The cover below are from the 2 volume reprint designed by my friend Ersu Pekin.
Mavi Boncuk |
The reception of Osman Hamdi’s paintings in the twentieth century mainly focused on his Orientalist works. One line of illustrious art critics and historians, exemplified by Nurullah Berk in the first half of the century and Sezer Tansu in the second half, criticized the artist for his derivative imagery and for subscribing to the idiom of French Orientalism instead of inventing a distinctly Turkish visual language.1
In response to this criticism, other historians have read a pedagogical mission in Hamdi’s work, one of correcting Western stereotypes about the East.2
While a detailed analysis of the scholarship on Hamdi’s Orientalist painting is beyond the scope of the present article and has been done efficiently by other scholars,3
I would liketo draw attention to a particular tendency in this body of writing:
that is, to the interchangeable deployment of the terms “Ottoman,” “Turkish,” and “us” that conflates late nineteenth-century identity politics in the Ottoman Empire with late twentieth-century Republican Turkish nationalism. The following paragraph by Mustafa Cezar, author of the only monograph on the artist, is representative of this approach:
In Osman Hamdi[’s work], an Orientalist painter, there is a distinct atmosphere, a distinct rendering of the subject matter that distinguishes him from European Orientalist painters. The magical factor that creates this important difference is no doubt the fact that Osman Hamdi is a member of these lands, of this society. Of course he would approach the subjects representing this country with a different sensitivity than the Westerner, and would reflect his sentiments in his work. (…) Even if most of the costumes he depicted are not Turkish, the actual elements that announce their belonging to us are architectural elements, ornaments and accessories.4
One of the earliest formulations of Hamdi’s “Turkishness” that had a lasting influenceon later generations of art historians and critics came from Adolphe-Marie-Antoine Thalasso.“Everything in Hamdy Bey is inspired by the Turkish Orient,” wrote Thalasso in 1910 in his L’Art Ottoman: Les Peintres de Turquie 5
Osman Hamdi’s paintings did not depict genericMuslim types, the writer argued, but specifically Turkish people, ornaments, architecture, andlandscape. 6
Thalasso also pointed out the meticulousness with which Hamdi researched anddepicted historical accessories, such as tiles, inscriptions, arms, costumes, and lanterns,stating that “the artist shall never lend himself to accusations of the slightest anachronism.” 7
Subsequent scholars have taken these two points about Hamdi’s Orientalist painting,namely its “Turkishness” and its accuracy, as proof that the painter was radically differentfrom his Western counterparts, who were—it is widely assumed to this day—unscrupulous intheir fantastic constructions of an imaginary Orient. What has not been explored is the placeof these concepts in the critical and artistic traditions of nineteenth-century France.
1 Berk 1943, 20; Tansu ! 1986, 95.
2 Germaner 2001, 4; Çelik 1992, 41; Shaw 1999, 425.
3 Eldem 2004, 39-46
4 Cezar 1995, 2: 349-51
5 Thalasso 1988, 21.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid. 22.
SOURCE: "CONVEYING THE DRAMA AS IT EXISTS " : OSMAN HAMDI'S _Zeibek at Watch_ (1867) AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PAINTING Gülru Çakmak 2011,
Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands
Sanatta Batıya Açılış Ve Osman Hamdi-Mustafa Cezar-First Edition 1971-674 pages
(Pictured Cover from a later 2 volume reprint)
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