perspectival depiction enters an Ottoman, Islamic, and nationalist contextualization, completing a function which writing alone could no longer fill in an environment of modernization characterized by loss. Oil on canvas painting entered the environmental niche of calligraphy not only in terms of interior design, but also in terms of representing an absent presence – of the past or of the word. In a world in which the pace of change was slow, writing sufficed; but in a modern world where patrimony was under continual threat, the image became a necessary supplement to writing, both augmenting and replacing the original practice. This approach was retained by Şevket (Dağ; 1875−1944), who graduated from the academy in 1897, became an art teacher at the Lycée de Galatasaray, and later served as a member of the republican parliament. As an 1897 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Şevket was one of the first Muslim artists in the capital trained not in a military environment, but through an education inspired by French academic style. As such, his choice of landscapes and mosque interiors may reflect an interest in raising public interest in art and heritage. In addition to participating in the Istanbul salon-style exhibits of 1902 and 1903, he also incorporated painting into traditional holiday entertainments of the month of Ramadan by organizing an exhibition of his works at a pudding shop near the Kuyucu Murat Pasha Tomb in Şehzadebaşı (Aksel 1943, 100). He was particularly interested in depicting scenes of the Hagia Sophia Mosque, receiving official permission to paint there after an initial arrest (fig. 41). Şevket’s focus on Islamically proper, idealized scenes of places

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of worship serves as a means of integrating Western painting techniques and Islamic mores. Indeed, a critique of the 1902 salon appearing in La Turquie singled him out as a Muslim of whom Muslims ought to be proud, and interpreted his work as “an artistic transposition, executed solely through color, of all the aspects, all the multiple sensations of the masterpiece of stone.”60 As can be seen in works by students of Şevket, most notably the Armenian artist Viçen Arslanyan, such subject matter became part of the standard curriculum at the Lycée de Galatasaray (Erçetin et al. 2009). Such interest in preservation continued to be supplemented textually, as in Hüsnü Tengüz’s Holiday Gift: the Beginnings of Ottoman Works [Bayram Hediyesi: Bedai-i Asar-i Atika], often misattributed to Hüseyin Zekai. Ottoman paintings of architecture have often been categorized as landscape. Although landscape developed as the dominant genre in Ottoman painting of the Western modality, the subjects it comprised differ considerably from Western subgenres of landscape. In contrast to narrative landscape, such as that of Nicolas Poussin, nationalist landscape, such as that of the Dutch tradition, dramatic landscape, such

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as that of J. W. Turner, or naturalist landscape, such as that of the Barbizon artists, Ottoman landscape forged a new sub-genre rooted in preservationism and with a subtext of religious mores. Ottoman artists built a vision of their own land less through experiences of modernity than through escapist images of the city: seascapes and historical monuments, employing landscape to perceive cultural heritage as separate from the ebb and flow of everyday life. Landscape Painting and Impressionism Although preservationist subject matter dominated landscape painting, a secondary style emerged with the adoption of Impressionism, which began to be practiced in the empire by artists returning from Europe, first during the late 1890s by Halil and Ömer Adil, and later by the artists who returned to Istanbul from Paris and took the reins of the academy in 1914. Unlike Parisian Impressionists, who emphasized contemporary life, these artists depicted the environs of Istanbul as a series of idyllic seascapes. While their technical outlook and adoption of Impressionist techniques were more directly linked to Western practices than their more religious, realist, or academically inclined colleagues, like them they turned their back on the rapidly changing Istanbul of the early twentieth century in favor of a more pastoral and less temporal worldview. The use of contrasting red-orange and blue in order to underscore the effects of light against water reflects Impressionist influence in works such as Halil’s 1890 Çengelköy Quay and Ömer Adil’s 1896 View of the Sea of Marmara (figs. 42, 43). Thalasso (1855−1919), points out that the salons of 1901 and 1902 included numerous Impressionist works (Thalasso 2008, 90). Nonetheless, in a July 1937 interview in Ar magazine, Halil actually discusses his distaste for Impressionism.61 He notes that an artist named ‘Manet’ (presumably a misspelling of Monet) had been very influential

42: Halil. Çengelköy Quay. 1890.

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during his stay in Paris, but, since he was not a good draughtsman, had sought to make up for his deficiency through the use of color. Thus Halil explained that he was “not hopeful” for the future of painting, since these Impressionist tendencies had led to a wild use of paint in works that displayed little compositional or representational order, once so highly valued in the French tradition. While he himself was involved in a revolutionary transition from an Ottoman mode of visuality to a Western one, he saw the mode which was to be adopted from the West as fixed in its modality, determined by perspectival representation of the real world. His circumscribed response to artistic modernism might be explained by the revolutionary nature of being an artist in his generation. He points out that as a student at the Imperial Naval Engineering College, he had first learned to draw by copying lithographed images, not by copying nature. He relates a story about the dangers of representation from his early years teaching at the Military Academy: One day I drew a picture of a villager on a donkey. I displayed it in a store in Beyoğlu. When Nuri Pasha saw it there, he immediately reported me to the sultan. He said that I was representing a Turk who was not properly dressed while riding a donkey on the streets of Beyoğlu. The sultan was angered and ordered the picture to be brought to the palace immediately. However, since the name of the store had been miswritten in the report, a similar picture was found in another store and the painter was investigated. Since the painter was Italian, 30 liras were paid, the picture was purchased, and an order was put out that such pictures were no longer to be made. Thus I was saved from exile. The anecdote reveals the deep concern of the palace with the self-representation implicit in the new art of painting, which had the power to ridicule, or, in displaying reality, make permanent aspects of reality deemed inappropriate. Surely everybody in

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Istanbul, including foreigners, would see “improperly dressed” villagers on donkeys, yet this was not the image to be preserved. Rather, the proper image of the country might be considered as emerging both from the Abdülhamid albums, as well as from paintings commissioned by the palace during this period (Çelik 2002; Allen 1988).62 While an Italian artist depicting a quaint oriental scene might be forgiven as foreigner, an Ottoman – indeed an Ottoman affiliated with the military – was bound to being a representative of the nation, and thereby censored. Thus for an artist like Halil, the right to draw from nature was itself a revolutionary position to take, one which the West had seemingly taken for granted. In this context Halil took Impressionist technical elements and applied them to subjects far more academic than those of contemporary European modern art. Yet in doing so, he either had to stay away from the real world, which had to be austerely uninhabited as in the works of Hüseyin Zekai, or stay away from realities perceived as distasteful. His pastoral scenes, showing seaside homes or a carriage full of picnickers, thus reflect contemporary mores. Perhaps because of their own struggle to engage in a revolution of academic realism, like Halil, the first generation of teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts was generally opposed to the practice of Impressionism. In response to the conservatism of their teachers, the first generation of students who had the opportunity to study in Paris became particularly wed to the style, which continued to influence their work well after Impressionism had ceased to be a leading style in the West. Only in the 1930s did their students, influenced by their European educations during the 1920s, rebel through the adoption of new styles, particularly Cubism, which dominated Turkish painting from the early 1930s until after World War II – decades after its prominence in Europe. Although reflective of modernization, Ottoman painting neither represented nor embodied modernity. While the first Ottoman artists trained in Paris had attempted to develop vernacular expressions of the Western painting tradition, subsequent artists were more interested in developing a pragmatic role for it in Ottoman society. Such art is less belated than ontologically different. Whereas working within the Western tradition, artists could take the existence and value accorded to art for granted, Ottoman artists needed to establish a function for art in the Ottoman modernity emerging around them. The art that they created thus did not address an internal dialectic of mastery and innovation, but the social discourses of modernity. Modern art shifted the paradigm of art from one of mastering and innovating within established rules of representation to one of radically restructuring artistic terms of engagement with the world. Ottoman art of modernity had no such interest. Innovation responded not to art, but to the exigencies of modernization and the question of how to translate a foreign cultural form into an already contested Islamic context. The problem of subsequent generations of artists remained one of responding simultaneously to the flux of differential modernity and to the call of modernism as projected from a Western epicenter.

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In Europe, the long nineteenth century can be said to have ended with World War I (1914−1918). The Ottoman Empire, however, experienced a far longer era of turbulence which began with the Second Constitutional Revolution in 1908 and the deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1909, continued with the Tripolitanian War in 1911 and the Balkan Wars in 1912−1913, and exploded with the onset of world war, during which the empire ultimately sided with the Central Powers. In 1918, the allied occupation of Istanbul triggered the Greek invasion of Anatolia between 1919 and 1922. This period culminated with the Turkish War for Liberation and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Within this turbulent environment, arts organization, support and production flourished. Painting History The deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II enabled his forty year-old nephew, Prince Abdülmecid, to emerge from his enforced seclusion and participate in public life. Not only did he enter the most active phase of his artistic career, he also became an important patron of the arts. He marked the transition by executing an unprecedentedly large painting, based on site photographs and eye-witness accounts of the deposition. This established his interest not simply in creating and promoting art, but in using it to record contemporary events. Abdülmecid was probably first exposed to Western art as a child when his father, Sultan Abdülaziz, hired the Polish artist Stanislaw Chelebowski to paint ceilings at his favorite summer palace, in Beylerbey. He later received instruction from a military painter, possibly Ahmed Ali, as well as from Fausto Zonaro, Osman Hamdi, and Salvatore Valeri, who taught the princes drawing while teaching at the academy (Erbay and Erbay 2006, 24). However, he never developed firm technical grounding, particularly in figural representation. Even in his late work, seated figures seem to slide off their seats, and the absence of artificially constructed perspective within paintings dependent on photographs often renders space awkwardly. Nonetheless, his paintings convey a clearly conceived function for painting in the modern Ottoman state: to depict and thereby preserve Ottoman history. First, he produced

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monumental copies of earlier works depicting Ottoman sultans. A photograph of him in his studio depicts him before two works, each approximately four meters high, one of Sultan Mahmud II, and the other of his father, Sultan Abdülaziz. Presenting both on horseback, he seems to link the legacy of the conqueror with the dynastic heritage of his father. Similarly, he also executed a large painting depicting Sultan Mahmud II at the feet of his father, Sultan Selim III, underscoring the continuity of their modernizing reforms. This painting was executed concurrently with a painting of him educating his own children, pointing to his awareness of his role in perpetuating the Ottoman legacy (fig. 44). Executed in 1912, the painting indicates his interest in uniting concern for the nation with education. In the work, his son points to a map on the table representing the Balkans, a region which had recently seceded from the empire. Although the original title of the painting was Advice [Nasihat], the painting was sent to the Paris salon of 1914 under an alternative title, The History Lesson, to be exhibited under a sign with the message, “Forget your personal disasters, but never those done to the motherland” (fig. 45). In 1913, Abdülmecid also drew, “Just wait until I grow up,” showing a boy spreading his arms in exclamation towards a map of the Balkans as a girl watches him. The work was published in the youth magazine, Student Notebook alongside a poem by Faik Ali (Ozansoy) lamenting the loss of these territories and pressing youth to fight and win back their lands (Yağbasan 2004, 42, 77−79). Understanding that history was both political and cultural, Abdülmecid also engaged in portraiture, depicting friends who were the literary leaders of his age, such as the novelist Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem in 1911 and the poet Abdülhak Hamid in 1917

44: Prince Abdülmecid with two paintings. 1912.

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(fig. 46). These portraits not only suggest his desire to construct an image of cultural modernity to parallel the modern literary forms of these authors, but also his close ties to the contemporary literary community. Concern for history dominated the age, as can be seen in the works of Hasan Rıza (1857−1913). Educated at the Military Academy, Hasan Rıza developed his painting skills by procuring an assignment as a guard for an Italian artist serving as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish war. After the war, he continued his studies both at the academy and with the artist, who settled on Heybeli Ada, one of the Princess Islands near Istanbul. Shortly before his graduation, Hasan Rıza aided in the restoration of the interior decoration of the imperial yacht the Sultanniye, and was subsequently rapidly promoted. Upset by his colleagues’ jealousy, he left the army and studied painting in Italy for twelve years. When he returned, he initially returned to the army, but then settled in Edirne, where he served as the director of the Edirne Hospital and the principal of an elementary school where he also taught drawing. In the meantime, he began to compile a visual album of Ottoman history, including portraits of the sultans and complex battle scenes, some of which emulated works by Chelebowski and Zonaro. As the Balkan Wars progressed, he continued to work at his studio. When Edirne came under siege, he rushed to protect his works and was killed in an ambush. The two younger artists who had accompanied him to his studio, Mehmed Ali (Laga; 1878−1947) and Mehmed Sami, removed one of his large paintings from its frame, hid it during their capture, and brought it with them to Sophia, Bulgaria, where they were held as prisoners of war. There, through a fortuitous meeting with a Bulgarian commander who was also an artist, they were able to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sophia during their imprisonment. Hasan Rıza’s paintings present the first attempt by an Ottoman artist to represent

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the imperial legacy for public consumption. As he explained, “Why, when the painters of Europe bring to life even the eras of Moses and Jesus which history describes as full of troubles, should the glorious events of our past which was just yesterday be stuck in the writings of a book of hundreds of volumes and thus ruined? Pictures of fruit, landscapes… these can always be made” (Ünver 1970, 6−7). Suggesting the Ottoman perception of intrinsic links between representation and Christianity even in secular subjects, Hasan Rıza points to a possible reason behind the relative absence of narrative Ottoman painting until this late date. Yet he recognized that in bringing history out of books and into view, painting could promote the war effort. Whereas earlier, dynastic portraiture had addressed elites and the military, Hasan Rıza proposed their deployment for public patriotism. For the first time, painting became a communicative vehicle. As Ahmed Lütfi had suggested, “the unavoidable reason to revere and bow towards old works is to make use of past times, know what has taken place, and learn. This must be applied towards education” (Halil Edhem 1924, 23). While under Sultan Mahmud II, the potential of art as a mode of communication between the state and the people had been perceived, resistance to representational forms had made such a relationship as infeasible as the imperial portrait. However, with the increase in printed images and photographs, Ottoman citizens of the early twentieth century had gained familiarity

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with visual representation, so that education through the image was no longer perceived as a religious threat. While the subjects of the paintings were historical, the effect was modern. No longer merely a document or a medium representing affiliation with the West, and no longer elite, painting demanded the viewer to look past the represented image towards a conceptual message. Making Museums Before the Second Constitutional Revolution, private venues to view and occasionally sell art proliferated, yet no centralized museum emerged. In the early 1900s, largescale exhibits complimented private, store-front exhibits. A professionally-juried exhibit was held in 1901 in the Passage Orientale in Beyoğlu at the large French pastry shop Bourdon.63 It was planned as an annual Istanbul salon in the French tradition by Alexandre Vallaury, Professor of Architecture at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, along with Régis Delbeuf, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Stanboul (Yağbasan 2004, 44). Among the participating artists, several Ottoman Muslims exhibited for the first time, including Halil and Ömer Adil. The exhibit also included several Levantine artists such as E. della Sudda, Stefano Farnetti, and Lina Gabuzi, who specialized in etchings of cemeteries. Teachers at the academy also participated – the Ottoman-Armenian professor of sculpture, Osgan Yervant, who had trained in Venice and Rome; the professors of painting, the Italians Salvator Valeri and Pietro Bello and the Polish J. Warnia-Zarzecki – as well as other foreigners living in Turkey, including Zonaro and de Mango. While Ahmet Ali contributed only one painting, Osman Hamdi failed to deliver the one he promised.64 Their relative absence suggests frictions even within this small artistic community. In 1902, twenty-seven new artists, most of whom were Istanbul-born Ottomans trained at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, joined the exhibition, including Şevket and Ahmed Ziya (Thalasso 2008, 110). During the first week of the exhibit, visitor numbers increased steadily from 130 to 764 entries per day, with a total of 2796 visitors.65 The Singer Manufacturing Company hosted annual artistic exhibitions at the Bon Marché of Pera between 1902 and 1906.66 In 1907, the Exposition Artistique Ottomane, celebrating the 31st anniversary of Abdülhamid II’s accession to the throne, was organized by a committee including municipal representatives and the artists Halil and İsmail Hakkı.67 It included work by Ömer Adil, Ahmet Ali, Osgan, Zonaro, Bahri (director of the exhibit), Şevket, a portraitist named Selim Edouard Mechaka, and Tekezade Said (1870−1913; Yağbasan 2004, 44).68 As foreign powers increasingly threatened Ottoman territories, painting increasingly came to celebrate imperial glory and national cohesion. In 1909, a renovated Military Museum opened in the former Church of Hagia Irene featuring display cases of weaponry as well as roundel drawings of the sultans, probably by Hasan Rıza (Shaw 2003, 202). In 1914, the artist Ali Sami’s leadership in the renovation of the Naval Museum established in the shipyards in 1897, expanded the use of paintings as illustrations for military exhibitions. With the Military Museum’s 1916 renovation, these relatively small drawings were replaced by large paintings of battles and some portraits of sultans. The museum’s central exhibit, located in the

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church apse, was flanked by two monumental history paintings depicting the Battle of Varna which had been commissioned by Sultan Abdülaziz from Chelebowski for the Military Academy. They framed a portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror by Hasan Rıza located at the center of the exhibit (fig. 47). Several other portraits of the sultans (possibly including the monumental paintings by Abdülmecid), and battle scenes by Hasan Rıza illustrated exhibits throughout the museum. For the first time in the Ottoman Empire, the genre of history painting came to fulfill its original function of glorifying monarchy. However, in contrast to the genre’s apogee in France, which coincided with the zenith of French monarchic power under Louis XIV and which was sponsored through the state-sanctioned academy, in the Ottoman Empire it emerged largely through individual patriotism for a weakened empire (Boime 1984, 283). Unlike the exhibitions which had generally taken place in Pera and only attracted Ottomans already interested in European art and culture, the Military Museum was located immediately beside the staging grounds for new recruits to the Balkan Wars. Museum entertainment provided relief from the field of tents filling the first courtyard of the palace. Visitors could view exhibits about the Turkish Red Crescent, the Janissaries, and the glories of the dynasty, use a shooting range, view the Bosporus from the fortification towers, listen to a military mehter band, and even

47: Hasan Rıza. Mehmed the Conqueror. c. 1903.

