373

PAINTING, ARTISTIC PATRONAGE AND CRITICISM
IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A STUDY OF THE
OTTOMAN SOCIETY OF PAINTERS,
1909-1918

iii
Thesis Abstract
Gizem Tongo, “Painting, Artistic Patronage and Criticism in the Public Sphere: A
Study of the Ottoman Society of Painters, 1909-1918”
This study examines the Ottoman Society of Painters, and traces the history of its
first nine years, from its foundation in 1909 until the demise of the Empire in 1918.
The position of the Ottoman Society of Painters in the late-Ottoman cultural milieu
was certainly a significant one. As an artistic organization, run by the graduates and
students of the Academy of Fine Arts, it published the first art journal of the Empire,
and contributed to the painting exhibitions organized in Istanbul and in Vienna
during the First World War.
The final decade of the Ottoman Empire was indeed a unique decade, and it is the
objective of this study to understand the Society and their art as part of these
„catastrophic‟ years; the years that witnessed revolutions, rebellions, nationalistic
agendas, wars and massacres. This thesis firstly explores the historical and artistic
specifics that lead to the foundation of the Society, and then, focuses on the key
themes and debates of its journal, in an attempt to understand how contemporary
political circumstances, such as the Balkan Wars and the nationalist agenda of the
CUP, influenced the fabric of the Journal itself. The last chapter looks at Ottoman
visual culture during World War I and explores the responses of the Society‟s
painters to this disastrous war and its extraordinary conditions.
iv
Tez Özeti
Gizem Tongo, “Resim, Sanatsal Patronaj ve Kamusal Alanda Eleştiri: Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Üzerine Bir Çalışma, 1909-1918”
Bu çalışmanın temel olarak incelediği konu, 1909 yılında kurulan Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve bu cemiyetin Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun 1918’deki
yıkılışına kadar olan dokuz yıllık tarihidir. Osmanlı’nın son dönem kültürel ortamı
düşünüldüğünde, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti’nin bu sosyal yapıdaki yeri çok
önemlidir. Bir sanatçı örgütlenmesi olarak, Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi öğrencileri ve
mezunları tarafından oluşturulan cemiyet, imparatorluğun ilk güzel sanatlar dergisini
yayınlamış ve Birinci Dünya Savaşı sırasında İstanbul ve Viyana’da düzenlenen
resim sergilerine katılmıştır.
Osmanlı’nın son on yılı pek çok yönden sıra dışı olayların yaşandığı, devrime,
ayaklanmalara, milliyetçi gündemlere, savaşlara ve katliamlara şahit olunduğu
çalkantılı ve yıkıcı bir dönemdir. Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti’ni bu katastrofik dönemin bir parçası olarak konumlandırmaktır. Bu amaç
doğrultusunda, bu tez öncelikle cemiyetin kuruluşuna zemin hazırlayan tarihsel ve
sanatsal temelleri inceler. İkinci olarak, Balkan Savaşları ve İttihat ve Terakki’nin
milliyetçi gündemi gibi dönemin güncel siyasi koşullarının, cemiyetin dergisinin
yapısını nasıl ve ne şekilde etkilediğini, derginin ana temalarına ve tartışmalarına
odaklanarak anlamlandırır. Tezin son bölümü ise, Birinci Dünya Savaşı sırasındaki
Osmanlı görsel kültürünü göz önünde bulundurarak, cemiyet ressamlarının bu feci
savaşa ve savaşın olağanüstü koşullarına dair tepkilerini inceler.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I find myself astounded by just how many people I owe gratitude to for their support and
contribution. First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Ahmet Ersoy, for his immensely
helpful editing and feedback in every stage of my thesis. His suggestions, enthusiasm and
support provided the greatest source of motivation and inspiration for this study. I have had
the privilege of having Sibel Bozdoğan and Edhem Eldem in my thesis committee. I learn a
lot from their wide range of academic interests and knowledge. I am greatly indebted to them
for their valuable comments and advice.
I am very grateful to Fatma Türe for introducing me to many people who have been very
helpful throughout my research. Among the people whom I met, Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu has
been very kind to share his collection of exhibition catalogues and visual sources. I benefited
a lot from our fruitful exchange of information on late Ottoman art. In the same vein, I must
express my deepest gratitude to Nazan Akpınar and Özlem Kalkan Erenus who were kind
enough to lend me many catalogues and documents from the Güzel Sanatlar Birliği Resim
Derneği. In addition to them, I also want to thank Caner Karavit, Ahmet Kamil Gören and
Nurcan Yazıcı. The kindly staff of the Ottoman Prime Minister Archives and of the Boğaziçi
University Library ably assisted my research.
My special thanks go to my dear friend Tania Bahar for sending me the exhibition catalogues
I needed from the Pera Museum. I would like to thank Onur Şar and Ceyda Yüksel for
helping me a lot with the archival documents. I am grateful to Murat Şiviloğlu for making it
possible for me to reach many early-twentieth century newspapers in the library of the
University of Cambridge. I also thank Can Eyüp Çekiç for helping me with the resources
from the library of Bilkent University. My lovely friends and colleagues, Ceren Abi, Tania
Bahar, Nilay Özlü, Yasemin Baran, Onur Şar, Saadet Özen, Cem Bico and Başak Deniz
Özdoğan have contributed more than they themselves are aware to my thesis, thanks to our
very enjoyable discussions and exchange of ideas. I also would like to thank our department
secretaries, Oya Arıkan and Buket Sargan, for keeping me happy with their lovely
companionship.
My debt to my family is far greater than I can find words for. My mother, Ümran Tongo, my
sister İdil Tongo, my grandmother Aliye Barut and my aunt Adalet Barut, have been so
indispensable to my life and to my well-being. My husband, Yan Overfield Shaw, was not
only extremely patient with my long hours away at libraries and in front of my computer, but
he was also eager to listen to my ideas and challenge me in constructive ways. I would like to
thank him for helping me with my translations, and for being a great critic and a wonderful
inspiration for many of the ideas in this thesis, and, of course, for saving me from starvation
several times over the last four months. Finally, I thank my late father, İlhan Tongo, for being
a wonderful father and for teaching me the value of love, learning and curiosity. I would like
to dedicate this study to him.
vi
In Memory of My Father
İLHAN TONGO
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66
Vazgeçtim bu dünyadan tek ölüm paklar beni,
Değmez bu yangın yeri, avuç açmaya değmez.
Değil mi ki çiğnenmiş inancın en seçkini,
Değil mi ki yoksullar mutluluktan habersiz,
Değil mi ki ayaklar altında insan onuru,
O kızoğlan kız erdem dağlara kaldırılmış,
Ezilmiş, horgörülmüş el emeği, göz nuru,
Ödlekler geçmiş başa, derken mertlik bozulmuş,
Değil mi ki korkudan dili bağlı sanatın,
Değil mi ki çılgınlık sahip çıkmış düzene,
Doğruya doğru derken eğriye çıkmış adın,
Değil mi ki kötüler kadı olmuş Yemen' e
Vazgeçtim bu dünyadan, dünyamdan geçtim ama,
Seni yalnız komak var, o koyuyor adama.
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66,
translated by Can Yücel
vii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION..................................................................................1
Historiography of Modern/Ottoman Turkish Painting: An Overview………........4
Modern Ottoman/ Turkish Painting Revisited: Revisionist Studies.......................8
The Historical Context: Just ‘National’ Ideals?....................................................12
Sources..................................................................................................................21
Outline of the Study& Chapter Breakdown..........................................................22
CHAPTER II : FOUNDATION OF THE OSMANLI RESSAMLAR CEMİYETİ…...24
The Context of the Society’s Foundation…………….........................................26
The Social Composition of the Ottoman Society of Painters...............................44
The ‘1914 Generation’ and Impressionism: An Ottoman Avant-Garde?............51
CHAPTER III: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ART CRITICISM:
A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE OSMANLI RESSAMLAR
CEMİYETİ GAZETESİ…..................................................................................57
The Birth of Art Criticism in the Empire............................................................. 59
The Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi as an Ottoman Intellectual Forum...66
The Changing Face of the Journal: Images, Plates and Covers……………..…..70
Key Themes and Debates in the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi ............73
CHAPTER IV: THE GREAT WAR: PAINTING THE ORDINARY SOLDIER….91
The Ottoman Empire in the Great War.................................................................91
The ‘Visuality’ of the War....................................................................................93
A View from the Trenches....................................................................................95
1916: The Golden Year of International War Culture…………………………..98
The 1916 and 1917 ‘Galatasaray Exhibitions’…………………………………103
International Exhibitions of War Paintings:
Istanbul and Vienna, 1917& 1918……………………………………......109
Painting the Ordinary Soldier Safeguarding the Fatherland…………………...116
A Reconsideration of the Art of the Great War………………………………..119
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION................................................................................126
FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………..132
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….168
viii
FIGURES
1. Ahmed Ziya, the garden of Yıldız Palace (from A History of Turkish
Painting, ed. Günsel Renda et.al. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1988).
2. Unknown painter, the garden of Yıldız Palace (from A History of Turkish
Painting).
3. Süleyman Seyyid, Still-life with Oranges (from A History of Turkish
Painting).
4. Hüseyin Zekai Paşa, Still-life (from A History of Turkish Painting).
5. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, The Quinces (from A History of Turkish Painting).
6. Osman Hamdi Bey, In front of the door of Sultan Ahmed Mosque (from
Edhem Eldem. Osman Hamdi Bey Sözlüğü. Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm
Bakanlığı, 2010).
7. The cover of the inaugural issue of the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi
(from the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
8. Hasan Rıza’s portrait of Sultan Osman (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
9. Hasan Rıza’s portrait of Hayreddin Barbarossa (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
10. Halil Paşa, A Camel Driver in Egypt (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi).
11. İzzet Bey’s portrait of Sultan Selim III (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
12. Tovmas Efendi’s painting of the three martyred Ottoman pilots (from the
Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
13. İsmail Hakkı’s portrait of Hoca Ali Rıza (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi).
14. Hoca Ali Rıza, Snow in Üsküdar (from Hoca Ali Rıza, ed. Ömer faruk
Şerifoğlu. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005).
15. Hoca Ali Rıza, Pink House (from Hoca Ali Rıza).
16. The poster of Die Türkei im Weltkrieg: Bildnisse und Skizzen von Wilhelm
Victor Krausz, 1916 (from the Imperial War Museum).
ix
17. The Grand vizier Said Halim Paşa (from the catalogue of Die Türkei im
Weltkrieg: Bildnisse und Skizzen von Wilhelm Victor Krausz).
18. Enver Paşa (from the catalogue of Die Türkei im Weltkrieg).
19. Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz (from the catalogue of Die Türkei im
Weltkrieg).
20. Liman von Sanders (from the catalogue of Die Türkei im Weltkrieg).
21. Sultan Mehmed V Reşad (from the catalogue of Die Türkei im Weltkrieg).
22. Ali Cemal, A Watchman in Maydos (from the Askeri Müze Resim
Koleksiyonu. Istanbul: Askeri Müze ve Kültür Sitesi Komutanlığı, 2011).
23. İbrahim Çallı, Private Soldier (from the Askeri Müze Resim Koleksiyonu).
24. İbrahim Çallı, Wounded Soldier (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler)
25. Simon Agopyan, Wounded Soldier Shooting (from the Askeri Müze Resim
Koleksiyonu).
26. The poster of the 1918 Vienna Exhibition (from the Imperial War Museum).
27. Prince Abdülmecid, Self-Portrait (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
28. Prince Abdülmecid, Sultan Selim I (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
29. Ruşen Zamir Hanım, Against Arc (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
30. Harika Hanım, Harmony (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler).
31. İsmail Hakkı, Yavuz (Goeben) (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler).
32. Tahsin Bey’s Barboros and Turgut (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
33. Şevket Bey, The Narthex of Hagia Sophia (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
34. Namık İsmail, Lost in Thought (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler).
35. Avni Lifij, The Wall Decoration for the Town Hall of Kadıköy (from the
Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
36. Ruhi, Triptyque (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
x
37. Feyhaman, War Experience (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler).
38. Namık İsmail, Soldier (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
39. Hikmet, Passing through his Village (from the Katalog der Ausstellug
Türkischer Maler).
40. Hikmet Bey, Letter from Home (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler).
41. Ali Cemal, In Dobruja (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
42. Fausto Zonaro’s painting of Sultan Mehmed the conqueror (from Semra
Germaner and Zeynep İnankur. Oryantalistlerin İstanbulu. Istanbul: Türkiye
İş Bankası, 2002).
43. Hasan Rıza, The Victory of Eğri (from the Askeri Müze Resim Koleksiyonu).
44. Hasan Rıza, ordinary soldier (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi).
45. Hasan Rıza, ordinary soldier (from the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi).
46. The photograph of Corporal Seyid during the naval battle in the Dardanelles
in 1915 (from the Osmanlı Belgelerinde Çanakkale Muharebeleri. Ankara:
T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2005).
47. The modern image of Corporal Seyid (photograph by the author).
48. İbrahim Çallı, Night Attack (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer
Maler) .
49. Avni Lifij, War (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler) .
50. Mehmed Ali Laga, Dardanelles after the Bombardment (from the Katalog
der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
51. Adil Bey, His Memory (from the Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler).
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The modern in „Modern Ottoman/Turkish Art‟ has been one of the most hotly debated
subjects within art-historical studies in Turkey. Until recently, the tendency to track the
„emergence‟ of modernism in Turkish art mostly found its voice by adopting Western
terminology. This was a particularly favoured practice among the first generation of
Republican art historians. Invested with the paradigm of the newly-founded nation-state
and an ethnically-defined nationalism, as well as a European art education and
formation, these art historians re/wrote the modern Turkish art history by, on the one
hand, canonizing mainly Muslim-Ottoman male artists and certain art works, while also
assuming a universal application of Western movements and stages on the other. For
these art historians, „modern‟ painting is generally seen to have emerged in the early
nineteenth century with the Western painting education offered to Muslim male students
in the military and civilian schools, whose art is regarded as „breaking away from
traditional Ottoman miniature painting,‟ and paved the way for the true „realization‟ of
modern art with the „Generation of 1914‟ (or the „Turkish Impressionists‟ as they were
also called). The „Generation of 1914,‟ which included the painters Hüseyin Avni Lifij,
Ruhi, Namık İsmail, Nazmi Ziya, İbrahim Çallı, Feyhaman, Sami and Hikmet, has
become almost a sine qua non for Turkish modern art history writing, and equally for
the collections of modern Turkish art museums. And yet, interestingly, most of the time
this apparently historical point is argued without any discussion of the fact that all these
painters were active members of the Ottoman Society of Painters (Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti).
2
The Ottoman Society of Painters was founded by the graduates and students of
the Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi) in 1909. The Society was active
during the reign of Sultan Reşad Mehmed V (r. 1909-1918), or the era of the Committee
of Union and Progress. It published the first art journal of the Empire, the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, between 1911 and 1914, and contributed to the painting
exhibitions organized during the First World War. In 1921, three years after the defeat of
the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Society preferred to drop the name
Ottoman and became known as the Türk Ressamlar Cemiyeti (the Turkish Society of
Painters). After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Society remained
active through the regular art exhibitions they organized in Istanbul and also in Ankara,
the new capital of the Turkish Republic. In 1926, the Society‟s name was changed again,
this time to the Türk Sanayi-i Nefise Birliği (the Turkish Association of Fine Arts), a
name the Society kept for only three years until 1929. For almost forty years, between
1929 and 1973, its name remained the Güzel Sanatlar Birliği (the Association of Fine
Arts) before its more active painting branch was finally renamed as the Güzel Sanatlar
Birliği Resim Derneği (the Club of Painting of the Association of Fine Arts) in 1973.
Today the Society is still active, organizing art exhibitions in several cities of Turkey.1
Whilst some members of the Ottoman Society of Painters managed to develop close
relations to the ruling block in the newly-founded Turkish state and became (and are
still) highly popular in Turkish modern art history writing, some Society members
proved less able to adapt to the Turkish Republic and are mostly forgotten in modern art
historiography.
1 The website of the Association is available at: http://www.guzelsanatlarbirligi.com/anasayfa.htm.
3
The issue of what the members of the Society were in the Ottoman Empire and
what they became in the Republic and how they are perceived in Modern Turkish art
history is interesting from a historical perspective. As an artistic organization founded in
the Ottoman Empire and carrying the title Ottoman, the Ottoman Society of Painters was
not often acknowledged in early Turkish republican art historiography. An example of
this would be the book, Türkiye’de Resim (Painting in Turkey) written by Nurullah Berk
in 1948. Though Berk referred „the Generation of 1914‟ as having “opened a new epoch
in the arts” in Turkey with “their exhibitions and the impressionistic style they brought
back from Paris,” he preferred to start his history with the Turkish Society of Painters
without acknowledging the Ottoman Society of Painters, which was, in fact, the former
association of the Turkish Society of Painters.2 This was certainly related to the „nation
building‟ project of the early Republic which did not see itself as the continuation of the
Ottoman Empire yet rather as a liberator from the Ottoman yoke.3 With the aim of
disassociating Turks from their Ottoman roots, history for Atatürk‟s Turkey became, to
borrow a phrase from Eric Hobsbawm, “part of the fund of knowledge” which was
“selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized”4 by those whose function
it was to do so. The challenge was what to select and popularize. In art historical terms,
only some of the Ottoman past of Turkish modern painting was chosen, and this
selective history writing set aside no place for non-Muslim Ottoman painters, nor for
anything explicitly Ottoman. In fact the generation of Muslim male students who had
2 Nurullah Berk, Türkiye’de Resim (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Neşriyatından, 1948), p.28.
3 Kemal Karpat, “Introduction,” in Kemal Karpat ed., Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden: Brill,
2000).
4 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds. The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1983]), p.13.
4
been educated in military and civilian schools in the nineteenth-century would be
reformulated anachronistically as the first modern „Turkish‟ painters. No wonder then,
that the art historiography of the early Republic was unwilling to include the history of a
Society carrying the tainted name of Ottoman. In fact, as we shall see, comprehensive
academic studies of the Ottoman Society of Painters had to wait until as late as the
1990s, the time when the process of Turkey‟s reconciliation with its Ottoman past was
already well underway.5
Historiography of Modern Ottoman/Turkish Painting: An Overview
There is no single story of modern Ottoman/Turkish art, though a canon was certainly
created by Turkish Republican art historians. Whilst Eurocentric (and mostly the
Franco-centric) modern art historiography has created a problematically exclusive
canon, Turkish art historians‟ reaction against their exclusion became an equally
problematic nationalist discourse. Yet such fiercely nationalist art history writing also
ironically adopted Western constructs of art-historical knowledge, particularly that of
European art styles and of the chronology of stylistic progress.6
Since the professionalization of art history in the nineteenth century, style has
played a significant role.7 Style has been called art historians‟ principal mode for
5 Karpat, “Introduction,” p.viii.
6 In a similar vein, Turkish architectural historiography also suffered from nationalist and formalist history
writing. One of the most important „contributions‟ to that methodology of art and architectural history
came from the Viennese scholars, such as Heinrich Glück, Ernst Diez and Josef Strzygowski in the early
decades of the twentieth century. See, Oya Pancaroğlu, “Formalism and the Academic Foundation of
Turkish Art in the Early Twentieth Century,” Muqarnas, Vol. 24 (2007), pp.67-78.
7 Donald Preziosi, “Art History: Making the Visible Legible” in Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1998]), p.7. For Hans Belting, art history “began with a concept
5
classifying works of art,8 embodied in a succession of genius artists (Courbet, Monet,
Picasso) and „isms‟ (Academism, Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism). The
selection and shaping of the history of art in non-Western contexts was also informed by
the same problematic notion of stylistic progress, this time with selected art works being
seen as close to contemporary Western styles, which stood at the apex of an imagined
hierarchy of Modern art. This „stylistic influence,‟ as the Indian art historian Partha
Mitter has acknowledged, became the key epistemic tool in studying the reception of
Western art in the non-Western world: “if the product is too close to its original source,
it reflects slavish mentality; if on the other hand, the imitation is imperfect, it represents
a failure.”9 This problem of „stylistic-dosage‟ was certainly felt in the Turkish republican
context as well, where a nationalist discourse marginalized anything „cosmopolitan‟ or
„multi-ethnic‟, including the Ottoman Empire, in this chronology of stylistic progress.
In one of the first books written on art in 1931, Demokrasi ve San’at (Democracy
and Art), İsmail Hakkı wrote on the influential „isms‟ of late-nineteenth and twentieth
century art, and criticized Academicism for “its failure to be personal and original” and
Impressionism for its “obsession with colour and light.”10 For İsmail Hakkı, Cubism was
of history and extended it to the concept of style” in the early twentieth century. Hans Belting, Art History
After Modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.26. Emphasis original.
8 George Kubler, “Style and the Representation of Historical Time,” Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 138 (1967), p.853. Also quoted in Svetlana Alpers, “Style is What You Make It: The Visual Arts
Once Again” in Berel Lang ed. The Concept of Style (Ithaca; New York: Cornell University Press, 1987),
p.138.
9 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 (London:
Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 7.
10 İsmail Hakkı, Demokrasi ve San’at (Istanbul: Istanbul Sanayi-i Nefise Matbaası, 1931), p.104.
6
the art of civilized democratic nations,11 and was thus the appropriate style for Turkish
architects and painters. In his conclusion, İsmail Hakkı wrote: “As our women did not
lose their national character by accepting European clothes, our cities will not lose their
Turkishness by adopting Cubism either.”12 In fact, two years later in 1933, an artistic
society was formed with the name D Grubu (Group D), whose most prominent
members, such as Nurullah Berk, Cemal Tollu and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, were
applying cubist abstraction techniques to folkloric motifs, peasant women, and
Anatolian landscapes.13 As a member of D Grubu, Nurullah Berk also published a book,
Modern San’at (Modern Art) in 1933.14 Like İsmail Hakkı, Berk‟s motive was to
explore European art styles, such as Impressionism, Abstract Art, Cubism and
Surrealism, and to understand how each novel artistic form broke with previous styles.
Though he did not explicitly write that Cubism was the art of democratic nations,
Modern San’at dedicated the largest section to Cubism and Cubist painters. İsmail Hakkı
and Nurullah Berk‟s books were not written with the aim of exploring the history of
Turkish Art per se, yet they were certainly formulating a formalist methodology, and
setting the stage of for future scholarship and collections of the modern art museums.
In fact, when Turkey‟s first modern art museum was opened in 1937 with the
name of Istanbul Resim Heykel Müzesi (Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture), the
rigidity of a formalist approach in the display was visible. The Museum chose to exhibit
11 Ibid., p.102. See, also Zeynep Yasa-Yaman, “Demokrasi ve Sanat,” Anadolu Sanat, Issue: 1(1993),
pp.183-96.
12 İsmail Hakkı, Demokrasi ve San’at, p.140.
13 Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p.253.
