This unique collection takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its center from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms. This new lens reveals the essential role of the Ottoman city and its patrons and artists in the dialogues that facilitated production, circulation, and consumption of British Orientalist cultures. In this volume, art works are conceptualized as traveling artifacts produced through localized interactions. World renowned scholars and curators analyze the diverse audiences for such art works and the range of differing contexts for their reception both in the 19th century and more recently. In this way, British art is put into a dynamic relationship with an historicized understanding of cultures of collecting and display during the formation of comparative modernities and also with the contemporary postcolonial creation of new national models of exhibition and education.
Featuring stunning visuals, this book puts art history in the context of cultural, visual, and literary studies, challenging the orthodoxies of postcolonial theory with the materiality of multiple imperialisms and modernities to offer a new take on the collection, display, and consumption of Orientalist cultures.
Acknowledgments
Preface / Suna, Inan and Ipek Kirac
Introduction: Disruptive Geographies / Mary Roberts, Reina Lewis and Zeynep Inankur
Part I: Institutions, Collections, Exhibitions
I. Staging The Lure of the East: Exhibition Making and Orientalism / Christine Riding
II. Cultural Exchange and the Politics of Pleasure / Reina Lewis
III. Bringing It Home? Orientalist Painting and the Art Market / Nicholas Tromans
IV. The Searight Collection / Sarah Searight
V. Cultural Consignment and Cultural (Ex)Change / Donald Preziosi
VI. Orientalism and Photography / Nancy Micklewright
Part II: Constructing History and the Politics of Place
VII. Between the Sublime and the Picturesque: Mourning Modernization and the Production of Orientalist Landscape in Thomas Allom and Reverend Robert Walsh's Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor (c. 1839) / Wendy M. K. Shaw
VIII. Genealogies of Display: Cross-Cultural Networks at the 1880s Istanbul Exhibitions / Mary Roberts
IX. Osman Hamdi Bey and the Historiophile Mood: Orientalist Vision and the Romantic Sense of the Past in Late Ottoman Culture / Ahmet Ersoy
X. Traveling East: Veiling, Race, and Nations / Teresa Heffernan
XI. "Solitary Eagle"?: The Public and Private Personas of John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) / Briony Llewellyn
XII. An Ottoman Traveler to the Orient: Osman Hamdi Bey / Edhem Eldem
Part III. Cultural Mediators, Boundaries, Exchanges
XIII. Mary Adelaide Walker / Zeynep Inankur
XIV. The Dragoman Who Commissioned His Own Portrait / Aykut Gurcaglar
XV. European Artists at the Ottoman Court: Propogating a New Dynastic Image in the Nineteenth Century / Gunsel Renda
XVI. The Interpretation of Pictorial Space in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Landscape Painting / Semra Germaner
XVII. Orientalism and Aestheticism / Tim Barringer
XVIII. The Reception of John Frederick Lewis at the Exposition Universelle in 1855 / Peter Benson Miller
Notes on Contributors
Index