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watch movies. Paintings in the exhibits were displayed with explanatory captions to illustrate otherwise decontextualized groupings of weaponry. Particularly for a nonelite public unaccustomed to visual imagery, the paintings must have awakened new sensibilities not available otherwise until 1938, when the State Museum of Painting and Sculpture opened in Istanbul. In contrast to the broad address of the Military Museum, projects for an art museum envisioned an audience limited to artists. After the death of Osman Hamdi in 1910, his brother Halil Edhem (Eldem; 1861−1938) became director of the Imperial Museum. He began to establish the Collection of Decorated Panels associated with the Academy of Fine Arts. In contrast to the Imperial Museum, which affiliated the empire with the roots of Western civilization by eschewing copies in favor of original artifacts discovered in Ottoman territories, a museum dedicated to copied paintings implicitly recognized art as foreign, as implied by Halil Edhem’s explication of the collection’s purpose: When we find ourselves across from a painting, old or new, the determination of its school is difficult without considerable knowledge and experience. Even an artist who is not familiar with painting collections or is foreign to art history would have difficulty in this regard and hesitate. In many countries, museums worth millions have been established not only to protect these works, but also to enhance the knowledge and talent of artists and then to increase the knowledge of the people. To this end, he arranged for state funding: during the sessions of 1910, the Representative Parliament approved the provision of an additional budget of a thousand Liras for the museum budget and, since original works of old masters are not available and, if available, excessively expensive for the museum budget, for copies of the most famous paintings to be commissioned (Halil Edhem 1924, 20, 40). Like art in the Western modality, the notion of an art museum was initially imported as a sign of Western practice that selected its institutional models according to local needs. He validates the project by pointing to the use of copies at both the Vienna School of Fine Arts Museum and the Munich Eastern Gallery. While European art museums of original works clearly could have served as far more obvious models, the impossibility of producing such a collection made their emulation a matter of gaining cultural capital rather than a means of amassing national fortune and a local artistic identity. Indeed, facing a similar problem, new museums in the United States often depended on copies to fill the blank spaces left in the art historical narrative of the progress of national styles across time. (Wallach 1998, 46−48). In contrast, Halil Edhem was less interested in the evolutionary presentation of Western art than in making seemingly arbitrary examples available to art students. If, as Lacan suggests, to imitate is not simply to produce an image but “to be inserted in a function whose

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exercise grasps” the subject, then the apparent purpose of the collection – to aid in the inclusion of Turkish painting within the discourse of Western art placed on display – was elided in the shift from originals to copies (Lacan and Miller 1998, 100). Young graduates of the academy perceived this difference. As Hüseyin Avni (Lifij; 1886−1927) explained in the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists, despite all good intentions, if an art museum is filled with copies, it will be to the detriment of both the public and artists. The public, and along with it novice artists who, as a result of a lack of environment are lacking a true idea about artistry, will, by seeing unaesthetic, practically cadavral things, get a limited idea about the fine arts or none at all. Indeed, to properly understand what kind of animal a lion is it is never sufficient to see its dead body. Thus to understand the true meaning of a painting that is a work of art one must see the original which is alive rather than the copy which is dead… For the first thing sought in a painting, the first thing loved, is neither composition nor color. It is solely the excitement and spiritual state of the artist when he brought the work into existence… (Zihnioğlu 2007, 110).69 Perceiving art as a mystical interaction between creator, object, and viewer rather than as a mark of cultural education, Hüseyin Avni suggests that what makes art is neither its image, nor its art historical identity, nor even its subject matter, but the aura of creation imbued within the work itself and impossible to reproduce through the interference of a second hand. Rendering mysterious the function of the artist as creator and the work of art as a manifestation of creative spirit, he argues against an environment where copies were not intended as supplements to an existing artistic tradition, but as the cornerstone of a new one. Yet in contrast to Hüseyin Avni’s vision of art as an autonomous field of expression, for many, art was more important in its potential to support the greater political goals of the Young Turk administration. Citing Thalasso’s books as well as articles in Delbeuf ’s Stamboul and an article by Kélékian in the Ottoman daily Sabah, an anonymous discussion in La Turquie in 1911 contextualized the development of the arts within broader projects of social development and education. “It is necessary to develop the instruction of drawing in schools, and the taste for art in all its forms. It is necessary to give the Ottoman people this powerful cultural ferment of civilization that emerges from the beautiful. Until now, the direction of the fine arts has been without aim or attribution.”70 Considering the arts as entering a "renaissance," the author cites new developments ranging from the new societies of artists and musicians to school instruction in sports as signs that art was being harnessed for the greater aim of national progress. Noting the Imperial Museum and the Endowment Museum [Evkaf Müzesi; which would become sole home to the Islamic collections in 1914] as sites where the Ottoman artistic heritage could be viewed, the author suggests that “an equivalent museum could also be created inexpensively and its installation

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would lend force to currents currently being manifest.” While the patriotic interest expressed by non-Turkish Ottomans in this French-language daily points not only to a more ethnically diverse nationalism that was possible before the development of the Turkish nation-state, its emphasis on the arts as a public, civilizing force replicates the tropes of colonial civilizing missions and points to a cultural chasm between many Christian Ottomans, more ideologically integrated in French conceptions of the arts, the public, and patriotism, and the Ottoman context in which the arts remained peripheral to the construction of a common public identity. Although never actualized as a public museum, the collection grew through the accumulation of works from a variety of sources. Paintings were commissioned from museums in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Madrid; the Tripolitanian War in 1911 eliminated Rome as a source.71 Halil Edhem assures his readers that the copies were made by accredited artists and approved by the museum directorates; ten of the copies were also executed by Ottoman artists (even including one by Hüseyin Avni). A total of forty paintings were thus obtained and organized according to their national origin and chronology. The works were exhibited in the main hall of the academy beginning in 1915. With the Ottoman entry into World War I, the Union Français building in Beyoğlu was converted into a law school and the art collections within it were added to the exhibit until their repatriation in 1918. A catalog of these works, entitled A Short List of Paintings and a Few Sculptures at the Academy of Fine Arts [Güzel Sanatlar Yüksek Okulu’nda bulunan resim eserleri, bazı heykellerin küçük fihristi], was also published. When painters from Munich opened an exhibit in Beyoğlu in May, 1918, the government purchased pictures of animals by Heinrich von Zügel and Otto Firle for the collection (Halil Edhem 1924, 41). The first original paintings by Ottoman artists were added to the collection in 1921 with the purchase of works commissioned by the army for a 1918 exhibit planned for Berlin and Vienna. In addition, thirteen paintings by Ottoman artists and one calligraphic panel commissioned for the mansion inhabited by the princes during the war were protected within the collection when the mansion was occupied by foreign troops in 1921, and became part of the collection in 1923 after the sultanate was abolished. Paintings were also donated from the annual Galatasaray Exhibit of 1922. By 1924, when Halil Edhem wrote his report on the collection in the hopes of establishing a museum, it included eightyseven works approved for display at the Parade Pavilion (Alay Köşkü) of the Topkapı Palace. The directorate of the Imperial Museum also wrote a plan for the establishment of a larger museum, which was accepted by the government on June 25, 1917 as the “Law for a Museum of Art” (Halil Edhem 1924, 41, 51−53). The law foresaw not only a museum in Istanbul, but branches in other cities. It was to include four sections: works by contemporary Ottoman artists; works by contemporary foreign artists; original works by European old masters; and successful copies of works by old masters. Works were to be accepted to the museum by a board of directors under the General Directorate of the Imperial Museum and including the director of the Academy of Fine Arts, instructors of the painting department, and four other people

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who were knowledgeable about art, to be selected from among eight candidates presented by the museum administration to the Ministry of Education. Original works purchased from abroad were to have a provenance from foreign museums, and copies were also to have documentation ascertaining their verisimilitude. The organization of works within the museum was to be at the discretion of its board members. During this period, the relationship between the academy and the museum began to change. When the academy and museum separated in 1916, Halil, who was also serving as court artist, became the director of the school. Complaining of insufficient space and inappropriate lighting at the existing building, some teachers asked the Ministry of Education for a new location. At the same time, the Imperial Museum administration sought a new building for their eastern antiquities collections. The ministry attempted to solve both problems by moving the academy and its collection to a site in Beyoğlu, and the Imperial Museum began to exhibit its collections of Near Eastern Antiquities in the former school building. As foreign troops began to overtake schools during the occupation of Istanbul in 1919, the academy and its collection of copied paintings and plaster casts of sculptures were forced to move several times. By the time an art museum was established in Istanbul in 1938, it was far richer in new works by Turkish artists, and the original collection of copies was not exhibited but remained in the academy collection. Thus during the Ottoman era, art in the Western modality entered the public eye most effectively at the Military Museum, where it served as a vehicle for propaganda. In contrast, the establishment of a public art collection was associated less with addressing a broad audience than with educating a small group of practitioners. Such an approach limited the public understanding of art, forcing graduates of the academy, despite study abroad, to temper their interest in modern art with conservative approaches likely to attract audiences. The Society of Ottoman Artists The growing desire to make art into a public discourse during this period took shape less through official activities of the museum and academy than through artists who took advantage of the new freedoms afforded by the new constitution to create a professional forum and legal protection for fine artists (Güler 1994; Başkan 1994, 25). The idea for the organization began with Mehmed Ruhi, who informally assembled his friends at his home in the Şehzadebaşı district of Istanbul. Mehmed Sami, Şevket, Hikmet, İbrahim, Ali Rıza, Ahmed Ziya, Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, Ahmed İzzet, Mehmed Muazzez, Mahmud and İzzet Mesmur attended these meetings. Most of the initial members were recent graduates of the academy, while others were art teachers. Although the organization was initially founded among friends, it became economically viable only under the patronage of Prince Abdülmecid. More artists joined, including Osman Asaf, Darüşşafakalı Galip, Ömer Adil, Nazmi Ziya, Hüseyin Avni, Mehmed Ali, Feyhaman (Duran; 1886−1970), Hasan Vecih (Bereketoğlu; 1895−1971), Namık İsmail, Üsküdarlı Cevat (Göktengiz; 1871−1939), Celal Esad, Mihri Rasim (1886−1956), Midhat Rebii, and Müfide

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Kadri (1890−1912). While not all the artists of the era were involved, the breadth of the organization is notable, including artists from military backgrounds (Ali Rıza, Mehmed Sami, and Mehmed Ali), independently educated artists (Hüseyin Avni, Namık İsmail, and Feyhaman), and women (Mihri Rasim and Müfide Kadri). All art forms were within the range of interest of the organization, which included sculptors (İzzet Mesmur) and printmakers (Midhat Rebii). While practitioners of traditional arts were not members of the organization, its journal included articles on calligraphy and illumination (teship). The Society of Ottoman Artists became a channel for public discussion of the arts through its journal, which published eighteen issues between 1911 and 1914. Although many of its members went to Paris for their education soon after its foundation, they continued to participate in debates about the nature and role of art back home, and also sent letters and sketches from Paris. Although several articles represented one-time contributions, the journal relied on columns by a small group of writers who either wrote on a single subject in serial form or who provided frequent commentary on issues related to art. The journal expressed four primary aims: to serve as a forum among artists to discuss the role of art in society; to provide information about the history and techniques of art; to provide monographic information about important Ottoman artists; and to advertise the Society of Ottoman Artists center, which included the first permanent sales-oriented gallery in the empire. Although the success of neither the publication nor the gallery is recorded, their establishment clearly indicates a desire to foster a discourse about art integrating modernizing Ottoman society with Ottoman visual traditions. Including articles on art history, the philosophy of art, art technique, and monographs on Turkish and European artists, the journal developed over the course of its publication, incorporating more and higher quality images after the tenth issue, and replacing technical discussions of perspectival construction with technical discussions of oil paint and color. However, its general approach remained fairly consistent, providing information and discussion rather than critique or analysis of artworks. In contrast to most Western critical discourse, this journal was far more interested in the role of art and the artist in society and in the technical aspects of art than in its communicative function – a mode of sociological rather than analytical treatment which endures in discourses concerning modern Turkish arts (Holbrook 1994). An elaborate masthead illustrated the journal’s aims. The front page of each issue features a complex emblem with two brushes of different shapes tied with a large ribbon hanging through the thumbhole of a palette daubed with paints in front of several tools of the trade – a compass, a tube of paint, and etching tools (fig. 48). This grouping precedes a scene framed by a crescent moon, showing a desk with a portrait bust of Prince Abdülmecid wearing a suit and fez. To the side, a pencil holder and the end of a laurel branch hold open a scroll bearing the organization’s name. A second laurel branch unites the composition, framing it as a single medallion pierced by a maulstick. Through this emblem, the journal presents itself as an agent of professionalization, promising to give meaning to the technical aspects of

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artmaking. A reader interested in art might recognize the obvious accoutrements of the artist, such as the palette and brushes, but would need the journal to understand the proper uses of more obscure items like the maulstick (used for steadying the hand while painting) and the burin and awl used by engravers. Although such tools are not themselves culturally coded, the medallion format of the emblem they compose clearly bears a close relationship to the European tradition, emphasized by the classically-inspired laurel leaf frame. Yet the European implications of this frame are diffused through the symbolism of the crescent moon, which becomes a frame in turn for the patron of the newspaper, represented by the bust of the prince. His patronage was not simply a means of financing the paper, but a signal of combined Ottoman and Western identity expressed through the modern representation of a member of the royal family. The inaugural issue of the journal begins with a statement of its objective, written by its editor Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim. In keeping with contemporary notions of Ottoman identity and politics, he promotes the fine arts as partners with science in reestablishing the intellectual and technical leadership of the Ottoman Empire in the modern world. More pragmatically, the availability of an organization along with an exhibition and sales center was intended to provide a public interface between art and the public, giving it economic viability not entirely dependent on elite patronage as it had been in the past-even if it itself depended on the patronage of

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Prince Abdülmecid. The journal presents the earliest textual acknowledgment that art ought not only to be a sign of modernization, but that such modernization needed to be integrated into a broader modern society. The connection of the paper with the notion of progress had overt political connotations, affiliating it with the Committee for Union and Progress which had led the Second Constitutional Revolution. The repeated emphasis on copying from nature in discussions of aesthetics strengthened this association with scientific endeavor (Duben 2007, 190). Indeed, the initiator of the organization, Mehmed Ruhi, worked at the mansion of party leader Enver Pasha, and painted his portrait while there (Güler 1994, 25). As was the case for public art institutions of the late empire, this private institutionalization of art, while conservative in its artistic approaches, incorporated social utilitarianism and political radicalism. The Definition of Art As painting became increasingly established in Ottoman visual culture, its definition fostered discussion. Mehmed Vahit, one of the empire’s first art historians and sonin-law of Osman Hamdi, used the journal to persuade his audience of the need for art. Pointing out that decoration, ranging from embroidery on dresses to carving on the fountain of Sultan Ahmed III, actually has no utility, he explains that “art is made up of things that have no function except to be beautiful and skillfully made.” He explains that art is disinterested in that it adds no money to our wallets. But it does more: “it incites in us the joy which excites the spirit when we find ourselves before something other than the self ” (Güler 1994, 59). Mehmed Vahit had long been active in introducing art to the public. Not only did he write Turkish catalogues for the Imperial Museum, but in 1906 he also began a translation of the general art history text Apollo by Salomon Reinach, head curator of the Louvre Museum. However, as he explained in the newspaper Sabah in 1907, he encountered numerous terminological difficulties in attempting the translation: the terminology associated with art simply did not exist in Turkish. The result was a short lexicon of words pertaining to art, accompanied by their French and German equivalents, published in 1915 (Bostancı 2003). He was not the first to notice the absence of an appropriate vocabulary for the arts in the empire. The earliest discussion of aesthetics in relation to painting seems to have appeared in 1889 in the magazine Muhit as a series by the poet and literary historian Abdülhalim Memduh (1866−1905). The same year, Mahmud Esad (1855−1917) published A History of Art (Tarih-i Sanayi). The work examines the development of the art of nations and their mutual influences, arranged chronologically from prehistory to the modern era. Among other works upon which he relied, he mentions Charles Bayet’s Un Précis de l’Histoire de l’Art (1886), the earliest survey of art history published in France. Mahmud Esad provides the following definitions of art: Art is the summation of the techniques and rules used to create a product which has been already observed. According to the French scientist "Littré", art produces something according to particular techniques. According to Jouber,

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art is the skill which fits theory. According to this statement, art sometimes means trade or craft, as in the art of workmanship, the art of surgery, the art of glassmaking, the art of music, the art of poetry. Gradually, the use of the word art has been established for the activities of humanity which bring forth emotion and depiction, and has been used by renowned ancestors for the five arts which bring together human thought and affect poetry, music, architecture, song, and painting [resim]. This word has also been used to refer to literature. Today when art is mentioned, ancient and associated arts come to mind. Even the word science [fenn], which refers to type and style, is sometimes used on the level of art (Mahmud Esad 1889). The history of art that he goes on to examine, then, is not that of art as defined today, but that of production, including commerce, sugar and gasoline. Likewise, Mehmed Ziya’s identically titled work might be better translated as a History of Industry, as it examines the history of production after briefly explaining the role of the beautiful arts [hüsnü sanayi] among them. The discussion of arts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could well be compared to the similar discussion which took place in France during the eighteenth century, as the place of fine arts as distinct from objects of use became a significant part of the ongoing project of the categorization of knowledge at the time of the Grande Encyclopédie (1751−1772) (Shiner 2003, 86−87). The first book published in the empire to discuss fine art was An Introduction to the History of Fine Arts (Fünun−i Nefise Tarihi Medhali, 1892) by Ohannes Pasha of Sakız (1830−1912), an Armenian native of Istanbul who, after seven and a half years of higher education in Paris, returned to the empire in 1856 as a member of the Translation Bureau, from which he rose to several higher offices. Although trained as an economist and author of the empire’s first economics book, he was also deeply interested in the arts and had painted in his youth. When the Academy of Fine Arts was founded, he began to teach a course on aesthetics. The book is a compilation of his lectures, which introduce the names and basic concepts associated with important artists of the West. He discusses many ideas, including the role of the artist; the perception of the sublime; Platonic idealism vs. realism, and the gap between photography and representational painting. While the work does not address issues of terminology, history, or aesthetics in rigorous fashion, it reflects Hippolyte Taine’s criticism of the late 1860s and must have vastly improved the theoretical understanding of the arts in the empire. The author’s choice of Taine, known for his scientism, suggests an affiliation with the cause of the Committee for Union and Progress. Despite advances, interest in the arts was limited. As Ali Ekrem lamented in Servet-i Funun in 1896, Strange! How is it that we still do not know the true nature of art; the things we call high art, fine art, delicate art, aesthetic sciences [sanayi-i ulviyye, sanayi-i nefise, sanayi-i nazike, fünun-ı bedia] or rather, those beautiful things that we

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do not know what we should call, today we do not have a sound idea or even sense of them! How is it that we have not yet understood what beauty and poetry are (Bostancı 2003, 13)? Celal Esad tried to raise artistic awareness by publishing a book series under the general heading of “The Library of Painting,” including volumes entitled Painting Lessons (Resim Dersleri) of 1895; Perspective for Painters and Architects (Ressam ve Mimarlara Mahsus Menazır) of 1899; Photography (Fotoğrafya) of 1899; Guidebook for Artists (Ressamlara Rehber) of 1901; and Color Paintings and Oil Paints (Renkler, Renkli Resimler ve Yağlıboya) of 1903. When Mehmed Vahit took up the issue of nomenclature in 1915, he discussed the French word art in relation to several Turkish words, examining each through examples of its usage and comparing connotations in French. The words he examined focused around derivatives of the word sun’, with connotations ranging from the act of creation to artificiality; san’at, which he sees as associated with the French profession; fenn which he sees as associated with technique and industrie and which was subsequently often used to refer to sciences; and finally the term on which he settles, sına’at, a word he points out was already in use, both for works of Arab music and poetry, and in the phrase for the seven liberal arts. His long discussion is of particular interest in light of the history of Turkish language reform, through which the language lost many of the abstract concepts and etymological and connotative functions of words borrowed from Arabic (Lewis 2002). The word which entered common use, sana’at (today, spelled sanat), emerged through Celal Esad’s rebuttal to Mehmed Vahit’s terminology published in his Dictionary of Art of 1923. Celal Esad argued that much as art could be used for both work and métier, it should carry the same meanings in Turkish, regardless of their confusion. He also argued that simplicity of phrasing, rather than adherence to etymological considerations, should determine usage (Bostancı 2003, 13). The debate reflects contested visions for the future during the transition from empire to nation: how was the relationship with the past to be structured? Should language, indeed, any form of expression, maintain existing practices or should it represent a break with the past and a drive towards modernity? As a sensibility which defined art and the role of the artist developed, the question of content supplanted the controversies of medium and representation.

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Art production immediately after the Second Constitutional Revolution was limited. As the older generation of artists passed away or continued modest artistic production without exhibition, new scholarships enabled the younger generation to go study in Paris. With the beginning of World War I in 1914, these students returned from Europe and began to teach at the academy and a new Academy of Fine Arts for Women provided equal educational opportunities. By 1916, the influx of artists led to the organization of annual exhibits, creating a large, regular venue dedicated to the exhibition of modern Turkish art. Recognizing art’s potential as a mode of local and international propaganda, during the war the state for the first time took an active role in commissioning artists and sent their work abroad in 1918. As the war progressed, artists became involved in the effort to salvage a new nation state out of the ruins of the empire and turned their attention towards the War for Liberation. As war consumed the country, art became a means of expressing an emerging national identity. Paris and the 1914 Generation Although in Turkish art histories, the 1909 revolution marks the beginning of liberalization which enabled the first support of Ottoman students studying abroad since the 1860s, several of the first Ottoman art students, most of whom were members of Christian minorities, had studied abroad during the 1880s and 1890s. However, their subsequent emigration (as well as their ethnicity under conditions of increased national consciousness) has excluded them from histories of the era. Sarkis Diranian (1860−?) studied at Guillemet’s academy in 1875 and, used the money from the sale of his painting entitled The Enchantress, exhibited at the photographic studio of Abdullah Frères, to pursue studies with Gérôme in Paris. In 1883 he was awarded a medal from the empire and began to receive a monthly stipend from the Ottoman Ministry of Education in 1887, but never returned to the empire (Kürkman 2004, 338). Similarly, after studying at the Murad Rafaelian School in Venice and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, between 1894 and 1896 Garabed Şarl Atamian (1872−1947) became one of the leading painters of imperial portraits

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with florid baroque frames set against palatial landscapes produced on the wares of the Imperial Porcelain Factory at Yıldız. However, unfavorable political conditions led him to emigrate to Paris the following year (Kürkman 2004, 175). Likewise, Arşağ Fetvadjian, member of the first class of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and its youngest graduate in 1887, refused the mandatory state service attached to the Rome Prize he received from the state, and chose to study independently in Rome, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, where he became the leading artist documenting the ruins of Ani, near the city of Kars which the Russians had wrested from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 (Kürkman 2004, 375−379). Although Diyarbekir-born Hovsep Ohannes Puşmayan began to study at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art at age eleven and received a medal for his contributions to the Ottoman Pavillion at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, he used the opportunity to emigrate to the United States (Kürkman 2004, 706). While their receipt of state funds suggests an imperial interest in developing the arts, their emigration prevented their education from influencing artistic movements back home. In contrast, the Muslim Ottoman artists who went to study abroad after 1909 returned to the empire and played important roles in determining artistic practices for decades to come. The diverse backgrounds of the artists who went to Paris between 1909 and 1914 reflect growing upward mobility resulting from the growth of educational institutions throughout the empire (Tekeli and İlkin 1993). Although less shielded from the outside world than the students who had stayed at the Ottoman School in Paris thirty years earlier, the new generation of young Ottomans also attended the academy and had limited contact with contemporary artistic practices. Most of the painters of this generation returned home to teach at the academy and ultimately produced work less reflective of individual interests and personal styles than of the complex times in which they lived. Among these students, the first to go to Paris was Hüseyin Avni, born in Samsun to a family of Crimean refugees who moved to Istanbul soon after his birth. He began his education at a local school where he learned painting and music, then continued at a model school for modern education where he learned French. His education curtailed by illness, at age sixteen he began to work for a railway company while continuing to take courses in French, physics and chemistry. His French tutor, Alexandre Friedrich, a Frenchman locally known as İskender Ferit, introduced him to a student from the Paris École des Beaux Arts who was staying in Istanbul to study the architecture of the Church of Hagia Sophia (in use as a mosque from 1453 to 1932, when it became a museum) during his Prix de Rome. The student, Henri Prost, who would gain renown for his work designing colonial cities (as well as Izmir and Istanbul), suggested that Hüseyin Avni show his works to Osman Hamdi, who not only accepted him as a student, but recommended him to Prince Abdülmecid as the best candidate for a scholarship to pursue an artistic education in Paris. The two paintings with which Hüseyin Avni introduced himself, a self-portrait and a still-life painting, suggest a degree of familiarity with Western symbolism rare in Ottoman painting and probably acquired through books. In his earliest self-portrait he depicts himself in three-quarter view, smiling knowingly at the viewer from under

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a carefully-groomed mustache and holding an open book in his hand (fig. 49). Yet his pose is singularly awkward for somebody reading; he seems to be walking around with an open book entitled l’Art pressed against his chest, wearing a black suit and an oversized hat perched precariously on his head. The awkwardness of the pose is far less surprising when considered in light of the book in his hand: an art history text, perhaps including an image of Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1662 Group Portrait of the Syndics, from which he seems to have copied the pose of one of the most important figures.72 While he did not choose one of Rembrandt’s many self-portraits, his choice of costume, muted colors, and referentiality to masterworks portrays him in a role that is both his own – that of a student of art – and also a character from another culture. His second offering to the academy, a vanitas showing piles of books and vials of powder arranged around a skull in the center, exhibits a similar awareness of Western artistic norms (fig. 50). Unlike most students at the academy, he continued to explore Western forms. For example, in his Self-portrait with Pipe, he depicts himself as a Bohemian as though already in Paris, wearing a red tie over a blue shirt, a glass of wine in hand, a pipe in his mouth, and a sock with holes slung over his shoulder (fig. 51).73 Once in Paris, Hüseyin Avni entered the studio of Fernand Cormon. He was more attracted by the vivid colors of the fauves and symbolists than the academism of his teacher. In an early work entitled The Artist’s Studio, he uses pastel colors to depict an interior where an artist, modeled after himself, is nude, falling over his palette

49: Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Self-portrait with Book. c. 1907.