14 Nurullah Berk, Modern San’at (Istanbul: Semih Lütfi Bitik ve Basım Evi, 1933).
7
(and still does) its large collection of Ottoman and Turkish oil paintings in a
chronological order where viewers move past the early nineteenth century non-figurative
paintings, on to the late-nineteenth century still-lifes, landscapes and orientalist paintings
in the academic style, continue past early-twentieth century images of urban life,
landscapes and portraits of ordinary people in a particularly impressionistic style, and
finally arrive at the experimental, cubist and abstract art works of the young Republican
artists. As a republican project with the aim of „educating the country‟s people,‟ the
collection directed viewers to follow a well-defined and teleological history of modern
„Turkish art,‟ where each style replaced the former one and was in turn replaced by a
more „western‟ and hence more „developed‟ successor. Not surprisingly, the young
Republican painters‟ works are represented as at the top of that aesthetic hierarchy “with
the highest number of works (159),”15 contradicting and displacing the former styles and
previous painters. One year later, Nurullah Berk wrote an article about the collection of
the Museum, where he divided the display into three periods: the “primitives” (the
period covering the beginnings of the nineteenth century until the middle and later
years); the “middle period” (including the painters working during the period beginning
with 1870 till the end of the nineteenth century); and the “modern period” (the artists of
the new Republican generation).16 For Berk, the still-lifes, landscapes and figurative
paintings in the impressionist style, or the “middle period” as he called, followed and
replaced those of the “primitives,” who were mostly copying from photographs, whilst
the “middle period” was also followed and replaced by the young early-Republican
15 Zeynep Yasa-Yaman, Suretin Sireti: Bir Koleksiyonu Ziyaret (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2011), p.30.
16 Nurullah Berk, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi,” Ar Dergisi, No: 4 (1938). Quoted in Semra Germaner,
“Elvah-ı Nahşiye Koleksiyonu‟ndan Resim ve Heykel Müzesi‟ne,” Serginin Sergisi (Istanbul: MSGSÜ
Yayını, 2009), pp.19-29.
8
painters, or by the “moderns.” The modern in „Turkish‟ modern art was hence created
and reformulated by these early twentieth century formalist discourses as a thing which
reached its true realization when the nation‟s art was seen to come to terms with the
social and aesthetic modernity of the West. This modernity was conceived as having
started with the “Turkish Impressionists,” and then being continued by the first
generation of the Republican painters, particularly the cubists including, of course, Berk
himself. Whilst undeniably useful in their endeavour to present the development of
modern art in a non-Western context, these classifications nevertheless assume a
universal application of Western art styles and formulate an ethnically-defined
nationalist history writing by excluding the non-Muslim Ottoman painters and their
artistic heritage.
Modern Ottoman/ Turkish Painting Revisited:
Revisionist Studies
The fresh critical insights offered by postmodern, feminist and postcolonial studies have
brought novel perspectives on the history of modern Ottoman painting. First, there were
the art historical studies, starting in the 1980s, which were interested in how local
westernization programmes affected „modern‟ late-Ottoman visual culture, including the
work of Günsel Renda and Zeynep İnankur. These studies were mostly the result of a
„home-grown‟ interest in the Ottoman past which had been denied by the early-
Republican historiography. Second, there are the prosopographic studies of non-Muslim
Ottoman painters, which have opened up new channels of inquiry into the multi-ethnic
and multi-religious artistic character of late Ottoman visual culture. Garo Kürkman‟s
comprehensive study of Ottoman-Armenian artists, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman
9
Empire, 1600-1923,17 and Mayda Saris‟s, Greek Painters of Istanbul18 are valuable
scholarly contributions tracking the long history of non-Muslim painters within the
Ottoman Empire. In opposition to official/nationalist Turkish art historiography,
Kürkman and Saris‟s studies have opened up previously obscured pages of Turkish art
history writing and have inspired more inclusive modern art histories. Of the package of
concepts inherited from nineteenth and early-twentieth century art historical studies, it is
the conceptualization of a passive and a-historical non-Western modern art that is
probably undergoing the most reconsideration. This revisionism has been felt in recent
studies of late Ottoman Empire painting culture by Mary Roberts and Wendy Shaw.
Wendy Shaw‟s 2011 book on modern Ottoman painting, Ottoman Painting: Reflections
of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic19 has endeavoured to
present a much more inclusive story of Ottoman/Turkish modern art than many previous
studies.
Inspired by the first of these revisionist approaches (reconciliation with the late-
Ottoman past), studies on the Ottoman Society of Painters began to appear in the 1990s.
Seçkin Naipoğlu‟s MA Thesis Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (The Journal of the
Ottoman Society of Painters) mostly focused on their monthly journal where Naipoğlu
presented extensive transcriptions of some of the articles from Ottoman Turkish to
17 Garo Kürkman, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Ermeni Ressamlar, 1600-1923 (Istanbul: Matüsalem,
2004). An English translation of the book also appeared in the same year. Armenian Painters of the
Ottoman Empire, 1600-1923, trans. Mary Priscilla (Istanbul: Matüsalem, 2004).
18 Mayda Saris, Istanbullu Rum Ressamlar/Greek Painters of Istanbul (Istanbul: Bir Zamanlar Yayıncılık,
2010).
19 Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish
Republic (London: New York, I.B. Tauris, 2011).
10
modern Turkish.20 Another MA Thesis, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Türk Resim
Sanatı İçindeki Yeri (The Ottoman Society of Painters and Its Place in the Art of Turkish
Painting),21 written by Seyfi Başkan, was completed one year later in 1992. Başkan‟s
motive was rather to provide biographical data about the Society‟s members (though the
Muslim-Ottoman ones) along with a historical background of the nineteenth century
artistic developments in the Empire.22 In 1994, another study on the Society, this time a
PhD Dissertation, was completed by Abdullah Sinan Güler with the title of İkinci
Meşrutiyet Ortamında Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi (The Ottoman Society of Painters and the Journal of the Ottoman Society of
Painters in the Context of the Second Constitutional Period).23 Güler‟s objective, besides
transcribing some articles of the Journal into modern Turkish, like Naipoğlu‟s thesis,
was also to situate the Society within the dynamics of the Second Constitutional Era.
These academic studies were also followed by more popular publications written in the
late 1990s, such as Ahmet Kamil Gören‟s publications on the 1917 Şişli Atelier and the
1918 Vienna Exhibition.24 In 2003, Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu‟s publications on the regular
20 Seçkin Naipoğlu, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (Unpublished MA Thesis, Gazi Üniversitesi,
1991).
21 Seyfi Başkan, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Türk Resim Sanatı İçindeki Yeri (Unpublished MA
Thesis, Gazi Üniversitesi, 1992).
22 Two years after he completed his MA, Seyfi Başkan also published the book, Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti in 1994. Seyfi Başkan, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti (Ankara: Çardaş, 1994).
23 Abdullah Sinan Güler, İkinci Meşrutiyet Ortamında Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (Unpublished PhD Diss., Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, 1994).
24 Ahmet Kamil Gören ed., Türk Resim Sanatında Şişli Atölyesi ve Viyana Sergisi (Istanbul: Şişli
Belediyesi, 1997).
11
Galatasaray exhibitions25 have also provided informative overviews about the activities
of these painters during the war years. Probably one of the most important developments
in terms of scholarship on the Society was the recent transcription of their eighteen-issue
Journal in 2007 from Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish.26 This has made the Journal
and the Society itself more accessible to the majority of the Turkish population born and
educated since the 1928 alphabet reform.
All of these studies on the Society have much to offer compared with the
relatively restrictive formalist approach adopted by the early-Republican art historians
who mostly focused the „Generation of 1914‟ by divorcing it from its role in the
Ottoman Society of Painters, hence, from its historical context. Yet certain problems are
posed by these studies as well. They have mostly presented the Ottoman Society of
Painters as a monolithic, homogenous and exclusionary body consisting of fixed and
established ideas. Such presentations seem to originate from taking the very foundation
of a „secular‟ artistic society in the Ottoman Empire at face value. These studies also
seem to sidestep the crucial issue of the canon, taking for granted that same list of artists
(i.e. the „Generation of 1914‟) confirmed by pre-revisionist art history. They also seem
to fail to question late-Ottoman history itself, leaving a lacuna of political, social and
cultural information of the period, particularly that of patronage, and of the relationship
between art and the nationalist policies taking place in the Second Constitutional Period.
Indeed, it is the central objective of this study to understand the Society and its
particular social and aesthetic anxieties together with the shaping effects of the political
25 Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu, Resim Tarihimizden: Galatasaray Sergileri, 1916-1951 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi
Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2003).
26 Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, 1911-1914: Güncelleştirilmiş Basım (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi,
2007).
12
and cultural dynamics of the late Empire itself. The Ottoman Society of Painters
emerged and existed during the most tumultuous years of the Ottoman Empire; the years
that witnessed revolutions, rebellions, wars and massacres. So, any attempt on the part of
an art historian to deal with the „historic moment‟ of the Ottoman Society of Painters, I
believe, must first engage with the politics of the late-Ottoman Empire itself. And these
politics, of course, have a history which is intertwined with the nationalist policies of the
Committee of Union and Progress in the final decade of the Ottoman Empire.
The Historical Context: Just „National‟ Ideals?
When „nationalism‟ became the revolutionary ideology of the world scene after the
French Revolution, the multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire
was in no way ready to adapt itself to the political realities of the century. Like other
traditional empires, such as those of the Romanovs and Hapsburgs, it suffered a great
deal – perhaps most of all – from the advent of nationalism. In order to adapt the
ideological weapons of this „revolutionary‟ change to its own purposes, the Empire
initially resorted to the policy of what Benedict Anderson has named “official
nationalism.”27 The two mottos of the French Revolution, equality and freedom, became
integrated into the vocabulary of the Ottoman state for the first time with the Hatt-ı
Hümayun (Imperial Edict) of 183928 and the İslahat Fermanı (The Edict of Reforms)29
27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London; New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]), p.83.
28 The Hatt-ı Hümayun was a statement of intent on the part of the Ottoman government, promising in
effect four basic reforms: (i) the establishment of guarantees for the life, honour and property of the
sultan‟s subjects; (ii) an orderly system of taxation to replace the system of tax farming; (iii) a system of
conscription for the army, and; (iv) equality before the law of all subjects, whatever their religion. Erik Jan
Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004 [1993]), p.51.
13
of 1856. These legal acts of the Tanzimat (Regulations) were simply the declaration of
modern state as they were centred on the concept of „rule by law‟ as the ultimate
principle, together with an attempt to create a common identity in order to contain all the
Ottoman subjects, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The Tanzimat reforms marked a watershed in Ottoman intellectual and cultural
life, but the very visible increase in the financial and the legal status of the Empire‟s
non-Muslims also gave rise to Muslim dissatisfaction and reaction. This reaction
expressed itself on a popular level in Muslim mob violence against Christian neighbours
or Western consuls in several cities (Maraş, Aleppo, Damascus) in the 1850s and 60s.
On an elite level, these reactions took the form of the Young Ottoman movement, led by
Western educated young bureaucrats and writers in the 1860s. The Young Ottomans
were critical of the „secularism‟ of the Tanzimat reformers, yet they were equally
inspired by the same Western ideas as that group, and reconciled liberal values with
traditional/Islamic references.30 Having realized that the Muslim population was
dissatisfied, the bureaucratic elite of the Tanzimat, who were responsible for the official
policy of reform, believed it necessary to renew Tanzimat Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) as
a legitimate official ideology. Their aim was to preserve the absolute sovereignty of the
Ottoman Empire and its sultan. By the 1860s, the ideology of Ottomanism, which was
29 The 1856 Edict of Reforms was more detailed in setting forth equal treatment for all subjects of the
Empire, recognizing the rights of the individual to a just, impartial, and consistent legal system by
establishing a precedent for constitutional principles of government. For a comprehensive study of the
reforms and edicts, see Roderic Davidson, Nineteenth Century Ottoman Diplomacy and Reforms (Istanbul:
Isis Press, 1999).
30 Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). In
Europe both the Young Ottomans and Young Turks were labelled “Young Turks,” although their political
ideologies were in fact fairly distinct, with the Young Turks employing more secular, nationalist
arguments. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, p.63.
14
based on the equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of ethnic, religious and
language differences,31 became the official ideology of Ottoman nationalism32 and of the
first Ottoman constitution (Kanun-i Esasi) of 1876,33 as well as of the constitutional
revolution that restored it in 1908. The „cosmopolitan‟ ideology of Ottomanism,
however, would very much lose ground after the loss of the European territories during
the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), and hence of the overwhelmingly multi-ethnic and multireligious
character of the Empire.
The last decade of the Ottoman Empire is certainly a historiographically unique
decade. Starting with a constitutional revolution and ending up with massacres and the
defeat of the Empire at the end of World War I, these years have been one of the most
hotly debated periods within historical studies in Turkey. The general propensity to
understand the concurrent ideologies of the late Ottoman Empire from Ottomanism to
Islamism and to nationalism nevertheless have been recently problematized by some
scholars. Erik Zürcher, for instance, has criticized this „linear fashion,‟ and shows that
the representation of the three currents of thinking: Ottomanism, (Pan-)Islamism and
(Pan-) Turkism is as old as the famous essay “Three Types of Policy” (Üç Tarz-ı
Siyaset) published by Yusuf Akçura in the Turkist émigré paper Türk in Cairo in 1904.
31 The famous nineteenth century Ottoman intellectual, Ahmed Midhat, championed Ottomanism
[Osmanlıcılık] in his 1877 Üss-i İnkilap (The Basis of Reform): “[The declaration of the Tanzimat]
reconfirmed the condition of equality that constitutes the founding basis of the Ottoman state: All classes
of people living under the Ottoman flag, regardless of their religious and denominational affiliations and
their communal and racial identities, constitute a unified political nation and are equal beneficiaries of the
common law.” Transcribed and translated by Ahmet Ersoy, “The Basis of Reform” in Balázs Trenczényi
and Mihal Kopaček (eds), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775-
1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. II, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), pp.291-6.
32 Ussama Makdisi, “After 1860: Debating Religion, Reform, and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No: 4 (November, 2002), p.606.
33 Robert Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A Study of the Midhat Constitution and
Parliament (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1963).
15
For Zürcher, “modern scholars generally failed to appreciate that Akçura‟s position at
the time was highly exceptional.”34 In order to emphasize the difference between the
revolutionary Young Turks and the war criminals CUP, Zürcher claims that this
teleological approach seems to obscure the overriding aim of the Young Turks‟ 1908
revolution, which was primarily to introduce certain constitutional rights in order to
protect and reinforce the Ottoman state they served, rather than, in Zürcher words, “on
an ideological preference per se.”35 Though the „Turk‟ in the „Young Turks‟ implies,
prima facie, an ethnic definition, Hasan Kayalı has also convincingly regarded the
designation of „Young Turk‟ as an “unfortunate misnomer,” for it conjures away the fact
that these Young Turks included many Arabs, Albanians, Jews in their ranks, especially
in the early stages of the movement.36 For most of these intellectuals, the feeling of
belonging to the Ottoman „nation‟ was neither defined by race, nor by religion, nor by
language, but rather by loyalty and patriarchal feeling.37 So, unlike the Kemalist
nationalists after the foundation of the Republic, turn of the century Ottoman
intellectuals and artists were, as Sibel Bozdoğan has reminded us, “concerned primarily
34 See Zürcher‟s essay “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908-
1938,” in Erik Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to
Atatürk’s Turkey (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp.213-35.
35 Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, p.211.
36 Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire,
1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.4.
37 For example, as Şükrü Hanioğlu points out, in 1911 a public affairs committee published an appeal to
all Ottomans to form a united front, and it did so in nine languages: Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Armenian,
Bulgarian, Greek, Ladino, Serbian, Syriac (in two different scripts, Nestorian and Serta) and French.
(“Ittihad-ı Anasır-ı Osmaniye Hey‟eti Tarafından Neşr Edilen Beyannamedir,” İttihad-ı Anasır-ı
Osmaniye [July 23, 1911]). Hanioğlu claims that though this appeal left aside numerous languages in use
in the Ottoman lands (such as Albanian, Kurdish, Rumanian, and numerous Caucasian tongues, to name a
few of the most significant), it gives some idea of the multilingualism of the Ottoman Empire. Şükrü
Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p.33.
16
with the preservation of the Ottoman state through identification with the sultan and the
empire.”38
Perhaps nothing illustrates the irony of the Young Turks more explicitly than a
speech given by Enver Bey (one of the strongest men of the Young Turk regime and
future Paşa) in 1911 in the opening ceremony of the Abide-i Hürriyet (Monument of
Freedom), erected to those who had died in defence of the constitution during the “31st
March Incident” (Otuzbir Mart Vakası), a failed attempt at counter-revolution by pro-
Islamic groups against the constitutional regime. Enver Bey remembered these heroes to
the public in the inclusive spirit of Ottomanism: “Muslims and Christians lay side by
side, a token that they, living or dead, were henceforward fellow patriots who would
know no distinction of race or creed.”39 Of course, the speech was given only two years
after the 1909 military service law passed by the Young Turk government which made
the military conscription of all Ottomans compulsory, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
In practice, however, the majority of eligible non-Muslim Ottomans still managed to get
exemption from military service by paying, albeit at a higher rate than Muslims did. So
the 1911 speech conducted by Enver Bey intended to communicate a political
expectation, rather than necessarily reflecting what was happening in reality.
Yet, as much as the 1908 Constitutional Revolution had been welcomed by the
majority of the Ottomans, Muslim and non-Muslims alike, the Unionists seized power in
January 1913 with a military coup d’etat headed by the Lieutenant-Colonel Enver Bey
himself, which would mark the beginning of the five-year „dictatorial triumvirate‟ of
38 Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, p.33.
39 Quoted in Klaus Kreiser, “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840-1916,” Muqarnas, Vol. 14
(1997), p.113.
17
Enver, Talat and Cemal Paşas until the end of World War I. Encompassed with the loss
of the Balkans in 1912-13, and hence of Ottoman identity, the CUP evolved rapidly
towards a profoundly anti non-Muslim Turkification policy. At its 1913 Congress,
Turkish nationalism was adopted as the official ideology, which was followed by the
1914 „National Economy‟ (Milli İktisat) programme that forced hundred thousands of
non-Muslim traders and businessmen to leave the Empire.40 And the aggressive
Turkification policies of the CUP with the creasing aggression of the Muslim Turkish
majority against the Armenian populations ended up with their final violent large-scale
persecutions in 1915.
But what was the relationship of the Ottoman Society of Painters to all these
developments? How did they situate themselves in the politics of the Ottoman state
between the years 1909, when the Society was officially founded, and 1918, when the
Ottoman Empire was dissolved at the end of the First World War? Was their patriotism
anti-cosmopolitan and xenophobic in spirit? Did they identify themselves primarily as
„Turkish‟ artists and marginalize non-Muslim painters? These are certainly interesting
and compelling questions. One could easily avoid them by merely making reference to
an article published in their official 1911 Regulations (Nizamname) which states; “The
Society is under no circumstances engaged with political matters.”41 Yet what is written
and wished for is not always what actually is. In fact, their Nizamname, which puts the
details about the objectives of the Society and the regulations of the membership in their
forty one articles, was published in 1911, when liberal or constitutional nationalist
40 For the most comprehensive study on the „national economy‟ programme, see Zafer Toprak, Türkiye’de
‘Milli İktisat’, 1908-1918 (Ankara: Yurt Yayınlar, 1982).
41 Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Nizamname-i Esasisi (Dersaadet: Bekir Efendi Matbaası, 1327 [1911].
18
Young Turks were still powerful in the imperial capital.42 During their active years,
between 1909 and 1918, and particularly after the 1913 coup d’etat, the Society existed
within a climate of ultra-nationalist policies, when, besides the CUP itself, some
Ottoman intellectuals like Ziya Gökalp (the official spokesman of the CUP) believed in
becoming “Turkish, Muslim and modern.”43 Within these political tensions, some issues
of the Society‟s Journal were published against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars. The
Balkan Wars were indeed a turning point in the rise of Turkish national consciousness;
and as such, they certainly found their way into the artistic debates within the Journal.
As a matter of fact, after the Journal‟s two-year break in 1912, it published even more
fervent diatribes against the non-Muslim instructors of the Academy of Fine Arts in their
„failure‟ to create and promote „national art‟ (Chapter III). Later, during World War I,
two Society members, İbrahim Çallı and Nazmi Ziya, went to Gallipoli in 1915 with
other Ottoman intellectuals on a „war trip‟ organized by the CUP to encourage artists
and intellectuals to promote „jingoistic‟ art from their experiences of the trenches. Just
after their return to Istanbul, İbrahim Çallı and Nazmi Ziya contributed to a painting
exhibition organized in the Türk Ocağı (Turkish Hearth) with other Society members,
such as İbrahim Feyhaman, Ruhi, Hüseyin Avni Lifij, İsmail Hakkı and Halil Paşa
(Chapter IV). The Türk Ocağı had been founded as a Turkish nationalist association in
42 The most famous liberal Young Turk was Prince Sabahaddin who wished to reform the Ottoman state
by decentralization and regeneration of civil society. Unlike Enver, Talat and Cemal, he opposed to
military dominance. As a matter of fact, he was condemned to death by the Unionists yet he managed to
escape to Paris in 1913. See, Hamit Bozarslan, “Le Prince Sabahaddin (1878-1948),” Revue Suisse
d’Histoire, 53/3 (2002), pp.287-301.
43 Ziya Gökalp, Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Mu’asırlaşmak (Istanbul: Yeni Matbaa, 1918).
19
1912 with the aim of “bringing the Turkish race and language to perfection,”44 and such
a contribution by some members of the Society to a nationalist organization‟s exhibition
very much contradicted the article in their Nizamname.
Attempting to read the history of the Society parallel to the CUP‟s nationalist
policies, however, might also leave us with a partial understanding of their art, obscuring
the great changes affecting artists during the last decade of the Empire: that of
patronage. Though we can never talk about a truly developed art market within the
Ottoman Empire, unlike contemporary European markets, the institutionalization of art
education with the foundation of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1883 created a great
number of professional painters in the first decade of the twentieth century. And this
increase in the number of the professional painters in no way coincided with the demand
for such art works (Chapter II).
Quite ironically, as we shall see, the First World War would facilitate art to a
great extent and provide an alternative to the economic stagnation of the differentiated
art market. The Türk Ocağı exhibition was followed by the Galatasaray exhibitions
organized in 1916 and in 1917, and also by the 1918 Vienna exhibition. The Ottoman
Society of Painters contributed to all these exhibitions, with picturesque landscapes,
portraits and images of everyday life, and, often, with battle scenes and depictions of
ordinary soldiers. Yet as much as visual culture flourished under the sponsorship of the
state during the First World War, artists were also actively discouraged from publicly
expressing any anti-war ideas. This, however, should not lead us to think that every
work of art was uncritically patriotic about the war effort, though most of the surviving
44 Füsun Üstel, İmparatorluktan Ulus-Devlete Geçişte Türk Milliyetçiliği: Türk Ocakları 1912-1931
(Istanbul: İletişim, 1997), p.100.
20
art works from the period have been interpreted and reconstructed that way in
official/nationalist art history writing. Rather than adopting a statist perspective which
centres on propaganda and pro-war efforts, more nuanced and multi-faced ways of
looking at these art works may certainly offer us different narratives of this strange
decade (Chapter IV).
