The Subversion and Orientalism of Osman Hamdi's "Mihrab" PDF

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The Subversion and Orientalism of Osman Hamdi’s Mihrab ALEXANDRA SOLOVYEV Columbia University, Class of 2018 ABSTRACT This paper focuses on an enigmatic painting by Ottoman modernist artist and administrator Osman Hamdi: Mihrab from 1901. Hamdi’s Academic education, his interest in all things French...

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The Subversion and Orientalism of Osman Hamdi's "Mihrab" Bowdoin Journal of Art, Alexandra Solovyev

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The Subversion and Orientalism of Osman Hamdi’s Mihrab ALEXANDRA SOLOVYEV Columbia University, Class of 2018

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on an enigmatic painting by Ottoman modernist artist and administrator Osman Hamdi: Mihrab from 1901. Hamdi’s Academic education, his interest in all things French, and his goal of creating paintings for a European audience all directed his work toward a conservative and Orientalist style. Having studied in Paris during the 1860s, Hamdi would have no doubt been aware of subversive paintings such as Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863); I argue that the public backlash against these works inspired Hamdi to create Mihrab. As to the meaning of Mihrab, two authors stand out in their interpretations of the painting: Wendy Shaw and Edhem Eldem. Shaw argues that the woman in Mihrab represents the Imperial Museum and the power of secular over spiritual knowledge. Eldem argues that painting shows a pregnant woman, evidenced by its original title, Genesis, and argues that the painting was inspired by Gérôme’s 1890 sculpture Tanagra, a work about which Gérôme and Hamdi communicated. I conclude that Edlem’s interpretation is correct, while acknowledging Shaw’s claim that the painting may be an allegory, and ultimately argue that Hamdi’s goal in creating Mihrab was to shock Western

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viewers by creating an image that did not fit a standard Orientalist representation, while nonetheless retaining Orientalist details.

Osman Hamdi is a complex and conflicted figure in late 19th and early 20th century Ottoman history; the art he produced throughout his life is just as complicated. Simultaneously nationalist and self-Orientalizing, keen on promoting the Empire while also keeping up with the standards of modernity set out by the West, Hamdi was a vital intellectual, public official, and artist whose contributions to the fields of art and archeology reflected both Ottoman and Western ambitions. Out of all the paintings he created, one stands out in both its peculiarity and apparent mélange of Ottoman and Western elements: his 1901 painting entitled Mihrab (fig. 1). Not enough is known about this work and the context in which it was produced for its meaning to be absolutely ascertained; nonetheless, taking into account the work that has been done on this painting and Hamdi’s life as a whole, I will seek to present a cohesive interpretation of Mihrab. In contextualizing the painting through Hamdi’s Parisian education and his later work at the Imperial Museum, I will argue that the primary goal of Mihrab was to incite controversy through its subversive elements. Whether Hamdi was successful in this endeavor, though, is still a matter of debate. Hamdi was born in 1842 into a Western-oriented bureaucratic family. Though brought up to be loyal to the Ottoman state, Hamdi was inclined toward Western, and specifically French, culture from a young age, likely

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speaking French at home with his father and brothers.1 In 1860, Hamdi traveled to Paris to study law. Soon after, he abandoned law to study painting in the studios of two celebrated French Academicians: Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme. For much of the 1860s and the start of the 1870s, Hamdi remained in Western Europe, exhibiting three works in the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition and helping his father organize the Ottoman exhibit at the 1873 Vienna International Exposition.2 Hamdi returned to Istanbul in the mid1870s with “a strict academism subtly informed by the debates surrounding them in Paris,”3 holding a number of government positions before being appointed the director of the Imperial Museum in 1881, a position he held until his death in 1910, and creating and instituting the Academy of Fine Arts in 1882.4 The combination of Hamdi’s preoccupation with all things French and his education in the studios of Boulanger and Gérôme directed his artwork toward an Academic, conservative, and Orientalist style. Indeed, his paintings are often self-Orientalizing representations of an ideal or mythical Oriental past, and, in terms of form and style, Hamdi’s paintings are hardly distinguishable from those of any given French Academician. However, in their content, Hamdi’s paintings are quite unlike those of a quintessential Orientalist like Gérôme. Where Gérôme’s scenes are fantasies about the harem and the slave market posited as objective realities through their attention to detail, Hamdi’s works present an idealized Ottoman daily life, but nonetheless one that is grounded in reality. Though often almost exclusively dressed in traditional Ottoman fashion and shown in locations with ornamentation that is stereotypically “Islamic,” Hamdi’s figures are not                                                         

Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003): 98. 2 Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 98. 3 Wendy M. K. Shaw, Ottoman Painting (London and New York: Tauris, 2011): 42. 4 Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 99. 1