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and bench into his canvas, which is held upright by a muse, clad in a white gown and standing at the window. In this small but dynamic composition, Hüseyin Avni created the first unambiguously allegorical image executed by an Ottoman artist, using imagery inspired entirely by Western examples that he would later apply to nationalist subjects. Prince Abdülmecid soon began to underwrite an annual competitive graduation scholarship which sent several more recent graduates from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts to Paris. Arriving in Paris in the summer of 1909, Mehmed Ruhi and İbrahim were the first recipients of the award. The following year, Hikmet, Ali Mehmed Sami (Boyar; 1880−1967), Nazmi Ziya, Namık İsmail and Mehmed Sami joined them. In 1911, they were joined by Feyhaman, who, like Hüseyin Avni, came from outside the academy and procured private funding from Abbas Halim Pasha. Thanks to Hüseyin Avni’s efforts and knowledge of French, all the students were ultimately admitted to the studio of Fernand Cormon, although some spent time first honing their skills at the Academie Julien, which provided a competitive alternative to the École des Beaux Arts (Weinberg 1981, 70; Erbay and Erbay 2006, 27; Artun 2007, 156−173). Despite proximity to the fabled art world of pre-war Paris, the young artists seem to have had little experience of modernist movements beyond Impressionism. They were undoubtedly deeply affected by the opportunity to experience a world in which art was a central part of public debate, identity, and policy. Nevertheless, while aware of contemporary avant-garde debates, they were more interested in integrating art into the Ottoman public sphere. Rather than bringing contemporary issues from France

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back home, these artists tended to adopt styles that were already well-established and palatable to a popular audience. Their resistance to the latest novelties of Paris resembles that of Halil decades earlier. Only a couple of years earlier, they had been banned from even using nude models. In the Ottoman context, the challenge was not to remove the centrality of the human form from realistic representation or to eliminate the subject position implicit in perspective, but to establish it. Having already experienced public suspicion of their practice of Western art, these students knew that as artists back in the Ottoman Empire their duty would be not to shock the public through radical innovation, but to persuade the public into an initial relationship with art. Letters published in the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists suggest that the students used their experience of Paris to participate in public debates back home. Writing in 1911 in reference to Taksim, the main square of modern Istanbul, Mehmed Ruhi opines, These days discussions and debates concerning the sale of the Taksim barracks and the square in front of them fill the newspaper columns. Some see the sale as appropriate. Others criticize it. We also want to express our opinions. First of all, more than anybody else the nation has the right of conservation in this matter, making its examination of the utmost importance. Some have discussed [the square’s] historical value and others [complain] that it has been

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sold cheaply. But more importantly, our subject here is the importance of this location. Rather than limiting himself to the terms of an ongoing discussion in the empire, he brings in a third point, informed by the modern urban planning of Paris. What state would not [want] us to have such a wide square in the most exclusive place in Istanbul? What couldn’t be done, what couldn’t be won on such a wide space for the use and prosperity of the nation? Are not the valuable places, adornments like the Luxenberg and Tuilleries Gardens, the Louvre, Petit Pal, and Luxenberg Museums the pride of Paris? Let us then sell this area for a sum of money. However in the future will there not be a need for such a wide square? What will we do then? Then will we be able to just buy such an appropriate area with the money we acquire?! When such an important place with such a wide area is immediately at hand, we believe it would be possible to organize it in a manner like the Luxembourg Gardens and make the barracks into a museum or a charitable institution. Because such gardens and such museums are the most valuable adornments of a city, visitors to a city go immediately to such gardens and museums; and the people go every day and make use of them. After two years in Paris, Ruhi expresses a new discourse concerning the urban environment: that spaces can be used to bring the public together, representing both the city and the nation for citizens and visitors alike. Much of the urban development of Istanbul to date had been focused on rebuilding the old city, particularly after disastrous fires (Çelik 1986). However, Taksim Square was destined to become symbolic of a modern, planned city inspired by the West. He continued, “Let us not simply make do with works left over from Byzantium. Let us make some of our own. Let us develop and protect our national works.” For him, Istanbul’s identity was marked by its Byzantine urban structure, a connection he may have made while in Paris. The elision of the Ottoman city suggests that he considers the Western identity as the one to develop, through procedures of modernism that reflect the development of Ottoman national, rather than imperial, identity. As he explains, To squander a place like this that incorporates the beautification, the pleasure, the knowledge, and the health of our nation for the sake of money would be quite pathetic. Money can be found but space cannot.74 In keeping with modernist urbanism, he identifies locations not simply with history, as had recently become common in Ottoman discourse, but also with social engineering, acknowledging that public spaces could affect public identity, education, and health. Rather than developing his ideas through abstractions, he relayed his experience of Paris as the model for a modern city. The omission of any mention of contemporary Parisian issues in these letters may

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not fully reflect the private correspondence of the artists (Güler 1994, 44). Yet like their writing, their art indicates no interest in the more radical aspects of modern art. Rather, for them modernity was a sequence of practices which could be applied to the Ottoman situation, perceived as a problem to be solved. For modernity to be an applicable set of procedures, it had to be fixed; the contingency of modernity was beyond translation. The first generation of Ottoman artists in Paris had engaged with the genres and movements of their era, Orientalism, still-life, and Realism while promoting academism in the Academy of Fine Arts. The younger generation rebelled against the academism of their teachers, but similarly avoided contemporary art movements in their work. Rather, they sought conventionalized modernist practices to provide a mode of art which would be palatable to a broad public. Mehmed Sami’s letters from Paris reflect such a vision. In two successive issues of the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists, Mehmed Sami reflects on museums and artists in Paris. In his first letter, entitled “The Chauchard collection at the Louvre and Our Need for a Museum,” Mehmed Sami describes the breadth of artists and the quality of Alfred Chauchard’s recent bequest to the Louvre Museum. Consisting mainly of late nineteenth-century works, the collection featured a cross-section of art collected by the owner of the Louvre department stores. Above all, Mehmed Sami admired the work of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815−1891), and cited in particular his Dragon en Vedette (1880), a large painting of a French soldier on horseback. He does not express admiration solely for the subject, but also for the style: In the picture one can see how [Meissonier] sees the most delicate, precise, uncapturable details of nature with a precise eye, how with a strength of perception he stands before nature, and represents… more accurately than even the most delicate of lenses (Zihnioğlu 2007, 37−8). For Mehmed Sami, this was the embodiment of the purpose of Western art, as it had been learned by the generation of Ottoman artists preceding him and as he had imagined it while under their tutelage. Exposure to contemporary modern art could not dissuade him from this desire for optical veracity as the embodiment of the Western tradition. He was similarly impressed with the naturalism of JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot (1796−1875) and scenes of farm life by Constant Troyon (1810−1865). Mehmed Sami contextualized his interest in the past through his relationship with the museum, which allowed him a “lesson at every visit.” He contrasted this with the lack of such opportunities back home. For him, the museum was far more important in engaging public interest in art and in representing the love of the nation through its heritage than the production of contemporary art. He explains that rather than seeing the past as a frightening sequence of encounters with the barbarian, or remembering artists as a series of names and dates, the museum encourages its visitors to engage with heritage. Invoking the saying, ‘what is not seen remains just words,’ he asks what his own society will do when its children demand a place where their

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past is preserved. Thus he called not only for the institution of a museum of art, but for new institutions of art education to be accorded equal value as those of medicine and law. As he expressed in a subsequent letter, he found the best example of such a realist approach in the work of Şevket, whom he compared with Meissonier. He admired the fineness of his brush, the delicacy of his representation, and the Eastern naturalness of his genius, particularly in his representation of historical spaces. Thus, like Hüseyin Zekai, he linked good art with verisimilitude (Zihnioğlu 2007, 46). Such utilitarian approaches towards integrating the Western tradition into the engineering of a modern Ottoman society led many artists of the era to oppose the involuted, art-for-art’s sake approach of their Western contemporaries. Many of this generation, particularly İbrahim, Hikmet, and Nazmi Ziya, espoused Impressionism because of its populism, and reviled the intellectual elitism of contemporary movements like Cubism. As Nazmi Ziya explained in 1937, Art is not for the sake of art. It is for the people. A customer must benefit from the work he hangs on his wall. That painting must be as useful for him as any other object he has paid for. A painting must be as of much use in a new house as a refrigerator, a table, or a side cabinet for dishes. A painting must give as much pleasure to the eyes that turn to it as a piece of music (Erol 1995, 29). This approach made him label artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse charlatans whose stylistic innovations he and his peers saw as inappropriate for Ottoman (and later Turkish) modernization. Like Halil, he denigrated modern art, saying offhandedly to his students, “Don’t bother with those trapeze artists!” However, he also admitted that, until the War for Liberation, he had been a proponent of art for art’s sake. “Had I not changed this predilection that is only tasted by artists and which leaves no effect on the public, perhaps I too might have followed after the modernists” (Duben 2007, 98, 156). In addition to seeing art as a keystone in building modern identity, this generation of artists also wanted to create a national artistic voice. Recounting his success at the Cormon Academy in Paris, an elderly İbrahim Çallı explained how his distinguished teacher once visited him in his small apartment, enjoying a drink of Turkish Rakı. There, Cormon praised his talent and exhorted him to find a national style. As he related the tale to a young acolyte, İbrahim Çallı was himself an old, distinguished professor, and the decades-old advice of his professor had become indistinguishable from his own. Every branch of painting is above all national. The more you are true to yourself, the more you will masculinely reach towards the universal. The artist builds his most difficult, most necessary monument on his own national foundations. This is how the race is won. You can look at the world only from the monuments you erect, Çallı, this is the issue. A Russian works as a Russian, an Englishman, having no choice, works as an Englishman. Don’t take, Çallı, let them take from you… (Azak 2005, 50).

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In these memoirs, Çallı speaks only once of having been influenced by another artist, the Ukranian Oleksa Hryshchenko who stayed in Istanbul in 1920−21 while fleeing from Russia. Çallı explains that he executed his paintings of dervishes under the influence of Hryshchenko’s style, but emphasizes his ultimate rejection of artistic modernism. He laid out craziness on the surface of the canvas, basically thinking geometrically, he rejected drawing and composition. When I objected, he said, “One can be Impressionist, even modern, by exploring the classical. What you do is an unnecessary risk, essentially running away from aesthetic harmonies.” He discounted my assertions by saying that I was overly concerned about the nihilist attitude in painting (Azak 2005, 66). İbrahim’s Woman Sewing (1927) embodies his rejection of this style (pl. 4). In the foreground, the autochthonous geometry of the flat-woven carpet covering the sewing table compliments the geometric play of light and shadow used in the naturalist portrayal of the woman. The play of geometry in the image moves from the artistic modernism of the earlier work, reduced to a decorative screen in the background, to one of national modernization in which the carpet becomes a trope for tradition while the woman’s attire symbolizes modernity. In a single composition, the artist rejects his early experimentation with modernism, the identification of Turkish art with the outlawed dervish orders, and the Orientalist interest in the depiction of such exotic subjects. The painting becomes a manifesto on the function of painting in the republic. Whether in images of women, coffee-houses, or balls, İbrahim’s rendition of the national voice became oriented less towards style than the representation of a new national identity. İbrahim enhanced his populism by emphasizing his life story, a rags−to−riches tale of growing up in the Western Anatolian town of Çal (near Denizli) and moving penniless to the big city. Drawing on a street corner, he was discovered by an Armenian artist named Rupen who became his first teacher, and then by Ahmed Ali, who sent him to the academy. But the real key to his popularity may be his familiarity with the founding father of the nation, Mustafa Kemal, whom he first met at the national exhibit in 1926, when Mustafa Kemal ordered his painting of Zeybeks purchased for the national collection. After that, he claimed to have become friendly enough with the great leader to drop by the Çankaya Presidential Palace one day, demanding to paint his portrait. “Will you paint the Atatürk you see or the one in your heart?” he asks. “The one in my heart!” Çallı replies, making Atatürk laugh as he walks away, “Well, you won’t be needing me then!”75 Indeed, in his brief 1960 summary of Turkish painting, Derek Patmore cites him as one of Atatürk’s favorite artists and “the father of modern Turkish painting” (Patmore 1960, 1). Çallı created his public persona as a rare synthesis of the Turkish ideal: a regional affiliation that brought to mind the authentic Turkish bandit-hero, the Zeybek, with a modern education and outlook, underscored by his patently un-Islamic drinking

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and womanizing. He moved from tradition into bohemia, from romanticized heritage to progressive modernity. His subjects represented modern life but without the artistic modernisms that could alienate the public. Like many of his generation, Çallı’s interest in producing a national art was more a matter of using art and the character of the artist as a sign of modernity than of using art to reconceptualize representation as a cornerstone of an ongoing progressive critique of society. In contrast to the bohemian avant-garde of Western artistic modernism, the Ottoman, and later Turkish version of artistic modernity colluded with a political avant-guard guided by state policies of modernization. Such use of art as a vehicle rather than as a language pervaded much of the art production of this first generation of Ottoman artists and can be seen in the design, patronage and works executed in the first public commissions, military art, exhibitions, and the rise of women as artists. Some of the young artists in Paris returned early: Mehmed Sami in 1911 to a teaching post at the Kuleli Military Academy, from which he was almost immediately deployed to serve in the Balkan Wars; and Nazmi Ziya in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the rest also returned home. İbrahim, Nazmi Ziya, Hikmet, and Feyhaman soon replaced the older generation of teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts, who retired, driven largely by increasing xenophobia: The Osgan Efendis, Monsieur Vallauris, and Monsieur Valeris can never represent Turkish Fine Arts. Nobody can deny the past service of these people. Osgan Efendi is an artist worthy of respect, Monsieur Valeri, an artist knowledgeable in classical methods. They are two talents who will enrich our museums. Nonetheless, they are not the teachers to imbue the children of this country with fine arts, with a national art (Giray 1995, 20).76 As teachers, the 1914 generation had a profound influence on the first generation of young artists in the Turkish Republic, not simply as role models but as pillars of tradition to resist, just as they had resisted their own academically-oriented teachers. This generation’s understanding of representation, Impressionism, and subject matter established artistic parameters until the 1930s, when their students began to contest their power. Each of these artists developed a specialty based on traditional forms which would be educational for their students and palatable to the public. The group portrait of the artists, executed by Feyhaman, suggests their role in the empire: bourgeois intellectuals whose style was realist and whose personalities were far from bohemian (fig. 52). Indeed, a social environment so closed to art would hardly have allowed for anything else. Feyhaman subtly depicts the characters of the artists (from left to right): the thoughtful calm of Mehmed Sami; the dynamism of İbrahim; Feyhaman’s own shyness as he peeks out from behind the satisfied, bourgeois Şevket; and the bewilderment of Hikmet. Taking on an illustrative function, the painting appears to limit itself to a textual correspondence between the image and its meaning. With no emphasis through lighting or color, Feyhaman produces an egalitarian setting with only subtle distinctions made through the positioning of the

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figures: İbrahim sits in a more active position than the others, and the elder Şevket sits complacently in acknowledgement of his status as Feyhaman’s teacher at the Lycée de Galatasaray and his established position in the art world of the day. Similarly, Feyhaman’s portrait of Dr. Akil Muhtar conveys little in excess of its subject, and utilizes a uniform, loose brushstroke more typical of illustrations than of paintings (fig. 53). The selection of props in the painting−the backdrop crowded with chemicals and vials and the soft, patient rabbit in the foreground−frame the doctor, who pauses in his work and looks up at the viewer before injecting the rabbit. Feyhaman thus portrays the doctor, who supported him upon his return from Paris, as small but able, gentle and kind. One might assume that he was a veterinarian, not the most renowned doctor of his era, a man who brought modern scientific method and pharmacology back to the empire after completing his education at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he had been exiled for his involvement with the Committee for Union and Progress (Hanioğlu 1995, 115). Beyond their success as character studies, these portraits reflect Feyhaman’s subtle understanding of the function of portraiture as an exploration of the subjectivity of the sitter. However, contemporary criticism provided no acknowledgement of complex implications. Rather, only the formal qualities of work were subject to discussion. For example, in his 1902 and 1903 critiques of the Istanbul salons, Halil bin Esad praised

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brushstrokes, the use of color, and composition in many works, but only addressed art as a concept while discussing the work of the academy professor Warnia-Zarzecki. His comments about other artists suggest that art should be measured within a discourse of painterly skill to which meaning should be secondary (Kürkman 2004, 64). Similarly, in a 1917 article, Nazmi Ziya emphasized simplicity of execution, critiquing the work of his fellow artists as excessively decorative. He focused particularly on the work of Şevket, whose depictions of the interiors of the Mosque of Hagia Sophia served no purpose other than providing a record of the colors and designs of tiles within. He criticized the work of Viçen Arslanian and Hüseyin Zekai in the same manner, and even found fault in the loose style of Feyhaman, which made the paint and color more assertive than the subject of the work. In contrast, he set the work of Namık İsmail as the model that should be followed on the road to a national style, adding that in order for a national voice to be found in painting, artists must “decide on a point which shows the reason the painting is made and place it in a legible way within the painting” (quoted in İrepoğlu 1986, 54). Although he points towards a conception of painting as providing meaning, he does not indicate what aspects of art, beyond straightforward depiction, might affect such objectives. In contrast to Halil’s misgivings a generation earlier, Impressionism became the primary style of the 1914 generation. Unlike other Ottoman artists of his generation who only used the loose brushwork and color contrasts of Impressionism, Nazmi

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Ziya paid attention to the effects of light on immediate observations of nature. Such attention is evident in Sailboats on the Bosporus, where sharp contrasts evoke a ruddy dusk (pl. 5). Beginning his studies with Ali Rıza, he adamantly copied directly from nature, a habit of which his teachers at the academy disapproved. Yet it was this style which became a vehicle for him to develop an art he felt could communicate directly with the public, an ambition that grew after the foundation of the republic. As with the earlier generation of landscape artists, his preference for scenes without figures was designed to appeal to a still conservative public while enticing them to appreciate art through the use of color and an aesthetic of patterned brushstrokes. Although he directed the figure drawing studio at the academy, like Nazmi Ziya, Hikmet worked primarily on landscapes drawn directly from nature and executed with an interest in light and loose brushwork reminiscent of Impressionism but informed by traditional values (fig. 54). “I am interested in and worship every spiritual beauty in creation to the same extent. In this respect my modes of interpretation entirely resemble those of Khayyam. I can say that I am a follower of Khayyam without the wine” (Giray 1995, 28). Although Nazmi Ziya never expressed sentiments of such a direct link with Islamic mysticism or existing traditions of appreciating nature, the patterns of observation and representation which he shares with an earlier generation of landscape artists, as well as with Hikmet, suggest that the use of loosely Impressionist techniques by these artists was intended as a vehicle with which to allow art to communicate with the public in a conceptual language that could be affiliated with Sufi tradition. Not merely a belated adoption of a Western technique,

54: Hikmet (Onat). From Kabataş. 1924.