The task of interpreting an Ottoman wartime painting and understanding the
mutual implication between this specific work of art and the historical data is certainly a
thorny one for the art historian. Yet these paintings, like all paintings, carry traces of
their ideological implications. Borrowing a phrase from Janet Wolff, we can say that
these works of art “are not closed, self-contained and transcendent entities, but are the
product of specific historical practices on the part of identifiable social groups in given
conditions.”45 This certainly does not mean to reduce art works to politics, nor to
understand these artists as passive agents of their historical conditions, yet, on the
contrary, without reducing one to the other, the function is to make the determinants of
the images appear.46 To write a history of the Ottoman Society of Painters without
acknowledging the catastrophic years of the First World War and how it informed the
fabric of the artistic world would leave us with only an inadequate, unfair and partial
understanding of the place and role of artistic production during these hard years.
45 Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p.49.
46 I have drawn inspiration from Terry Eagleton here: “Like private property, the [work] thus appears as a
„natural‟ object, typically denying the determinants of its productive process. The function of criticism is
to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work –to deny that „naturalness‟ in order to make its real
determinants appear.” Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1976), p.101.
Emphasis added.
21
Sources for the Study
In line with revisionist approaches and recent studies on the Ottoman Society of
Painters, my research will attempt to contribute to the writing of a revised history of late
Ottoman art. Yet differently from previous studies on the Society, my aim will be to
understand the Ottoman Society of Painters as composed of different and competing
voices and agendas, and within the flux of its social and cultural context, and with its
own creative specificities. Thus, while this thesis will ask questions of a familiar object,
it will also attempt to be a place where, as T.J. Clark once said, those questions “cannot
be asked in the old way.”47
In addition to the extant scholarship on early-twentieth century Ottoman art and
politics, I also draw on literary, narrative and archival sources from the period. Among
the literary sources, Adolphe Thalasso‟s articles published in the contemporary Les Arts
et des Artistes were extremely useful for their perspective on late-Ottoman art world and
the aesthetic and economic anxieties of the artists. As my aim was to understand the
late-Ottoman artistic world from the perspective of the members of the Ottoman Society
of Painters, I have also used artists‟ memoirs and their interviews in the secondary
sources. In that sense, I analysed their Journal, the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, in order to understand the changing agendas of the Society between 1911 and
1914, and the mindset of these late Ottoman artists. The official documents in the Prime
Ministry Ottoman Archives and personal memoirs of Ottoman intellectuals were
immensely useful in understanding the cultural agendas of the Ottoman state in visual
culture, particularly during the war years. Local and international periodicals and
47 T.J.Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” TLS (May 24, 1974), p.562.
22
newspapers such as Türk Yurdu, Yeni Mecmua, Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung and The
Times provided much useful information on how wartime artistic production was
perceived in the media. Much of the study is also based on exhibition catalogues, such as
Die Türkei im Weltkrieg, Galatasaraylılar Yurdu Resim Sergisi and Katalog der
Ausstellug Türkischer Maler, which I consulted in private collections and also in the
libraries of Boğaziçi University and Bilkent University.
Outline of the Study & Chapter Breakdown
My thesis is structured in three main parts. The chapter following this introduction aims
at a general overview of the visual culture of the late-Ottoman Empire, and tries to
understand how the historical and artistic specifics of the formation of the Society relate
to the circumstances of its foundation and its general agenda. In this chapter, I also
attempt to situate the Ottoman painters in a broader art historical framework, particularly
with regard to the European avant-garde arts and their socio-political and aesthetic
concerns. In embarking on a close reading of their Journal in the third chapter, I aim to
understand the interactions between the different political and aesthetic agendas of the
authors, as well as how the contemporary historical and cultural dynamics, such as the
reaction to the defeat in the Balkan Wars and increasing „nationalist‟ tendencies,
informed the debates within the Journal. In the fourth chapter, drawing on narrative and
archival sources and the exhibition catalogues, I explore the Istanbul and Vienna
painting exhibitions attended by the Ottoman Society of Painters during the First World
War. In this final chapter, my aim is to listen to the different responses of the painters to
23
this disastrous war, and to understand how they situated themselves in relation to its
extraordinary conditions.
In terms of chronology, this study firstly focuses on the early and late nineteenth
century artistic conditions preceding the foundation of the Society in 1909, and touching
upon the Parisian years of the members from 1910-1914 (Chapter II). The third chapter
mainly concentrates on the debates occurring in the Society‟s journal, and overlapping
the Paris period. And the final chapter continues with the story of the Society‟s wartime
experience from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the Empire‟s final
demise in 1918.
Understanding late Ottoman art history is vital not only to comprehend modern
Ottoman/Turkish art history on its own terms, but is also significant for the study of
global art history where Ottoman visual culture provides an excellent opportunity to
grasp the impact of artistic modernity in a non-Western context. To that end, the
Ottoman Society of Painters is also one of the most promising case studies to illustrate
the logic and ideology of the relationship between visual culture and the „nationalist‟
policies of a dynastic empire during its last decade.
24
CHAPTER II
FOUNDATION OF THE OSMANLI RESSAMLAR CEMİYETİ
At a time when the Ottoman artists have newly founded an Association
and when, by dint of the constitutional regime in Turkey, all the arts in
this country are about to undergo a development unknown until today, it
is useful and even necessary, for the history of painting in general and for
Ottoman painting in particular, to relate in a few brief pages the lives and
works of those painters who share the glory of having founded the
Turkish School. This school, which is destined to have its place in the sun
of art and to diffuse its luminously realist manner throughout Europe in
the very near future, will, among other things, lead to the collapse of false
Orientalists. 1
Thus writes Adolph Thalasso, the famous Istanbul-born Parisian art critic, in his 1911
work L’Art Ottoman. For Thalasso, the eruption of the constitutional revolution in 1908
was the main motive for what he saw as the groundbreaking artistic progress in the
Empire. He observed that the revolution had initiated artistic reforms and placed
particular emphasis on the foundation of an Ottoman artist‟s society that would
eventually shape the cultural fabric of the country and, together with the “Turkish
School” (École Turque), would take its place “in the sun of art”; and the sun for a
Levantine art critic such as Thalasso, was, despite his championing of the artists of the
1 Adolphe Thalasso, L’Art Ottoman: Les Peintres de Turquie (Paris: Librairie Artistique Internationale
[1911]). Reprinted with his other two works: Les Premiers Salons de Peinture de Constantinople (Paris,
1906), and, Deri Se’adet ou Stamboul, Porte du Bonheur (Paris, 1908) with a supplementary English
translation. Osmanlı Sanatı, Türkiye’nin Ressamları ve İlk İstanbul Salonları (Istanbul: Istanbul
Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür A.Ş. Yayınları, 2008), p.35. Thalasso‟s L’Art Ottoman was dedicated to
Prince Abdülmecid, Sultan Abdülaziz‟s son and a painter himself, who would later become the honorary
president of the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti.
25
imperial capital, still a Parisian one.2 Exhilarated as he was by the Young Turks‟ success
in building a constitutional regime, the emergence of a comparatively liberal political
order, the vivid social and intellectual milieu, and the flourishing of publications and
associations, Thalasso was right to be optimistic about the cultural progress of the
empire. Yet he could scarcely have foreseen that both the artists and new patrons of art,
the Ottoman bourgeoisie, would be less preoccupied with challenging the “false
Orientalists,” than with developing bourgeois portraiture, studies of everyday life objects
and military and nationalistic themes.
In this chapter I will take a broad glance at the historical and artistic specifics of
the formation of the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti, its social composition and general
agenda. I will begin with an account of the reasons for the emergence of such an artistic
union in the first decade of the twentieth century, and attempt to understand its
formation as a part of broader historical processes: the long history of
professionalization and institutionalization of the arts in the empire (i.e. the painting
classes in the military and civilian schools from the late eighteenth century onwards, and
the foundation of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1883); the new atmosphere of freedom
brought by the 1908 Second Constitutional Revolution; the collapse of traditional
institutions of patronage after the demise of Sultan Abdülhamid II; and, finally, the
attempt of the Ottoman Society of Painters to build networks of private patronage within
the Empire. In the following section I will introduce the Society, and give an overview
of its official founding document, Nizamname (Regulations), and of the social
2 In L’Art Ottoman, Thalasso wrote about the history of Ottoman painting and the pioneers of the “Turkish
School”; Pierre Desiré Guillemet, Ahmed Ali Paşa, Osman Hamdi Bey, Fausto Zonaro, Salvator Valéri,
Halil Paşa, Joseph Warnia-Zarzecki, Leonardo de Mango and Philippe Bello, the majority of whom were
art instructors in the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. I will explore the way how Thalasso portrays the
“Turkish School” in more detail in Chapter III.
26
composition of its membership. Finally, I will attempt to provide a broader crosscultural
perspective of their Paris years (between 1910 and 1914), and to think about
them in relation to their modern contemporaries, particularly the European avant-garde
artists. The issues that will arise from an inquiry into the reasons of the Society‟s
formation and its social character will, I hope, constitute a helpful historical background
for the following chapters where I will focus more closely on their journal, the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, and the art exhibitions they organized during the First
World War.
The Context of the Society‟s Foundation
Professionalization of the Arts in the Empire
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire experienced profound social changes as a
result of an engagement with Western modernity, which had a particular impact on the
artistic fabric of the Ottoman Empire. The gradual professionalization of the arts from
the eighteenth century onwards would eventually pave the way for the emergence of a
professional artistic body such as the Ottoman Society of Painters in the early twentieth
century.
The professionalization of the arts dates back to the later decades of the
eighteenth century, when Europe and European methods of education came to represent
the paragon of progress and development, under the reforming sultans Selim III (r.1789-
1807) and Mahmud II (r.1808-39). Though military issues were the major stimuli for
reform under their rule; Selim III‟s establishment of an entirely novel army force, the
Nizam-ı Cedid, with European style training, uniform and up-to-date weapons, and the
27
final destruction of the traditional military backbone of the Empire, the Janissary corps,
by Mahmud II in 1826, perhaps their most significant cultural outcome was the
development of the means of education in the empire. The Military School of
Engineering (Mühendishane-i Berri-i Hümayun), which was founded in 1793 during the
reign of Sultan Selim III, was the first among these schools, and was later followed by
War Academy (Harbiye), Naval Academy (Bahriye), Military Medical School (Askeri
Tıbbiye) and the Military Veterinary Surgeon School (Askeri Baytar), opened in the
early nineteenth century.3 The establishment of these new schools, and especially of art
classes in their curricula, were also significant initiatives for the future „modern‟
Ottoman painting.
Starting from the late eighteenth century onwards, painting classes were
scheduled at these military and civilian schools of the period. The cadets and future
soldiers were trained in naturalistic styles based on printed examples and photographs,
with the aim of training the students in producing topographic lay-outs and technical
drawings for military purposes. Among the generation of artists trained in this way were
Ferik İbrahim Paşa (1815-1889), Halil Paşa (1857-1939), Ferik Tevfik Paşa (1819-
1866), Hüseyin Zekai Paşa (1860-1919), Hoca Ali Rıza (1858-1930), Süleyman Seyyid
(1842-1913) and Şeker Ahmed Paşa (1841-1907).4 In spite of their stylistic differences,
this generation are grouped under the umbrella term of „soldier painters‟ in modern
3 Osman Ergin, İstanbul Mektepleri ve İlim, Terbiye, ve San’at Müesseseleri Dolayısıyla Türkiye Maarif
Tarihi (Istanbul: OsmanBey Matbaası, 1939-1943).
4 This generation has been one of the mostly referred subjects in Turkish art history writing. For earliest
studies on these paşa painters, see, Sami Yetik, Ressamlarımız (Istanbul: Marifet Basımevi, 1940); Pertev
Boyar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devirlerinde Türk Ressamları, Hayatları ve
Eserleri (Ankara: Jandarma Basımevi, 1948). For a recent study on this generation, see, Turan Erol,
“Painting in Turkey in XIX and Early XXth Century” in A History of Turkish Painting, ed. Günsel Renda
et.al. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).
28
Turkish art history writing due to their military background.5 Another educational
institution founded much later than the Military schools was the Darüşşafaka, which
also offered painting classes to its students from 1873 onwards.6 Like the painting
classes offered by the Military schools, the Darüşşafaka did not include figural training
as part of their academic system; the painting classes offered in these institutions, such
as resm-i hatti (linear perspective) or menazir (perspective) were based on the study of
nature and topography.7 In Turkish art history writing, the nonfigurative works of those
artists, particularly those from the Darüşşafaka, are referred to as photo-interpreters
(foto yorumcular)8 or “primitives” (primitifler), a quite Western terminology which was
first used, unsurprisingly, by a French art historian, René Huygue, who visited the
Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (Istanbul Resim Heykel Müzesi) after its
foundation in 1937.9
As opposed to the Military and Civilian Schools, where art education was
included as a part of a wider syllabus, with the foundation of the Academy of Fine Arts
5 Nüzhet İslimyeli, Asker Ressamlar ve Ekoller (Ankara: Asker Ressamlar Sanat Derneği Yayınları,
1965); İlkay Karatepe, Asker Ressamlar Kataloğu (İstanbul: Askeri Müze ve Kültür Sitesi Komutanlığı,
2001).
6 On Darüşşafaka painters, see, for example, Adnan Çoker, “Fotoğraftan Resim ve Darüşşafakalı
Ressamlar”, Yeni Boyut, vol. 2, no: 9 (January, 1983), pp.4-12; Turan Erol, “19. Yüzyıl Resim Sanatımız
ve Ressamlarımız Üzerine Yeni Bilgiler,” Yeni Boyut, vol. 2, no: 11 (March, 1983), pp.8-9. The
Darüşşafaka was a pious foundation educating orphans for civilian careers. Darüşşafaka means „house of
compassion‟ from the Arabic dar ush-shafka.
7 As this art education was based on copying from models, Turan Erol, for instance, refers to it as
establishing another “master/apprentice tradition,” quite similar to those of the former miniature art
production of the Ottoman court. Turan Erol, “Painting in Turkey in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth
Century,” in Günsel Renda [et al] eds., A History of Turkish Painting (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1988), p.96.
8 Seyfi Başkan, Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye’de Resim (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 1997),
p.46.
9 Nurullah Berk, İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi (Istanbul: Akbank Sanat Kitapları, 1972).
29
(Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi) in 1883, education in fine arts, including painting, sculpture,
architecture and engraving, was, for the first time, institutionalized in the Ottoman
Empire. Besides art classes, pupils were offered classes in art history, ornamentation,
perspective, arithmetic, geometry, history, antiques and anatomy.10 In the Academy, art
classes were taught by mostly foreign and non-Muslim Ottoman artists, such as
Salvatore Valeri, Joseph Warnia-Zarzecki, Fausto Zonaro, Leonardo de Mango, Philippe
Bello, Osgan Efendi, in other words those to whom Adolphe Thalasso referred as the
“pioneers of the Turkish School”, while anatomy was taught by Yusuf Rami Efendi,
mathematics by Hasan Bey, and art history by Aristoklis Efendi. The chair of the
Academy himself was an Ottoman painter, archaeologist, museum director and public
figure, Osman Hamdi Bey (1841-1910), whose paintings were academic and „orientalist‟
in style.11 The academy also embarked on a programme of publicity to develop a public
appetite for the fine arts and their Ottoman practitioners. By 1885, the academy had
begun to host annual exhibitions, where pupils exhibited the works they produced during
studio classes to the public. The Academy also hosted the beginnings of professional
artistic scholarship. The first academic work on aesthetics, the “Prolegomena to the
History of Fine Arts” (Fünun-ı Nefise Tarihi Medhali) written by Sakızlı Ohannes
10 These classes are stated in an official document dated 1882. Transcribed and published in Mustafa
Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1971),
p.461.
11 For Osman Hamdi, see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi; Cezar, Müzeci ve Ressam
Osman Hamdi Bey (Istanbul: Türk Kültürüne Hizmet Vakfı, 1987). For Osman Hamdi and the Fine Arts
Academy, see, Adnan Çoker (ed.), Osman Hamdi ve Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan
Üniversitesi, 1963). For the most recent study on him, see, Edhem Eldem, Osman Hamdi Bey Sözlüğü
(Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2010).
30
Efendi and published in 1892, was a compilation of the author‟s lectures he delivered at
the Academy of Fine Arts.12
Another aspect of professionalization was the increasing use of Western
educational techniques, though these were sometimes controversial. Art education in the
Academy involved the classic studio-based, western-style art classes in painting,
sculpture and architecture. One graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Ali Sami (Boyar),
later complained that the Academy did not offer live models until 1906. In that year, a
group of students, including himself, Ruhi and Nazmi Ziya, demonstrated against this
attitude, and gained, in return for their pains, an opportunity to work with real human
models, though these were male oil wrestlers, and were to be allowed to model only
semi-naked.13 This was still a significant challenge to the Muslim „identity‟ and
traditions of the Empire that time, and the director of the Academy himself was perhaps
understandably reticent about attracting any negative attention. Another graduate of the
Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the Ottoman Society of Painters, Hikmet Onat
mentioned in an interview that one day he and his fellow students had had enough of
working with male porters as models and brought a girl once from a gypsy settlement
and made her adopt various postures. As they started to paint, Osman Hamdi Bey, the
director, called them to his office and yelled at them that they were in a country that
could not bear such things. “I hope” he said “you will go to Europe soon and paint lots
of women, even naked ones.”14 Perhaps these painting students who had grown up
12 Sakızlı Ohannes, Fünun-ı Nefise Tarihi Medhali (Istanbul: 1308 [1892]).
13 Ali Sami Boyar‟s 1945 speech was published in Bedi N. Şehsuvaroğlu, Ressam Ali Sami Boyar: A Well
Known Turkish Painter (Istanbul: İsmail Akgün Matbaası), p.72.
14 Hikmet Onat, “Interview” in Nurullah Berk and Hüseyin Gezer, 50 Yılın Türk Resim ve Heykeli
(Istanbul: Türkiye Iş Bankası, 1973), pp.17-8.
31
relying on the presence and legitimacy of the Academy in the Empire were already
braver than their high elite Academy teachers, despite the latter‟s established artistic
relations with Europe. In fact, in his memoirs, Ahmed İhsan, the well-known Ottoman
publisher and the owner of the magazine Servet-i Fünun, wrote that when he had been
invited by Osman Hamdi Bey once to his mansion to be shown the painter‟s atelier, he
was surprised by the fact that the atelier was located in a hidden place in the house. For
Ahmed İhsan, “Hamdi was creating his paintings thus secreted away from others and
sent them to Europe, and not every man could enter there because he was scared of the
dragon of zealotry.”15 True, Ahmed İhsan was writing his memoirs in the early-
Republic, when the country had moulded Kemalism into Six Principles (republicanism;
secularism; nationalism; populism; statism and revolutionism) with the aim of
marginalising the influence of traditional religion and religious elites over its politics.
Yet, Ahmed İhsan was not totally wrong in his narration of the Empire, even while
looking at it from a Republican perspective. In fact, some reaction had already occurred
in the Empire against the usage of images: the wall maps of the Rüşdiye (adolescence)
schools, displayed for teaching purposes, were in some instances destroyed on the
grounds that they were „drawings.‟ It is also claimed that a contributing factor that led to
the closure of the Dar-ül Fünun (Imperial University) in 1870 were the remarks of Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani on the subject of the advancement of arts, crafts, and industry, which
were interpreted as placing the arts on an equal footing with divine inspiration.16 Despite
15 Ahmed İhsan, Matbuat Hatıralarım, 1888-1923, Vol. 1 (Istanbul: Ahmed İhsan Matbaası, 1930-1931),
p.74.
16 See, Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman
Empire (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press: 2002), p.165.
32
these reactions, five years after students‟ resistance against the lack of live models, a
new version of the Regulations and Syllabus of the Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i
Nefise Mektebi Talimatname ve Ders Programları) was published in 1911 under the new
chair of the school, Halil Edhem, which stated that during the third year of the painting
section the Academy would offer live-model-based study.17 Thus in contrast to the art
classes offered in Military and Civilian Schools, the Academy of Fine Arts was, with
some prompting, ultimately not afraid to take the lead in dictating what was and was not
proper in the professional training of its students.
The Academy of Fine Arts was an example par excellence of a modern meritbased
education system developed during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909).
The Hamidian period was characterised by a great faith in the power of education to
strengthen the Ottoman state. Ottoman officials saw public education as a means to
increase the identification between students and the empire itself.18 In fact, in an 1891
circular directive from the Ministry of Education to all high schools, graduates from
these institutions were expected to be “ready to serve their state and country
unwaveringly.”19 However, like the rest of that system, the Academy of Fine Arts
produced a generation of Ottomans who would be unwilling to put up with the
intellectual and political restrictions that characterised his rule outside of the enlightened
academies. Adolphe Thalasso remarked this irony on the first anniversary of the
constitutional revolution, arguing that while poets and historians would write down
17 Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi Talimatname ve Ders Programları (Dersaadet: Mahmud Bey Matbaası, 1327
[1911]). For a transcription of the document see, Seçkin G. Naipoğlu, Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi’nde Sanat
Tarihi Yaklaşımı ve Vahit Bey (Unpublished PhD Diss., Hacettepe University, 2008), pp.343-77.
18 Fortna, Imperial Classrooom, p.168.
19 Quoted in Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the
Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: New York, I.B. Tauris, 1999), p.96.
33
Abdülhamid‟s thirty year reign “in blood”, “artistic Turkey” should engrave the name of
its patron sovereign “in letters of gold”:
The deposed sovereign … did everything in his power to gag and stifle all
seeds of a generous thought, and of a liberatory aspiration. For thirty
three years, there was no literature in Turkey. History, poetry and the
theatre were reduced to nothing! … If Literature was mercilessly
persecuted, the plastic Arts, on the contrary, experienced, under the reign
of Abdul Hamid, a renaissance, nay, a nascence, such as has never
existed in the artistic annals of any people. Something truly worthy of
remark; this sovereign, who lost the throne for having failed to respect the
constitutional freedom finally proclaimed by his people last July, is the
first among the Ottoman sultans who – despite the hadiths which collect
the oral precepts of the Prophet – granted to Turkey its artistic
independence.20
Ironically or not, the founding of the Ottoman Society of Painters is related to the rise of
a new protean middle class who were integrated through an „equal opportunity‟ meritbased
education system. The graduates of the education offered by institutions like the
Academy of Fine Arts would ultimately come to despise and dismantle the system of
Hamidian patronage which supported them. It can be argued that, suspicious as they
were of traditional proscriptions and confident of the superiority of their education, these
painters represented a new social group, establishing their own public sphere through
voluntary artistic associations like the Society.
Constitutional Optimism and the New Associations
The Ottoman Society of Painters was first founded on the crest of a profound historical
change. The year in which the society made its appearance, 1909, was a time in which
people still had a robust enthusiasm for the constitutional revolution of July 1908; the
20 Adolphe Thalasso, “Orient” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome IX, Avril-Septembre 1909, pp.145-6.