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objects of admiration for the Westerner’s gaze. They are women reading and performing domestic chores, male scholars discussing and debating the Qur’an; they are all engaged in mundane and intellectual activities that would never be seen in a European painting. Prominently, there are no nude women in Hamdi’s work; it is difficult, on the other hand, to find a fully dressed woman in a Gérôme, Ingres, or Delacroix. Certainly, Hamdi’s scenes are Orientalist in style and feature many recurring Orientalist motifs, but as Zeynep Çelik writes, they function as “a form of answering back to the European discourse that froze Ottoman culture and society in an undefined and imagined past.”5 Though I would not say that Hamdi was seeking to change the system of Orientalist representations in Europe – as Wendy Shaw posits, it was Hamdi’s elitism that drew him to Orientalism, “not his penchant towards reform within existing structures of power”6 – I would certainly argue that Hamdi’s work presented an alternate Orient, one not defined by excess but rather by intellectual activity, and represented a “resistant voice”7 to the West’s conception of the Ottomans. In most paintings by Osman Hamdi, it tends to be clear what exactly the artist is trying to show. Even in a painting like From the Harem (fig. 3), the meaning and implication of which can be debated, it is nonetheless clear that the painting shows four young women conversing and doing laundry inside a mosque. With Mihrab, on the other hand, what is occurring and why is quite unclear. Hamdi painted Mihrab in 1901, in the midst of his tenure at the Imperial Museum. The painting depicts a woman in a yellow, green, and white gown sitting on a Qur’an stand in the mihrab of a mosque. Books are thrown about around her feet and the stand. A lit incense burner                                                         

Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors, edited by Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003): 31. 6 Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 67. 7 Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” 23. 5

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stands in the foreground and a recently extinguished candle is in the background, to the woman’s right. We are seeing the woman from a threequarter view, with the viewer apparently standing in front of and to the left of the woman and the mihrab. She does not look back at us, instead staring straight ahead with an expression that does not betray any emotion. Her stomach appears to be slightly protruding. Numerous questions are raised from looking at this painting: who is the woman? Is she pregnant? Why is she sitting on a Qur’an stand? What are the books at her feet? Why has the candle in the background recently been extinguished? Where is she looking, and is there anyone else in the mosque looking back? In addition to these initial formal questions comes the overarching question of what this painting is supposed to represent and how subversive it is meant to be. In order to consider this, I would like to take a cue from Wendy Shaw and contextualize Mihrab among a number of other Hamdi works that use the mosque as a setting. Indeed, Mihrab is not the only Hamdi painting that uses the interior of a mosque as a backdrop for activities that would have been unacceptable to perform inside. Three paintings that do the same are Girls Playing Music (1880) (fig. 2), From the Harem (1880) (fig. 3), and The Tortoise Trainer (1906) (fig. 4). Girls Playing Music shows two women inside a mosque, one seated, one standing, and both playing instruments while barefoot. The shoe niches behind the girls indicate that they are in a mosque and not a domestic space.8 Wendy Shaw writes that the girls’ “location in the main prayer space, their casual attitude, and above all their playing of instruments would be sacrilegious.”9 From the Harem shows four women, also in the interior of a mosque. Three are                                                          8 9

Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 70. Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 70.

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seated, one is standing, and all four seem to be in the process of socializing. Two of the women are looking directly out at the viewer. In the upper right corner of the painting is a rack on which laundry is drying – once again, incredibly sacrilegious. The Tortoise Trainer depicts a man wearing a turban standing over five turtles that are eating lettuce and crawling on the ground. Again, the man and the turtles are inside a mosque space. All three of these images show scenes that would have and could have never taken place inside a mosque. For an Ottoman viewer seeing these images, they would have been clearly sacrilegious. The fact that Hamdi created images like these, then, seems to indicate that he was interested in subverting what was sacred and what was not in the eyes of an Ottoman. However, what is vital to consider in thinking about these subversive elements is the audience for whom they were intended. A viewer would have only read the paintings as sacrilegious, or even recognized that they were set inside a mosque, if they had some familiarity with Islamic customs. However, Hamdi was producing work for a European audience, most of whom were accustomed to the Orientalist imagery of Gérôme, the formal elements of which Girls Playing Music, From the Harem, and The Tortoise Trainer would have fallen exactly in line with. A Western audience would have had no sense of what was sacred for Islam; considering that most, if not all, visual knowledge for Europeans about the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire in particular came from curated postcards, staged photographs, and Orientalist paintings. That being said, Mihrab, however, seems to be doing something more than Girls Playing Music, From the Harem, or The Tortoise Trainer. Certainly, Mihrab was made for a European audience; it was first exhibited

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in Berlin and later London and was named in exhibitions by its French title10 – but more on its name later. In the three Hamdi works that I mentioned, there is nothing to suggest that they would have been subversive to a European audience. Mihrab, on the other hand, I would argue was made to stir controversy even among Western viewers. A woman in a low-cut gown and books scattered around her feet is not a typical Orientalist painting; it has Orientalist elements, but it does not look like an “objective” Gérôme that purported to offer Europeans a glimpse into the real world of the Orient. Hamdi’s intention with Mihrab, it seems, was to create a combination of the Orientalist style Europe was used to and the provocation of the some of the 19th century’s most controversial paintings, simultaneously the best of the Academic style and the most provocative of anti-Academic philosophy. The sort of subversion and critical intrigue that Hamdi sought to present through Mihrab was a staple of anti-Academic painting in mid and late-19th century France, starting, debatably, with Courbet and moving through to Manet and Impressionists, later to the post-Impressionists, and on to all the subversive artistic movements that took over Europe in the 20th century. As an artist working in Paris during the mid-1860s, Osman Hamdi was no doubt exposed to the debates and discussions surrounding the emergence of the city’s new anti-Academic art scene. 1863, in particular, was a tumultuous year for Paris; in was in 1863 that the Académie des Beaux-Arts would start to lose its overwhelming influence. This change was instigated by the exhibition of two paintings by Édouard Manet, Olympia (fig. 5) and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (fig. 6), both which incited negative critical and public responses. Caroline Van Eck describes these two Manet paintings, along with Antonio Canova’s 1801 sculpture of Pauline Borghese                                                         