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Impressionism became a hybrid style which allowed the translation of traditional values into a modern aesthetic form. The categorization of a group of artists as an age cohort rather than as a movement, comparable with other non-Western experiences of artistic development, bespeaks a very different notion of the artist as innovator (Clark 1998, 128). Rather than sharing ideas, an age cohort shares providence; rather than forging an original idea through their union, they promote shared social position and function within a broader order of modernity. Thus rather than representing an artistic turning point in Ottoman/ Turkish art history, the 1914 generation functioned as part of far broader cultural shifts involving the nationalisation of cultural institutions within an overarching discourse of Westernizing modernization. Women Artists After the Second Constitutional Revolution, new opportunities emerged for women. Although non-Muslim local and foreign female Ottoman artists had exhibited at turn of the century salons in Istanbul, none sustained long periods of public exhibition. Among them one, Lina Gabuzzi (born to Italian parents), specialized in Orientalist drawings and was the first artist in Istanbul to make and exhibit etchings (Thalasso and Şerifoğlu 2008, 95). In contrast, a few of the women artists of the 1910s gained some renown and their paintings remain in important collections. Most of these women came from elite families and their artmaking was an expression of the Westernizing aspirations of their environments. However, early deaths or marriage shortened the careers of many, resulting in a paucity of women among early republican artists. Like the work of their Western counterparts, their paintings tend to focus on the home, particularly on portraits of women. In light of growing feminism after the Second Constitutional Revolution, their work reflects a desire to make women visible both through their art-making and through their representation in art. In 1869, ten years after the foundation of the first girls’ elementary school, the first School of Vocational Arts for Girls opened, attracting Muslim women from urban lower and middle classes (Karakaya-Stump 2003, 160). The following year, the foundation of a Teacher’s College for Women (Dar ul-Muallimin) enabled women’s education to spread more rapidly through the increasing availability of female teachers (Altındal 1995, 244). Adopting educational models of the West, where schools like the London Female School of Design had, since 1842, sought to provide working class women a means of economic sustenance, Ottoman women’s education incorporated design into its program (Chalmers 1996, 237). One of the first exhibitions of painting in the empire actually took place at the Teacher’s College for Women, where paintings could be viewed alongside other useful handcrafts such as embroidery and sewing (Gören 1998, 34; Cezar 1995, 422−3). While unlike painting, these crafts had long been part of women’s domestic work, their exhibition signaled entry into the public sphere for Ottoman women. Nonetheless, while the availability of education in the arts may appear to signal women’s emancipation, it may also indicate the limits placed on women’s social roles.

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In a 1908 letter to the newspaper İkdam, a woman named İsmet Hakkı wrote a letter asking, “What share are we going to get from the progress of this age? Are we yet again going to bow to the sadnesses and deprivations which through being educated we think have fallen by the wayside?” She lamented the limitations placed on women’s professions. “For the most part,” she continues, “most [people] are antifeminist. They don’t see professions outside the fine arts as appropriate for women.” Indicating that she did not share this opinion, she argued for the necessity to include science classes in women’s schools. However, in subsequent letters, many women objected to her arguments, believing that such activities and opinions were inappropriate for Muslim women (Çakır 1994, 33). The earliest women involved in art in the Ottoman Empire were members of minority groups and foreigners who participated in the salon-style exhibits of the era. Nothing is known about them but their names. Out of thirty-five artists at the 1875 exhibition, only five of whom were (male) Ottoman Muslims, two women (Mme. Jérichau and Mlle. Serpasian) participated. The Armenian-Ottoman Mlle. Serviçen participated in the exhibit held at the Elifba Club in 1880, and Mlle. Jones, Mme. Walker, and Lady Hobart participated in 1881. In the 1901 exhibition in Pera, the Ottoman-born, Levantine artist Mlle. Lina Gabuzzi was the only woman to participate. The following year, she was joined by Nuvart Aslan, Anna Aslan, A. Kopello, Thalia Floras, Hilda Gvaraçinyu, H. Pateryano, Virjini de Stulzenberg, D. Labella, and Desgozi. In 1903, only five women participated, including Anna Aslan, Mme. Desgozi, Mlle. Labella, Mme. V. Compte Calix, and Montanyani Riçi. The frequent shift in names suggests that many of the women only lived in the empire temporarily, perhaps as the wives of local embassy officials (Kürkman 2004, 60−72). In contrast to lower and middle-class women who benefited from public education, upper class women still depended on private tutors for their education. Many of the earliest Ottoman Muslim women involved in the arts were the daughters of Ottoman reformers. Particularly after the Crimean War, numerous European women put out advertisements offering private lessons for French, music, and painting. Halil Pasha depicted a young woman who might hire such a teacher (fig. 55). Although he portrays her as the producer of a new cultural form, she remains within a domestic space reflecting the syncretic visual culture of the era. The image of the woman painting serves as a trope of modernization without disturbing existing social patterns – the woman, whether in western or eastern dress, whether painting or embroidering, remains housebound, just as the sketches which decorate the walls supplement, rather than replace, more traditional forms of decoration within the home. Most women affiliated with the arts during this period came from elite backgrounds. The participation of Princess Nazlı in one of the first exhibits in the empire, in 1880 at the private Elifba Club, indicates the early acceptance of such pursuits within elite environments. Elites saw themselves as exemplars of Western practices which would filter down to create a new society, and women were an active part of this exercise in social engineering. Celile Hikmet (1879−1956), daughter of the revolutionary leader Enver Pasha, mother of the famous poet Nazım Hikmet (Ran; 1902−1965) and beloved of the poet Yahya Kemal (Beyatlı; 1884−1958),

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received private lessons from Fausto Zonaro. Probably the most well-known female artist of her generation, Mihri Rasim/Müşfik (1886−1954), was the daughter of a renowned doctor and medical professor, Rasim Pasha, director of the Imperial School of Medicine. Of the same generation, Müfide Kadri lost her mother to tuberculosis soon after her birth, and was adopted by the husband of her mother’s ‘milk-sister’, a wealthy man known for his Western taste who decorated his house with a piano, palm trees, and aquariums (Aksel 1971, 245). Thus she had the opportunity for private art lessons from teachers including Zonaro, Halil, and Osman Hamdi. Similarly, the artist Nazlı Ecevit (1900−1985); mother of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit) was the granddaughter of the military leader Ferik Salih Pasha, while Fahrelnissa (Zeid; 1901−1991) and her niece Aliye (Berger; 1903−1974) were both members of the family of the Grand Vezir Cevat Şakir Pasha. The life stories of these women engaged in the arts suggest both the opportunities and restrictions of the era in which they lived. Rebelling against social mores from an early age, Mihri eloped to Rome with the director of an Italian acrobatic company she met through her teacher Zonaro. After a year, she went to Paris to continue

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studying painting, and made a living by drawing portraits and letting a room in her apartment. She married one of her tenants, Müşfik Selami, son of an administrator from Izmir who was studying politics at the Sorbonne. Back in the empire, Müfide began to serve as the first female art teacher at the Teacher’s College for Women. This appointment of a seventeen year-old girl reflects the dearth of suitable female art teachers. She also taught Princess Dürrüşehvar, daughter of Prince Abdülmecid, and was a founding member of the Society of Ottoman Artists in 1909 before her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1912. Mihri was then called back home by the Minister of Finance to take her place as a teacher. Speaking to the Minister of Education Şükrü, she suggested that an academy of art for women be founded, arguing that while men had benefited from the freedom, equality, justice, and fraternity that had come with the constitutional revolution of 1908, women were still living as ever, without equal opportunities (Aksel 2000, 97). They were, however, beginning to complain about the deficiencies in their education. When, in the interim between Müfide’s death and Mihri’s arrival, the teacher Mme. Raphael took students from the Teacher’s College for Women to an exhibit of student work at the Academy of Fine Arts, the male teacher who was taking them around requested that they remove their veils so that they could properly see the work. Thus unveiled, one of the students remarked that despite enjoying such beautiful works, “a contrarian revolt rises in me because this school is closed to us” (Pelvanoğlu 2007, 25). When the Academy of Fine Arts for Women (İnas Sanayi-ye Nefise Mektebi) opened in 1914, offering courses in both painting and sculpture, Mihri became the head painting teacher. Salih Zeki (a man) was the first principal of the new school, but she soon replaced him. During this period, she also maintained a strong friendship with Tevfik Fikret, whose poems she illustrated and whose face she cast in plaster upon his death in 1915. The best known woman artist in the empire, Mihri divorced in 1922 and left for Italy in 1923, where she had an affair with the Fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio and is even said to have executed a portrait of the pope. Although she returned briefly to Turkey after the institution of the republic, after the sudden death of several family members in 1938, she moved to the United States where she worked as an illustrator, penniless and bitter that she had ever engaged in art at all (Toros 1988; İnel 2002). Like Mihri, many early Ottoman women artists had lives which spanned multiple countries or met tragic ends, curtailing their artistic production. The life of Hale Asaf (1905−1938), Mihri’s niece, took a surprisingly similar course. After learning to draw in secondary school, she visited her aunt in Rome, continued her studies with Namık İsmail in Paris, and entered the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts the following year. She returned to Turkey in 1928 after several years of poor health and studying alternately in Istanbul, Munich (with Lovis Corinth), and Paris (with André Lhote). Although initially appointed as an art teacher at the Bursa Teaching College, pressure on her as a woman in a provincial city was so great that she and Mahmud Celalledin (Cuda; 1904−1987), a close friend from Paris, agreed to trade positions, enabling her to teach at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in 1929. The same year, she was one of the founding members of the Organization of Independent Artists (Müstakil Ressamlar

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Cemiyeti), and was an important proponent of Cubism in Turkey. She went to Paris in 1930 to participate in the Montparnasse Summer Exhibit, where she met the antiFascist Italian author Antonio Aniante. Accepting his invitation to live with him in Paris, she began to work for the Galerie Librarie Jeune Europe, of which he was the director. Impoverished, she died of breast cancer in 1938 (Adil 1940; Dino 2005). Similarly, Belkıs Mustafa (1896−1925), the first Turkish graduate of the women’s academy, won a scholarship for education abroad and studied with Lovis Corinth at the Berlin Academy of Fine Art until 1921. Returning to Turkey in 1922, she exhibited several portraits and landscapes at the Galatasaray Exhibitions of 1922 and 1923. Her successful paintings won her a second scholarship for study abroad, but she fell ill and died in Berlin in 1925 (fig. 56). Less tragic stories of artists of this generation also suggest a gap between the eagerness to educate women artists and the perils of their participation in the professional art world. Marriage often made their work secondary to their husbands’ careers. Those who were most promising in their pursuit of the arts often ended up living abroad, far from the social pressures of their class. Although Melek Ziya/Celal Sofu (Lampe; 1896−1974) began her career with great verve and regular participation in group exhibits, after her husband’s death in 1946, she remarried in Germany and remained abroad until her death. For women who continued to live in the empire, family took priority over profession. Following their marriages to the successful artists Hüseyin Avni and Feyhaman, Harika Sirel/Lifij (1890−1991) and Güzin (Duran; 1898−1981), took on supporting roles in their husbands’ careers rather than fully developing their own (although Güzin did work as an art teacher at the Beşiktaş and Atatürk high schools for girls) (Pelvanoğlu 2007, 28). Nazlı Ecevit interrupted her career for twenty-five years in order to raise a family, and began to paint and exhibit her work at the annual state exhibitions from 1948 until her death. Likewise, Müzdan Sait (1897−1986) and Emine Fuad (Tugay; 1897−1975; wife of Ambassador Zeki Velide Tugay), both of whom specialized in portraits, truncated their careers for the sake of family obligations. While Fahrelnissa (Zeid; 1901−1991) ultimately had a fruitful career as one of Turkey’s first abstract artists, she held her first solo exhibit in 1944, after her children were grown. Likewise, her niece Aliye Berger (1903−1974) trained as a painter and a violinist in

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her youth, but only began to practice professionally after the death of her husband in England, where she studied printmaking before returning to Turkey in 1951. Conversely, despite her education with Paul Signac while in Paris between 1931−34 and with Giorgio de Chirico in Italy between 1947−49, Sabiha Rüştü (Bozcalı; 1905−1987) ceased exhibiting after 1939 (Pelvanoğlu 2007, 29; fig. 57). Although each example seems coincidental, the confluence of so many curtailed careers suggests social pressure against the professionalization of women artists despite the immense gains for women’s education and participation in the public sphere during the early twentieth century. These experiences reflect both the new opportunities for women embodied by education and the continuing restrictions on women’s roles. Since all the students were women, the Women’s Academy of Fine Arts became the first place in Turkey where a female nude model, a bath-worker who was a member of a religious minority, could be drawn. Reversing the problems associated with life drawing in the West, where men were prohibited from drawing the live female figure until the mid-nineteenth century and women were prohibited from drawing any live models until the twentieth, social mores enabled the practice of women viewing and drawing women through the already commonplace practice of the public bath (Nochlin 1971). Nonetheless, their use of classical male statues was controversial. One day as Mihri carried an antique statue to the classroom, a museum staff member saw that it was naked and informed the Ministry of Education. Mihri solved the problem by promising to tie a towel around the waists of the statues (Pelvanoğlu 2007, 27).

57: Sabiha Rüştü. Landscape. n.d.

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Women had even less liberty in relation to depicting landscape: so that the moral rectitude of the students would not be compromised, they were accompanied by a police guard when they went to sketch outdoors during the summer under the tutelage of Ali Rıza (Gören 1998, 52). Despite such restrictions, women were taught by many of the academy faculty and received an education equivalent to that of their male counterparts. Although Ali Sami (Boyar; 1880−1967) taught there initially, student preference for the studio of Mihri may have contributed to his departure in 1915 (Konyar 2002, 43). Ömer Adil, who became the principal of the school when Mihri left the country in 1919, captured its environment in one of his paintings (pl. 6). The work emphasizes the calm rectitude of the studio. Nonetheless, Ömer Adil alludes to the use live female nude models through paintings on the wall, on the upper left of the scene and on the middle right, the most unobtrusive points in the painting. In contrast, the larger, more obvious works on the walls show landscapes reminiscent of those by Ali Rıza. Thirty-three artists studied at the Academy of Fine Art for Women, yet none of them had the life-long success of their male counterparts (Konyar 2002, 43). When the academies were fused into a single, coeducational Academy of Fine Arts in 1926, women students could still study with the premier artists of the country, but lost the teaching opportunities which sustained premier male artists.77 Although they could have pursued teaching in secondary education, prejudices against art as bohemian limited opportunities outside of Istanbul. Moreover, despite statepromoted feminism, women continued to be expected to put family before personal achievement. Those women who needed to work would choose more secure professions than art; those wealthy enough not to work were expected to put family first, leaving aside professional interests. Painting itself was not a problem; however, professionalization proved incompatible with social expectations for women. The focus of the first Ottoman female artists on portraiture during an era when male artists emphasized landscape reflects both the limitations and ambitions of women’s painting. Restricted except when going directly from one monitored space to another (such as from home to school, or to the homes of friends and neighbors), women artists lacked the opportunity to paint landscapes directly from nature. However, by choice, they focused less on other possible subjects, such as garden or still-life scenes, than on images of women. This may reflect both the priority placed on personal relationships within the world of women and a desire to take on the representation of women on their own terms. For unlike male artists of the era, whose works featured Westernized odalisques, women’s representations of themselves made no compositional reference to Western practices of depicting the Orient. Rather than using women as social symbols, these portraits depict individuals. Mihri’s portraits emphasize facial expression and fashion, itself an indicator of change. She reveals a domestic world already split between traditional and modern lifestyles. As suggested by a sketch of her sister Enise, many of her contemporaries lived quite modern lifestyles, enjoying Western fashions and participating in balls. Nonetheless, her numerous self-portraits and sketches of women in the black overgarments worn outside the home suggest a conflict she may have perceived between

TEN LONG YEARS OF WAR Western lifestyles in the private sphere and their near invisibility in public (fig. 58). Indeed, despite the rapid pace of change among her generation, an older generation cleaved to traditional lifestyles with equal ease, as suggested by her portrait of Naile Hanım, mother of the parliament leader Ahmed Rıza Bey. Similarly, in Portrait of Keriman, Nazlı Ecevit, whose work was dominated in later years by still-life and landscape paintings, depicts a lively woman who happens to also represent modern liberation through her dress and pose (pl. 7). Several years later, Hale Asaf became an important proponent of Cubism in Turkey by emphasizing the image of the modern woman in her successive portraits and self-portraits (fig. 59). Müfide rooted her expression of women in youthful fantasy. Although her student Harika remembered her as an innovator in arts instruction who emphasized copying from nature, her paintings suffer from underdeveloped drawing skills. While her work has historic importance and graces several important collections, it is perhaps most interesting less as professionally developed work than as insight into the romantic fantasies of a young woman in turn of the century Istanbul. In one of her paintings, a group of women sit idyllically in a field, playing the lute and picking flowers (fig. 60). In another, a couple clad in white take a romantic stroll along the shore with a cityscape in the background. Nonetheless, at the time of her death, she was well known enough for a short obituary to announce a final exhibition of her works, with proceeds to be donated to the Ottoman navy.78 Unlike women artists fighting to enter the masculine domain of art in the

59: Hale Asaf. Self-portrait. 1925.

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West, Ottoman women engaged in art during approximately the same era as their male counterparts. In the West, training and market pressures encouraged women artists to take up minor genres such as portraiture, landscape, and pictures of animals while men pursued such dominant genres as history painting. Art in the Ottoman Empire already focused on minor genres. Nonetheless, social restrictions affected women’s choice of subject matter, often directing them to domestic subjects such as portraits of women, self-portraits, and pictures of flowers. Such works suggest a desire on the part of women artists to represent themselves as actors in public space through painting their own image. Their purpose in artmaking was, like that of their male counterparts, less to create great art than to enact modernity, both as part of the movement towards Westernization and as signs of women’s entry into the public sphere that accompanied Westernization. Public Commissions and the Galatasaray Exhibitions Other than teaching, few professional opportunities were available for artists returning from Europe in 1914, a time of war and privation. One of the most active supporters of the arts was Celal Esad, who had recently become the municipal head of Istanbul’s Kadıköy district. Trying to incorporate arts into the public sphere, he commissioned Hüseyin Avni and a French artist by the name of Andres to execute large-scale paintings for the Kadıköy Municipal Building, recently converted from an old wooden mansion.79 Painted on removable canvas panels and located over a doorway, the painting shows workers laboring in front of the building (fig. 61). The workers toil between two sets of buildings: a group of dilapidated houses on the right and the upright municipal building on the left. A similar contrast emerges in the center of the composition, where a water flask set over the doorway, suggesting a

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trompe l’oeil effect, represents the past, while a tractor-like grader in the background represents the future. Beyond them, the Haydarpasha train station (inaugurated in 1909) reiterates the message of progress. Although such paintings were common as municipal commissions in Europe, the visual portrayal of the city as a heroic element in the transformation from tradition to modernity was unique in the empire. Such a commission signaled an era in which the public would gain increasing access to art. When the empire joined the Central Powers and the citizens of Entente nations left, many vacated spaces in Istanbul opened to new uses. One of these was the Italian Societa Operaia, which became the dormitory for the nearby Lycée de Galatasaray. Beginning in 1916, the main hall of this dormitory was leased every summer for an annual exhibit, which came to be known as the Galatasaray Exhibition. At the first exhibit, the works exhibited were naturalist paintings which reflected no awareness of contemporary modernist movements after Impressionism, introduced in Paris four decades earlier. The exhibit was juried but open to all artists, and visitors were charged admission. Several works at the 1916 exhibit received prizes from the Ministry of Education and were subsequently purchased as part of the Collection of Decorated Panels. These included paintings of women by İbrahim and Feyhaman, landscapes by Hikmet, Halil, and Hüseyin Zekai, an interior of Hagia Sophia by Viçen Arslanyan, and Collections for the Red Crescent by Mehmed Ruhi (pl. 8). While the exhibit included war−related works by İbrahim, Ruhi, and Mehmed Sami, the committee preferred landscapes for most of their awards. This preference for landscape rewarded noncontroversial subjects and styles. Even the painting Collections for the Red Crescent, which shows inside of a mosque a man collecting alms for the poor, clearly an appeal for public support of the war effort, was modest. While the work makes reference to a contemporary scene, it avoids drama and sentimentality. Its selection for an award probably reflected the role of the Red Crescent as a sponsor of the exhibit that gave medallions to all the organizers (İrepoğlu 1986, 55). The Galatasaray Exhibit of 1916 was also the first venue at which Muslim Ottoman artists exhibited nudes. Among these, those by İzzet Ziya (1880−1934) are remarkable for their technical understanding of Impressionism and the candor of the poses, indicating that Ottoman audiences were ready for artistic nudes (pl. 9).