34
revolution that brought the Western-educated Young Turks to power during the last
decade of the Ottoman Empire. On the eve of 23 July 1908, the Ottoman people
regained their parliament and constitution, suspended some thirty years earlier by Sultan
Abdülhamid II. This was the end of the absolute regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II, with
its atmosphere of paranoia, surveillance and censorship. With the newfound freedom of
parliament and of thought, there was an extensive enthusiasm for and increase in the
number of professional and fraternal organizations. The Law of Associations
(Cemiyetler Kanunu), decreed in August 1909, provided certain guarantees to these
social formations.21 This new atmosphere of liberty was also marked an explosion in the
number of publications; a jump from around a hundred to seven hundred was a clear
indicator of this new freedom of expression.22 The foundation of the Ottoman Society of
Painters was certainly a result of the novel possibilities brought about by that enthusiasm
– which would not have been possible under Abdülhamid II‟s rigorous policy of
censorship. In fact, just one month after the Constitutional Revolution, an immediate
response came from the artists of the imperial capital. As Adolphe Thalasso relates, an
association consisting of painters, sculptors and architects founded an artistic
organization, the “Society of Turkish Artists” (translated from Thalasso‟s La Société des
Artistes Turcs).23 This was a possible forerunner or inspiration for the painters who
21 Zafer Toprak, “Cemiyetler Kanunu,” Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, Vol:1
(Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1983), p.206; Hüseyin Hatemi, “Bilim Derneklerinin Hukuki Çerçevesi
(Dernek Tüzelkişiliği)” in Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu ed. Osmanlı İlmi ve Mesleki Cemiyetleri (Istanbul:
Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1987), pp.83-4.
22 According to Orhan Koloğlu, the number of publications jumped from 120 to 730. See, Orhan Koloğlu,
“The Printing Press and Journalism in the Ottoman State,” Boğaziçi Journal: Review of Social, Economic
and Administrative Studies, Vol. 18, No: 1-2, (2004), pp.27-33.
23 Adolphe Thalasso, “La Société des Artistes Turcs, ” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VIII, Octobre1908 -
Mars 1909, p.42.
35
would form the Ottoman Society of Painters one year later, though it was perhaps both
more „academic‟ and diverse in sprit; headed by Osman Hamdi, the leading spirit of the
academy, and reflected the Academy‟s cosmopolitan character, being staffed by
instructors and ex-pupils of all the Academic departments, and including Greek,
Armenian and Levantine members.24 Their shared enthusiasm for the new democratic
and convivial methods of “Liberal Turkey” is clear from Thalasso‟s detailed descriptions
of “sealed letters”, “secret ballots” and transparent oversight of the election process.25
However, after the initial euphoria had died away, it was clearly felt that there was a
need for a separate and specialist society to adequately represent or meet the
professional needs of more explicitly Ottoman painters.
According to the official founding document of the Ottoman Society of Painters
itself, dated September 30, 1909, the society was founded with the aim of “publicizing
the love of fine arts and progressing the art of painting in the Ottoman State.”26 The aim
24 “General president: H.E. Hamdy Bey, general director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum and of the
Museums of the Empire … Presidents: H.E. Halil Pasha … Osgan Effendi, director of the School of Fine
Arts and professor of sculpture at the same school, … and Vahad Bey, the architect … Vice Presidents:
Adil Bey, a painter … Ihsan Effendi, a sculptor … Zardijan Effendi, an architect … Members of the
committee: Alaeddine Effendi, another Turkish architect … Mr S. Valery, professor of painting … and the
sculptor Boshnakian Effendi, an old student of the School of Fine Arts, … Members of the council:
Among the architects: Assim Bey, Nisameddin Bey, Mavromati Effendi, Kiriakidi Effendi and Edhem
Bey, who is the son of H.E. Hamdy Bey; Among the Sculptors: Hakky Bey; among the painters: Reshid
Riza Bey, Shevket Bey and M. Warnia, professor at the school of fine arts, … the posts of secretaries, …
were carried by Arif Bey, Nazmi Bey and H. Boshnakian Effendi.” Ibid., p.42.
25 Ibid., p.42.
26 The whole document reads the following: “Memalik-i Osmaniye‟de, hiss-i bedayi-i perveriyye ta‟mimi
ve ressamlığın terakkisi içün [teşekkül eden ve merkezi şimdilik Üsküdar‟da vapur iskelesi fevkinde resim
sergisi ittihaz edilen, mahall-i mahsusta bulunan Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti müessisini tarafından,
cemiyetler nizamnamesine tevkifan ita olunan beyanname bittetkik Nizamname-i mezkür ahkamına
muafık olduğu ve cemiyetin de maksad-ı teşekkülü menafi-i vataniyyeye hadim bulunduğu
anlaşıldığından yine mezkür nizamnamenin altıncı maddesine tevkifan işbu varak ita kılındı].” (17
September 1325/ 30 September 1909). This official document was first published in Naci Terzi‟s article,
“Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti‟nin Kuruluşu ile İlgili Bir Belge,” Sanat Çevresi (December, 1979), p.14.
As the author informs us, the document was provided by Osman Asaf‟s son İzzettin Bora.
36
of the Society would also be stated in more detail later in the first article of their 1911
dated Regulations (Nizamname):
The founding mission of the Society is to open public workshops,
exhibitions and night classes, to give conferences, to organize trips, and
to spread the love of fine arts with periodicals and other scientific
publications, and to serve the progress of painting and Ottoman painters,
and is based on the principal of the union of [Ottoman painters] for the
achievement of their labour to secure their future in the Ottoman state.27
Thus the foundation of a society can be understood as both a continuation of historical
processes of professionalization of the arts in the Empire and as a response to the new
freedom of civic organization. Yet, as the phrase about the need to “secure their future”
in their declaration suggests, the founders of the Society also had other, more
economically pressing reasons to respond collectively to the position of painting in the
Empire.
The Crisis in Patronage
The merit-based art education of the Academy of Fine Arts described above had led to a
vast increase in the number of trained artists in the Empire. After his visit to the
Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Adolphe Thalasso wrote that the school had a hundred
and eighty students in total, consisting of “57 architecture students; 103 painting and
drawing students; 14 sculpture students; and 6 metal engraving students”28 making a
27 Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Nizamname-i Esasisi (Dersaadet: Bekir Efendi Matbaası, 1327 [1911].
The transcription of the Nizamname into modern Turkish is also available. See, Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu,
“Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve İlk Nizamnamesi,” Sanat Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, Issue:1 (2006),
pp.119-34.
28 Thalasso‟s article is indeed very interesting, as he also separates the students according to their choices
of the classes in the Academy: “The preference of Muslims and Armenians for drawing, painting and
sculpture is remarkable, as is that of the Greeks for architecture, and of the Jews for metal engraving.”
Adolphe Thalasso, “Orient,” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome V, Avril-Septembre 1907, pp.220-1.
37
total of almost two hundred. Though at the foundation of the Academy this number was
limited at around fifty (consisting of “some Ottomans, some Armenians, some
Levantines”), this still makes an extensive amount of new artists, since the first
graduation from the Academy around 1887. However, in the wake of the constitutional
revolution and the deposition of the sultan, there were serious economical problems for
these young graduates in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, greatly adding to the
impetus to found a professional artistic society. Thalasso also wrote about the
unfortunate economic situation, faced particularly by the painting and sculpture
graduates of the Academy:
Of the students leaving from Fine-Arts, some do not continue to work,
the others work „on the side‟, with no defined goal, in the guise of a
pastime and in their hours of leisure, subordinating their art, so little
encouraged, so little appreciated, in favour of more lucrative occupations.
Only the architects succeed. With the Fine-Arts certificate or diploma in
hand, they obtain any important work, or almost any, on the spot or in the
provinces. On the other hand, the painting or sculpture student deciding
to earn his living with his art is obliged to leave the country. These last
three years, many students have at their own expense continued their
studies abroad.29
When Thalasso published his article in 1907, there were still some positions available
for the graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts as painters in the recently industrialised
craft production of the Empire. For example, the Imperial Factory of Hereke (Hereke
Fabrika-i Hümayun) had been actively producing carpets, often from painted designs,
since 1840s and the Imperial Yıldız Porcelain Factory (Yıldız Çini Fabrika-i Hümayun)
had been founded in 1894 by Abdülhamid II. While the Hereke Factory continued its
production during the early twentieth century, the deposition of Abdülhamid II in 1909
29 Ibid.
38
would bring porcelain production to a halt, and this would bring economic hardship to
the already embattled young graduates.
These young artists were also having other economic problems which the
previous generation did not have, related to the collapse of traditional institutions of
patronage after the Constitutional Revolution. Of course, the income of painters such as
Osman Hamdi, Hüseyin Zekai Paşa and Şeker Ahmed Paşa was not only dependent on
the sales of their paintings; they came from upper rank Ottoman families and were
themselves high level bureaucrats, close to the Sultan himself. But their art was also
supported by Sultan Abdülhamid II. An 1890 official document from Abdülhamid II‟s
private library at the Yıldız Palace, “The Inventory Notebook (list) of the Artists and
Their Paintings Belonging to the Imperial Collection” (Saray ve Kasr-ı Hümayunlarda
Bulunan Resimlerin Cinsini ve Ressamların Esamisini Mübeyyen Defter),30 written
under the order of the Sultan himself, illustrates how broad and rich the imperial
collection was. The collection, most of which was gathered upon the order of Sultan
Abdülaziz (r.1861-76) and Abdülhamid II, consisted of 346 paintings by 104 foreign,
Levantine, Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman painters; the collection included seventeen
paintings by Şeker Ahmed Paşa (mostly still-life); twenty seven paintings by Hüseyin
Zekai Paşa (still-lifes, landscapes, interiors and paintings of historical places); and seven
paintings by Hamdi Bey (orientalist paintings together with still-lifes, a battle scene and
30 This imperial document has been comprehensively analyzed and translated by Zehra Güven Öztürk in
her study Ottoman Imperial Painting Collection through a Document Dating from 1890 (Unpublished MA
Thesis, Koç University, 2008). As Öztürk informs us, this imperial collection would later become the
nucleus of the first museums founded in the Republican Era, such as the Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, the
Yıldız Palace Museum, the Beylerbeyi Palace Museum, the Topkapı Palace Museum, the Istanbul
Museum of Painting and Sculpture, the Naval Museum and the Ankara State Museum of Fine Arts.
Today, the notebook is kept in the Rare Books Library of Istanbul University.
39
a landscape).31 Of course, this does not mean that these paintings were directly
purchased by Sultan Abdülhamid II himself. In fact, the notebook does not include
prices for any of the paintings by Ottoman painters, unlike the ones painted by Gustave
Boulanger each of which were bought for high prices, such as 25,000 or 20,000 francs.32
Different from Gustave Boulanger and other European professional painters in the
collection, Osman Hamdi, Şeker Ahmed and Hüseyin Zekai Paşa were not wagelabouring
painters who depended on the art market at the time; they were high-level
bureaucrats with salaried state positions. Even so dedicated an artist as Osman Hamdi
himself was strictly speaking only ever an „amateur‟ painter. Yet, one should not think
about Hamidian art patronage only in „hard cash‟ terms. True, Abdülhamid most likely
did not purchase these paintings directly from these Ottoman painters; his „patronage‟ of
the arts was more about providing opportunities for „publicizing‟ and securing art in the
Empire, such as in the foundation of the Imperial Museum and of the Academy of Fine
Arts both of which were directed by Osman Hamdi himself. After Abdülhamid‟s
deposition, however, Sultan Mehmed V Reşad‟s approach to the fine arts was totally a
different story. Unlike Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid II, he did not intend to have an
imperial painting collection which could, otherwise, have supported the graduates of the
Academy of Fine Arts. Of course, it remains questionable whether, had the Sultan taken
more of an interest in art, he would have bought these graduates‟ increasingly
„impressionistic‟ paintings of everyday-life or whether he would have preferred
paintings in the Academy‟s more traditional and academic style. What is certain is that
the new generation was no longer interested in producing such work, and despite the
31 Ibid., pp.53-6.
32 Ibid., pp.39-40.
40
nascent bourgeois taste and sensibilites in some sections of Ottoman society, free-lance
studio artists still suffered from the lack of a real art market.
So with the rising power of the bourgeois class to which the artists belonged and
the changes this brought about in the patronage system, whereby the artists did not
always have a pre-determined buyer, such as the Sultan or members of his court, the
establishment of an artists‟ organization became a crucial initiative for the painters of the
Empire.
Actively Developing Public Taste
Another priority for the Society, then, was the development of networks of private
patronage which could furnish a market for its members‟ work. There were a few public
painting exhibitions organized in the imperial capital in the early-twentieth century, such
as the 1907 exhibition in which the future young members of the Society, like Ömer
Adil, Sami, Nazmi, Hikmet, and Mehmed Ali all participated.33 In fact, in an attempt to
encourage private patronage, the Ottoman Society of Painters would organize permanent
painting exhibitions in their Society centre, Üsküdar, displaying their works for sale
while donating a certain amount of the sales to the budget of the Society. According to
the programme they published in their Journal, these exhibitions were open every day
33 Thalasso wrote an article on this specific exhibition, which he called “The First Ottoman Exhibition.”
Adolphe Thalasso, “Premiére Exposition Artistique Ottomane,” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VI, Octobre
1907- Mars 1908, pp.415-6. In this article, Thalasso wrote about the future members of the Society:
“Ömer Adil Bey, a student of the School of Fine Arts, he has presented to the public a landscape and three
paintings of figures, very curiously approached [ … ] Sami Bey, a Turkish painter with a great future. His
fourteen landscapes bear witness to a very acute and realistic vision of nature; Nazmi Bey, another young
Ottoman painter with a great future. His landscape view of Moda and his two life size Heads are treated
with candour and strength; [ … ] Hikmet Bey, and his five little Landscapes; [ … ] Mehmed Ali Bey, and
his three Medals.” For further information on this exhibition and other public exhibitions organized in the
imperial capital, see, Chapter III.
41
and, with the exception of Society members, all visitors were charged 1 kuruş entrance
fee.34 Besides these permanent sale exhibitions, they also organized public painting
exhibitions lasting three months, either in the Society centre or at other available venues,
and which would accept works by other Ottoman painters, not necessarily from among
their members. These public exhibitions, whose budget was sponsored by Prince
Abdülmecid Efendi, the honorary president of the Society, also offered awards to three
selected artists from each branch of fine arts, painting, architecture, sculpture and
engraving.35 The presence of Prince Abdülmecid Efendi in the Society might be read as
a resort to traditional modes of patronage, but despite his financial support to the Journal
and the exhibitions, his „patronage‟ power could certainly in no way approach the
previous Sultan‟s ability to build an imperial collection.
Despite these efforts by the Society and its aristocratic patron, it was still hard for
individual artists to gain recognition in the differentiated art market. This was because
the market for art was not yet based, or had not yet really developed, a reliable public
taste for European style art. One sketch by Adolphe Thalasso of an unnamed Paşa‟s
philistine attitude towards art, mostly likely during the 1907 exhibition, very much
proves the point:
One thinks of the Pasha of whom we asked – at one of the „Istanbul
Salons‟ – 500 francs for a marine which he wanted to acquire, but who
would offer no more than 70, after having – with the knowing air of a
gentleman who „would not be taken for a fool‟ – speculated in the artist's
presence about the cost of the frame, the meters of canvas, the colours
and the eight „days‟ of the painter's work, estimated at 6 francs! 50
centimes more a day than for painters and decorators! In this manner, he
34 “Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Merkezinde Küşad Edilen Daimi Satış Sergisi Programıdır,” Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:1 (19 Muharrem Sene 1329/ 7 Kanunusani 1326 [January 20, 1911]).
35 “Umumi Resim Sergisi Programı,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:2 (15 Saferülhayur
Sene 1329/1 Şubat 1326 [February 14, 1911]).
42
arrived at a total of 58 francs to which he added, very generously, a tip or
bakshish of 12 francs „because the panorama of the Bosporus was well
treated‟!36
Besides his, to Thalasso, philistine undervaluing of the artist‟s labour, the Paşa‟s attitude
also raises another interesting issue; his preference for a non-figurative painting suggests
that Islamic and traditional norms of taste still prevalent among sections of the Empire‟s
ruling elite. Indeed, Thalasso continues with the exploits of another philistine Paşa who
also ordered a landscape for his carpet design, and:
… after having ordered a landscape of 2 meters by 1 meter 75 from a
renowned painter, to be used as a model for a carpet that he wanted to
have made at the Hereke Factory, demanded on six occasions alterations
to the canvas, worked the artist at a frantic pace for two months in a row,
and, after the picture was finally delivered, not only forgot to pay him,
but, in very good faith, gave credit to himself as its true father, „as he had
himself given all the instructions to the artist!‟37
As much as Thalasso is critical of these anonymous Paşas‟ conservative Muslim taste
and philistinism, one should not hastily categorize him as a fanciful Orientalist,
generalizing an a-historical Muslim tendency in art. True, Thalasso is often outspokenly
critical of what he sees as the “false interpretation” of Islamic tradition which he blames
for Muslim hostility to figurative art.38 Yet, in this article, he is also adamantly critical of
the European Orientalist views of writers like Gerard de Nerval and the Baron de Tott,
and he takes great pains to separate the mentalities and “superhuman efforts” for art of
36 Adolph Thalasso, “Orient: Esthétique d'Art des Ottomans, ” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VI, Octobre
1907 - Mars 1908, pp.503-4.
37 Ibid., p.504.
38 See, for instance, Adolphe Thalasso “Orient: le Coran et l‟Art Osmanli” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VII,
Avril-Septembre 1908, pp.40-1.
43
the Paşas who had been educated in and travelled to Europe from those who had never
been beyond the horizons of the imperial capital. Perhaps too, he does not literally
acknowledge counter-examples for the tendency, such as the collection of Halil Şerif
Paşa, the Ottoman statesman who has generally been characterized as „lascivious‟ and a
rich Ottoman dandy relishing the Parisian nightlife in 1860s, including the shockingly
erotic Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet, and the Turkish Bath by Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres among many other explicitly figurative paintings.39 However, the
objective of Thalasso‟s criticism was to name and shame all that was unhelpful or a
hindrance to the development of “artistic Turkey” - thus Paşas like Halil Şerif Paşa, in
his „radical‟ bravery for non-figurative painting, was generating his collection in France
and with French art, instead of collecting the Ottoman painting. Also to this end,
Thalasso is elsewhere equally critical of the tendency of colonials, Levantines,
Armenians and Greeks to dismiss work by great Ottoman painters, preferring instead to
support even mediocrities newly arrived from Christian Western Europe to genuine local
talents.40 Whether Thalasso was right or wrong in his diagnosis, and despite the best
efforts of the Society to encourage the market for fine arts, it seems that the prospects for
making a living from art alone still remained quite limited in the Empire when compared
to the flourishing European art market.
39 For Halil Şerif Paşa‟s collection, see Michéle Haddad, Khalil-Bey: Un homme, une collection (Paris:
Amateur, 2000).
40 See Adolphe Thalasso “Orient: Esthétique d‟Art des Levantines” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VI, Octobre
1907 - Mars 1908, pp.552-3.
44
The Social Composition of the Ottoman Society of Painters
As we have seen, the emergence of the Ottoman Society of Painters in the form of an
association had historical precedents and responded to specific socio-economic
pressures. We now turn to an analysis of the social composition of this group, which, at
least initially, attempted to incorporate artists from across class, religious, ethnic and
gender divides.
Professional Bourgeoisie
When thinking about these continuities and changes in late nineteenth and early
twentieth century Ottoman painting and patronage, the term „bourgeois‟ seems to serve a
useful purpose. However, in itself the term is perhaps not enough; the term Ottoman
bourgeois artist signals the intellectual and cultural characteristics of this particular
grouping which pertain to its own distinctive class structure specific to the history of the
Ottoman state. My own understanding of the term draws particularly on the analysis of
the concept as elaborated by Edhem Eldem.41 Eldem understands Osman Hamdi as a
haut bourgeois who was “a high-level bureaucrat, the son of İbrahim Edhem Paşa,
several times minister, ambassador and once grand vizier,”42 while acknowledging his
41 Edhem Eldem‟s study of some two thousand stock and bond depositors among the customers of the
Ottoman Bank between 1903 and 1918 is one of the first attempts to rethink about the highly contested
term „Ottoman bourgeois,‟ which is mostly marginalized and neutralized in Ottoman studies, if not
avoided altogether. See Eldem‟s “Istanbul 1903-1918: A Quantitative Analysis of A Bourgeoisie,”
Boğaziçi Journal. Review of Social, Economic and Administrative Studies, Vol. 11, No: 1-2 (1997), pp.53-
98. What made each customer a bourgeois, for Eldem, was her or his “involvement in a capitalist type of
investment and a western type of network.” For a survey of the existing literature on the term „Ottoman
bourgeoisie‟ with regard to its social and economic transformation during the nineteenth century see
Eldem, “[A Quest for] the Bourgeoisie of Istanbul: Identities, Roles and Conflicts,” forthcoming. With the
permission of the author.
42 Eldem, “[A Quest for] the Bourgeoisie of Istanbul: Identities, Roles and Conflicts.”
45
„higher standing‟ as opposed to the newly emerging Ottoman professional class who
were rising up through the social ranks. There was thus a transition in the late Empire
from the Ottoman Tanzimat official bourgeoisie, with their „higher standing‟ based on
positions at court or high up in the military or bureaucracy, to the nascent professional
bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century. These last became waged professionals and
no longer needed to be members of distinguished Muslim Ottoman families in order to
train as teachers, doctors and lawyers in the more meritocratic education institutions of
the Hamidian era. Unlike the previous generation of “amateur” painters, who belonged
mostly to the upper ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy (such as Şeker Ahmed Paşa,
Hüseyin Zekai Paşa, Halil Paşa and Osman Hamdi), the graduates of the Academy of
Fine Arts, in fact most members of the Ottoman Society of Painters, were the new
professional middle-class of the early twentieth century; they were often full-time artists
who depended on the increasingly differentiated patronage of the art market, and most of
them would become professional art teachers.
So how can we see these emerging social distinctions at work in the Society
itself? Firstly, we can perhaps see a gesture of social continuity in the fact that Prince
Abdülmecid Efendi was always mentioned as the honorary president of the Society in
the Journal. However, the Society‟s foundational document, the Nizamname, also details
that permanent members were to be chosen from among those “Ottoman painters and
painting instructors from the Ottoman schools.” The tendency of the permanent
members to be both painters and teachers also shows us that its main attraction was
towards the newly risen professional bourgeoisie of Ottoman Society. Interestingly, the
Nizamname includes no names, but clearly states four divisions among the membership;
46
besides the founding members (aza-yı müessise), there were honorary members (aza-yı
fahriye), temporary members (aza-yı muvakkate) and permanent members (aza-i daime).
As well as being an organising principle, this division also seems to have had a socioeconomic
rationale. As we learn from the thirty-fifth article, an entrance fee, 1 lira, was
collected from each new permanent member, all of which would be reserved for the
future expenditures of the Society. However, while the (probably salaried) permanent
members were obliged to pay 20 kuruş each month, the honorary members were
exempted from this payment. Yet the same article also talks about their possible
financial assistance for artists in need to whom the Society could donate with money to
be collected from the honorary members‟ donations. While the article gives little
specific detail on how this was to be carried out, it is clear that there was expectation
that some members would have more difficulty in paying their way than others, and that
the founders envisioned that the Society would have to collectively provide in cases of
serious hardship. Such provisions seem to point to a consciousness of differences in
socio-economic background among the Ottoman painters; from paşa painters and
patrons to the sometimes struggling new professionals.
