On her book Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Cover Interview of February 01, 2017
A close-up
I hope a reader who stumbles across this
book might initially be drawn to the visual richness of this art and then engaged
by their cross-cultural narratives. These images are drawn from internationally
diverse sources; finding them has been an adventure. When I first began
travelling to Istanbul, many of these paintings were in obscure corners of the
former Ottoman palaces on the Bosphorus, and many were uncatalogued. It is my
conviction that drawing together this visual archive, that will come to form
part of a new canon of a global history of nineteenth-century art, can
challenge our theoretical presuppositions about cultural production in this
period.
The one artwork that is likely to be
familiar to readers is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer. This
painting takes us to the heartland of the Orientalism debate. It was made
famous (or more perhaps more accurately, it became notorious) when reproduced on
the cover of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism in 1978. Since then
Gérôme’s work has come to exemplify the binary logic of the European discourse
through which Western visual culture produced the East as its other. My book
disrupts these entrenched understandings of Gérôme’s art by resituating his
orientalism within a broader reception history, encompassing international
networks of pedagogy and Ottoman patronage.
Gérôme’s works were among the contemporary
art that Sultan Abdülaziz and his aide-de-camp (Gérôme’s former student), Şeker
Ahmed Paşa, purchased for the Ottoman palace through the French dealers Goupil
et Cie in the 1870s. Contextual analysis of these works enables us to consider
what they meant to an Ottoman audience and to situate these collecting
practices within the semantic economy of Goupil’s international networks of image
replication and circulation.
The acquisition of Gérôme’s paintings for
the Ottoman palace reveals the mutable semiotics of his Orientalism. Among an
elite Ottoman audience in Istanbul they were transmuted into Ottoman
Orientalism. One of these paintings, generically titled Bashi-Bazouk Dancing,
was renamed in Istanbul. Ottoman viewers recognized it as a representation of
the distinctive costume and dance of the Zeybek warriors from the mountain
regions of Western Anatolia. They had been part of the irregular Ottoman forces
and their itinerant existence and distinctive traditional dress was the
antithesis of Ottoman palace life governed by formality and protocol. Indeed
the range of representations of Ottoman culture within the sultans’ art
collection, which by the end of the century came to include numerous paintings
of Arab horsemen from the empire’s peripheries, provided a visual précis of the
empire’s diversity for its elite audience. As such they were a reminder of
cultural patrimony – that which distinguished the Ottoman Empire from Europe
– within the contextualizing frame of the modern Ottoman palace.
In 1878 Gerome borrowed his Zeybek painting
back from the Ottomans in order to display it in the Paris International
Exposition. So too, the painting was reproduced as a print that circulated
widely across Europe and America. In these contexts the Ottoman warriors took
on more exotic, Orientalist connotations. By tracking the circulation of this
painting from Paris to Istanbul to Paris and then back again, the life of their
reprographic double, and the variant titles that this painting accrued as a
result of these transitions, my study exposes a complex range of meanings for
divergent audiences.
This broader cross-cultural interpretive
work reveals a more entangled politics of spectatorship for Gérôme’s Orientalism
than Linda Nochlin’s formulation about his art that, “The white man, the
Westerner, [exerts] … the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental
world into being, the gaze for which it was ultimately intended.”
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
A close-up
I hope a reader who stumbles across this book might initially be drawn to the visual richness of this art and then engaged by their cross-cultural narratives. These images are drawn from internationally diverse sources; finding them has been an adventure. When I first began travelling to Istanbul, many of these paintings were in obscure corners of the former Ottoman palaces on the Bosphorus, and many were uncatalogued. It is my conviction that drawing together this visual archive, that will come to form part of a new canon of a global history of nineteenth-century art, can challenge our theoretical presuppositions about cultural production in this period.
The one artwork that is likely to be familiar to readers is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer. This painting takes us to the heartland of the Orientalism debate. It was made famous (or more perhaps more accurately, it became notorious) when reproduced on the cover of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism in 1978. Since then Gérôme’s work has come to exemplify the binary logic of the European discourse through which Western visual culture produced the East as its other. My book disrupts these entrenched understandings of Gérôme’s art by resituating his orientalism within a broader reception history, encompassing international networks of pedagogy and Ottoman patronage.
Gérôme’s works were among the contemporary art that Sultan Abdülaziz and his aide-de-camp (Gérôme’s former student), Şeker Ahmed Paşa, purchased for the Ottoman palace through the French dealers Goupil et Cie in the 1870s. Contextual analysis of these works enables us to consider what they meant to an Ottoman audience and to situate these collecting practices within the semantic economy of Goupil’s international networks of image replication and circulation.
The acquisition of Gérôme’s paintings for the Ottoman palace reveals the mutable semiotics of his Orientalism. Among an elite Ottoman audience in Istanbul they were transmuted into Ottoman Orientalism. One of these paintings, generically titled Bashi-Bazouk Dancing, was renamed in Istanbul. Ottoman viewers recognized it as a representation of the distinctive costume and dance of the Zeybek warriors from the mountain regions of Western Anatolia. They had been part of the irregular Ottoman forces and their itinerant existence and distinctive traditional dress was the antithesis of Ottoman palace life governed by formality and protocol. Indeed the range of representations of Ottoman culture within the sultans’ art collection, which by the end of the century came to include numerous paintings of Arab horsemen from the empire’s peripheries, provided a visual précis of the empire’s diversity for its elite audience. As such they were a reminder of cultural patrimony – that which distinguished the Ottoman Empire from Europe – within the contextualizing frame of the modern Ottoman palace.
In 1878 Gerome borrowed his Zeybek painting back from the Ottomans in order to display it in the Paris International Exposition. So too, the painting was reproduced as a print that circulated widely across Europe and America. In these contexts the Ottoman warriors took on more exotic, Orientalist connotations. By tracking the circulation of this painting from Paris to Istanbul to Paris and then back again, the life of their reprographic double, and the variant titles that this painting accrued as a result of these transitions, my study exposes a complex range of meanings for divergent audiences.
This broader cross-cultural interpretive work reveals a more entangled politics of spectatorship for Gérôme’s Orientalism than Linda Nochlin’s formulation about his art that, “The white man, the Westerner, [exerts] … the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into being, the gaze for which it was ultimately intended.”