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Most of his works naturalize the nudity of the figures by depicting them in relation to rowboats, a popular summer passtime of the era. Boys scrape down the paint on a boat, or smile upwards in a manner that suggests the use of a photographic intermediary. More surprisingly, naked young women about to dive into the water raise questions about where artist and model could have found the privacy for women to skinny-dip outdoors. Unfortunately, little is known about the artist, so such questions remain unanswered. While many artists exhibited regularly at the annual Galatasaray Exhibitions, the range of participants changed dramatically during and after the war. In 1916, of the 49 artists who contributed 190 paintings, most were Muslim men, nine were women (four Turkish, two Armenian, one Greek, and two unclear), two Greek, seven Armenian, and five more of unclear non-Ottoman origins. Only five artists were distinguished from the others by the title “painter” (ressam) in the listings, although of the names listed, nineteen are generally cited as artists today. Several of the names are also familiar as important figures in the republican era, suggesting that painting was not simply a profession, but also an element in the general culture of the Ottoman elite. Thus the journalist and caricaturist Sedat Simavi, and the architects Kemaleddin (1870−1927) and Arif Hikmet (Koyunoğlu; 1888−1982) participated in the exhibit. An even greater diversity participated in the 1917 exhibit: of 37 artists, eleven were women (five Turkish, one Jewish, two Greek, and three unclear); of the men, most were Turkish, six Armenian and three European. The absence of many Turkish male artists may be attributed to the war, although some soldiers continued to contribute to the exhibit, most notably Mehmed Sami who was in the navy at the time. Underwritten by the army, the 1918 exhibit became dominated by Turkish male artists, with the exception of one Turkish woman, Harika. In 1919, all the partipants were Turkish men. Viçen Arslanyan exhibited again regularly between 1920 and 1922, and was joined by one or two other less renowned Armenian or Greek artists every year thereafter. The proportion of participating women increased over time: five out of forty-four participants were women in 1920, seven out of forty-two in 1921, ten out of sixty-three in 1922, and eighteen out of fifty-four in 1923. From the turn of the century until approximately 1918, non-Muslims had not only made up a large part of the population, but also been a central force in the adoption of artistic practices in the Western modality. However, by the years of the national struggle and the foundation of the republic, war, famine, migration, forced exodus, and the divisiveness of nation-building had caused their numbers and social influence to dwindle rapidly. The war years fostered a new sense of collective identity based on the nation− state. Despite various national formulations, ranging from a nationalized Ottoman state to an ethnically Turkish one, the notion of developing a collective voice was gaining importance for artists. Discussing the Galatasaray Exhibit of 1917, Nazmi Ziya explained, Painters have until now proceeded according to their own conceptions and attitudes, and this is just the second time they are making a public appearance. It will take a little more time before they understand the spirit of the people

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and what they want, can develop vehicles for explaining their own emotions, or directly express the spirit of the nation. Then painting will have found a local and national path which will lead to its goal (Nazmi Ziya 1917). Forging a link between national identity and art was not limited to a local audience. For several years, select works of Ottoman art had been sent for exhibits in European cities such as Florence and Munich.80 The same year as the first Galatasaray Exhibit, Celal Esad convinced the director of the Department of Intelligence, that the arts should not only be used as visual propaganda for the Turkish people, but as a means of convincing the world that Turks were not merely good soldiers, but also had a strong civilization. Thus the director commissioned artists to paint works for an exhibit which would visit the capitals of the Central Powers, first Vienna and then Berlin. Underwritten by Prince Abdülmecid, a studio was established in the new residential district of Şişli and became a working space for several artists (fig. 62). In an era of war, not only was the space important to the artists, but so was the provision of paints, canvases, soldiers as models, and props like canons. While artists of independent means did not make use of the space, many of the young artists who had recently returned from Paris worked there, including: İbrahim, Namık İsmail, Hikmet, Mehmed Sami, Ali Sami, Mehmed Ruhi, and Ali Cemal (Benim; 1881−1939). The paintings produced at the studio used an earthy palette suggesting the military themes they were to portray. Although Celal Esad had imagined the works as introducing the humane rather

62: Anonymous. Şişli Studio. 1917.

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than the military character of Turks to Europeans, the subjects of the paintings focused on the experience of soldiers, especially the events surrounding the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli. Realism was essential, and military uniforms from that era and photographs from the front were used to enhance the artists’ memories of their own military service. The subject was not incidental, as Germany had aided in building fortifications against the British onslaught. Thus the images were as much a meditation on the heroism and hardship of soldiers at war as reinforcement of the alliance between the Ottomans and the Central Powers. Many works from the studio – including Namık İsmail’s Take that! The Last Shell and his dynamic Whirlpool of Victory; İbrahim’s Turkish Cannoneers, Morning in the Trenches, and his Wounded Soldier, Night Attack in the Trenches; Mehmed Ruhi’s After the Enemy’s Desertion and his triptych, the first in Ottoman art, depicting The Villager Going to War, The Enemy Driven to Sea (Gallipoli) and Return to the Village as a Veteran (pl. 10); Mehmed Sami’s The Battle of Ismail Tepe and Military Watchmen; and Ali Cemal’s At Dobruca – depict the often beleaguered Ottoman soldiers, their heads in bandages, fighting among their dead comrades or in a flaming battle, heroic to the end (figs. 63, 64). In contrast to the glorious history paintings of Hasan Rıza executed for the military and naval museums only four years earlier, these images depict history not as an unwavering celebration of imperial might, but as a testament to the personal courage that emerges under great duress. As such, not only are the uniforms of the soldiers depicted as unprecedentedly modern, so is the subject: not a ruler leading an army to inevitable victory, but common men willing to die for a national cause. Other paintings reflect a more humane vision of the soldier: Hikmet’s On Passing the Village/Goodbye on the Road to War, as well as two paintings, both entitled A Letter in the Trenches, by Hikmet and Ali Cemal reflect the soldier as a person living a double life, one in the present of the trenches, another in the fantasy of the home which he risks his life to protect (pl. 11). With his numerous portraits of anonymous soldiers, Ali Cemal’s paintings were often the most emotive in evincing a consideration for the soldier as a person rather than as a function of war. His subjects included A Little Water/A Turkish Soldier Helping the Wounded Enemy, Wounded Soldier, Turkish Cavalryman, From Maydos, On Horseback beside the Trough, Trumpeter, and Private of the Fire Brigade. The 1918 article in the Wochen Ausgabe des Berliner Tageblatts criticized the quality many of the paintings, their tendency towards propaganda, and their heavily military cast. However, it also pointed out that the exhibit, as the first of its kind, provided a surprisingly modern face for the empire, reflecting the reforms following the deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Austrians became better acquainted with their allies while revising fixed notions of the East. As the introduction to the article explains, the exhibit not only included four works of an heir apparent (Prince Abdülmecid) and two by a pasha (Halil), but most surprisingly, works by two women “of the harem.” Inclusion of images of and by women was designed to express Ottoman modernity. These included Abdülmecid’s two representations of the harem, as well as İbrahim’s portrait of his daughter and a large frontal nude by Feyhaman. The

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Tageblatts was particularly impressed by the symbolist, art nouveau style of Harika’s paintings. Both Harmony with Nature and The Entertainment of the Gods included nudes: the former, of a nymph by the water greeting an angel on high, and the latter of a group of Greek gods standing before a temple, their genitals politely covered, watching a wrestling match (fig. 65). And one of them, Miss Harika, a Mohamedan Turk, half a millennium after the destruction of Hellenic−Byzantine culture, paints the Greek gods… It is a somewhat shy picture, beyond the astonishing courage in the hand of the artist. But nevertheless, what an apotheosis of the old Gods, what a triumph of the Hellenic idea! Turkish cannons devastated the Acropolis over and over− what else? … Greek gods were in the long run stronger than Asiatic force (Gören 1997, 67). Although laden with tropes of Ottoman identity rooted in images of the warriorTurk and the harem maiden, the article nonetheless indicates that the exhibit fulfilled its ambition of serving as a signal of modernization. Many works from outside the studio made indirect references to the war. Ruhi’s Collections for the Red Crescent, Ömer Adil’s Woman in Thought, and Namık İsmail’s Thought has Also Sunk were exhibited, reflecting their metaphorical explorations of the wartime mood. Namık İsmail’s Typhus, hauntingly depicted the disease plaguing Erzurum, where he had fought (fig. 66). Hüseyin Avni’s 1916 Allegory of War, reminiscent of Delacroix’s Massacre of Chios (1824), indicated the ravages of war through a pyramidal composition of semi-nude figures leaning on a broken wagon wheel in the foreground with wounded soldiers wandering through a ravaged, burning landscape (fig. 67). In contrast to Delacroix’s work, where the Ottoman

65: Harika (Lifij). The Entertainment of the Gods. c. 1917.

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enemy is clearly culpable for the horrors of war, here war itself ravages humanity. Although at the time, landscapes were the most common genre in Ottoman painting, only a few were sent abroad, indicating awareness of the interpretation of subject matter. The drama of these works, expressed through subject, lighting, and economy of brushstrokes led Nazmi Ziya to call them models for all Ottoman artists. Not only did they clearly express contemporary life, they did so in terms which communicated with an international audience. The exhibit itself succumbed to the predations of war. As the works were packed for Berlin, roads and railways closed, leaving paintings and their human escorts stranded with no means of getting money from the state as the head of the war office had changed in the interim. Celal Esad began to earn a living by painting and traveling the dangerous route between Berlin and Munich to trade watches and other small items for cash. Namık İsmail took the opportunity to study in Berlin, at the studio of Lovis Corinth. There, he not only executed an expressionist self− portrait, but also developed an interest in painting the nude which he continued after his return to Istanbul by painting his own wife (fig. 68). Such works were first displayed at the Galatasaray Exhibit of 1921. A caricature in Çizgi lambasted his work, but the drawing suggests that the caricaturist had not seen Namık İsmail’s far less revealing painting, which shows a nude reclining on a divan as seen from behind (Yağbasan 2004, 53). In contrast, the caricature shows a frontal nude of a woman covering her face, while two men examining the painting comment, “What’s done is

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done, so they might as well have given the address!” (Şerifoğlu 2003, 37). Although the painting was simply entitled “nude,” in the caricature its name was transformed to “hicab,” which can be translated either as shame or modesty. Still radical enough to garner humorous responses from the caricature press, the exhibit of a female nude was nonetheless possible. 1918 marked the end of war in Europe, but conflicts in Ottoman territories continued. After the defeat of the Central Powers, Istanbul was occupied by British forces. With the death of Sultan Mehmed V Reşad (r. 1909−1918) on July 4, 1918, Sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin (r. 1918−1922) ascended to the throne and took an anti-nationalist, pan-Islamist stance supported by the British and resisted by the nationalist forces gaining strength in Anatolia. Prince Abdülmecid became heir apparent, but supported the nationalist cause. While he made no overt reference to war in his works exhibited at the 1919 and 1920 Galatasaray Exhibitions, two paintings can be seen as referring to his political position. Both the landscape entitled, The place I would like to read the works of Faik Ali, and a large portrait of the poet Abdülhak Hamid underscored his continuing respect for the (defunct) Servet-i Funun movement and thus reiterated his stance against the state. Art largely ignored the ongoing war. Taking a break from his standard fare of landscapes, in 1917 Ali Rıza painted a work (exhibited in 1919) depicting a meal for breaking the Ramadan fast.81 The modest meal, consisting of a loaf of bread, soup, cheese, tomatoes, olives, and a lemon to squeeze into the soup, sits on a plain metal tray balanced on a stool. The absence of figures and Western furniture suggests a respect for non-figural Islamic mores and a conservative vision of life. Mehmed Ruhi’s 1919 painting Morning Prayers, showing an old man praying before light streaming in from a window, suggests inspiration similar to that of Ali Rıza: the desire to find succor in faith during a time of war, or a wistful desire to return to an idealized past. Abdülmecid praised this work as carrying inflections of A Thousand and One Nights – an odd reference, since the image of an old man praying should hardly have seemed so far removed (Yağbasan 2004, 49). Yet the image is also remarkable in that Ruhi was looking for a means to affirm prayer through an artistic modality alien to its cultural norms. Images of the war were rare. Ruhi’s most closely related work, Group on the Bridge was a small watercolor in orange tones depicting a group of English soldiers on the Galata Bridge overlooking the Istanbul skyline as an old Turkish man and a young Turkish boy look on from the edge of the frame. It is the only representation of the occupation which entered the Galatasaray Exhibitions, but due to its medium, was not considered worthy of mention by any critics. İbrahim’s depiction of irregular forces from the Aegean, known as Efe, also makes oblique reference to the war, but depicts a group of men being seen off by women rather than actually engaged in battle, implied only by the presence of a rifle. Mehmed Sami’s Attack at Aydın of 1921 presented a rare direct reference to war, unseen since the 1918 exhibit. Rather than representing the era, Mehmed Ruhi used art to support the war effort, producing postcards that emphasized the plight of refugees and the importance of joining the war effort (fig. 69).

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Many artists chose subjects even more remote from war. Hüseyin Zekai continued his engagement with still-life, while Mehmed Sami, Hikmet, Namık İsmail, Nazmi Ziya and İbrahim focused on small landscapes. Such choices might seem to reflect the taste of a conservative audience; however, several contemporary critics lament the lack of public interest in the exhibits and the absence of a culture of art: Although we have many prosperous and wealthy people who do not hesitate to spend hundreds of liras for their own largely empty pleasures, they will not make the smallest sacrifice for the sake of adorning their homes with a couple of beautiful works of art. It is often observed that the elaborate walls of an imposing drawing room are hung with no other works of art than an enlarged photograph in a shining gilt frame or colour prints purchased either from one of the picture shops on Yüksekkaldırım or together with the furnishings themselves from a furniture shop. With such an attitude, our country’s artistic life cannot progress (Şerifoğlu 2003, 39). Lack of interest in the exhibits may reflect the lack of content in the paintings. Despite the British occupation which permeated every aspect of life in the capital, Mehmed Sami’s landscape of Beykoz, a placid view of the Bosporus, won the annual award. More than the content, it was the act of artmaking which was interpreted by the press. The newspaper Tasvir-i Efkar praised artists only for making art despite the unfavorable circumstances, while Akşam similarly admired their work as inspired by the desire to prove a national talent (Şerifoğlu 2003, 39). Similarly, in 1920, the works praised most highly by the newspaper Tasvir-i Efkar were portraits and landscapes by Feyhaman, admired for his apoetic, realistic approach which followed

69: Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Deployment, from a set of twelve postcards. 1914.

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the rules of art and contrasted with the canvases of İbrahim, whose “talent had been sacrificed to his unruly genius” (Şerifoğlu 2003). In taking a relatively formal view of art, such critiques avoided engagement with the subject matter−or its irrelevance to contemporary life. Respected journalist Ahmed Haşim addressed the issue of content through the use of a cross-cultural metaphor. While his series of three articles in İleri suggests the importance he gave the exhibit, he lamented both its disorganization and lack of audience. He compared the situation of Turkish painters to the characters in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind, in which the leader of a group of blind men going through a large forest suddenly dies, and the blind are left to their fate. No doubt our painters are not blind. How could they be, they are neither ears nor noses, nor feet: each is but a pair of eyes opened to life, light, and the mystique of the atmosphere. But this eye has a lack worthy of amazement: that with it our painters are completely unable to see themselves (Şerifoğlu 2003, 32). Given the heavy censorship which led to a paucity of literary production during World War I, neither artists nor critics probably felt at liberty to touch public nerves through their works. Although art had been used for broadly propagandistic objectives only two years earlier, without the express sponsorship of the Department of War, even clearly nationalistic images might have been perceived as having multiple messages, especially as the Ottoman army fragmented and the Turkish national army began to emerge under the leadership of several prominent generals who had defected from the imperial army. By 1923, Ahmed Cevdet’s criticism of Turkish painting was far more direct: he called upon painters to “give precedence to patriotic subjects, to try to keep the traditions of the homeland alive, and to depict events of their own time” (Elif Naci 1933, 7−8).

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The events “of their own time” were dramatic indeed. A Greek onslaught in 1919 led to outright war until 1922, by which time the nationalist forces, under the leadership of the former Ottoman general Mustafa Kemal, had established a new government in Ankara. When the sultanate was abolished by the new parliament on November 1, 1922, Sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin retained the title of caliph, but soon left the country. On November 18, Prince Abdülmecid was elected as the last caliph from among three nominees. He thus became the only member of the Ottoman royal family to become caliph without ascending to the throne, and also the only one to be elected. The new Republic of Turkey was recognized internationally through the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24, 1923. How was art to represent this young nation? From Empire to Republic The shift from the Ottoman to the republican era is perhaps most dramatically marked in the work of Hüseyin Avni. Around 1921−1922, he was painting decorative scenes of pastel-toned Oriental fantasies for a mural at Prince Abdülmecid’s Bağlarbaşı Palace, as well as a similar work, A Page from the Times of Nefi, which was first displayed at the Galatasaray Exhibit in 1922 and later purchased by Mustafa Kemal for the presidential palace at Çankaya (fig. 70). The former work, situated around and above a doorway, features a mosque on a hillside and several groupings of young figures, mostly women, clad in gauzy Orientalist village clothing. The latter depicts a love scene in which a man in a turban offers a cup of wine to a girl lying on a garden wall. They present an art nouveau fantasy of the Orient for an elite audience imagining itself as Western. These escapist, decorative themes were soon interrupted for the far more weighty commission by Prince Abdülmecid to record the investiture ceremony following his election as caliph by the new republican congress. It was the first time in Turkish history that painting was to be used to record contemporary events. Like Mehmed Ruhi’s far more modest Morning Prayers, this work united Islam and Western representational practice. Although never recast in the monumental format which Abdülmecid foresaw, three small, on-site oil sketches were produced: one of the investiture ceremony at which the caliph was sworn in; one of his night procession

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from the gate of the Topkapı Palace to the nearby main imperial mosque (Hagia Sophia): and one of the two-hour lessons given by the caliph to a select group at the palace during the first eight days of Ramadan.82 For the first and last time in the history of Islam, the investiture ceremonies of its leader were documented by a Muslim in a medium and mode of depiction developed in the West, suggesting a caliph who envisioned a more culturally syncretic Islam suited for a modern age. However, on March 3, 1924, the caliphate was abolished and all members of the royal family were ordered to leave the country. That night, Abdülmecid and his family left for Switzerland. They soon moved to France, where he died in 1944 shortly before the end of World War II. The Ottoman Empire expired as an era of radical reform began. The artists of the Ottoman era became the first interpreters of the new Republic of Turkey, and their concerns, interests, limitations, and desires informed art in Turkey for several decades. They served as the teachers of a new generation of artists who would bring their own translations of artistic modernism to the nation as they returned and began to exhibit and teach in the 1930s. Speaking on behalf of Mustafa Kemal at the opening of the 1923 Galatasaray Exhibition, the writer and politician Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver; 1885−1966) summarized the state’s view of the role of painting in Turkey: If Turkish painting, which today has a history of fifty or sixty years, had begun earlier, then that great past would not have been so deprived of memorials. Ottoman history resembles a gravestone surmounted by a great turban that we watch through a window in a cemetery wall. The hand which portrays this turban was stopped when it reached the face. All of Ottoman history is like this stone on which the face beneath the turban has not been depicted.

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We are additionally grateful to our painters for beginning to record the recent instead of the distant past… From Bellini up to the time of Valeri, who was appointed teacher at our own Academy of Fine Arts, the subject of Turkey has been painted by those who are not Turks, but now our painters have taken this sphere into their own hands (Elif Naci 1933, 6−7).83 Hüseyin Avni was one of the first artists inspired to portray his own era, which he did through allegorical images of war. In the complementary paintings Dark Day and White Day (which never developed beyond an oil sketch), he attempted to show the gap between the ravages of war and the promise of peace (fig. 71). Like him, in Harvest of 1923, Namık İsmail addressed the celebration of victory through a carefully conceived metaphor. Although this work has never been interpreted as conveying meaning, as one of the largest paintings in the Turkish canon of which the artist created two versions, it seems unlikely that the artist did not consider its narrative possibilities. The work depicts a farmer drinking water from an earthenware jug, pausing in his labor as his oxen, harnessed to a plow, await him in an open field of wheat (pl. 12). The painting is suffused with bright sunshine; the farmer quenches his thirst after fruitful labor. After an era of intense privation, in which a tenth of the male population had died in war and much of the country had suffered famine, the coming of peace signified a return to the potential bounty of normal life. Reflecting the rhetoric of the revolution, which focused on the nation as the

71: Hüseyin Avni (Lifij). Dark Day. 1923.