Muslim & Non-Muslim Painters
As the inaugural membership registration notebook has apparently not survived until
today, the names of the initial members of the Society vary in many secondary sources.
Ruhi (Arel), Sami (Yetik), Şevket (Dağ), Hikmet (Onat), İbrahim Çallı, Ahmed Ziya
(Akbulut) and Mesrur İzzet have mostly been acknowledged by secondary sources as the
47
initial members of the Society.43 Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, Osman Asaf, Ömer
Adil, Nazmi Ziya, Hüseyin Avni (Lifij), Mehmed Ali, Feyhaman (Duran), Hasan Vecih
(Bereketoğlu), Namık İsmail, Celal Esad, Mihri Rasim, Midhat Rebii, Müfide Kadri
have generally been classified as later joiners.44 However, as we shall see later (Chapter
III), both Sami and Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim would ultimately be among the most
productive authors of the Society‟s Journal. While Osman Asaf had the responsibility of
the managing chair (müdür-i mesul), and Ahmed Ziya is stated as the executive manager
of the committee of the Ottoman Society of Painters (Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
heyet-i idare reisi), the contribution to the Journal by other members of the Society
would seem to have been comparatively limited, if they made any at all. The Society
Journal also mentions the names of some members who have mostly remained
unacknowledged by the secondary literature; such as Agah Efendi, a painting instructor
of the University (Darüşşafaka), or a bureaucrat like Şerif Ferid Beyefendi who was the
vice manager of the Public Debt Commission (Düyun-ı Umumiye). What the sources
seem to agree on is that all those in positions of authority and influence in the society
had Muslim Ottoman names.
One reason for this may simply have been changes in the class and ethnic
composition of Ottoman painters since 1883. While the quantity and visibility of Muslim
43 Seyfi Başkan , Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti (Ankara: Çardaş, 1994), p.27; Zeynep Yasa Yaman,
“Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti,” Dünden Bugüne Istanbul Ansiklopedisi: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal
Tarih Vakfı, Vol. 6 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1993-95), pp.176-7. Among these members, the non-Muslim
painter Tovmas Efendi is sometimes included as well. See Abdullah Sinan Güler İkinci Meşrutiyet
Ortamında Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (Unpublished PhD
Diss., Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi, 1994). The names of the members are mostly based on a 1943 exhibition
catalogue Güzel Sanatlar Birliği 29. Yıl Resim Sergisi Katalogu (Istanbul: 1943) or on the Website of the
Güzel Sanatlar Birliği Resim Derneği at http://www.guzelsanatlarbirligi.com/tarihce.htm.
44 A recent example of this is Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the
Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London; New York: I. B Tauris, 2011), pp.116-7.
48
Ottoman students increased dramatically in the Academy of Fine Arts in the early
twentieth century, there were nevertheless, still a great many non-Muslim students in the
institution around the time of the foundation of the Ottoman Society of Painters. In his
1907 article on the Academy of Fine Arts Thalasso continues with a classification of the
pupils according to their “nationalities”: “87 Muslim students; 36 Armenian; 45 Greek;
6 Jewish; 6 Levantine.” Indeed, the increase in the number of the Muslim students is a
tremendous one; as Celal Esad narrates in his memoirs, when he was himself a student at
the Academy in 1890, there were only three Muslim students.45 This shift to a Muslim
majority is perhaps reflected in the fact that, rather than a modern and cosmopolitan
district of Istanbul such as Pera or Galata, the Ottoman painters‟ chose for their
headquarters a more traditionally Muslim district; Üsküdar. The location they chose for
the exhibitions during the First World War, however, would be the vacated club of La
Societa Operaia in the more cosmopolitan district of Pera. There is also a clear Muslim
dominance in the Society‟s intellectual production. In the eighteen issues of the Journal,
no non-Muslim painters published anything, or at least none of the non-Muslim painters
referred to as members of the Society. The Journal did publish one painting by a non-
Muslim painter, Tovmas Efendi, as the cover image for its seventeenth issue, together
with a short biography, yet his name was not included among the members.
One should not, however, hastily conclude that the Society was an exclusively
Muslim-Ottoman construction, though it was certainly a dominantly Muslim one. It
should be remembered that the twelfth article of the society‟s Nizamname stipulated
45 Celal Esad [Arseven] was a painter and art historian of the late-Ottoman and early-Republic. During the
First World War he served as the municipal head of Istanbul‟s Kadıköy district (Chapter IV). Celal Esad
Arseven, Sanat ve Siyaset Hatıralarım (Istanbul: İletişim, 1993), p.42. In his memoirs, Celal Esad added
that other two Muslim students were İsmail Hakkı and Galib Bey.
49
only that new members be drawn from among those painters “whose honesty and
goodwill is confirmed by another.”46 This shows that any painter or instructor could be a
permanent member of this voluntary artist organization, based on another‟s
recommendation. Furthermore, the contribution by non-Muslim painters to the 1916 and
1917 exhibitions, such as Viçen Arslanyan, Eleni İlyadis, Rupen Seropyan Efendi and
Dimitraki Trifidi Efendi among others should certainly be emphasised; in fact, the
percentage of non-Muslim painters to the 1916 exhibition was twenty seven percent and
the 1917 exhibition was forty percent. It seems clear that the Ottoman Society of
Painters, as an artistic union, was probably much more inclusive and heterogonous than
has generally been thought.
Women Painters
Differently again from the opportunities available to the bourgeois male artist, it was
also almost impossible for female artists to win recognition as painters in their own
right. Thus the Society was an opportunity for women artists to develop their careers.
These women members of the Society came from an upper-class background but would
eventually become professional, middle-class painters and art teachers in the newly
opened İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (Girls Fine Arts Academy) from 1914 onwards.
Indeed, without exception, all of the women members of the Society were of a
privileged social class status, and came from families that were close to the court.
Though the Academy of Fine Arts offered merit-based artistic education, this
education was still possible only for men, and art education for women had to stay
46 This is stated in the twelfth article of their Nizamname.
50
within four walls with private tutors until the foundation of the Girls Fine Arts Academy
as late as 1914. For example, Mihri Hanım, the director of the school, was born into a
prominent upper-class family; her father was Ahmed Rasim Paşa, once Minister of
Health. Like Mihri Hanım, Celile Hanım was also born into an upper-class family; her
father was Enver Celaleddin Paşa and her grandfather on her mother's side was Mehmed
Ali Paşa, both ministers in the Ottoman cabinet. Another important member of the
Society, Müfide Hanım was also born into a wealthy family and had the opportunity to
take private art courses from a famous Italian painter of the time, Salvatore Valeri.47
After 1914, these women all continued their artistic lives by teaching professionally in
the İnas Sanayi-i Nefise. While their intellectual position in the Ottoman Society of
Painters was to remain a rather peripheral one,48 they did not found a woman painters
society themselves, like the 1881 French Union of Women Painters and Sculptors.49 As
an Ottoman woman it was important to belong to an artists‟ organization to participate
and exist artistically in the cultural milieu of the late Ottoman Empire.
47 For women painters see, Taha Toros, İlk Kadın Ressamlarımız (Istanbul: Akbank, 1988); Berke İnel and
Burçak İnel, “Discovering the Missing Heroines: The Role of Women Painters in Early Modernist Art in
Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (April, 2002), pp.205-12; Wendy Shaw, “Where Did the
Women Go? Female Artists from the Ottoman Empire to the Early Years of the Turkish Republic,”
Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 23, No: 1 (2011), pp.13-37.
48 No woman member of the society, for instance, wrote anything in the Journal, and, in contrast to the
constant display of male Ottoman artists' paintings and articles, the eighteen issue journal published only
one song composed by Müfide Kadri in its eighth issue and one painting by her in its eleventh Issue. Their
peripheral position did not change in the following years either, as we shall see (Chapter IV), only nine
women painters took part both in the 1916 and 1917 Galatasaray exhibitions, compare to forty and twenty
seven male painters respectively. The 1918 Vienna exhibition hosted only two female painters.
49 For the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors see, Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s
Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
51
The „1914 Generation‟ and Impressionism: An Ottoman Avant-Garde?
The „1914 generation‟ has been probably one of the most popular subjects among
Turkish art historians and has become almost indispensible staple of Turkish modern art
history writing. These artists have mostly been acknowledged as bringing the belated
nineteenth century modern style, Impressionism, into the country on the eve of World
War I, which led them to be called the “Impressionists” along with their other label as
“the 1914 generation,” or “the Çallı generation.”
The story begins when some members of the Society – perhaps not surprisingly
male ones only – were sent to Paris for art education in 1910, and where they stayed
until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The members went to Paris under
various auspices: the most popular ones among them, İbrahim Çallı, Hikmet and Ruhi
were sent by the Ottoman state as the winners of an art contest; Nazmi Ziya and Ali
Sami covered his own expenses and went to Paris; Avni Lifij was sent to Paris by Prince
Abdülmecid Efendi on the advice of Osman Hamdi Bey; and Feyhaman's expenses were
paid by Abbas Halim Paşa.50 Once in Paris, Avni Lifij took classes by Jean Paul
Laurens, one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style.51 Except Avni
Lifij, all other young Ottoman painters were educated in the Atelier Cormon run by the
history painter Fernand Cormon.52
50 Hikmet Onat, “Interview” in Nurullah Berk and Hüseyin Gezer, 50 Yılın Türk Resim ve Heykeli
(İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 1973), pp.17-8. One of the documents in the archives also shows us that
Feyhaman was given an official recommendation for his art education in Europe. BOA, MF. MKT,
1177/73, 23 Muharrem 1330 [January 13, 1912].
51 Ibid., p.18.
52 As Deniz Artun has pointed out, one important difference between the state-sponsored painters (Ruhi,
İbrahim and Hikmet) and the privately sponsored ones (Nazmi, Namık İsmail, Feyhaman and Ali Sami)
was the fact that the latter needed to register at the Académie Julian first in order to enter the Atelier
52
The question of whether these artists were directly influenced by their French
masters is indeed an interesting one. Cormon was a painter known for his academic style
and epic scenes from pre-history. Much earlier than the Ottoman painters, the famous
post-Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh had also entered the studio of Cormon in
1885.53 Given Van Gogh's post-impressionist style with highly charged colours and light
and an emotional manner, and his depiction of objects from everyday life, one may
easily conclude that, as a teacher, Cormon was not very influential on this Dutch painter.
What about the young Ottoman painters who were in Paris that time? Given their
impressionistic style and depiction of ordinary scenes and people, can we say that they
were not influenced by Paris academicism either?
Impressionism as an artistic movement had already arisen in Paris in the late
1800s with Monet, Renoir and Seurat. In the France of the Third Republic,
Impressionism represented bourgeois ideology as a mode of both fervent self-expression
and technical conformity, which for Arnold Hauser embodied the contradictions of the
class.54 Later in the century, as the once-revolutionary French bourgeoisie revealed its
anti-revolutionary and conservative character, the once-revolutionary art of
Impressionism, a movement of l’art pour l’art, with its bourgeois values – imagination,
intuition, spirituality and individuality – was neither as explicitly revolutionary nor as
Cormon in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, as they lacked an official letter, which the Ottoman Ministery of
Education had provided to Ruhi, İbrahim Çallı and Hikmet. Deniz Artun, Paris’ten Modernlik
Tercümeleri: Académie Julian’da İmparatorluk ve Cumhuriyet Öğrencileri (Istanbul: İletişim, 2007),
pp.160-1.
53 See, Melissa A McQuillan, Van Gogh (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Peter Harrison,
Vincent Van Gogh (New York: Sterling Pub. Co., 1996); Dieter Beaujean, Vincent Van Gogh: Life and
Work (Cologne: Könemann, 2000).
54 For a historical analysis between the French Revolution, Romanticism and Impressionism, Arnold
Hauser‟s study offers one of the most detailed study on the subject, see, The Social History of Art: Three:
Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp.181-4.
53
political as the Parisian avant-garde. By way of contrast, the political Mexican painter,
Diego Rivera, for instance, was also sent to Paris in 1909 by the Mexican state, but he
preferred to establish himself within the contemporary revolutionary current of
Cubism.55
Of course, the question of the „radical‟ in art comes with a dual implication;
whether the artist was artistically or/and politically radical. The famous nineteenth
century French painter, Gustave Courbet, was certainly the example par excellence of
one who was both artistically and politically progressive. With his artistic choice of what
Linda Nochlin has referred to as “militantly radical Realism,”56 and his close association
with the anarchist revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Courbet “naturally expected
the radical artist to be at war with the ruling forces of society.”57 The examples of
Courbet and Rivera, however, should not lead us to think that the „avant-garde‟ was
always the property of politically left wing artists. In fact the early twentieth-century
avant-garde movements58 would fan out in opposed political directions; the Russian
Futurists‟, Dadaists‟, and Surrealists‟ association with socialism, on one hand, and the
British Vorticists‟ sympathy with and Italian Futurists‟ active role in fascism, on the
other, is great proof of the politically dual character of the avant-garde. Yet in spite of
these opposite political tendencies, all avant-garde movements had a common factor,
which was their challenge to the bourgeois order. All these movements, in Raymond
55 Diego Rivera and Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Citadel Press, 1960).
56 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York:
Harper & Row, 1989), p.3.
57 Ibid., p.3.
58 On the “historical avant-garde,” see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1974] 1984).
54
Williams terms, “implicitly but more often explicitly, claimed to be anti-bourgeois …
hostile or indifferent or merely vulgar, the bourgeois was the mass which the creative
artist must either ignore and circumvent, or now increasingly, shock, deride, and
attack.”59 This was the main difference, I believe, between the European avant-garde and
the Ottoman painters who were in Paris during these turbulent artistic years. They were
not, and maybe should not be expected to be, critical of the bourgeois art world, its
aesthetics, or its market. On the contrary, the aim of the Ottoman Society of Painters was
to establish and exist in the art world of the bourgeois order, and to work for the very
existence of art in the Empire. Their modernity and bourgeois sensibilities resembled not
that of the Italian60 or the Russian futurists,61 who called for a new art form that would
break with the aesthetic traditions of the past. As much as the love for old-Italian culture
and the canon of Russian literature were the enemies of the Italian futurists and the
Russian avant-gardes respectively, for the Ottoman painters, the previous painters or the
modern Ottoman artistic heritage as handed down by artists such as Şeker Ahmed Paşa
and Osman Hamdi Bey were highly valuable and examplary; these painterly forbears
were seen as role models in their contribution to the Empire‟s „road of progress,‟
59 Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avant-Garde” in Edward Timms and Peter Collier eds., Visions
and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), p.5.
60 In the eleventh and final proposition of his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti states: “We will sing of
great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides
of revolution in modern capital cities: we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards
blazing with violent electric moons; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke.”
published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Quoted in F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. R.
W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p.42.
61 The 1912 Russian Manifesto published: “The past suffocates us. The Academy and Pushkin are less
intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., overboard from the steamship
of modernity. He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.” Quoted in Anne Charters
and Samuel Charters, I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (London: Andre Deutsch,
1979), p.29.
55
particularly Şeker Ahmed‟s active role in opening public exhibitions and Osman
Hamdi‟s role as the chair of the Imperial Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts. As we
shall see (Chapter III), many debates in their Journal show their veneration to these
artists. Without aiming to discard the past, the Ottoman Society of Painters believed in
their power to advance and envision the future of the country as „leaders‟ of the society.
After his Paris years, Nazmi Ziya once said to a fellow painter during their
conversation on Picasso and Matisse; “forget these tricksters!” as these cubist artists
were doing a kind of art “which could only be understood by themselves or the ones
who thinks like themselves,” whereas art, for Ziya, “should be loved and understood by
everyone.”62 Nazmi Ziya thus preferred to understand art as a „public mission.‟ Ali Sami
likewise attributed similar role to art, and took a critical attitude towards his group‟s
classification as mere „impressionist‟ painters:
We did not bring Impressionism from Paris. Our generation attempted to
bring classical and academic art to the fatherland. On my return I firstly
founded a fine arts academy for girls under the name İnas Sanayi-i Nefise
Mektebi. I am the founder of this school and the first instructor of its
atelier.63
As a matter of fact, as we shall see, their Journal, unlike many contemporary Western art
journals and manifestos, would not contain any articles on the question of „style‟. Their
main aim was not to come with a new, radical and innovative art style. Yet, at the same
time, they were the members of a specific generation, who were raised into an
intellectual milieu by the „equal opportunity‟ education system offered by the Academy
of Fine Arts. So the bourgeois values of intuition, imagination and individuality were
62 Quoted in Bedri Rahmi, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi, 1937) , p.20.
63 Bedi N. Şehsuvaroğlu, Ressam Ali Sami Boyar, p.73.
56
central to their art. As much as they were involved in impressionistic style, their main
motivation, unlike the European avant-garde, was in no way to contradict or displace the
previously established styles, artists or institutions. So, without falling into the trap of
reading their art in a teleological sense, this newly formed Ottoman bourgeoisie, at the
same time, responded in clear ways to bourgeois tastes hand in hand with the rising
bourgeois patronage of the arts. They depicted portraits of ordinary people which, as the
art historian Sibel Bozdoğan observes, marked “the emergence of modern individual
subjectivities.”64 The new images of everyday life, of ordinary people, and of nationalist
themes in the paintings of the Ottoman Society of Painters would indeed be different
from the previous traditions of „photo-interpreters‟ whose taste is reflected in the
popularity of unpeopled landscape paintings, depicting Ottoman palaces, mansions and
kiosks (fig.1, fig.2). Their modernism was also different from that of previous academic
traditions of still-life and orientalist paintings by painters like Süleyman Seyyid (fig.3),
Hüseyin Zekai Paşa (fig. 4), Şeker Ahmed Paşa (fig. 5), and Osman Hamdi Bey (fig. 6).
As part and parcel of profound historical changes within the Empire, including a newly
developed merit-based art education system, „nationalist‟ ideologies and war, the
Ottoman Society of Painters initially channelled the art scene in line with ideals and
bourgeois sensibilities which were still Western, yet would soon find their artistic voice
in fervent nationalistic concerns.
64 Sibel Bozdoğan, “Art and Architecture in Modern Turkey: The Republican Period” in Reşat Kasaba
(ed.) The Cambridge History of Turkey: Vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), p.423.
57
CHAPTER III
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ART CRITICISM:
A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE OSMANLI RESSAMLAR CEMİYETİ GAZETESİ
In the eighteen issues they published between 1911 and 1914, the authors of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi put forward the view that art was a strong social force with
potential to contribute to the progress of the Ottoman nation. As the inaugural article of
the Journal states, they felt that their nation had not “reached prosperity … due to the
harmful influence of living with eyes closed to the road of progress.”1 The „road of
progress‟ was no doubt the highway of Western civilization, which, for the majority of
the Society‟s members, was associated with glamorous scientific, technological and
artistic advancement, while the Ottomans were “destitute of the real virtue of civilization
… because of their superstitious beliefs and unproductive habits.”2 The authors were
self-conscious of their social role in Ottoman society; they found themselves confronted
with new sensibilities and concerns, particularly the question of their responsibility to
the nation. “We shall pay the debt we owe to our nation” wrote Osman Asaf, the
managing chair (müdür-i mesul) of the Journal, by “decorating our pages with the chef
1 The first article of their inaugural issue, “Maksadımız,” was written by Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin
Haşim, chairman of the editorial board (heyet-i tahririye müdürü). Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim,
“Maksadımız” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:1 (19 Muharrem Sene 1329/ 7 Kanunusani
1326 [January 20, 1911]).
2 Ibid.
58
d’oeuvres of our old and new artists. We will work hard for the emergence and
development of ideas belonging to art.”3
As we shall see in the following pages, the cultural politics of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi was an amalgamation of several political and artistic
propensities and propositions. However, its discourse was no doubt unified by the
authors‟ idealist and conscious desire to contribute to the „road to progress,‟ by making
artistic and cultural issues central to Ottoman society as a whole. Of course, this
endeavour was their ideal; compared with the efforts of contemporary art journals
published in Western Europe, the reality of the low literacy rate in the actual society
they wrote for remained a real obstacle for any effort to reach a broader public.4 Despite
this apparent lack of popular impact, the debates which the journal framed – on art as a
measure of civilisation, the modern artistic heritage of the empire, the insularity and
nepotism of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the creation and promotion of a national art
– addressed the already established Ottoman intelligentsia in the name of a broader and
increasingly self-conscious formation with national interests and bourgeois tastes.
This chapter will begin with an account of the context of the Journal‟s
emergence, examining how art criticism developed in the Empire as an outgrowth of
reviews in the Ottoman and foreign press of the public art exhibitions which began to be
organised in the late nineteenth century. Next, an overview of the governing body of the
3 Osman Asaf, “İzale-i Sübuhat İçin, Karia ve Karielerimize,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi,
Issue:15 (1 Nisan 1330 [April 14, 1914]).
4 There seems to be no precise data concerning the literacy rates of the period in question. However, due
to the rise of privately founded schools and a state-sponsored educational system, overall literacy
increased sharply during the nineteenth century; by the end of the century, the literacy rate among
Muslims had increased from between 2-3 to 15 percent. For the imperial capital, while there were only
eleven books published annually before the 1840s, that number had increased to 285 published by ninetynine
printing houses in 1908. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp.167-8.
59
Journal and the intellectual interests of its key contributors will give an impression of
how the Journal acted as a forum for various currents in the cultural dialogue of late-
Ottoman intellectual life. Section three briefly outlines the changes in the visual
appearance of the Journal, both in the choice of images in the text and the Journal
covers. The last section analyses the key themes and debates in the Journal, and is
divided into four parts: the first examines the authors‟ understanding of the role of art
and artistic heritage as a measure of civilisation; the second looks at the Journal‟s
respectful attitude to significant Ottoman painters in general, and to Osman Hamdi in
particular; the third looks at the changing criticisms of the Academy of Fine Arts, from
criticisms of its new management and their ineffectual attempts to improve the Ottoman
market for painting to, after the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, attacks on the
cosmopolitan teaching staff; and finally, we examine how the Journal approached the
question of the national in art between the publication break during the Balkan Wars and
its last issue on the eve of World War I.
The Birth of Art Criticism in the Empire
Art criticism as a genre is mostly said to have acquired its modern form by the
eighteenth century. From 1737 onwards, the self-published pamphlets distributed on the
occasions of the Paris Salon exhibitions initiated the future form of modern art journals.