Edhem Eldem, “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and His Paintings,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 359. 10

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as Victorious Venus, as among the most controversial representations of nude women exhibited in the 19th century, citing the ways in which these works violated the theoretical and academic artistic conventions of the time in which they were produced.11 Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe depicts four people, two men and two women, in an open, grassy area within what appears to be a forest. In the foreground is a cornucopia full of food. Seated in the middle-ground in the center of the painting are two men, dressed in suit coats, pants, and hats, and a woman, completely nude. In the background is the other woman, dressed in a thin dress and seemingly stepping out of or into a stream. Out of all four people, only the nude woman in the mid-ground looks out at us. Upon its exhibition at the Salon des Réfusés in 1863 – where it was shown because it was rejected from the Academy’s annual Salon – the painting drew generally negative criticism. As a whole, contemporary criticism of the work commented on its lack of subject, its indeterminate genre, and its positioning of nude women in the same space as dressed men.12 What these criticisms tend to ignore, however, is the gaze of the nude woman in the mid-ground. “Her appraisal of the viewer,” writes Van Eck, “makes it difficult to reduce her to an object of sexual fantasies” in the way Titian’s or Cabanal’s images of Venus would; her gaze, thus, becomes “the foundation for [the painting’s] agency.”13 The same agency is even more obvious in Olympia, a painting so abhorred that policemen had to be placed in front of it during its exhibition at the 1863 Salon.14 This work shows a woman, wearing nothing but a bracelet, sandals, a choker, earrings, and a flower in her hair, reclining on a                                                         

Caroline Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave: Agency, Excess, and Material Presence in Canova and Manet,” New Literary History 46 (2015): 409. 12 Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave,” 421. 13 Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave,” 425. 14 Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave,” 422. 11

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bed. Behind her is a maid of African descent holding up a bouquet of flowers. On the bed, along with the reclining Olympia, is a black cat. Here, again, the nude woman’s gaze is the most provocative element. Olympia looks directly out at the viewer; she is a prostitute, we are her employers, and the interaction between the painting and the audience is that of a business transaction. Criticism of the work revolved around its formal elements, again forgoing the woman’s aggressive gaze.15 The nude women in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia both deny the viewer the chance to objectify them; they know they are being viewed, and they are looking back.16 Mihrab cannot form a direct comparison with these two Manet works for the reasons that the subject of Hamdi’s painting is not looking out at the viewer, nor is she nude. Nevertheless, I would argue that in creating Mihrab, Hamdi was thinking about, either consciously or not, the potential for creating a painting that caused the similar sort of public commotion as Déjeuner and Olympia, perhaps not as dramatic, but enough to unsettle his viewers and to force them to consider the painting’s meaning. In order to adequately ascertain how subversive Hamdi was trying to be, however, it is first necessary to consider what exactly the painting represents. Two authors in particular stand out in their pointed and thorough interpretations of Mihrab: Wendy Shaw and Edhem Eldem. Both offer compelling interpretations of the painting, though Shaw’s work relies heavily on art historical and biographical analysis, while Eldem’s is grounded exclusively in historical documentation. Considered together, the interpretations offered by Shaw and Eldem constitute a complex and sometimes

                                                        

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Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave,” 422. Van Eck, “Works of Art That Refuse to Behave,” 426.

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contradictory set of ideas about Hamdi’s work and raise new questions about Mihrab that cannot necessarily be answered without conjecture. Wendy Shaw presents a number of possibilities about the potential meaning behind Mihrab, but it is necessary first to consider the some of the details that she seems to take for granted. Shaw asserts in most, if not all, of her writing on Hamdi that the woman in Mihrab is Hamdi’s wife.17 From what I have found, Shaw does not provide substantive reason to argue that this is indeed the case. Further, she asserts that the woman in the painting is wearing an “antique gown,”18 and further still, she does not address the fact that the woman’s stomach seems to be protruding. Though I cannot claim to have read all of Shaw’s writing, four separate papers or books in which she discusses Mihrab take these facets for granted. These facets, as I will later show, are questioned – and, I would say, disproven – by Eldem. Shaw provides a number of interpretations for the meaning of Mihrab, all of which are essentially interconnected. The primary explanation that she argues for is the idea that the painting functions as an allegory for the Imperial Museum, of which Hamdi was the director for a large part of his later life. This argument is grounded in the fact that all of the devotional objects represented in the image, including the Qur’an stand, the candleholder, the incense burner, and perhaps even the books on the f...