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collective embodiment of the common man, Harvest personifies the people finally reaping the rewards of their hard-earned labor. Also responding to the end of war, Ömer Adil’s 1924 Call to Duty shows a family seated at a table (pl. 13). Behind them to the left is a map of Turkey, on which the Eastern borders are already delineated while the contested southern borders are obscured by the head of the woman in the foreground. The woman, at home and therefore not wearing a head covering, is shown sewing, a common trope of late Ottoman and early republican depictions of women as modernized, yet still engaged in domestic activities. A landscape painting hangs on the wall in the right background of the image, suggesting a modern home in which Western forms have become common. A soldier sits in three quarter profile turned away from the viewer. He looks at an old man seated across from him at the table. A young girl stands behind the old man, gently leaning on his chair. They all look intently at his hand, pointing to the map. The painting creates a national mythology through the celebration of wartime patriotism. It transcends the mundane domestic sphere by mimicking the structure of Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, in which the map and the landscape painting take the place of the chiaroscuro and become the subject of a secularized drama which functions through the gaze of the actors rather than through lighting effects. Ömer Adil inverts the composition laterally, replacing the resurrected Christ with the elderly teacher and the two disciples with the soldier and girl. The elderly Emmaus is replaced by the woman setting aside her sewing, and the complex still-life at the center of the Caravaggio is replaced by an “Oriental” carpet, placed not as in a Ottoman home (where tables were themselves a novelty), but as in paintings such as those of Holbein through which Oriental carpets had gained renown in Europe. In keeping with the shift in lighting, the dramatic gestures of the original work have been replaced by calm stoicism. For the first time in Ottoman painting, these works use space to draw the viewer into an alternate reality which serves as a creative metaphor of common circumstance. In contrast to landscape and still-life paintings, many of which shied away from the overt production of meaning, and in contrast with history painting, which presented an unwavering glorification of empire, these paintings suggest meaning through the creative use of compositional and expressive tactics. Not simply mimetic of the real world or informative illustrations, they use a language borrowed from the tradition of painting itself. This awareness of tradition, through which painting becomes “a field without origin except in other paintings,” played a key role in the development of modern art as aware of its own archive (Bryson 1981, 120). Although these paintings refer to the idiom of the Western tradition, they do not depend on them for their meaning; they stand as fully capable translations not of specific works, but of a practice of artmaking, and as such make reference without relying on the omnipresence of their referents. As Hal Foster points out, Baudelaire cited this as one of the key requirements for a great work within an artistic tradition (Foster 2002, 67). By partaking of the mnemonic language of Western art, these artists began to partake of its tradition.

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The Representation of Victory Portraits became one of the first genres called upon to memorialize victory. Generally focusing on one person, Mustafa Kemal, these portraits show a subtle shift from his public persona as one of several important military leaders to the sole father of the nation. During his lifetime, the only large-scale oil portrait commissioned by the state of another figure took place very early on: Hüseyin Avni depicted Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak (1876−1950) in 1923 (fig. 72). One of the main commanders of the War for Liberation, he served as the prime minister of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 1921 and 1922. With the rise of the preeminent general of the War of Liberation, Mustafa Kemal, as president of the young nation, Fevzi Çakmak became the Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Army until 1944. The earliest portraits of Mustafa Kemal also depicted him as a field marshal. The first was executed by Mihri and presented to him during a return visit to Turkey in the early 1920s (Toros 1988, 13−15). Although the portrait initially hung in the Ankara Halkevi, it was given as a gift to the Yugoslav King Alexander, and was destroyed during World War II (Toros 2007).84 As in Avni Lifij’s portrait of Fevzi Çakmak, this portrait celebrates Mustafa Kemal’s achievements through the attributes of his office such as his uniform and binoculars. Nazmi Ziya executed another early portrait in 1925, again entitled Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal (fig. 73). He is depicted in military costume, wearing the kalpak hat that would later be perceived as affiliated with Islamic identity. Likewise, the few portraits executed by foreign artists emphasized his military persona. Although his portrait had been executed as early as 1916 by the Austrian artist Victor Krausz, the first state commission of his portrait to a foreigner

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did not occur until 1926, when Arthur Kampf (1865−1950), Director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, executed two portraits of him in his field marshal uniform, one equestrian and another standing. Although the paintings were initially hung at the Çankaya Presidential Palace, Mustafa Kemal disliked them (Erbay and Erbay 2006, 129). Between 1933 and 1937, Feyhaman, Hikmet, İbrahim, and Namık İsmail each completed multiple portraits of him in formal coats and tuxedos, at times even working from the same photographs. Both the content and the medium of the portraits served to disseminate the image of the president as a modern figure. At the same time, portraits cemented the loyalty of the artists and the academy at which they taught to the state, underscoring the political role of art as a promoter of Western reform. During the same period, monumental sculpture depicting him began to punctuate public squares throughout the country. In 1925, competitions were opened for monuments at Taksim Square in Istanbul and Ulus Square in Ankara, won by the Italian Pietro Canonica and the German Heinrich Krippel, respectively (Erbay and Erbay 2006, 71). Heinrich Krippel’s first memorial to Mustafa Kemal was placed at Sarayburnu, the tip of the peninsula of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, on October 3, 1926. While the pose is somewhat heroic, the sculpture is fairly small, unprepossessing, and placed in a secluded location. A man in a suit standing, feet apart, with a hand on one hip on a plinth twice his size, it is a sculpture easy to miss. Yet such monuments brought into practice very new ideas about representation. Responding to a question posed in Bursa in 1923 concerning monuments, Mustafa Kemal had explained: The monuments to which our friend refers must be sculpture. Every nation that wants to be civilized, progressive and evolved must, no matter what, make sculpture and educate sculptors. Those who claim that the erection hither and thither of statues memorializing history contravenes religion have not examined and researched the laws of the sharia to the extent they deserve. One thousand three hundred years have passed since his excellency the prophet established the religion of Islam. At the time of the honorable prophet’s delivery of the holy commands, those he spoke to had idols in their hearts and souls. In order to invite these people to the path of the righteous he had to throw away these pieces of stone and take them out of their pockets and hearts. Once the truth of Islam had been fully comprehended and the moral opinion that emerged had been strengthened by powerful events, to assume and believe that enlightened people would worship such pieces of stone is to insult the entirety of Islam... A nation who cannot make statues is a nation who cannot do the things required by science; and one must admit that such a nation has no place on the road to progress... (Gür 2001, 157−8). Symbolic of republicanization, secularization, and the great leader himself, monuments proliferated throughout the nation. The second monument to Mustafa

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Kemal, unveiled on October 29, 1926 in Konya, reflects the difficulties of producing a local idiom. Again designed by Krippel, the statue was placed on a massive plinth designed following the neo-Ottoman architectural principles which informed the First National Architectural Style during the early republic. Partially reflecting the non-figural Ottoman monuments which had been erected in Istanbul during the late nineteenth century, the monument attempted to bring together the European and Ottoman three-dimensional visual traditions in a manner which was never again replicated, perhaps because of its failure to represent the modern in its synthesis (Kreiser 1997). On October 29, 1927, a major equestrian monument by Pietro Canonica was unveiled in front of the new Ankara Ethnographic Museum, and a standing monument was erected five days later in Sıhhiye Square in Ankara. On November 24, Krippel’s third monument to Mustafa Kemal was erected in the new Ulus Square in Ankara. Although the first monument to commemorate common soldiers alongside their leader, it locates him on horseback on a high plinth, while footsoldiers almost mingle with pedestrians. Another iconographically complex monument designed by Pietro Canonica was erected in Taksim Square on July 8, 1928. It depicts Mustafa Kemal leading the battle on one side and posing as a statesman along with İsmet İnönü, Fevzi Çakmak, and other leaders on the other. Canonica’s fourth monument to Mustafa Kemal, erected on July 27, 1932 in Izmir, depicts him in an equestrian pose reminiscent of the classical tradition. While also using an equestrian pose, Krippel’s Samsun monument of January 15, 1932 enhances the figure by showing the horse rearing. Again making use of an arched plinth reminiscent of Ottoman architectural style, it simplifies and modernizes it. Ironically, rather than normalizing portraiture, the reproduction and proliferation of presidential portraits throughout the country reduced the potential diversity and expressiveness of the genre. Portraiture became less a genre of interpretive representation than a signifier of an ever-present signified, Atatürk himself. The portrait came to function as an oath, on the part of schools, businesses, offices, and private homes where portraits were (and are) displayed, that under the watchful eye of Atatürk, made present through his portrait, his principles would be followed (Özyürek 2004). In contrast to the portraits of Sultan Mahmud II, decommissioned after his death, the portraits of Atatürk proliferated after his passing, in effect taking his place within public space and acting as oxymoronic icons of secularism. As a result, they act less as windows onto the world than as signs. Although their reproductions are ubiquitous in Turkey and form the basis of popular familiarity with painting and especially sculpture, they have largely been ignored in histories of Turkish art, where they would have little place in narratives designed to parallel dominant narratives of Western art history. Conversely, they have periodically served as targets of vandalism by anti-secular groups who generally throw paint or break the sculptures – ironically artistic acts which suggest that once art forms have entered a culture, even their destruction has difficulty in erasing their communicative modality. The utilization of art as a sign of political allegiance affected the latitude with which it could employ the language of painting. True to Ahmed Cevdet’s suggestion at the 1923 Galatasaray Exhibit that painting express patriotism, the subject of

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history paintings became circumscribed to the commemoration and celebration of Mustafa Kemal and the reforms he led. In 1931, Ruhi received a state commission for four moderately large (111 x 147 cm) paintings about the transfer of power from the occupying forces to the Turkish army in 1923. All were probably based on photographs, perhaps accounting for the uncharacteristically stiff quality of the figures and colors. The series begins with the French Commander Franchet d’Esperey’s entry into Istanbul on February 8, 1919. He rides a horse which was a gift of the Greeks of Istanbul, emphasized by the prominent Greek flags lining the boulevard along which he and his men ride. The second painting in the series commemorates the transfer of power from the occupying forces to the Turkish forces through a ceremony taking place in front of the Dolmabahçe Palace clock tower with a warship in the background. The third and most famous of the paintings shows Mustafa Kemal arriving by ship to Istanbul, a city he had boycotted during the occupation. He is greeted by numerous figures on boats, most prominently a group of young women in light, Western clothes seen from behind in the foreground of the image (fig. 74). The fourth shows the Turkish army, led by Mustafa Kemal, parading through Taksim Square. Entirely uncharacteristic of Ruhi’s academic, realist style, the brightly colored work suggest art harnessed by the state rather than the development of a national style on the part of the artist. While reflecting the genre of history painting, they reflect a frozen vision of history. Serving as an illustration rather than as an interpretation, the paintings may use an artistic medium, but function instead

74: Mehmed Ruhi (Arel). Atatürk’s Welcome to Istanbul. 1931.

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as a visual translation of a canonical historical text. Many artists of the 1914 generation began to shift their interest towards Ankara in works designating symbolic features of the still nascent city, such as the fortress towering over the city painted by Namık İsmail in 1927, and Kurbağlıdere, a stream that ran through a section of Ankara which became the subject of works by Hasan Vecih and Hikmet, the closest to a seascape which artists accustomed to the landscape of Istanbul could muster on the arid Anatolian plateau (Yaman 2003; fig. 75). Much as Ankara had to be created as a modern city through the work of urban planners like Hermann Jansen who drafted its plan in 1926, artists felt a need to create views of the city through which to perceive the new capital. While many artists used its fortress as a symbolic element, Sami Yetik’s repeated portrayal of its traditional marketplace emphasized its rural, Anatolian character despite all modernization efforts (fig. 76). Istanbul continued to dominate the landscapes of Nazmi Ziya, Namık İsmail, Hikmet, and Hüseyin Avni. Artists also used images of women to express the cultural shifts which rapid modernization entailed. With the state’s encouragement to remove the veil and enter the workforce, the status of women was one of the most visible signs of change in the nation. As İbrahim’s portrait of a woman wearing a sheer sleeveless gown, a fashionable hat, and holding a folded fan suggests, the modern woman could take on new identities completely divorced from traditional roles (fig. 77). And yet how much had women’s life actually changed? While İbrahim depicts a modern woman,

75: Namık İsmail. Ankara Fortress. 1927.

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his painting provides no clue whether she is a prostitute or a member of the modern elite. Like a modern odalisque, she signals male pleasure. For many artists, while women were a trope of modernity, their modernity was still well within the bounds of traditional femininity, as in paintings of women sewing by Hikmet in 1924, İbrahim in 1927, and Melek Celal in 1923 and 1936, and as in Feyhaman’s Girl with Dog of 1925 (pl. 14). Although these paintings have often been interpreted as signs of the modern role afforded to women by the republic, the frequent tropes of mother and child and of sewing women can also be interpreted as reaffirming female domesticity within modernized practices of dress and behavior. Indeed, the woman of action that Melek Celal imagined in parliament in 1936, two years after women won the right to run for election, is faceless, more an imaginary figure addressing a parliament apparently populated by women, than a real voice (fig. 78). Similarly, the close affiliation between the scene of women enjoying public space in Nazmi Ziya’s 1935 Taksim and the Taksim monument to Mustafa Kemal in the background underscores the ideological role of the image of woman more than necessarily representing widespread change (fig. 79). Despite the use of women as a symbol of modernity, and despite the promise of women’s movements during the last decade of the Ottoman era, during the first years of the republic very few women participated in public exhibitions. During the first decade of the republican era, style, genre, and subject matter largely served patriotic rather than aesthetic objectives. As art was pressed into the service of political modernization, it represented readily legible topics and themes without consideration of aesthetic or stylistic issues. Far from the intellectual concerns of modernist movements in the West, art in the Turkish Republic sought neither

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originality nor rebellion. Rather, it became a communicative organ of a revolutionary state which used the traditions of another culture to affect and commemorate radical changes at home. Art and Its Institutions in the Early Republic Financial hardship contributed to the need for artists to seek state support. Writing in 1933, Elif Naci explained, “We have neither a gallery nor documents to help us take account of these ten years. Most of our artists paint over the works of the previous year and exhibit the same canvases year after year. Thus their salaries, so low as to not afford them new canvases, have erased the documents with which to write a history of Turkish art” (Elif Naci 1933, 4). Both cooperative organizations and state programs sought to remedy this problem by promoting art. As the Society of Ottoman Artists changed its name to the Organization of Turkish Artists [Türk Ressamlar Cemiyeti] in 1921, the Union of Turkish Fine Arts [Türk Sanayi−i Nefise Birliği] in 1926, and The Organization of the Union of Fine Arts [Güzel Sanatlar Birliği Cemiyeti] in 1929, it remained an administrative union geared towards facilitating exhibition and popularization. The Galatasaray Exhibitions continued annually until 1951, moving to Ankara for several years after 1926 (Şerifoğlu 2003, 22). The state encouraged artists to accept the shift in venue by establishing a system of gold, silver, and bronze awards for the juried exhibit the same year.

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State-operated banks began to play an important role in arts patronage. Commissions for unprecedentedly large paintings such as İbrahim’s 1928 Harvest (450 x 530 cm) and Namık İsmail’s 1929 The Great Veteran among the Farmers (450 x 500 cm) provided new professional opportunities for artists, but circumscribed the artistic freedom by limiting subject matter and requiring clear, ideological messages (Ziraat Bankası 2006). Although ostensibly similar in subject matter to Harvest of 1923, the earlier work had operated on two levels, both as an image of agrarian idealism and as a metaphor for the end of revolution. In contrast, the emphasis on collective agriculture and on the nation’s leader removed the possibility of multiple interpretations of these works. As established artists used traditional styles for official purposes, emerging artists had more freedom to experiment with modernism. In 1923, students finishing their studies at the academy established a New Arts Organization [Yeni Resim Cemiyeti]. The group, composed entirely of men, exhibited its work in Ankara on May 15, 1924, and many paintings were purchased by the Ministry of Education. Elif Naci relates that their work was influential on older artists as well, who exhibited more nationalist works at the Galatasaray Exhibition in July (1933, 8−11). Most of these young artists took the opportunity offered by the Ministry of Education to study abroad, either in Paris or in Munich. The first artists to return were Ali Avni (Çelebi; 1904−1993) and Ahmed Zeki (Kocamemi; 1900−1959), who studied with Hans Hofmann (1880−1966) in Munich and brought Expressionism to Turkey in 1927 at the 11th Galatasaray Exhibition. However, the older generation disapproved of their new styles. Observing that even Picasso had by that time forgone Cubism in favor of classicism, Namık İsmail failed to see it or its derivative movements as a worthwhile addition to Turkish artistic practice: Even concerned with being new and original, calm has started to descend on the artist of this wild parade of the insane and the fashionable. Even the leader of this movement, Picasso, having passed the cubist and dada styles, is now producing academic works older than the classics (Elif Naci 1933, 20). Conversely, Cubism was also perceived as the style of modern rationalism and democracy (İsmail Hakkı 1931). This debate, between accessible academism (by then inclusive of Impressionism) and Cubism as representing the social avant-garde, opened the first chapter of modern art in the Turkish Republic when the dominance of artists who had come of age during the Ottoman era began to wane in the 1930s. These young artists saw themselves as the first to integrate intellectual concerns into modern Turkish art. Berk suggests that it would be better to consider the artists of the late nineteenth century as craftsmen rather than artists. Writing as one of the young artists who saw himself as bringing ‘true’ modernism to Turkey, he explains: They had no claim of expressing their inner worlds... They had neither a world view nor a philosophy. Esentially the situation of Turkey in the world concert at that time it was not suitable for thinkers and artists to be interested

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in the movements of their era. In fact, one could not even speak of a national consciousness such as we understand today. Can we find intellectual intentions for the second era beginning in 1914? We think not. The difference between the artists of this age and their predecessors was their adoption of Impressionism, which had once been so revolutionary in Europe, and their attempt to refresh the palette of Turkish painting which they found as photographic as it was dark (Berk 1943, 36). Likewise, Elif Naci presented his own era as a period of unprecedented innovation: For ten years, painting has buried the specter of zealotry that stood over it like the watchman of a grave, in the face of broad freedom and incentive has stretched away the lethargy and wiped away the crust of sleep from its eyes as it goes towards rebirth (Elif Naci 1933, 5). Surrounded by an ideology of republicanism which downplayed Ottoman-era modernization, the new generation saw their own era as far more revolutionary than that of their teachers or earlier predecessors. Thus their accounts of the era – the first art histories of Turkey − are biased towards their own excellence. In July, 1929, returning artists aiming to popularize modernist movements in Turkey established the Union of Independent Painters and Sculptors (Müstakil Ressamlar ve Heykeltraşlar Birliği) based on the French La Société des Artistes Indépendants.85 With one exhibit in 1928 at the Ankara Ethnographic Museum before settling on their name, the group had four exhibitions before disbanding in 1933. That same year, a group of artists devoted to Cubism and Constructivism began to call themselves the ‘d Group,’ a name chosen to indicate that they were as the fourth group of artists since the Ottoman period.86 Interested in promoting modernism, the group reflected the influence of André Lhote, with whom many of the younger artists studied in Paris. As a result of their exhibitions, which continued until 1947, Cubism and deformation of the visual field became hotly debated issues among Turkish artists during the 1930s and 1940s. However, as part of their drive to produce art with a local appeal, the artists of the d Group were eager to develop Turkish motifs and subject matter in their work, and many participated in the statesponsored Homeland Tours [Yurt Gezileri] program, during which artists painted and taught in remote towns throughout Anatolia between 1938 and 1943. During this period, the state began to sponsor large exhibitions. Taking place annually between 1933 and 1937, Exhibitions of the Revolution [İnkılap Sergileri] were established to commemorate the War for Liberation. Annual State Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture took their stead as of 1939. Works inflected with national sentiment often incorporated modernist stylistic innovations. For example, Cemal Tollu (1899−1968) clearly modeled his study of Manisa for his circa 1937 work The Burning of Manisa during the War for Liberation on Cezanne’s numerous views of Mont Sainte Victoire (fig. 80). Despite the influx of new styles, the depiction of the new nation through

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portraiture, history painting, and landscape remained an important part of the practice of young artists, particularly during the 1930s. Many artists paid homage to Mustafa Kemal by producing at least one portrait. Hamit Görele (1935), Zeki Kocamemi (1937), and Şeref Akdik (1940) were among the young artists who portrayed the president, but none of these works entered the mainstream of reproductions which have remained a mainstay of Turkish official visual culture. The historical genre painting encouraged by the Exhibitions of the Revolution and executed by the young artists concerning the war and the reforms of the republic were far more successful. Numerous artists took up subjects related to the war they had been too young to fight in. Such works include Şeref Akdik's The Entry of our Victorious Army into Çanakkale, Making Bayonets from Bread Platters, and his 1934 Atatürk by the Telegraph; Zeki Kocamemi’s 1935 Pack Animal Soldiers, Turgut Zaim’s 1933 Atatürk and his Friends at Arms, Halil Dikmen’s 1933 Women Carrying Arms to the Front during the War for Independence and Ali Avni Çelebi’s 1937 Brothers in Arms (fig. 81). Many artists also took on the subject of alphabet reform and teaching the populace, particularly women, to read, as evident in Şeref Akdik’s 1930 Alphabet Reform/Local School which includes a portrait of Atatürk above the blackboard, and Cemal Tollu’s 1933 Villagers Reading the Alphabet (fig. 82, pl. 15). While such images celebrate the dramatic reforms of the era, they also serve to mask the trauma which