As Thomas Crow has illustrated, different from previous displays of royal and noble
collections, the Salon was the first display of contemporary art in Europe to be regular,
open and free to a wider audience, and secular in character; that is, “for the purpose of
60
encouraging a primarily aesthetic response in large numbers of people.”5 Art as such
thereby lost the exclusive position of objects belonging solely to upper-class patrons and
circles, but became a public experience open to all, and public popularity or “mass
appeal” thus began to be a determinant of the worth of a painting. In fact, the rise of art
criticism in eighteenth century France was tied to the specific social and evaluative
experience of the Salon public. To quote Jürgen Habermas: “the innumerable pamphlets
criticizing or defending the leading theory of art built on the discussion of the salons and
reacted back on them – art criticism as conversation.”6 In nineteenth century Europe, art
criticism did not remain limited to Salon exhibition reviews, but also extended into a
variety of forms; museum guides, monographs, art correspondence and historical
studies.7
Following the European model, the development of art criticism in the Ottoman
Empire, limited as it was in comparison, was largely concomitant on the rise of art
exhibitions in the imperial capital, which began to be organized in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century. The official bulletin of the 1873 painting exhibition, organized
by Şeker Ahmed Paşa in the Mekteb-i Sanayi (School of Industry), announced the news
to both public and painters in contemporary Ottoman newspapers:
In light of the regular painting exhibitions that are every year held in
Europe, in order to progress the art of painting, the magnanimous Ahmed
Efendi [the future Şeker Ahmed Paşa], painting instructor at the Mekteb-i
Sanayi [School of Industry], has elected the salon of the school as the site
5 Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985), p.3.
6 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Bürger, Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993
[1962]), p.40.
7 See, James Elkins and Michael Newman eds., The State of Art Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2007).
61
for the promotion, execution and accommodation in Istanbul of a painting
exhibition, and it is hoped that painters will submit their works.8
Differently from former „private‟ exhibitions such as the 1843 Çırağan Palace exhibition
or the 1850s shop exhibitions,9 the 1873 exhibition seemed to point to a more general
and heterogonous Ottoman public; it was located in the centre, Sultanahmed,10 where
any and all could see the works of various artists by paying an entrance fee of 40 para.11
The first public exhibition dedicated to the art of painting seemed to receive a good
response from the artists of the time. Besides the younger pupils of the Tıbbiye Mektebi,
Mekteb-i Sultani and Mekteb-i Sanayi, established professional artists such as Héléne
and Pierre Desiré Guillemet, Hayette, Said Efendi, Mesut Bey, Palombo, Moretti,
8 The exhibition announcement was published in Hakayik-ul Vekayi and in Basiret on February 6, 1873.
One month later, on March 18, the annoucement was republished in the same newspapers, and also in the
La Turquie. For the announcement, see Mustafa Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi
(Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık Vakfı Yayını, 1995), pp.426-8.
9 In 1843, an Austrian painter, named Oreker, exhibited his landscape paintings for Sultan Abdülmecid
(r.1839-1861) and for the palace circle in Çırağan Palace. Later, in 1849, another painting exhibition was
organized, this time in the War Academy (Harbiye İdadisi); a year-end student exhibition where pupils
exhibited their watercolour paintings, sketches and lithography. There were also private shop exhibitions
being organized in various places around Istanbul in the 1850s. In 1851, for instance, there were the
Pharmacy of Antoine Calleja exhibition and the Shop of Jacques Alléon exhibitions. See the catalogue
published for the exhibition “Pera Ressamları-Pera Sergileri, 1845-1916” (Pera Painters-Pera Exhitions,
1845-1916); Pera Ressamları-Pera Sergileri, 1845-1916 (Istanbul: Norgunk Yayıncılık, 2010), p.63.
Mustafa Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi and Mustafa Cezar, “Türkiye‟de İlk Resim
Sergisi,” Birinci Osman Hamdi Bey Kongresi Bildiriler, October 2-5, 1990 (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan
Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1992). See also, Mehmet Üstünipek, Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Çağdaş Türk
Sanatı’nda Sergiler, 1850-1950 (Istanbul: Artes Yayınları, 2007).
10 It is important to note that in 1863 a mixed public exhibition was also organized in Sultanahmed, where
the very name “public” was included in the title “Sergi-i Umumi-i Osmani” (The Ottoman Public
Exhibition). Different from the 1873 exhibition, which only exhibited paintings, the “Sergi-i Umumi
Osmani” exhibition accommodated photographs, engravings on wood, books and book bindings in its fine
art section. Rifat Önsoy, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu‟nun Katıldığı İlk Uluslararası Sergiler ve Sergi-i
Umumi-i Osmani (1863 İstanbul Sergileri), Belleten, cilt XLVII, Issue: 185 (January, 1983), pp.195-235.
See also Seza Sinanlar, Bizans Araba Yarışlarından Osmanlı Şenliklerine Atmeydanı (Istanbul: Kitap
Yayınevi, 2005), and the exhibition catalogue, Hippodrom/Atmeydanı. İstanbul’un Tarih Sahnesi
(Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2010).
11 Just one year before, in 1872, the School of Industry hosted a quite interesting permanent exhibit
composed of mannequins wearing Janissary costumes. The entrance fee was also designated as 40 para
from adults and 20 para from kids. The amount of the entrence fee, as Mustafa Cezar points out, was
written in contemporary newspapers. Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, p.428.
62
Télémaque, Ali Bey, Bourmance, Naim Bey, Acquarone, Virginia Stolzenberg, Yusuf
Bahaddin Paşa and Şeker Ahmed Paşa himself all contributed to the exhibition.12 The
contemporary French-language newspaper, La Turquie, wrote of this very “first
venture”:
Though the range of paintings and sketches is still not extensive enough,
the difficulties that this new venture has faced should also be considered.
For this exhibition is a first venture. In any case, we do not wish to
detract from these artists‟ feelings of effort and competition […]13
Almost one month later another article appeared in the same newspaper, and this time
the author clearly states that his aim is not to criticize, but to indicate the “benefit of
these exhibitions for the progress of art”14 in the country:
Seeing an excellent nation which does not yet have regular
institutionalized fine art exhibitions is indeed a surprise for us.
Nevertheless, each nation is obliged to attain ever greater successes in art
and painting. Is it a feeling for colour which they lack? Absolutely not! In
a way, before they fell behind other nations, the Easterners used to be
mentors and masters. Are not their vivid and harmoniously coloured
fabrics elegant examples of this?15
Both the announcement and the reviews of the exhibition anticipated the event as one
which would enable the Ottomans to participate more fully in artistic endeavours and
contribute to the progress of art in the country, though in quite condescending terms.
Subsequent exhibitions were also announced in both Ottoman and French
language newspapers, such as the second exhibition organized by Şeker Ahmed Paşa in
12 The news about the exhibition was published in the French newspaper La Turquie, 29 Avril, 3 Mai, 20
Mai, 1873. See, Mustafa Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, pp.429-30.
13 La Turquie, 29 Avril, 1873 in Mustafa Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, p.429.
14 La Turquie, 20 Mai 1873 in Ibid., p.430.
15 Ibid, p.430.
63
1875 in the Darülfunun (University), or Pierre Desiré Guillemet‟s exhibition of 1876 for
his atelier students at the Painting Academy in Beyoğlu.16
One of the most interesting disputes with regard to art criticism was probably
between the reviewers of the 1880 exhibition,17 organized by the “ABC Club” (Artists of
the Bosporus and Constantinople) in Tarabya, published both in the local Englishlanguage
newspaper, The Constantinople Messenger, and an Ottoman-language
newspaper, Osmanlı. As Mary Roberts informs us, the newspapers‟ reviews of the 1880
exhibition used very distinct ethnic vocabularies: while the anonymous reviewer for The
Constantinople Messenger, presented the exhibition as hosting many distinct
nationalities; Turkish, Armenian, Greek, English, French, Italian, German and Belgian,
the review written in Osmanlı by the Ottoman critic, Abdullah Kamil, referred to the
event as an “Ottoman exhibition,” for “nothing else but Ottoman themes could be seen
there.”18 For Abdullah Kamil, the Armenian painters of the exhibition – Kirkor
16 As Mustafa Cezar points out, the news of the 1875 exhibition was published in Basiret advertising the
entrance fee as 1 kuruş (40 para). An article on Pierre Desiré Guillemet‟s exhibition, on the other hand,
was published in La Turquie (29 Juin 1876). See, Cezar, Sanat’ta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, pp.424-
33. The imperial capital saw various other exhibitions in the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
three of which were organized by Şeker Ahmed Paşa in 1897, 1898 and 1900. In 1908, Adolphe Thalasso
dedicated an article to the famous Ottoman painter, to commemorate the first anniversary of his death. Of
the Paşa‟s 1900 exhibition, Thalasso wrote that: “In 1900, he opened a special exhibition of his works at
the Pera Palace. The public, who were invited to visit the exhibition, admired canvasses … under the
influence of the light and the sun and inspired by the Turkish school ...This special exhibition had –
whatever else we may say of it – a considerable influence on the destiny of artistic Turkey. It was exactly
in the year that followed this exhibition that the artists of Istanbul grouped themselves into a society and
founded the Salons of Istanbul.” Adolphe Thalasso, “Orient,” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome V (Avril-
Septembre 1907), pp.274-5.
17 The 1880 exhibition and also the 1881 exhibition of the ABC Club were initiated by Reverend George
Washington, the Anglican priest connected to Istanbul British Embassy. Whilst the first year exhibition
was located in Tarabya, for the location of the second year exhibition Pera was chosen.
18 Mary Roberts, “Geneologies of Display: Cross-Cultural Networks at the 1880s Istanbul Exhibitions” in
Zeynep Inankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Robert eds. The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul
and British Orientalism (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi; Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011),
p.127. These reviews were published on September 11 and September 16 respectively.
64
Köçeoğlu, Bogos Şaşıyan, Verjin Serviçen – were pointedly as Ottoman as the Muslim
participants – Osman Hamdi Bey and Princess Nazlı Hanım.
The French art critic Adolphe Thalasso‟s vocabulary was probably the most
ambiguous and changeable.19 In his reviews of the Salon exhibitions (organized in 1901,
1902 and 1903), Thalasso coined the term “Turkish School,” to refer to all the exhibiting
painters:
[…] the Turkish School … has highly maintained its existence in this
First Salon [of 1901]… The approach of this School can be defined as a
certain type of impression, provoked not by the sight of things but by the
action of light on these very same things … an ability to understand,
penetrate and feel the oriental nature and customs, which are extremely
different to those of other countries and reflect these by employing a
particular technique, which consists of putting the colours of the sun in
the service of an artistic vision. These painters have achieved this thanks
to their nationalities, places of birth or their long sojourns in the oriental
countries.20
Thus, for Thalasso in 1906, the “Turkish School” consists of Levantine artists – Della
Sudda Bey, Stefano Farnetti and Lina Gabuzzi – the instructors of the Academy of Fine
Arts –Salvator Valéri, Joseph Warnia-Zarzecki, Philippe Bello and also the non-Muslim
Ottoman sculptor Osgan Efendi – foreign artists living in Istanbul – Fausto Zonaro and
Leonardo de Mango – together with the Ottoman Muslim Artists – Osman Hamdi Bey,
Ahmed Ali Paşa, Colonel Halil Bey and Adil Bey. As odd as it might sound from the
perspective of today‟s Turkish Republic, the term “Turkish” deployed by Thalasso
19 For Adolphe Thalasso, see, also, Xavier du Crest, De Paris à Istanbul, 1851-1949: Un siècle de
relations artistiques entre la France et la Turquie (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg,
2010).
20 Les Premiers Salons de Peinture de Constantinople (Paris, 1906). This sixteen-page booklet written by
Adolphe Thalasso on the 1901, 1902 and 1903 Pera Salon exhibitions was translated and published with
his other two works, Deri Se’adet ou Stamboul, Porte du Bonheur and L’Art Ottoman: Les Peintres de
Turquie with a supplemantary English translation. Osmanlı Sanatı, Türkiye’nin Ressamları ve İlk İstanbul
Salonları (Istanbul: Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür A.Ş. Yayınları, 2008), pp.90-1.
65
seemed to have a more broad and inclusive sense than his usage of the term “Ottoman.”
As a believer in a universal republic of art, Thalasso chose to define the national school
not by considering discreet cultures of „origin‟ but by judging to what extent they
represented a shared condition, in the form of local „nature‟, „customs‟, „colours‟ and
„sun‟.
However, in a 1907 article published in the contemporary French art Journal
L'Art et les Artistes, Thalasso wrote on an exhibition organized for the occasion of the
thirty-first anniversary of the succession to the throne of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Thalasso
chose the title, “Premiére Exposition Artistique Ottomane” for his article, as he believed
that this was the “first Ottoman art exhibition” ever organized:
It is for me a pleasure even greater than to speak of it that this exhibition
marks a date in the annals of Ottoman art. Until today, in effect, all the
exhibitions inaugurated in Constantinople, including the Salons of which
I have spoken here last year, have been organised by Levantine artists, in
a Levantine milieu, with members much more Levantine than Turkish,
and have always taken place in Pera, which is the Levantine quarter of
the capital. This time, the principal organiser of the exhibition is a Turk,
Bahri Bey, the milieu is Turkish, the exhibitors, with only a few
exceptions, are Turks, and the venue chosen is in the heart of Istanbul, in
the Turkish quarter, on the street of the Sublime Porte [Bab-ı Ali].21
We may theorise that a new more nationalistic agenda in the artistic sphere had
influenced Thalasso here, as he seems to be using the terms „Turk‟ and „Turkish‟ in the
main text to describe an exclusively Ottoman Muslim milieu, and to distinguish it from
its Levantine competitor, while the term “Ottoman” also carries an exclusively Muslim
meaning in the title. That Thalasso should deploy the term „Turkish‟ in two such
21 Adolphe Thalasso, “Premiére Exposition Artistique Ottomane,” L'Art et les Artistes, Tome VI, Octobre
1907- Mars 1908, pp.415-6. In this specific exhibition, many future members of the Ottoman Society of
Painters also displayed their paintings, such as Sami, Nazmi, Omer Adil, Hikmet and Mehmed Ali.
66
apparently contradictory contexts is interesting in itself. As we shall see, the vocabulary
of the Ottoman Society of Painters would contain similar contradictions to that of
Thalasso about what constituted national art; for the writers of the Society, and
particularly in issues published after the Balkan Wars, none of Thalasso‟s supposedly
“Turkish School” artists (except the „Muslim-Ottoman artists‟ of course) would be seen
as capable of promoting or advancing Ottoman national art.
Thus, with the advent of the art exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, lively artistic debates developed mostly in foreign language,
published inside and outside of the Empire, and in Ottoman language newspapers such
as Osmanlı, as well as in literary journals like Servet-i Fünun and Şehbal. It is not clear
to what extent the reviews and debates published in contemporary journals took the form
of “art criticism as conversation,” as Habermas described the pamphlets on the Paris
Salons. However, we can safely claim that the birth of art criticism in the Ottoman
Empire, which would eventually produce the first art journal of the Empire, was closely
related to the exhibition reviews published in contemporary newspapers.
The Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi as an Ottoman Intellectual Forum
The Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi was the first journal of the Empire entirely
devoted to fine arts. The authors published articles on art history, the philosophy of art,
aesthetics, and biographies of Ottoman painters, and embarked on a process of
institutionalization of art criticism in the Ottoman state. Though most of the
reproductions and the articles published in the Journal are on painting, it also includes
articles and images on sculpture, theatre, architecture, calligraphy and music. As the
67
motto of their first ten covers states: “Sanayi-i nefisenin her şubesinden bahseder”
(“Discusses every branch of the fine arts”).
Published under the declared honorary presidency (riyaset-i fahri) of Prince
Abdülmecid Efendi,22 the first three issues of the Journal were in fact initiated by Şerif
Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, chairman of the editorial board (heyet-i tahririye
müdürü), Osman Asaf Bey, the managing chair (müdür-i mesul), and M. Adil Bey,
editor (sermuharrir). Osman Asaf Bey‟s chairmanship continued until the last issue of
the Journal, and his name always appears as the “müdür-i mesul” on the last page of
each issue. The Journal stopped writing the names of the governing body on its cover
page after the seventh issue, so we do not know who assisted Osman Asaf Bey after that.
Though there were minor changes in the cover design, publication house,23 and the
quantity of the page numbers and illustrations, and despite the break in publication
during the Balkan Wars, the Journal committee managed to publish 18 issues between
1911 and 1914.
While the Journal was published and managed by members of the Ottoman
Society of Painters, and most of the contributors were former students of the Academy
22 Prince Abdülmecid is referred to as the honorary president in a couple of places in the Journal. The first
article, “Maksadımız” written by Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, states how grateful the Society is
for the Prince‟s donations and encouragement: “Sanayi-i nefisedeki iktidar-ı mahsusları cihetiyle hanedanı
saltanat-ı seniyenin medar-ı iftiharı olan ve tasvir-i alileri gazetemizin serlevhasına vücud-ı maalinümudı
necabetpenahileri de cemiyetimizin riyaset-i fahriyesine şerefbahş buyuran devletlu, necabetlu
Abdülmecid Efendi hazretlerinin, cemiyetin her veçhile mazhar-ı feyz ve teali olması emrinde
mütemadiyen ibraz buyurmakta oldukları taltifat ve teşvikatı terakkiyata nailiyetimiz hakkında bir beşareti
mahsusa olarak telakki eylediğimizden bu cihetle de bahtiyar ve müşarünileyh hazretlerine karşı daima
müteşekkir ve minnettarız.” Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, “Maksadımız” Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:1 (19 Muharrem Sene 1329/ 7 Kanunusani 1326 [January 20, 1911]).
23 The Journal used three different publication houses; the Manzume-i Efkar Matbaası only published the
first issue, while the Şant Matbaası published the second and the third issues. The publication house they
used to publish their fourth issue, Matbaa-i Hayriye ve Şürekası, would be the last change in their choice,
as it would regularly publish the rest of the fifteen issues of the Journal.
68
of Fine Arts in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the debates on its pages
demonstrate a variety of artistic and political tendencies. Most of the introductory
articles were written by Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim himself, who was the
intellectual voice behind the Journal‟s interest in traditional art. As a poet himself,
Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim‟s articles were written in a sophisticated Ottoman
Turkish, enriched by many Persian and Arabic words.24 Another productive author of
the Journal was Sami, who was much more rigorous then Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin
Haşim in his articles, particularly in his harsh criticisms of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Sami was not that much interested in traditional art; his Franco-centric vision of culture
rather advocated learning from and implementing the École des Beaux-Arts model in the
imperial capital‟s Academy of Fine Arts. Kemal Emin also published regularly in the
Journal, his general articles under the heading of „The Philosophy of Art‟ (Felsefe-i
Sanat) mostly focused on the universality of art and its intrinsic value. Without reducing
the meaning of art to being a mere copy of nature, he nevertheless believed that for the
progress of art, one should “look for the virtue of art in nature,”25 as, “the most powerful
teacher of fine arts is nature.”26 Murtaza, another graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts,
also contributed to the Journal with his regular articles, with a specific focus on the
technique of human anatomical drawing, providing instructions on bone and muscle
24 Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim published his collection of poems in his books, Şihab and Mülhemat in
1887 and 1897 respectively. Hüseyin Haşim, Şihab (Istanbul: Matbua-i Ebuziziya, 1305 [1887]) and
Hüseyin Haşim, Mülhemat (Istanbul: Mahmud Bey Matbaası, 1315 [1897]). Some of his poems have been
transcribed into modern Turkish by Asuman Üneş. See Asuman Üneş, Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim
Bey, Hayatı, Sanatı, Eserleri Üzerine Monografik Bir Çalışma (Unpublished MA Thesis, Gaziosmanpaşa
Üniversitiesi, 2004).
25 Kemal Emin, “Felsefe-i Sanat,” Issue:7 (17 Cemaziyülahir Sene / 1 Haziran Sene 1327 [June 14,
1911]).
26 Kemal Emin, “Tabiat,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:9 (10 Safer 1330/17 Kanunisani
Sene 1327 [January 30, 1912]).
69
structure. The articles written on art history by Mehmed Faik and Feyzi Ulu generally
focused on Egyptian, Assyrian and Phoenician civilization, and also on Italian
Renaissance art and artists. Feyzi Ulu based his presentation of the Renaissance period
on famous French historian, Charles Seignobos‟s studies. In fact, Ahmed Refik, the
well-known Ottoman historian of the period, had made Seignobos‟s books available in
Ottoman Turkish in 1912.27
It is generally argued that artistic currents in the late Ottoman Empire can be
sufficiently explained as merely translations and adaptations of Western intellectual
developments. However, when tracing the genealogy of ideas in the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi, it is important to bear in mind that the authors employed no rigorous
methodology of citation, making the identification of sources and influences in these
articles difficult. Thus, any attempt to compare the ideas in the Journal with those of
Western philosophers would be necessarily conjectural. To what extent does F. Rebii‟s
view that “art does not have a purpose”28 connote the opinions of the Enlightenment
philosopher Immanuel Kant?29 Or does Rebii, again, make an implicit reference to
Friedrich Nietzsche‟s claim that “art makes life bearable”30 when he defines art as the
27 Charles Seignobos, Tarih-i Medeniyet, trans. Ahmed Refik (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Artin Asaduryan ve
Mahdumları, 1328 [1912]).
28 F. Rebii, “Mesai-i Fikriye,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:12 (25 Nisan Sene 1328 [May
8, 1912]).
29 In his 1790 book Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kant defines the beautiful as the subject of “disinterested
satistaction.” For Kant, beauty has nothing to do with content, but with form, which is elucidated as
“purposiveness without purpose.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed
Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 [1790]).
30 In his 1878 book, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für Freie Geister, Nietzsche defines art as
making “the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking.” Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004 [1878]), p.82.
70
thing which “makes us love life”31? Given that most of the authors were Westerneducated
and were familiar with Western ideas, life-style and cultural vocabulary, their
references to and usage of the European model of knowledge should not be surprising.
Yet it is also important to acknowledge the contribution of the Ottoman literary legacy
to the intellectual milieu and equally the influence of the art history education these men
were offered in the Academy of Fine Arts. While understanding the role of Western
schooling and theory in late Ottoman cultural dialogue is undoubtedly productive, we
should also take into account the Ottoman intellectual dynamics and specifics of the
local Ottoman setting in which these ideas were reconstructed.
The Changing Face of the Journal: Images, Plates and Covers
For an art journal, the number of the images used in the first ten issues of the Journal is
surprisingly low. The inaugural issue, for instance, only published one single photograph
of Osman Hamdi Bey; a rather informal photo depicting him sitting backwards on his
chair. Until the eleventh issue, the journal mostly published photos of famous living and
deceased Ottoman painters and their works, such as Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Şevket Bey,
Prince Abdülmecid Efendi, Ali Rıza Bey, and also the paintings of the two writers of the
Journal, Osman Asaf and Sami. The first journal of the second year, the eleventh issue,
came with a rather changed face, with a very different cover page and extensive number
of images; a photo of Osman Hamdi Bey, together with a few paintings by Sami,
Mahmud Bey, İzzet Bey, Osgan Efendi, Abdülmecid Efendi and Osman Hamdi himself.
31 F. Rebii, “Mesai-i Fikriye,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:12 (25 Nisan Sene 1328 [May
8, 1912]).
71
The eleventh issue was also the first issue that printed a reproduction of a painting by a
woman artist, Müfide Hanım, on its pages. The fourteenth issue, which was published in
1914 after an almost two year break due to the Balkan Wars, published many prints of
works by Hasan Rıza, who had died during fighting. Hasan Rıza, a self-trained painter
with a military education background, was well-known for his historical paintings.32 The
authors must have been familiar with his oval drawings of the sultans, which were
exhibited in the Military Museum.33
Quite remarkably, no reproductions of traditional work were published until as
late as the twelfth issue in May 1912, when the Journal committee decided to include
some examples of calligraphy and pottery of both the Ottoman and Arab speaking
worlds. Apart from Ottoman calligraphy, the Journal also published, in its fifteenth
issue, images of Arabic vases, decorated oil lamps, and trays.