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must have accompanied the reeducation of a nation first decimated by a decade of war then made illiterate through the alphabet reform of 1928. In his “Tenth Year Address” commemorating the foundation of the republic, Mustafa Kemal encouraged the nation to work even harder to reach and surpass the level of contemporary civilization. He emphasized the fine arts as a primary means of achieving this end. We will raise the level of our national culture beyond that of contemporary civilization. To this end, we must think not in terms of the lax mentality of past times, but in terms of the concepts of speed and movement of our era… Let us emphasize that the historic quality of the Turkish nation is to love and advance the fine arts. It for this reason that it is our national principle, always and by all means, to promote our nation’s high character, undying industriousness, innate intelligence, adherence to science, love of the fine arts, and sense of national unity. This principle, which suits the Turkish nation so well, will enable it to perform its civilizational duty on the road to the true contentment of humanity. Frequently quoted, this ambition to surpass contemporary civilization presents a double-edged sword. In constructing this as a national aim, the speaker takes the

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notion of the “contemporary” out of contemporaneous time and instead associates it with teleological progress. Through the self-consciousness of this objective, the nation becomes always already excluded from the benchmark of contemporary civilization (Chakrabarty 2000, 87). Wed to this project, art becomes not a vehicle of cultural discourse, but a vehicle of a metanarrative of progress always self-consciously fumbling and tripping over its belatedness. Indeed, the fine arts which were designed to celebrate the nation were quite distant from ‘the contemporary’, and instead deeply ensconced in the traditions of allegorical history painting a century earlier. Two works produced for the Exhibitions of the Revolution illustrate the contemporary relationship between art and the state: Arif Bedii Kaptan’s 1934 Giving the Republic to the Youth and Zeki Faik’s 1933 On the Road to Revolution (fig. 83, pl. 16). Like the works of 1923, these works mimic traditions of allegorical history painting. Yet in their close adherence to earlier models, they are nearly parodic. While these artists were modernists and among the founders of the d Group, the arts sanctioned by the state were far more closely affiliated with social realism, an alternative aesthetic mode officially sanctioned in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union (Antliff 2002). In this sense, of course, the work was contemporary; but in its recognizable reapplication of well-known paintings it was closer to an unselfconscious post-modernism. This gap between the adoption of

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a form common to pre-modern political painting in a modernist environment and the literal quotation of works executed centuries earlier reflects the chasm created by differential modernism. Arif Kaptan’s Gift of the Republic to the Youth presents a visual reprise of Mustafa Kemal’s “Speech to the Turkish Youth” of 1927, where he entrusts new generations with the protection of the nation from a plague of ills cast after his own experience of the revolution − occupation by the victors of World War I, as well as treachery from leaders within the nation (particularly that of the Ottoman sultan, who accepted the occupation). In the painting, Mustafa Kemal, wearing a white tuxedo, bowtie, and vest, stands in the center. Before him, two partially-clad male figures, one in green and the other in red, hold up a blond child in a pink shirt as though receiving it from the paternal figure. The three figures stand on thick white clouds. On the left behind them, a draped male figure with a military hat, the handle of a sword held in his ready fist, stands before a flag. On the right, a figure holds a burning torch. Toppled figures marked with Ottoman symbols such as a turban occupy the foreground. Although a poor portrait, the image clearly represents Atatürk, handing over the nation (the atypically blond baby) to youth (the two draped men). The green tunic of one of the men hints at Islamic identity, while the red wrestling costume of the other suggests the color of the flag. Indeed, it is the man in red who holds the baby,

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while the one in green supports it from a few steps away. The repetition of athletic tropes – the wrestling costume, the torch, the hilt of the sword which doubles as a medal – suggests an awareness of the symbolism of national prowess vested in the Olympics, in which Turkey would participate for the first time in 1936, winning two medals for wrestling. Considered with reference to Western painting, Arif Kaptan’s work presents an awkward transcription of the Catholic tropes which dominate so much of the Western tradition. The lone figure holding a baby in the center of the painting brings to mind a virgin and child ensconced in clouds. And yet here the virgin is a man who in real life had no children but adopted several, educating the girls as models for the nation’s women. The two figures flanking him echo the structure of a crucifixion, with Mustafa Kemal as Christ, and the youths as Mary Magdalene and St. John the Younger. The imagery, then, becomes highly charged, as the young nation is equated with the Christ child, an eternal embodiment of the sacrificed prophet, Atatürk.87 Much as the portraits of Atatürk had begun to function as an icon for the modern state, this painting supplies a Christian compositional framework for a largely Muslim, albeit secular, nation. The problem of quotational allegory is even more pronounced in Zeki Faik’s On the Road to Revolution, a direct transposition of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People of 1830. Delacroix’s work shows the anthropomorphic figure of Liberty, a strong woman holding the French flag representing Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, leading an army of revolutionaries from all classes over the toppled figures of the ancien régime trampled under their feet. The work was initially purchased by the state to hang in the throne room of the Luxemburg Palace as a reminder to the citizenking Louis-Philippe, but was deemed too controversial and, after its initial reception at the Salon of 1831, was not exhibited as a celebration of the July Revolution until much later in the century (Boime 2004, 257). Unlike Arif Kaptan’s imagery, which mimics the form but not the content of Western narrative painting, Zeki Faik’s work directly transposes the imagery of a famous allegorical work. In the foreground, the old regime is represented again by toppled figures. In the center, a woman carries the Turkish flag. Far from being a semi-nude allegorical figure, she is not only clothed, but also wears a headscarf. Behind her on the right, a soldier with a bayonet, replacing the young boy with guns, looks at the dying old regime, and a figure behind him holds a lit torch. In front of her, a girl gazes up, stepping on an official document emblazoned with an inverted tuğra, the monogram of the sultan, and holding up a thick volume entitled Turkish Language and History, a reference to the contemporary project of developing Turkish national linguistic and cultural history through the Turkish Historical Thesis. Behind them, Atatürk, rather than the woman, leads the way forward with his pointed finger. Through the position in the painting, he replaces the figure of the middle class man in a top hat in the Delacroix, believed to be a self-portrait indicating the seminal role of the artist in revolution. With his other hand, Atatürk wraps a protective arm around a young man and a young woman, both wearing Western dress. Behind them, a woman tears a white headscarf from her head and the fortress of Ankara looms in the distance. Criticized for directly copying

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an earlier work, Zeki Faik defended his choice by citing the limitations created by the revolutionary theme of the exhibition. They said I stole it, but our situation was clear… Our technical ability was to express a scene of the revolution. That is, we are both distant and lacking the image power of Ingres and Delacroix! The real revolution is in the quality of those who participate in the state exhibition… Art needs the long haul, the strength and luck of generations is important; essences remain… (Elibal 1973, 157−8). Zeki Faik was aware of the restrictions placed on art by the thematic approach of state sponsorship, but this was the type of work which the state desired: another artist, Halil Dikmen recalls that the work received particular admiration from Atatürk, who took great pleasure in the subject as it was explained to him. As the painting translates a French allegory of nationhood into a Turkish idiom, the loss of symbolic representation in each of the figures entirely transforms its message. Within the academic tradition, the key female figure in the Delacroix is automatically perceived as allegorical. In the appropriated version, who is this woman holding a flag? Is she a clothed allegorical liberty, as in the statue in New York harbor? Or is she a personification of ‘the nation’ which has played out many of the controversies of modernity through the rights and images of women? Or is she just a woman commanded to march forward by the patriarchal figure of Mustafa Kemal? As such, is she a role-model for the young girl? Is she the symbolic liberated woman of modern Turkey? Significantly, it is not she who leads, but who follows. While Delacroix’s Liberty looks back in order to lead her minions forward, this woman looks to Mustafa Kemal for guidance: no transfer of vision takes place from the great leader to the personified nation. Indeed, replacing the middle-class revolutionary with the president, Zeki Faik takes power away from the people and vests it instead in a single figure who must, for all eternity, keep the young teachers of the nation under his wing. Those he protects are the modern few, not the multiplicity of classes suggested by Delacroix, and certainly not the predominantly rural populace of 1930s Turkey. The work depicts dependence not on a revolutionary ideal, but a paternalistic leadership antithetical to egalitarianism or democracy. The painting attempts to suggest “as in France, so in Turkey”, but the ideals have been lost in translation. Much as earlier adoptions such as landscape and portraiture had resembled the genres of Western painting in modality but not in discursivity, painting in the early republic engaged with the tradition of Western painting only to lose its interpretive spirit with the codification of patriotic expression. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, in the Western tradition, such an understanding of art reflects what Kant defines as ‘barbarous taste,’ the refusal or impossibility to distinguish between gratification and disinterestedness which defines the agreeable in terms of the interest of Reason, expecting “each image to fulfill a function, if only that of a sign” (Bourdieu 1991, 40). The dominance of the centralized state as the primary agent of artistic patronage, coupled with the needs of an emergent nation to press art into service as productive

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of nationalist signs, limited the language of painting to one that could be understood through straightforward codes. Ironically, at this very moment that art came to play a public role in Turkey, those aspects of painting that move it beyond the sign-style, referentiality, ambiguity, and expressive autonomy – were stripped away, and painting became a language barred from speaking.

CONCLUSION

Painting was barred from speaking not simply as a translation from one culture to another, but through the limits placed on its critical interpretation. But is painting even a language, that it might be translated? This has been one of the primary concerns of art history ever since Alois Riegl suggested that such a language would require a historical grammar, and since Ernst Gombrich pointed out that pictorial meaning can only be fully translated to the extent that its signs are shared by artist and audiences (Woodfield 2009). One might try to parse the language of painting in a formalist manner, revealing the codes within it as though there were no social interface creating a meta-language. Alternatively, Jean-Louis Schefer asks, “What is the connection between the picture and the language inevitably used in order to read it – i. e., in order (implicitly) to write it? Is not this connection the picture itself ?” (quoted in Barthes 1991, 50). For him, painting gains meaning not through the internal organization of an intrinsic code, but through a continual blurring and leakage between the binary elements (of signifier and signified) within the painting as well as elements used in reading the painting that are adopted from a far broader lexical field. A painting, then, comes to be located in a langue of feasible readings for the work, producing a lexie of meanings ordered not simply by chronology or historical context, but also by the spectators’ experience. That is, painting functions as a very different sort of language, one not based on a closed system in which each signifier indicates a single signified, but an open system in which the signifieds are produced supplementarily to the language of the painting, which can never be contained in the absence of this supplementarity. For this reason, even an artist cannot know the full meaning of his or her work (Schefer 1995). This book has not looked at Ottoman art in the Western modality from the point of view of its own lexie, as this point of view would be impossible to reproduce retroactively. Likewise, it has not limited itself to the lexie of contemporary Turkey, which, through the processes of modernization and the passage of time, has lost many of the cultural elements which may have given meaning to these works within

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their original contexts. Instead, it attempts to broaden the palette of how these works can be interpreted by drawing on a wider lexie, comprised both of the local society, politics, and culture from which Ottoman artists emerged and which their audiences shared, as well as on the ever-changing European cultures that inspired their explorations of this new modality of artmaking. Ottoman and early Republican artists worked in a borrowed medium through a system of complex, mutually referential codes with which they had limited familiarity and thus sophistication. Barred by medium from drawing directly on the aesthetic and expressive traditions of the culture with which they were most familiar, as poets and musicians were able to do during the transition to modernity, they nonetheless grounded their work in their own hybrid cultures. Fine artists worked with a palette of colors tinted by the lexical associations through which they were able to produce complex meanings. The works are neither silenced historical documents nor ethnographic specimens afterall, but paintings functioning with the slippage of meaning that characterizes art. These works signal complex expressive processes grounded in disparate cultural experiences as individual artists made sense of their worlds. As the depiction of landscape emerged on walls in the late eighteenth century, artists translated existing practices of interior decoration into a new method appropriate for new architectural forms, but quite distinct from their models in the West. Likewise, as Ottoman soldierartists transcribed photographs into oils, they produced the effect of a Western form without comprehending its conceptual underpinnings. Their translations could be likened to the mechanical translations of a computer if not for the new meanings which they acquired within the empire. For while not partaking in the Western perspectival tradition, these works stretched from the world of girih pattern to that of oil painting, and acted less as communicators through a representational window than as signs of a newly emerging hybrid cultural identity. As cultural communication increased and artists enjoyed extended stays in the West, they began to more easily incorporate Western representational and conceptual practices into their work. However, their expressive range continually battled with the limits of the translation of meaning from one cultural context to another, as can be seen in the affinities for Realism in the work of Ahmed Ali and Süleyman Seyyid, as well as in the remobilized Orientalism of Osman Hamdi. Far from drawing from strictly bounded artistic sources in the West, making their work into a translation of a foreign practice, Ottoman artists were simultaneously engaged in their own social and political worlds, exploring ways in which to use the Western art modality to express issues of religion, patrimony, and national identity in an era of rapid change. Through their explorations, the first generations of Ottoman artists defined the subjectivity of the artist, creating the first works designed to act less as signals of Westernization than as signifiers of the world beyond the canvas. As art became an established profession, artists began to look for ways to engage audiences with their work, both to mould it into a communicative practice and to earn a living from their work. In contrast to Charles Le Brun, who, beginning in 1766, raised the consciousness of the French public towards art interpretation

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through the regular convening of the academy for a discourse on a selected work, Ottoman artists limited their artistic practice to the comprehension of their audiences (Bryson 1981, 32). In contrast to the close marriage between words and images taken on by the catalogues of the annual public salon in Paris, as well as by the extensive criticism of art developed by Denis Diderot, the Goncourt brothers, Théophile Thoré, Hyppolite Taine and Charles Baudelaire, art in Turkey developed alongside a largely journalistic critical practice that did not develop into a full-bodied literary mode through which art could gain complex and layered meanings subject to open public debate. As the formats of artistic exhibition were translated as dutifully as the murals in Ottoman homes a century earlier, the translation of the accompanying practices of interpretation was often just as literal rather than literary. Nonetheless, during an era of war, its political utility enabled art to enter public culture. The revolution that built the Republic of Turkey ripped the cultural canvas on which Ottoman artists had begun their practice. It transformed the musical, literary, linguistic, and visual cues understood as indigenous, creating nationalist uniformization and a complex sense of belonging that involved a perennial sense of belatedness. Artists who began their artistic practice in the latter years of empire remained powerful as teachers during the early years of the republic, but their artmaking ceased to develop after the revolution. While their work suggests strong support of and appreciation for the new government which had kept imperialism at bay, their later artmaking focused almost exclusively on the production of landscape paintings in a style often called Impressionism even though it addresses none of the optical, scientific, coloristic, or avant-garde aspects of French Impressionism.88 For Nazmi Ziya, this provided a means of constructing an artistic language for the people. For Hikmet, it provided a way to continue to express Ottoman cultural forms, such as mystical poetry, through a modern visual language. For Hüseyin Avni, highly coloristic landscapes may have provided a way to disengage from politics and escape into the realm of color after the exile of his friend and patron Prince Abdülmecid. Not all artists produced landscape exclusively: İbrahim and Feyhaman both continued to paint portraits until late in life, but none of their later works had the novelty or freshness of their youth. One might argue that these artists had simply grown old and set in their ways. And yet the blandness of much of their late work says a lot about the kind of voice they sought to foster through art. On the one hand, the state wanted to use culture as part of a nationalist quest to define the Turkish state in contradistinction to others; on the other, art was a vehicle for enabling the public to see their own world in the patently foreign modality of painting (Jusdanis 1995). Views of familiar scenes, particularly of the Bosporus, provided a novel means of viewing the world not because they were artistically innovative, but on the contrary, because they were not. Instead, they had a profoundly normalizing function in convincing the Turkish public to view the world in a perspectival, representational, and realist mode. The aesthetic introduced in the Journal of the Organization of Ottoman Artists that had affiliated the pleasures of nature with the pleasures of art and thereby made art appreciation appropriate within a religious society ultimately became a limit for the possibilities of artistic

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appreciation by a secularized Turkish public. These artists set boundaries not only for themselves, but also for their students. In the footsteps of their own teachers, who had been adamant about academic realism, they were adamant about Impressionism and strongly opposed to such modernist movements as Cubism and Constructivism, let alone less rationalist movements such as Surrealism, Expressionism or Dada which never emerged in Turkey. This boundary, like all restrictions set by the old for the young, met with opposition. Although the influence of the 1914 generation continued as many of them taught at the Academy of Fine Arts well into the 1960s, their styles and opinions began to be supplanted with new ones brought by artists returning from France and Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. With the increasing distance modernism forged between its forms and the classical artistic languages of medium and genre, the problem of reinventing a Turkish idiom based on the language of painting in the Western modality became less pronounced. As modernist abstraction and subsequent movements took center stage in the visual arts of the Turkish Republic, new issues emerged for new times. Nonetheless, derivative of movements which got their vitality and vision from revolutionary breaks with the past grounded in an ideal of originality, artistic modernism in Turkey lost its revolutionary bent as it replicated the forms of European modernism. Rather than participating in the modernist ethos which undermined the objectives of artmaking in the Western tradition, artists maintained the representational tradition which was still very new to most Turks. For them, artmaking remained less a mode of communicated subjectivity than a signal of Western identity and a literal representation of the world which artist and viewer were expected to interpret in the same way. Art took on a lexie of predefined texts: of nationhood, history, modern identity, and socio-political engagement. As such, it lost the essential character of modernist movements, a drive to raze and reconfigure perception of the world in an absolutely original way. Following the precepts of positivist progress rather than functioning a self-reflexive process of change, art became a vehicle towards a future imagined through external examples rather than towards one of its own imagination, a practice moving towards a prefabricated destination rather than an agent of uncharted creation. Yet the idea of originality has always included an element of unease. Writing from Tahiti to his dealer Ambroise Vollard, Paul Gauguin echoed the Kantian paradox, complaining that “the potential for commercial success seemed to depend on both his difference from others and his likeness to them. The fact that others imitated him would make his own work, otherwise so original as to be inassimilable, meaningful or acceptable to the public. Yet if he were copied, if he served as the original ‘copy’ for others, he might lose his originality – both his singularity and his priority – and his priority−and appear to be the copy of others” (Schiff 1984, 30). Similarly, OttomanTurkish artists were caught in a double bind: they had to make art that was both recognizable to a local audience, unfamiliar with Western forms, and identifiable within a discourse of Western art in the process of radical transformation. Western art demanded conformity to a principle and tradition of artmaking while also demanding originality. In order to partake of Western modernism, Ottoman and Turkish art was

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bound to be copy, and thereby to forgo the basic principle of modernism. And yet in being a copy, such art was also original. Not only did it serve to address a new audience within a new context, but it also made use of existing forms in new ways. As the French theorist Quatremere de Quincy suggested in 1823, “to imitate in the fine arts, is to produce the resemblance of a thing, but in some other thing which becomes the image of it” (Schiff 1984, 33−4). Ottoman-Turkish painting was the image not simply of its own cultural context, but of Western art taken as a holistic discourse. Although not original in form, it was original in content, an anamorphic mirror of the modernism to which it aspired and yet also avoided. This reflection of modernism did not simply comprise the artistic realm. Rather, the practice of art in the Ottoman Empire provides a reflection of modernity itself, not in its original form as developed in the West, but in its universal promise. Ottoman artists were not avant-garde in the artistic sense, but in its original political sense which entered the ideology of Turkey less through Saint-Simon than through Auguste Comte, who developed his theories of Positivism under the direct influence of SaintSimon’s early writings and whose ideology inspired reform in Turkish modernization. Thus it is not surprising that the objective of Ottoman artists was not to engage the discourse of art through innovation, but to change the discourse of society through the application of artistic styles. The idea of art for art’s sake, a phrase first used in the early nineteenth century and which can be understood as the Romantic counterpoint to the political contextualization of art, was not part of the development of Ottoman art in the Western modality (Egbert 1967, 344). Even art which appeared romantic, such as landscape painting, had an overarching political motivation and social utility communicated by its medium. In contrast with Servet-i Funun poetry, which built on an existing and very rich poetic tradition in espousing the notion of art for art’s sake, the visual arts could not rely on an established interpretive tradition. While the ethos of art in the Western modality may be grounded in originality, this examination of the translation of the Western tradition in art suggests how much art also depends on the codes through which meaning is made. The issue of ethics raised by Barthes concerning the creative individual operating from within a society becomes a moot point when seen from the vantage point of artists working outside a society which has the lexical tools to understand its art, and from within a society which does not. In part, this communicative barrier results from limited critical practice. In Turkey, as in many parts of the world, analytical art history has rarely broken through a conservative, positivist, and formalist stance in which almost nothing can be said about a work beyond its description, historical circumstance, and in which works are bound to whatever analysis, or lack thereof, which originally surrounded them (Elkins 2007, 5−9). The architectural historian Doğan Kuban touches on this issue in pointing out that: If it becomes possible to look at and evaluate an art that emerges from us with a theory that is ours, it will become necessary to define the notion of content within the confines of our cultural conditions, the objective of theory, and other concepts and questions like the following will emerge: If art is geared