During the first year of the Journal, that includes the first ten issues, the cover of
the Journal uses the same image; the portrait bust of the Prince Abdülmecid Efendi
framed in a crescent moon, occupying the centre of the Journal cover (fig.7). Together
with the image of the Prince, the tools of four different fine artists; painters, sculptures,
architects and, most probably, calligraphers, were represented by a paint tube, cutter,
compass, and a brush situated in the bottom of the crescent moon. While a big pallet
with two long brushes intertwining each other was used on the right side of the cover,
32 Hasan Rıza‟s interest in painting started during the Russo-Turkish War while he was serving as a guard
for an Italian artist. In Turkish art history writing, he is mostly referred as the “martyr”. On Hasan Rıza,
see Süheyl Ünver, Ressam Şehit Hasan Rıza (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1970).
33 The Military Museum, located in the former Church of Hagia Irene, also displayed cases of weaponry
alongside sultans‟ portraits. See, Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and
the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (California: California University Press, 2003),
p.202.
72
the name of the Society, “Ressamlar Cemiyeti” (without using the “Ottoman”), occupied
the left side of the cover, written in Kufic script situated in a paper roll. On the upper left
side was written “art” (sanat), whilst the whole cover was decorated by olive tree leaves.
The last eight issues, published in their second year, do not use the same cover.
Starting from the eleventh issue, each cover would use a different image. The painter
Hasan Rıza‟s portraits of Sultan Osman (r.1299-1324), the first sultan of the Ottoman
Empire,34 and Hayreddin Barbarossa, the famous sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral,
would be used in the eleventh (fig.8) and twelfth issues (fig.9), respectively. The cover
of the thirteenth issue used a painting by Halil Paşa named “A Camel Driver in Egypt”
(Mısır‟da Bir Deveci) (fig.10). The fourteenth and fifteenth issues carried no cover
image at all, most probably in a mourning gesture for the Balkan Wars. The sixteenth
issue publishes Konstantin Kapıdağlı‟s 1803-dated painting of Sultan Selim III (r.1789-
1807), and a description above the picture states that the image belonged to the painter
İzzet Bey who produced a copy of Kapıdağlı‟s painting under orders from a sultan
(fig.11). The cover of the seventeenth issue carries a painting by a Non-Muslim painter,
Tovmas Efendi, the head painter of the carpet factory, Hereke Imperial Factory (Hereke
Fabrika-i Hümayunu) who was also a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts (fig.12).
The eighteenth issue, which would be the last issue of the Journal, shows a humble
pencil sketch of the painter Rıza Bey (Hoca Ali Rıza) by painter İsmail Hakkı (fig.13).
In fact, the whole eighteenth issue was dedicated to Rıza Bey.
34 The bust of Sultan Osman was published as the cover image in the eleventh issue, and as the caption
below the picture states, this specific work was part of the collection of the Naval Museum (Bahriye
Müzesi).
73
Key Themes and Debates in the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi
Art and Artistic Heritage; Measures of Civilization
Among the writers for the Journal, art is almost synonymous with civilisation itself. In
the tenth issue, Sami emphasized the importance of art: “those nations who do not heed
their literature, music and fine arts,” he writes, “are in the condition of being a victim
without eyes, ears or language.”35 Yet, while believing in the power of civilisation, they
were also self-conscious and anxious about their comparative underdevelopment. “Poor
us …” wrote Sami from Paris, after one of his regular visits to the rich collection of the
Louvre Museum “I do not know if we will merely remain the flatterers of the civilized
countries”:
For our noble nation which holds the practice of education with the need
of progress, and which cares about its universities, schools of medicine
and schools of law, it is vital to care also about fine arts and not to be
destitute of this vital organ [uzv-ı mühim] of civilization.36
The articles written by the readers of the Journal are also remarkable in revealing the
view of art among the Ottoman public (or, more precisely, by those readers who spoke
in the name of the public) and their expectations of the artists of the Society. In an
article published in the eleventh issue, a district governor (kaymakam) utters similar
ideas on the identification of art and civilization to those of the Ottoman Society of
Painters. Kaymakam A. Rıza claims the following:
35 Sami, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi İçin”, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:10 (11 Rebiülevvel
1330/ 16 Şubat 1327 [February 29, 1912]).
36 Anonymous [Sami], “ Tefrika-i Mahsusa: Ressam ve Heykeltıraşlara Mahsus Teşrih-i Cesed-i İnsan
Yahut Teşrih-i Tasviri”, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:4 (14 Rebiyülahir Sene 1329/ 1
Nisan Sene 1327 [April 14, 1911]).
74
Painting is an inseparable part of civilization and the necessary guide that
serves its deployment and advancement … in the civilized world, an
educated person who is not related to art to even some degree is regarded
as illiterate.37
The language of these reviews also suggests an anticipated role for artists – of course,
this expectation entailed any Ottoman artists, not just members of the Society. Another
reader, Aziz Hüdayi, wrote a piece directly about the Society where he identified what
seemed to him to be the key characteristics of this significant artists‟ union and their
Journal with regard to civilization:
The degree of a nation‟s civilization and progress is measured by its fine
arts … When I first saw the „Ottoman Society of Painters‟ in this Journal,
an old but, as it is significant, still-vivid memory reappeared: In a French
journal, I once read the history of the progress of the French painters,
and, in contrast to their life-struggles, I wept that the treasure of our art
lay sleeping and abandoned in mist and neglect.38
This view neatly explains the major expectations of the Ottoman public from the
Society: promotion and advancement of national art and culture, but also, paradoxically,
conformity to the superiority of the Western civilization. Raif Necdet dedicated another
article to the Ottoman Society of Painters, “Heyecan-ı Sanat” (Passion for Art), which
implicitly formulated the criteria of civilization. He complained about the contempt for
the fine arts among the Ottoman public, and demanded reform on the issue, implicitly
from society itself, but explicitly from the Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti). He
presented the interest in the museums of developed nations [müterakki milletler] as
exemplary:
37 Kaymakam A. Rıza, “Resma Dair”, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:7 (17 Cemaziyülahir
Sene 1329/1 Haziran Sene 1327 [June 14, 1911]).
38 Aziz Hüdayi, “Bizde Resim,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:17 (1 Haziran 1330 [June
14, 1914]).
75
In this period of awakening [devre-i intibahta], to break people‟s
indifference … towards the fine arts and bring about reform on this
subject is in fact a great and precious mission when the nation is in need
of substantial and thorough social and mental changes [tahavvülat].39
For Raif Necdet, the time had come to learn a lesson from the developed nations in
“their indescribable and unimaginable indulgence and passion for art works … and for
their museums.”40 The European museums Raif Necdet referred to in his article were
very much the product of the nineteenth century, or of the “century of history,”41 that
witnessed the rise of major public museums across the world. This “great upheaval that
occurred in the Western episteme”42 with regard to collecting and exhibiting, resonated
in the Ottoman world which developed its own museums, particularly the Janissary
Museum and the Imperial Archaeological Museum, directed by Osman Hamdi Bey, the
Western-educated artist, bureaucrat and public figure.
Surprisingly the Journal itself was not equally interested in detailing all aspects
of Ottoman artistic heritage.43 While articles on calligraphy and traditional Ottoman
decorative art were included from the second issue onwards, these were mostly written
by Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim. These articles discuss how the traditional arts,
particularly calligraphy, had lost their former popularity by the turn of the century. In an
39 Raif Necdet, “Heyecan-ı Sanat: Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Münevveresine İthaf,” Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:11 (25 Mart Sene 1328 [April 7, 1912]).
40 Ibid.
41 Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p.232.
42 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1970), p.367.
43 By way of contrast, the first art journal of Japan, Kokka (meaning “flower of the nation”) started to be
published in 1889 during the Meiji Period, published extensively on traditional Japanese art with a specific
focus on Buddhist culture. This gesture is sometimes read as a counter-position against Meiji Japan‟s
obsession with European art and culture. See, Andrew Gosling, Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written
Word (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011).
76
attempt to revive this once-significant Ottoman art, Hüseyin Haşim wrote the history of
calligraphy and its former importance in the Empire. In the article, “Zamanımızdaki
Hattatine Dair” (On Today‟s Calligraphers), Hüseyin Haşim juxtaposes the works of
many contemporary calligraphers. He also talks about the development of calligraphy
during the reign of Sultan Beyazid II (r.1481-1512) and the most famous historical
Ottoman calligraphers, such as Mustafa Rakım Efendi of the reign of Mahmud II
(r.1808-1839).44 Ahmed Süreyya, a graduate of the Department of Literature of the
Darülfünun and most likely a reader of the Journal (as he published only one article),
also wrote about the condition of calligraphy within the Empire. He asks “whether we
shouldn‟t make an end of the profession of calligraphy, engraving, illuminating
[müzehhiblik] and book binding [mücellitlik], following the Western example.” Ahmed
Süreyya later took issue with this idea; for him, the development in the art of
illuminating might be a good replacement for the stagnation of painting within the
Empire.45
Ottoman Painters as “Everlasting Sources of Pride”
From its first issue, the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi was enthusiastic about
publishing articles on Ottoman painters and reproductions of their work. The Journal
regularly published works by contemporary artists, such as the picturesque landscapes
by Halil Paşa, portraits of ordinary people by Tekezade Said, historical paintings by
44 Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, “Zamanımızdaki Hattatine Dair” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, Issue:7 (17 Cemaziyülahir Sene / 1 Haziran Sene 1327 [June 14, 1911]).
45 Ahmed Süreyya, “Hikmet-i Bedayi: Resim ve Hat,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:12 (25
Nisan Sene 1328 [May 8, 1912]).
77
Hasan Rıza, topographic drawings by Cevad Bey, and sketches made by Sami and
Mehmed Ali in Sofia during the Balkan Wars. Another important initiative was to
publish works and biographies of previous Ottoman painters whose artistic contributions
were generally consulted for guidance. At the end of the eight issue, an anonymous
article, “Rica-yı Mahsus” (Deliberate Request), asked the journal‟s readers to contribute
to its endeavour in the “revival of Ottoman fine arts” [ihya-i sanayi-i nefise-i Osmaniye]
by inviting them to send in to the Journal any documents or works by previous Ottoman
masters [eslaf-ı üstad] in their possession.46 Thus the aim was, rather, to demonstrate the
modern Ottoman artistic heritage as handed down by artists such as Şeker Ahmed Paşa
and Osman Hamdi Bey.
As the director of the Imperial Archaeological Museum in 1881 and of the
Academy of Fine Arts in 1883, Osman Hamdi Bey was unsurprisingly the most popular
artist in the Journal. This is clear from the frequency of reproductions of his works. In
the tenth issue, seven of the eight specially printed images published at the end of the
Journal were reproductions of Osman Hamdi‟s paintings. In the next issue, which was
called the “Extraordinary Edition” [nüsha-i fevkalade], Ebuşşefik wrote a short
introductory article, in which he regretted the lack of Osman Hamdi‟s paintings in the
museums of the Ottoman nation to which “he belongs.” A photo of the painter, depicting
the “Müze müdürü” (chair of the Museum) in front of his table, also followed the article:
Regrettably, painting has neither value [revac] nor a market [pazar] in our
land. Whilst each of the paintings by the deceased Hamdi Bey serialised
in this publication of ours embellishes one or another European museum
or king‟s palace, in the hands of the nation he belongs to there is nothing
46 Anonymous, “Rica-yı Mahsus” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:8 (18 Zilhicce Sene
1329/26 Teşrinisani Sene 1327 Muharrem Sene 1329 [December 9, 1911]).
78
left except a venerable grave and a sarcophagus in full tranquillity [lahid-i
pür sükundan].47
In the following article, Sami refers to Hamdi Bey as a “lover of education” who
brought to the East “the light of talent and civilization” he learned from the West and “in
spite of all obstacles.”48 In the same article, Sami regales his readers with a story about
Hamdi Bey told to him by a friend. We learn that Osman Hamdi had been proposed a
job with a high salary by his foreign friends, and instead of being excited by this
proposal, Osman Hamdi asked his friends what else this offer might bring. Sami
romanticizes Osman Hamdi as one for whom “the progress of civilization and education
of the nation he is a member of”49 was more important than anything.
Interestingly enough, this romanticising of Osman Hamdi as the “everlasting
source of pride,”50 and the prime exemplar of artistic sensibility and responsibility,
seemed rather to avoid the question of his actual talent as a painter. Unlike the painters
Şevket Bey, whose artistic ability was regarded to be as good as the famous French
painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, or Hoca Ali Rıza Bey, whose landscapes were
highly valued in their artistic ability to represent the real „national character,‟ Osman
Hamdi‟s artistic talent was not at all emphasized. One even wonders whether there is an
implicit critique of his preference for the Orientalist genre. In his article, the “Study of
47 Ebuşeffik, “Bir İki Söz,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:11 (25 Mart Sene 1328 [April 7,
1912]).
48 Sami, “Müze-i Osmani Müdür-i Sabıkı Merhum Hamdi Bey,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi,
Issue:11 (25 Mart Sene 1328 [April 7, 1912]).
49 Ibid.
50 Sami refers to Osman Hamdi, Şevket Bey, Hüsnü Yusuf Bey and Ziya Paşa as “everlasting sources of
pride” Sami, “Mektup, Meissonier ve Louvre‟daki Asarı: Bizde Meissonier Mesleğini Takip Eden Kim
İdi?,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:5 (14 Cemazeyilevvel 1329/1 Mayıs 1327 [May14,
1911]).
79
Fine Arts from the Perspective of the Nation,” Galib Bahtiyar explicitly criticizes the
famous Orientalist painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme:
… national art cannot be designated by the peculiarity of a [nation‟s]
costume … some painters with us, for instance, unnecessarily place
someone in a turban or a shalwar somewhere in a landscape or an interior
picture in order to be understood.51
For Galib Bahtiyar, these practices served to pique the interest of foreigners, but from a
fine arts perspective, they were not worthy of study. For Galib, while Gérôme might
have shown his genius in his series of Orientalist paintings, “he could not quite expose
the spirit of the East.” Of course, Galib utters nothing against Osman Hamdi whose
work was highly influenced by the French Orientalist. As the man most venerated by the
Ottoman Society of Painters, Osman Hamdi would, nevertheless, always be remembered
as an Enlightenment “father figure,” and sometimes to the detriment of his successors:
It is a pity, a great pity that when we need Hamdi Bey‟s most enthusiastic
and tender encouragements, this unfortunate institution, abandoned into
Halil Bey‟s protecting hands with an orphan‟s sadness, has not – to be
honest – achieved either significant progress or significant protection.52
The Academy of Fine Arts:
When the Journal began to be published in 1911, it had been almost thirty years since
the foundation of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1883. Osman Hamdi, chair of the school,
had died in 1910 and now the Academy was directed by Halil Edhem, Osman Hamdi‟s
51Galib Bahtiyar, “Sanayi-i Nefisenin Milliyet Nokta-i Nazarından Tetkiki,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, Issue:18 (1 Temmuz 1330 [July 14, 1914]).
52 Sami, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi İçin,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:15 (1 Nisan Sene
1330/[April 14, 1914]).
80
brother. Starting with the sixth issue, the management of the Academy of Fine Arts
became one of the centres of debate within the Journal.
This was particularly evident in Sami‟s articles, which advocated the French
model. In his third article, entitled “Esquisse ve Ehemmiyeti – Müsabakaları” (The
Importance of Sketching – the Competitions), he focused on a comparison between the
Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi and the École des Beaux-Arts.53 After a long discussion of the
significance of sketching education for both painters and sculptors alike, he concludes
the article with certain expectations from the Ministry of Education and the Academy of
Fine Art in terms of learning from the education programme of the French school.
Sami‟s article was the first article in the Journal to directly criticise the Academy of Fine
Art, from which most writers of the Journal had graduated, but it must have been wellreceived
by the other writers as it would mark the beginning of an ongoing debate about
the Academy. In the next issue, Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim wrote about the 1911
competition salon of the Academy of Fine Arts, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi‟nin İmtihan
Salonunu Ziyaret” (Visit to the Competition Salon of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi) which
he had visited more than a decade after his graduation.54 In the article, which details the
names of the winning students, Hüseyin Haşim expresses his excitement at the
successful architectural projects of the school: “the architectural science [fenn-i mimari]
section is a magnificent city [şehristan-ı muhteşem] in never-ending contemplation of its
53 Sami, Esquisse ve Ehemmiyeti – Müsabakaları: Fransa Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebinde Eskiz ve Sanayi-i
Nefise Mektebimize Tatbik Lüzumu”, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:6 (17 Cemaziyülahir
Sene / 1 Haziran Sene 1327 [June 14, 1911]).
54 Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi‟nin İmtihan Salonunu Ziyaret,” Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:7 (17 Cemaziyülahir Sene 1329/1 Haziran Sene 1327 [June 14,
1911]).
81
grandiose projects.” Yet Hüseyin Haşim also remarks his tremendous disappointment at
the inadequacy of the painting, sculpture and engraving sections:
The oil painting section of the salon is a place of sadness far away from
the demands of the nation … the engraving and sculpture sections also,
like painting, could not maintain their old brightness … this is related to
the lack of demand for the painting, engraving, and sculpture branches of
the fine arts in our country.55
Sami reiterated his concern with the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in the eighth issue, where
he seconded Hüseyin Haşim‟s disappointment with the painting section of the school
competition that year, though Sami was more cutting than Hüseyin Haşim in his
criticism:
The Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi has consoled and deluded enthusiastic
young people from the Military Academies [Askeri] and Civil Service
Academies [Mülkiye] for ages with Valeri‟s brushstrokes … today we
see that this gust of reputation has not, could not and will not remain.56
Like Hüseyin Haşim, Sami thinks that demand for painting is low in the country and that
this lack of demand has constrained people to seek professions other than painting. In
the next issue, Sami continues to voice his concerns about the school, though this time
his main target is the Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti), whose “carelessness
forced these [talented and smart young] people to renounce their eager education and
look for a job to feed themselves.” Why, then, were the economic prospects of painting
and sculpture graduates of the Academy of Fine Art so much worse than those of the
55 Ibid.
56 Sami, “Sanayi-i Mektebi İçin,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:8 (18 Zilhicce Sene
1329/26 Teşrinisani Sene 1327 Muharrem Sene 1329 [December 9, 1911]).
82
architects? Though there were a few painting exhibitions in late nineteenth and earlytwentieth
century, the art market for painting seemed to remain quite limited.57
Sami‟s third article on the Academy of Fine Art with the same title, “Sanayi-i
Nefise Mektebi İçin” (For the Fine Arts School) was published in the tenth issue. This
time, however, Sami embarked on a new topic which would inspire other writers to take
a position on the subject as well. We learn from Sami‟s article that Halil Edhem has
come up with new projects for the Academy of Fine Arts, such as the idea, which Sami
found most inspiring, of constructing an art gallery. Nevertheless, as stated in the article,
Halil Edhem was thinking about hiring foreign artists to make reproductions of wellknown
paintings and put these reproductions in the gallery. The idea of decorating the
gallery of the school with reproductions done by foreign painters seems to have made
Sami completely furious, and he insists that exhibiting original art works, though fewer
in number, will be better for the future of the school. Sami is clear in his criticism of
Halil Edhem, while he values the Society and appeals to its judgement:
As for Halil Bey, the Ottoman Society of Painters must be sure that they
know the merit and power of the puppets attached by the wires of
nepotism and play with ridiculous reverence on the art scene. Benjamin
Constant is nothing but a promoter who copies Chaplin. The Society
cannot tolerate this covetous and egoistic promoter, even if he was a
member of the Society …, the Society is a courthouse of art [mahkeme-i
57 The situation was even worse for sculpture, as the market for public works was even more limited: only
two big public monuments were constructed in Istanbul between 1908 and 1918 – the Abide-i Hürriyet
(Monument of Freedom) and the Tayyare Şehidleri Abidesi (Monument to the Victims of Air) – and even
these were built by architects. The Abide-i Hürriyet (Monument of Freedom) was built by the architect
Muzaffer Bey in 1911 to commemorate the victims of the intervention army against a reactionary mutiny
in 1909. Tayyare Şehidleri Abidesi (Monument to the Victims of Air) was built by the architect Vedat in
1914 to commemorate the three Ottoman pilots who were martyred in an air-crash in 1914. For Ottoman
public monuments, see Klaus Kreiser, “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840-1916”, Muqarnas,
Vol. 14 (1997). As already mentioned, Nuri Bey, Fethi Bey and Sadık Bey were killed during their flight
from Istanbul to Alexandria.
83
sanat], it is not a theatre founded to acclaim and encourage others to
acclaim the people who worship fame.58
In the next issue, an immediate response to Sami‟s article comes from Vahid, the art
history instructor of the Academy of Fine Arts and the son-in-law of Osman Hamdi
Bey.59 Vahid starts his article with the importance of the Academy of Fine Arts and its
success in educating many painters, architects and engravers.60 Unlike Sami, Vahid finds
the idea of ordering the reproductions of well-known paintings convincing, as
attempting to buy the originals would be financially impossible for the school. As a
response to Sami, Vahid informs the readers that the painters who were ordered to paint
the copies are high quality artists, and that “four of them are Ottomans and one is even a
graduate of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi.” In the same issue, just after Vahid‟s article, the
Journal also published Hüseyin Avni‟s views on the same matter.61 Hüseyin Avni
expresses similar concerns to those of Sami but Hüseyin Avni‟s main reason for refusing
the copies is that he believes a reproduction is “like a cadaver exempt from its soul
[ruhtan ari]” and as such it cannot show the real importance of art to the Ottoman
public:
To really understand what kind of an animal a lion is, it is never sufficient
to see it dead … in order to have a correct idea of its lion-ness, one
should see it alive. Just as in order to understand completely the real
meaning of an art work, a painting, and what it is for and for whom it is
58 Sami, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi İçin,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:10 (11 Rebiülevvel
1330/ 16 Şubat 1327 [February 29, 1912]).
59 For a comprehensive study of Vahid Bey see, Seçkin G. Naipoğlu, Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi’nde Sanat
Tarihi Yaklaşımı ve Vahit Bey (Unpublished PhD Diss., Hacettepe University, 2008).
60 Vahid, “Müze-i Hümayun‟da Bir Şube-i Cedide-i Sınaat,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi,
Issue:11 (25 Mart Sene 1328 [April 7, 1912]).
61 H. Avni, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebinde Küşadı Musammem Galeri İçin,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, Issue:11 (25 Mart Sene 1328 [April 7, 1912]).
84
made, one should see the original work alive, and not the copy, which is
its corpse.62
Thus Hüseyin Avni thinks that Ottoman people would not gain a correct idea of art from
seeing only the copies – the „corpses‟ in his words. These ideas on the aesthetic status of
reproductions had an intellectual precedent within the Empire. Sakızlı Ohannes had also
put forward similar ideas on the reproduction of painting in his Fünun-ı Nefise Tarihi
Medhali. Ohannes wrote that in a copy of a painting one “understands the lack of the
traces of an artist‟s feelings.”63
While this debate was a significant flaring up of divisions over the future
direction (and management) of the Academy of Fine Arts, the last four issues of the
Journal in particular would change the direction of this criticism of Academy policy
away from the aesthetic consequences of the gallery project and towards its non-Muslim
instructors.