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towards social objectives, how can an observer be affected in a society without a Western artistic tradition? (Kuban 1974) Duben tries to escape this conundrum by universalizing it: Knowing that it is difficult to get a handle on an art object, Western theorists try to found critical theory on the relationship and communication between the viewer/critic. Thus this problem is not particular to Turkey, but is universal. The essential problem is that even when people perceive the artwork through learning about it, they may be unable to understand all the connotations of cultural symbols (Duben 2007, 19). However, the problem is not simply one of symbolic knowledge, which can indeed be acquired, but the basic expectation of interpretive communication through the object, not to mention the cultural capital involved in deploying such knowledge. The problem emerges less from the absence of a local theory for a local practice, than with the fact that the very desire for a local theory depends on the kind of cultural cross-fertilization which those who object to the use of Western theory deny. As Chakrabarty points out, historical practice necessitates the production of subjects who are already European in their subjectivity, establishing a “hyperreal Europe” which makes the non-Western subject practicing history effectively European (Chakrabarty 2000, 27). In its attempt to address and analyze being as a totality, theory cannot be local in the sense that its modality is even more deeply rooted in the West than that of art. Indeed, Kuban inadvertently points to this when he says, I think that at this stage of world history the characteristic that makes Western culture dominant is its reality that is based on the object that can be seen in all of its stages. At the root of Western thought, there is a tendency to give the object and the phenomenon precedence over the human, and, going further, I would even say that Western culture has remained at a stage where it sees the human as an object (Kuban 1974)! In this binary perception of the West and the rest, it would seem, only a civilization devoted to the object could gain meaning from it. One which (supposedly) gives precedence to the human could not accept the mediation of the object, rendering the Hegelian function of art as a translator of the foreignness of the material world theoretically not only impossible, but a sign of a less progressive and materialist stage of what Kuban refers to as world history, a singularity ultimately rooted in Marxist Hegelianism, but inverted in terms of the hierarchy of progress. It would seem to follow that such an advanced society ought not to produce art, let alone art theory, at all. The cultural commentator Hasan Bülent Kahraman identifies the paucity of analytical art historical discourse in Turkey in a reluctance to look past the surface towards meaning:

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The Eastern approach to the object is entirely different from that of the West and it is difficult to claim that it has changed over time... The East perceives the object as unassailable. The object is part of an objective order, and that order is absolute. Not only can it not be superceded, it cannot even be discussed. The object can only exist in its perception, which is... defined by factual truths. Thus objects are the solidification of a prescribed reality beyond themselves... The mind is to be used not to perceive and solve the object, but to accept its verifiable presence. This is so much the case that the East never experienced the development of perspective the West experienced during the Renaissance, and never felt a need for it, because the effect of perspective (which emerged to establish foregrounded and backgrounded objects but was really a means of organizing them) is lived as though “from within,” cleansed of the debate between right and wrong. Eastern societies perceive reality as a preconceived order… and within this order there is no hierarchical dimension. For this reason, there is no perceived need for depth. The surface suffices for the plane of the image (Kahraman 2002, 16). Both Kuban’s essentialization and Kahraman’s refusal of history and context reify the apparently natural distinction between East and West in much the same way that Bourdieu points to museums as naturalizing the distinction between bourgeois and working class subjects (1997, 111). Yet it also provides insight into the absence of a critical discourse which finds no solution in the predominantly empiricist, largely monographic and catalogue studies that continue to be published on modern Turkish art. By essentializing the problem as inherent to an unchanging (and undifferentiated) “East,” Kahraman eradicates the possibility of change, as does the art historian Gören in citing it as an explanation of the absence of a Turkish art historical memory (Gören 2008, 62). Indeed, although contemporary Turkish art has been working within a Western modality for over two centuries, such comments suggest criticism remains wed to defining a “natural” mentality of the East: ahistorical, a-perspectival, and non-analytical. Instead of such essentialized positions, one might consider the conditions under which a culture of analysis (associated, in the end, only metaphorically with artistic perspectivalism) might emerge in parallel with an increasingly active civil society, institutions of education and exhibition, and organs of critical discussion. By moving beyond the descriptive and seeking a sociopolitically contextualized approach which conceives of artworks themselves as readerly modes of communication, this book has attempted to give voice to an art that has been made subaltern by the restrictions placed on its disciplinary legibility. Ultimately, the most appropriate question may not be whether painting is a language that may be translated, but how painting as an interface of communication depends on various types of political, social, critical, and visual discourses to give it voice within different cultures. The discourse surrounding art enables it to function as a creative medium of communication. The more limited that language, the more bounded the creativity of the artists trying to communicate with their society regardless of their own personal

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vision or richness of thought. The development of a communicative and effective art world in Turkey, integrated both with the world and with the nation, depends, then, not simply on marketing or participation in world art fairs and biennials, but also on the development of a discourse of art that reveals the interaction between past and present, not simply answering its riddles, but giving rise to new questions. This has been the objective of this book: not to provide an absolute or unassailable definition of the translation of art in the Western modality in the Ottoman Empire, but to suggest how this art might be discussed through the full richness of its lexical implications, and as a precedent on which later artists have continued to develop their art and build their relationships with audiences, both locally and globally.

NOTES

1 Before the name was officially changed in 1930, the city had multiple names, including Der Saadet, Constantinople, and Istanbul. For consistency, in this work Istanbul appears throughout, even though Constantinople was the most common appellation in Western languages. 2 While recent exhibits such as Word into Art (The British Museum, 2006), Without Boundaries (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006), and Taswir (Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2009) have attempted to redress this disjunction, such efforts have not yet included alternative modernities, nor have they been incorporated into the disciplinary frameworks of academic study. 3 For a similar analysis of political history, see also Chakrabarty (2000), 34−42. 4 Manuscript painting is also known as miniature painting, a term derived from the use of the lead-oxide minium in European medieval manuscripts (Barry 2004, 45 n. 1). 5 Hamadeh (2008, 200) argues that similarities with Mughal practices suggest a far more complex mode of adoption of such practices than simple Westernization. While indeed the Ottomans may have encountered novelty from both East and West during this period, the Mughals were also characterized by their openness to other cultures, suggesting that the Ottoman adoption of Mughal modes of depiction does not preclude an element of Westernization. 6 Prime Minister’s Archives of the Republic of Turkey (BBA) İrade−i Hariciye, 33:1520, 23/S/1262 7 BBA, İrade−i Hariciye 37:1738, 26/Za/1262; İrade-i Hariciye 40:1874, 15/Ca?1263; Hariciye Nezareti Mektubî Kalemi Belgeleri 26:6, 03/B /1265 8 These large-scale historical battle scenes were used first at the Military Academy, and later flanked the central exhibit in the apse−space at the Military Museum at the Church of Hagia Irene as it was arranged between 1916 and 1923. 9 His first set of works include scenes of the Battle of Varna; the second set include “Attack of the Turkish Cavalry” 1868, “The Cretan War” 1868, “Bombing of the Fortress,” 1869, “The Turkish−Greek War,” 1869 10 BBA HAT 677:33015/K, 15/S/1251; İ.HR. 12:591, 05/B/1257; HAT 478:23410, 29/Z/1253; İ.HR.10:505, 29/Ra/1257; İ.HR. 46:2164, 13/B/1264; İ.HR. 42:1987, 07/ za/1263. 11 BBA HAT 677:31724, 11/B/1252. 12 While Renda’s caption dates the painting to 1850, the signature and date clearly indicate 1857, which would suggest that both the portrait of Abdülmecid and that of Mahmud II were executed in the early 1850s, around the time that Winterhalter was circulating copies of his

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portrait of Napoleon III. See also BBA Hariciye İradeler 170:9190 (1859). 13 For a discussion of the dynamic role of such puppet-theater venues during this era, see Savaş Arslan. “Hollywood alla Turca: a History of Popular Cinema in Turkey.” Unpublished dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2005. 14 Although descriptive geometry had been part of the curriculum for military engineers at the École de Mézière since approximately 1775, it was only made available to the larger public through courses at the École Normale and the École Polytechnique in 1794 and 1795, around the same time as it entered the Ottoman curriculum (Godlewska 1995). 15 The use of expressions of loyalty rooted in the idea of servitude to the sultan became increasingly common during this period. Thus the use of the term kulları as part of signatures on paintings needs to be seen not as part of the practice of painting, but as part of broader cultural practices of the era (Hanioğlu 1995, 24). 16 For the photograph, see Library of Congress LC−USZ62−81225. 17 The emphasis of Turkish ethnicity during the republican period has led to the exclusion of most minority artists from Turkish art historiography. Garo Kürkman’s 2004 compendium of Armenian artists in the Ottoman Empire helps to partially rectify this oversight, but does not suggest what the role of other minorities, particularly Greeks and Leventines, might have been. 18 BBA A.}DVN 97:60 06/Za/1270, A./DVN.MHM 13:5 20/Ra/1271. 19 BBA İ..TAL 88:1313: B−28 07/B/1313; İ.TAL 198:1317/N−010 07/N/1317; İ..TAL. 408: 1324/N−015 01/N/ 1324. 20 The Ottoman School in Paris was established under the directorship of Ahmed Esad Pasha in 1858 (Mardin 2000, 213 n.71); (this date is cited between 1855 and 1865 in various sources) in order to aid Ottoman students in learning French and prepare them for French university entry exams. However, located at 1860 Viola St. in the Caranel section of Paris, it was perceived as distant from the city and may have been conceived as a means of keeping young Ottoman students under surveillance. Indeed, it is said to have been closed in 1874 as punishment for students who complained that they were unable to learn because they were kept away from the French (Tansuğ 1986, 55). A similar school established in 1844 for Egyptian students had been one of the innovations instituted by Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt. 21 Although officially he committed suicide, many believe that he was killed. 22 (Batur 2008) acknowledges the potential relationship between this political sphere and the work of Ahmed Ali, only to dismiss it by pointing out that it is believed that he never met Namık Kemal while in Paris, and later was very far from such political positions. However, simply not meeting political figures does not preclude influence; indeed, most ideas circulate in writing rather than in person. Ahmet Ali’s professional position also does not preclude such interests, as people often have far more conflicted political views than are retrospectively apparent. In contrast to the essays in (Şerifoğlu 2008), my examination presumes that artmaking in Paris was an obviously political activity, and that Ottoman artists would inevitably have been aware of the political ramifications of a practise as contested as Realism. 23 While according to many accounts, Napoleon III had been the first owner of this painting and had been forced to return it to Ingres’ studio due to the objections of his wife, he and Halil actually may have owned different copies of the same painting (Haskell 1982, 43). 24 According to the Dallas Museum of Art website, Halil Şerif purchased Courbet’s Fox in the Snow (1860) at auction in 1861. While it is unclear when he purchased the Death of the Stag, it was one of the paintings sold in his collection. Haddad dates this work to 1857, but I have been unable to find a record of such a painting before 1860. (Dallas Museum of Art Collection Highlights). 25 Osman Hamdi and Süleyman Seyyid arrived in 1860, Ahmed Ali the following year; the

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first two left in 1869 and 1870, Süleyman Seyyid left Europe sometime before 1875. Although Osman Hamdi and Ahmet Ali are said to have studied with Gustave Boulanger, he did not open a studio at the academy until 1885. However, it was a common practice for students to study with well-known painters who were not faculty at the academy, and they may have studied with him in this capacity (Weinberg 1981, 67). Kortun points out that these artists were not among the many citizens of the Ottoman Empire enrolled at the academy during this period (Kortun 1987). Deniz Artun points out that as a result of the academic reform of 1863, foreign students could not actually enroll in classes; however, as Christian citizens of the Ottoman empire, Christian students were under the provisions of Ottoman concessions to France, which enabled them to enroll (Artun 2007, 5). Therefore, the unofficial status of Muslim Ottoman students is not surprising. The common misperception that they attended the academy probably emerged unintentionally from iterative condensations of information from the first history of Turkish art. Berk does not specify in which academy the students enrolled, and specifically notes that Osman Hamdi studied at the independent studios of Gérôme and Boulanger (Berk 1943, 23). 26 Some Turkish authors cite this as the Prix de Rome. However, not only is this a year-long prize, it was also only offered to French citizens (Weinberg 1981, 68). Therefore, Ahmet Ali presumably received funds to study in Rome from another source. 27 A Zeybek was a mountain warrior of the Aegean region. 28 A painting entitled Zeybek by Gérôme of 80 x 63 cm is currently in the collection of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey. The painting was probably purchased by the palace during the late nineteenth century, and probably inspired one of the first paintings of Prince Abdülmecid, who later became caliph (Taşdelen 2006). 29 Halil Edhem sites the newspaper Takvim-i Vekai of May 29, 1870 for this information, and also says that these paintings were moved to the military museum after the building was occupied by the British. 30 La Turquie, March 5, 1887. 31 La Turquie, March 26, 1887. 32 La Turquie, July 8, 1892. 33 La Turquie, November 3, 1894. 34 La Turquie, August 2, 1896. 35 La Turquie, February 8, 1897; April 16, 1898. 36 La Turquie, January 5, 1906. 37 La Turquie, January 12, 1906; September 9, 1906. 38 La Turquie, January 21, 1902. 39 La Turquie, March 20, 1910. 40 This work, for which he was awarded a Mecidiye of the second degree, was actually a copy of a work he had executed at the behest of the sultan as a gift for the visiting prime minister of France, Paul Deschanel [La Turquie, February 8, 1901]. 41 La Turquie, January 12, 1891. 42 La Turquie, September 2, 1883. 43 Nochlin makes a similar argument concerning the work of the Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller (Nochlin 1989, 226−28). 44 The animosity between these artists is mentioned, but not explained, in several early Turkish sources. 45 For example, compare Still-life with Three Trout from the Loue River (1873) Bern Kunstmuseum, available at http://www.the−athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=7292, accessed July 23, 2009.

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46 Osman Hamdi exhibited regularly at the Salons des Peintres Orientalistes and the Salons des Champs Elysées in Paris. In 1901, rather than exhibiting in Istanbul, he exhibited his work Man with Tortoises at l’Union des Artistes Français, where he had exhibited Fountain of Life the previous year. (Cezar 1995, 441−5). 47 La Turquie, May 2, 3, and 31, 1897. 48 La Turquie, May 20, 1897. 49 La Turquie October 7, 1898. 50 Batur (2008, 14−15) hints at this connection without exploring it, probably due to the absence of written sources to confirm this exploration. 51 Due to an inheritance dispute, permission for the use of this image cannot be acquired at this time. An image of the work is available at www.sanalmuze.org under Retrospective Exhibitions/Osman Hamdi Bey Iconographic Texts. 52 “Şifa al-kulub, lika’ al-mahboub” (Eldem 2009) 53 For images of these works, see www.sanalmuze.org or Shaw (2003). 54 La Turquie, March 21, 1902. 55 The painting, lost today, is preserved in a photograph by Foto Sebah & Jouaillier. Given the age of the artist, it is probably from the late 1870s. 56 The word odalisque is a French corruption of the Turkish word odalık meaning ‘of the room’ and referring to a concubine. 57 Turkish coffee cups often consisted of a ceramic bowl fitting into a metal holder, or sleeve, with a handle. 58 His works were published under two names, Ahmed Ziyauddin, his original name, as well as Ahmed Ziya, which he continued to use after he took the surname Akbulut in 1934. 59 By Persianate, I refer to the language of the text, which is Persian as used as a literary lingua franca among many Islamic cultures, from Anatolia to India, over the course of many centuries. Although often used as a symbol of national heritage both in modern Turkey and Iran, such an understanding of Rumi’s legacy is not only anachronistic, but antithetical to his philosophy. 60 La Turquie May 1, 1902. 61 Published between 1932 and 1937, the first republican magazine devoted to the visual arts, Ar used as its title a word borrowed from French but made to look Turkish in accordance with the recently redefined rules of a purified Turkish. 62 Turkish histories of photography do not specify the process used by these photographers. Although the Library of Congress catalogues them as Albumin prints, a newspaper article in the May 1, 1896 issue of La Turquie refers to them as platinotypes, a popular process of the era. 63 Cezar (440) cites this as the Beyoğlu home of the merchant Bourdon, but the contemporary source La Turquie (May 2, 1901) cites it as “la grande patisserie Français Bourdon.” 64 La Turquie, May 2, 1901. 65 La Turquie, March 21, 1907. 66 La Turquie, November 19, 1903; March 18, 1906. 67 La Turquie, September 20, 1907. 68 La Turquie, October 3, 1907. 69 Unlike most artists of the era, Hüseyin Avni was already using Lifij as a surname during the Ottoman era, and thus was also known as Avni Lifij during his lifetime. 70 La Turquie, March 13, 1911. 71 La Turquie, March 16, 1912. 72 This was illustrated in Reinach’s Apollo. 73 The portrait is reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s Self-portrait with Pipe.

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Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi 3(12 Rebii−ül Evvel 1329/ 13 Mart 1327) 22. The apocryphal nature of this anecdote is suggested by the use of Mustafa Kemal’s last name, Atatürk (literally "Father Turk"), granted to him by parliament with the passage of the Surname Law in 1934. 76 The rise of an ethnically based national identity is evident in this quote, in which the Armenian Osgan Efendi, who had no homeland outside of the empire, is identified as foreign. 77 Citing the date of unification as 1923, Pelvanoğlu (14) notes that even at the same school, classrooms were not coeducational. 78 La Turquie, September 11, 1912. 79 Salah Cimcoz, with whom Arseven had just begun to edit the new caricature magazine Kalem, financed the project (Gören 1997). 80 La Turquie, January 12, 1911; September 11, 1912. 81 Yağbasan (2004, 49) mentions its exhibition in relation to Abdülmecid’s reactions to the exhibit, but it does not appear on the list in Şerifoğlu (2003). 82 Due to an ongoing court case determining the ownership rights of this work, permission for its use in this book was not possible. It is available at www.sanalmuze.org. 83 As part of a peace agreement between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, in 1479 Gentile Bellini (1429−1527) became the first European artist invited to work at the Ottoman court, reflecting Sultan Mehmed II’s interest in participating in the European Renaissance−an interest not pursued by his more conservative descendants. Long forgotten, this history was brought to light in the empire by the popular historian Ahmet Refik’s 1907 translation of L. Thuasne’s 1888 work, Gentile Bellini et Le Sultan Mohamet II, on the cover of which Ahmet Refik appeared as author rather than translator. Through this work, Bellini became symbolic of an untaken path towards Western culture during the apogee of Ottoman power that could legitimate Westernization in the Republic of Turkey. 84 The Ankara Halkevi was the central branch of the “House of the People,” an institution run by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the party of Mustafa Kemal, with branches throughout the country. The painting is available at www.sanalmuze.org. 85 The Independents included Refik Fazıl (Epikman), Cevat Hamit (Dereli), Şeref Kamil (Akdik), Mahmud Celalledin (Cuda), Nurullah Cemal (Berk), Ali Avni (Çelebi), Ahmet Zeki (Kocamemi), Muhittin Sebati, the sculptor Ratip Aşir (Acudoğlu) and the decorator Fahrettin. Hale Asaf was the only woman in the group. 86 The d Group originally included Zeki Faik İzer, Nurullah Berk, Elif Naci, Cemal Tollu, Abidin Dino, and Zühtü Müridoğlu. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, his wife Eren Eyüboğlu, and Turgut Zaim joined the following year, although Zaim soon left the group because of his desire to develop local Turkish styles rather than follow European ones. 87 The frequent eulogization of the brown-haired Mustafa Kemal as blond and blue-eyed has complex implications. On the one hand, the lightening of the Turkish race reflects the push towards Europeanization of his era, augmented by the push towards imagining Turks as Aryan during the 1930s and 1940s (Kaplan 2005, 670). On the other, his lightness also reflects his birth in Salonica, often used by his detractors to portray him as having Greek or Jewish origins. 88 This kind of belatedness falls into a much broader understanding of Turkish modernity, within which Turkish artists have often been understood by critics as having imported outdated artistic practices as they returned from education abroad. Rather, this seeming time delay can be attributed to the gap between the art historiographical focus on founding moments and the dissolution of those moments into the normalized practice of an epoch. More problematically, the assumption of belatedness not only relies on an ideal originary moment, but also implies a complete, if temporally displaced, adoption of artistic practice without considering the conceptual aspects of imported artistic forms. 75

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