Vision of „National Art‟ and the „National Artist‟
In the wake of the disastrous Balkan Wars, for the members of the Ottoman Society of
Painters, the victorious Bulgarians came to represent one of the most successful
examples of the advancement and promotion of a national art. The main target of the
authors‟ criticisms of the Academy of Fine Arts would from that point on become the
62 Ibid.
63 Sakızlı Ohannes, Fünun-ı Nefise Tarihi Medhali (Istanbul: Karabet Matbaası, 1308). In this study I use
the recently published transcribed version of the book. Sakızlı Ohannes, Güzel Sanatlar Tarihine Giriş
(Ankara: Hece Yayınları, 2005), p.30.
85
non-Muslim, Levantine and foreign instructors who, for them, were capable neither of
creating nor of teaching a sufficiently national art.
After an early use of and emphasis on the term „national art‟ in the third issue,
the authors seemed to have been largely uninterested in the subject until after the
Empire‟s loss of the Balkans. In the only article he published in the Journal, Ruhi writes
from Paris to comment on the recent news of the sale of the Taksim Quarter (Kışla) and
the square in front of it. Holding up Parisian urban planning as an example, and
particularly its gardens and museums, he warns the Ottoman public about the importance
of these public areas:
We should not only be content with the works we possess from Byzantine
times. We should also make some by ourselves. Let us produce our
national work [asar-ı milliye] and preserve it.64
However, after the fourteenth issue, published after a two-year break due to the Balkan
Wars, Muallim Vahyi wrote regularly in each issue, and one can feel the increased
nationalist undertones of these articles. Muallim Vahyi had been taken prisoner in Sofia
with Mehmed Ali and Sami. During their captivity, they had the opportunity to visit the
Bulgarian Fine-Arts School and to see painting exhibitions by various Bulgarian artists.
The educational reforms of the Bulgarians impressed these artists to such an extent that,
after they came back to the imperial capital, they wrote about how successful Bulgarians
were in their endeavour to develop and preserve their national art. After visiting a
humble painting exhibition by a young Bulgarian painter, whom these three veteran
Ottoman painters actually found to be of little artistic talent, Muallim Vahyi tells the
64 Ruhi, “Paris‟ten Mektup,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:3 (12 Rebiülevvel Sene 1329/ 1
Mart Sene 1327 [March 14, 1911]). Emphasis added.
86
story of his conversation with a Bulgarian man who was also aware of the technical
incompetence of the paintings:
Yes, we also know and even confess that these paintings and other
paintings done by his peers are not valuable at all with regard to art, but
they are highly valuable with regard to nationality; we have never even
commissioned the necessary paintings for our visual education from the
European artists. Our paintings show only our country, our nation and our
being Bulgarian … No, neither of those paintings nor the other paintings
done by his peers are valuable artistically. But they are our essential
property … the paintings you do not like are willingly bought by our
viziers, ministers, generals, and by our rich people. They hang these
paintings in their houses, and they are even proud of this.65
Muallim Vahyi names his article “Our Adults Owe a Great Duty” (“Büyüklerimizin
Borçları Pek Çoktur”) as he blames Ottoman parents for “not decorating their kids‟ room
with Islamic and Ottoman fine art works” and, by their ignorance, causing the “national
future to die away.”66
The concept of „national art‟ also resonated in Sami‟s by now regular column on
the Academy of Fine Arts, “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi İçin.” In one article emphasizing
the concepts of „national art‟ and „national artists,‟ Sami writes words apparently heard
from his friend‟s mouth. In this indirect criticism of the Academy of Fine Arts, for
Sami‟s friend (or most likely for Sami himself) neither Valeri, nor Osgan Efendi (who
was in fact an Ottoman artist), though they are both talented artistically, can “inspire
national fine arts in the sons of the nation.”67 The article continues its harsh criticism of
these two non-Muslim instructors of the School:
65 Muallim Vahyi, “Büyüklerimizin Borçları Pek Çoktur” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:14
(1 Mart Sene 1330 [March 14, 1914]).
66 Ibid.
67 Anonymous [Sami], “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi İçin” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue:15 (1
Nisan Sene 1330/[April 14, 1914]). Emphasis added.
87
What have they done, these two great professors who have been
instructors for almost thirty years in the Turkish Fine Arts School [sic],
two artists who have mansions in the [Princess] Islands, apartments in
Beyoğlu, and considerable purchases and reputations? How many
paintings have they produced for our national pages? … A painter, a
national painter, cannot be cultivated in this way.68
Thus the Journal writers‟ criticism of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi begins to attack both
the non-Muslim and foreign instructors of the school. Though they appreciate and praise
these painters‟ artistic talents, for the majority of the writers, “Turkish fine arts” can
never be represented by instructors like Osgan Efendi, Mösyö Warnia and Mösyö
Valeri. Fausto Zonaro, the court painter of Abdülhamid II between the years 1896 and
1909, also receives his share of this criticism for not being enough of a “Turk”69:
Mösyö Zonaro has depicted the magical glitter of Eastern horizons, and
maybe he has created good works with regard to art, yet neither of these
works has been the work of an Easterner or a Turk [sic].70
The question that needs to be asked is what the claims of the Journal‟s authors – all of
whom were male, bourgeois, and Muslim – were designed to accrue privilege to male,
Muslim Ottoman artists, and how effectively they marginalized the non-Muslims
painters of the Empire. Did their patriotism and their definition of national art ultimately
become xenophobic and anti-cosmopolitan in spirit? Ironically enough, the Journal also
68 Ibid. Emphasis added.
69 This is particularly ironic when one remembers what Adolphe Thalasso had written on the “Turkish
School.” Thalasso had defined Zonaro exactly the opposite in the article he wrote after Zonaro had to
leave his court painter position as Sultan Abdülhamid was sent to exile: “Zonaro did not serve to the
Sultan, he served Turkey” stated Adolphe, expressing his grief for the painter‟s recent economical
hardships. Thalasso continued: “Undoubtedly, Turkey belongs to Turks, yet … with his brush, Zonaro was
the front-runner for the progress of the new Turkey on the road of civilization.” Adolphe Thalasso, “Le
cas Zonaro,” L’Art et Les Artistes, Lafitte Edition, Paris, October 1909-March 1910, V. 10. Quoted in
Pera Ressamları-Pera Sergileri 1845-1916, p.59.
70 Galib Bahtiyar, “Sanayi-i Nefisenin Milliyet Nokat-i Nazarından Tetkiki,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, Issue:18 (1 Temmuz 1330 [July 14, 1914]).
88
used a highly patriotic painting by Tovmas Efendi, the non-Muslim head painter of the
Hereke Factory (Hereke Fabrika-i Hümayunu) as its cover-page for the seventeenth
issue. The publication of a work by a non-Muslim artist as the cover image is all the
more remarkable, considering that no non-Muslims published anything in the Journal. At
the same time, however, given the national mood, the choice of Tovmas Efendi‟s
painting makes sense, as it is a patriotic depiction of three martyred Ottoman pilots who
lost their lives in an aircraft crash just after the Balkan Wars, their spirits floating in the
clouds above their bones, which are draped with the Ottoman flag (fig.12).71 In the same
issue, an article was also dedicated to Tovmas Efendi, and his short educational
biography was presented. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that Tovmas
Efendi was introduced as a highly talented painter who worked “with national and
harmonious colours and lines.” Finally, in the very last issue of the Journal, we see an
attempt to canonize Rıza Efendi (Hoca Ali Rıza) as a national painter.
The quest for „national‟ art and artist was very much the product of the
nineteenth century Europe, of the era characterized by nationalism; the „national artist‟ is
imagined72 and constructed as the man (it is almost impossible to find a female „national
artist‟) who expresses the fundamental cultural identity, beliefs and customs of that
nation. The trend that saw the revision of William Shakespeare as the „national poet‟ of
Britain, the elevation of Jack Yeats as the „national painter‟ of Ireland and the
71 After its tremendous defeat at the end of the Balkan Wars, in the beginning of the year 1914, the
Ottoman state decided to conduct a flight from Istanbul to Alexandria as a political show. Two type
aircraft were piloted by four Ottoman pilots; Nuri Bey, İsmail Hakkı Bey, Fethi Bey and Sadık Bey. The
aircraft named “Muavenet-i Milliye” crashed near Damascus, killing Fethi and Sadık Bey. The other
plane, “Prens Celaleddin” crashed into the sea near Jaffa killing Nuri Bey.
72 Here, of course, I use the concept „imagined‟ in the sense it is employed by Benedict Anderson.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London; New York: Verso, 1991 [1983]).
89
construction of Jean-Baptiste Greuze as the „national painter‟ of France73 made its way
to the Ottoman world, to one of the most multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic
empires to survive to the age of modernity. For Galib Bahtiyar, writing in the Journal‟s
ultimate issue, a painter‟s nationality is always revealed in his paintings; “a German
painter can never see … a landscape or a face like an Italian or a Frenchman does; he
cannot understand the spiritual mood like an Englishman or a Spaniard does.” For Galib,
Hoca Ali Rıza Efendi‟s works, as humble as they were in the size of his canvases and
the context of his works (as simple as rocks, old houses, and grasses) show a real
“Turkishness and Easternerness.”74 This all the more surprising, perhaps, given that Rıza
Efendi‟s picturesque landscape paintings are far from being explicitly patriotic or
symbolically „nationalist‟ in content (fig.14, fig.15).
This polemic on the question of the „national artist‟ was published in the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi‟s last issue. After 1914, the Journal stopped being
published due to the outbreak of the First World War. This new situation would,
however, mark another beginning for the Society; a shift from academicism and fairly
insular scholarly debate towards a more popular appeal, with the painting exhibitions
organized during the war in 1916, 1917 and 1918. It is therefore neither surprising nor
paradoxical that the proliferation of heroic ideas and images peaked precisely when
popular „nationalism‟ was at its height, i.e. during World War I, as the familiar imagery
73 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the celebrated eighteenth century French painter was called “the true national
painter of the French” in an 1831 American popular dictionary as, in his pictures, “he exhibits the most
characteristic traits of the French manner of thinking and feeling.” Encyclopaedia Americana: A Popular
Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Politics and Biography, Vol.V, ed. Francis Lieber
(Philadelphia: Carey& Lea, 1831), p.275.
74 Galib Bahtiyar, “Sanayi-i Nefisenin Milliyet Nokta-i Nazarından Tetkiki,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti
Gazetesi, Issue:18 (1 Temmuz 1330 [July 14, 1914]).
90
of heroic soldiers helped ordinary men and women imagine the „abstract category‟ of the
nation.
91
CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT WAR: PAINTING THE „ORDINARY SOLDIER‟
The exact social, political and historical circumstances of the First World War and the
reigning nationalist ideologies that penetrated into almost every activity in support of the
war effort, created extraordinary circumstances for Ottoman art and artists. The spirit
was jingoistic; artists were expected to contribute to that spirit, and to create works out
of a war experience which was common to them all. The responses to this first total and
fully modern war by the Ottoman Society of Painters were diverse, and came from
different institutional and political positions – as active soldiers continuing to create
works while fighting at the front, as independent artists pursuing their work on the home
front, as volunteer observers in the trenches experiencing the battle zones, and as semiofficial
war artists paid by the state to make images in support of the war cause. This
chapter is concerned with how, during these four disastrous and world-changing years,
Ottoman visual culture in general and the artists of the Ottoman Society of Painters in
particular were both motivated and compelled to meet the extraordinary conditions of
war on the home front.
The Ottoman Empire in the Great War
The Ottoman Empire entered the Great War on October 29, 1914 on the side of the
Central Powers. With insufficient infrastructure and meagre resources, the Empire was
in no way prepared to fight another war, particularly following the long period of defeats
and catastrophes it experienced at the turn of the century. The last African province was
92
taken by Italy in the Turco-Italian War (1911-1912), and by the end of the second
Balkan War (1912-13) the Empire had lost 83 percent of its European territory,1 leaving
the country traumatized and in economic hardship. With the aim of ending the
diplomatic isolation it had experienced during the Balkan Wars, the Empire sought
alliances with major powers. After the failure of attempts to interest France and Britain
in an alliance, the CUP turned their eyes to Germany and Austria-Hungary, resulting in
the Empire entering the war on the side of the Central Powers at war with Russia, France
and Britain.
The Ottoman Empire saw combat on nine different fronts – the Caucasus, Sinai-
Palestine, Hijaz, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Macedonia, Persia, Galicia, and Romania –
and mobilized 2.8 million troops.2 Official casualty figures were never published by the
Ottoman State; a fact mostly attributed to inaccurate and insufficient record keeping and
to attempts to minimize the number of Armenian victims during the massacres of 1915-
16.3 Yet in four years of hard-fought total war, with human suffering on an
unprecedented scale, the Empire suffered a very large number of casualties.
1 Zafer Toprak, “Cihan Harbi‟nin Provası Balkan Harbi”, Toplumsal Tarih 104 (August 2002), pp.45-6.
2 See, Edward J. Erickson, Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World War I: A Comparative Study (London;
New York: Routledge, 2007).
3 The number of fatalities provided by Edward J. Erickson‟s 2001 study, Ordered to Die: A History of the
Ottoman Army in the First World War, is 750, 000; a number which includes military causalities killed in
action and by other causes. See the Appendix F in Edward J. Erikson, Ordered to Die: A History of the
Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 237. Though there is
no „real‟ fatality figure for Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman victims of the First World War, Erickson‟s
analysis remains rather vague when considering the Ottoman campaign against the Armenian population
between 1915-1916, which resulted in approximately one million deaths. Among others, see Jay M.
Winter ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
93
The „Visuality‟ of the War
No war in Ottoman history had facilitated art in its most various forms and to such an
extent until the First World War: postcards, drawings, paintings and countless
photographs appeared on exhibition walls and on the pages of contemporary press. The
patriotic postcards published in Austria, Germany and occasionally in the Ottoman
Empire were perhaps the most remarkable and inexpensive direct visual products
available during the war years.4 The publication of the Harb Mecmuası (War Magazine)
in November 1915, one year after the Empire entered the war, became an effective tool
for visually representing the war. Even more than the contemporary press, this journal
brought updated battlefront photographs, illustrations and drawings under the public
gaze.5 In addition to the substantial use of photographs, the magazine printed many
illustrations and drawings of the battlefronts; ordinary soldier heroes, sinking Russian
boats, gigantic Ottoman fleets. Photography was used frequently in the magazine, but
the effects that could be achieved with drawings and illustrations were different, and
were preferred by the editors in some cases. In terms of propaganda aims, the posed
photographs of the battle zones seemed to be prosaic and monotonous in contrast to the
inspiring drawings of soldiers fighting heroically for future victory.6 It is not surprising
4 For the popular visual culture, such as war postcards, medals and decorative objects produced during the
war years see Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations
(Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004); particularly the chapter entitled
“Revolution and War, 1908-1989,” pp. 362- 483.
5 As Erol Köroğlu points out, one of the main goals of the Magazine was certainly to “serve the purpose of
raising the sprits both of the soldiers at the front and of the civilians on the home front.” Erol Köroğlu,
Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during World War (London: I.B. Tauris,
2007), p.80.
6 This was the case for other belligerent countries as well. During the first years of the war, the British
government, for instance, deliberately preferred war illustrations created by fine artists to official
94
then, that illustrations were preferred to photographs; with photos, the Ottoman public
began to see what war actually looked like, but with the illustrations, the public saw
what they wanted to see about the war.
Except the two decisive victories in Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara, the Ottoman
army suffered an almost uninterrupted string of military defeats during the war. The
victory of Gallipoli, although primarily a defensive one, immediately became the symbol
of national pride and inspiration for resistance; the Ottomans managed to resist the
attack by Anglo-French fleet which had started in February 1915 and saved the capital
from a possible invasion.
Unlike all the other fronts of the war, and even unlike all other battles the Empire
had been through, and despite the 300,000 causalities,7 Gallipoli would provide and
inspire the most prevalent and residual images in the visual memory of the late-Ottoman
Empire and of the future Turkish Republic. The bravery of the ordinary soldier was
lauded in contemporary newspapers, such as the battlefield achievements of the famous
sergeant Mehmed, who became a popular heroic image in the Ottoman media, and who
also received a donation of ten Ottoman lira by the chief editor of the Müdafaa-i Milliye
Journal, Mehmed Zeki Bey.8 Certainly, the Ottoman media represented Gallipoli as a
seminal event; the campaign became a locus of pride and honour for the nation and an
effective propaganda machine for the CUP.
photographs. See, Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1994), p.198.
7 Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003 [1994]), p.118.
8 BOA, HR.MA, 1122/7, 26 Şubat 1330 [March 11, 1915].
95
A View from the Trenches: Çallı İbrahim and Nazmi Ziya in Gallipoli
Early in July 1915, the Office of the Supreme Commander in Charge invited twenty to
thirty contemporary intellectuals via the General Staff Headquarters Intelligence Office
(Karargah-ı Umumi İstihbarat Şubesi) to Gallipoli.9 The aim was to encourage artists,
writers and musicians to produce works about the war after experiencing the battlefronts
first hand. Though many expressed an interest in the Gallipoli trip,10 on 11 July 1915,
the day of departure, there were only eighteen people at the Sirkeci Train Station: among
them were the painters Çallı İbrahim and Nazmi Ziya.11 Perhaps the best way to
illustrate what kind of images these two Ottoman painters witnessed in the battle zone is
to quote a passage from one of the writers of that trip who travelled with them. İbrahim
Alaeddin [Gövsa], the Ottoman poet who would later publish poems on the Gallipoli
campaign, wrote about his experiences of their trip and the war:
On Sunday, July 11, 1915, the group of artists who had gathered at the
Sirkeci Train Station set off at 8 p.m. with the green double-laurel marked
on their left arms and their khaki colour linen clothes… Through
Uzunköprü, Keşan, Bolayır and Gelibolu we arrived in the fifth-army
headquarters and from there we wandered into the Arıburnu and
Seddülbahir battle zones, and after that we came to Çanakkale and saw the
defences. By entering the closest trenches to the enemy, I saw how the war
was being fought arduously and faithfully against the excellent and
exceptional offensive apparatus; I also saw the scale of the defence
mounted with resolution and faith against iron and fire. The cemeteries
like cities and the battalions of unburied bodies have left me with a never-
9 BOA, DH.KMS, 33/15, 22 Haziran 1331 [July 05, 1915].
10 Erol Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity, pp.82-3.
11 Nazmi Ziya was working as one of the education supervisors at that time. BOA, MF. MKT, 1234/45, 22
Şaban 1333 [July 05, 1915]. Besides Çallı İbrahim and Nazmi Ziya, these people also include the writers
and journalists, Ağaoğlu Ahmed, Ali Canip, Celal Sahir, Enis Behiç, Hakkı Süha, Hamdullah Suphi, Hıfzı
Tevfik, Muhittin, Orhan Seyfi, Selahattin, Yusuf Razi, Mehmed Emin, Ömer Seyfettin, İbrahim Alaeddin
and Müfit Ratip; and the musician Ahmed Yekta. See, İbrahim Alaettin [Gövsa]‟s introduction to the
second edition of the Çanakkale İzleri: Anafartalar’ın Müebbet Kahramanına (İstanbul: Semih Lütfi-
Sühulet Kütüphanesi, 1932 [1922]).
96
to-be-forgotten ache. I witnessed what a catastrophic and lofty madness
war is.12
In İbrahim Alaeddin‟s words, the Ottoman soldier became an „arduous‟ fighter against
the technically more advanced power, and the war zones became cemeteries themselves,
carrying dead bodies from both sides. Different from İbrahim Alaeddin, Hamdullah
Suphi, who also travelled to Gallipoli with İbrahim Çallı and Nazmi Ziya, preferred not
to mention the devastating side of the war. The nationalistic tone is rather more apparent
in his account.13
The three big arts, painting, music, and literature, were going to utter their
respect and love for the soldiers who defend Çanakkale, and their
gratitude and admiration to that sublime, old Turkish sword shining like a
crimson dawn on the ridge of Çanakkale.14
When İbrahim Çallı and Nazmi Ziya were sent to Gallipoli in 1915, the Peninsula was
witnessing an interminable, disastrous trench war that had started in April 25 against the
British Army with ANZAC (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps) support. Different
from most of the painters who would later participate in the Galatasaray exhibitions,
İbrahim Çallı and Nazmi Ziya experienced the horror of trenches and the ordinary
soldiers‟ sufferings and traumas first hand. “Until the World War” Nazmi Ziya said, “I
also had been in favour of those who do art for art‟s sake. Had I not changed the
12 İbrahim Alaettin‟s introduction to the second edition of the Çanakkale İzleri, unnumbered.
13 Hamdullah Suphi‟s accounts on this trip appeared as series of articles in the same year. These articles,
titled “Çanakkale” were published in the newspaper İkdam. I use the 1929 collection of his writings in this
study. Hamdullah Suphi, “Çanakkale” in Günebakan (Ankara: Türk Ocakları İlim ve Sanat Heyeti
Neşriyatı, 1929), pp.79-123.
14 Ibid., p.81.
97
direction of this progress that was only tasted by artists and had no effect on the people,
I too may have followed the moderns.”15
On July 23rd 1915, probably due to the camaraderie attained during the Gallipoli
trip, a painting exhibition was organized in the Türk Ocağı which had been under the
direction of Hamdullah Suphi since 1913. Together with works by İbrahim Çallı and
Nazmi Ziya, the exhibition displayed paintings by Halil Paşa, İsmail Hakkı, Şevket Bey,
İzzet Bey, Mahmut Bey, İbrahim Feyhaman, Ruhi and Hüseyin Avni Bey.16 Hamdullah
Suphi immediately wrote a review article about the exhibition. In the article, entitled
“Son Resim Sergisi” (The Latest Painting Exhibition), he drew attention to this “small
exhibition, containing various themes and different styles.”17 After asking to his readers
whether “Turkish painting has yet realized the hopes expected from it?” Hamdullah
Suphi continues his article by reviewing some works from the exhibition; a painting of a
veiled woman by Halil Paşa, a watercolour work of a landscape by İsmail Hakkı and
numerous „impressionist‟ [teessürcü] oil paintings by İbrahim Feyhaman, Nazmi Ziya,
Ruhi, Çallı İbrahim and Hüseyin Avni. Hamdullah Suphi finishes the article on a rather
optimistic note:
We are obliged to say that today and tomorrow, we are, and will be, proud
of these dignified artists. The era which will understand them has arrived.
15 Nazmi Ziya, quoted in Bedri Rahmi, Nazmi Ziya, (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi, 1937), p.20.
16 In the 1998 book of the Türk Ocakları Tarihi (History of the Turkish Hearth), the painters were listed as
the following: “Halil Paşa, İsmail Hakkı Bey, Hamdi Bey, Şevket Bey, İzzet Bey, İbrahim Bey, Nazmi
Ziya Bey, Mahmut Bey, Hüseyin Avni Bey and Dr. Hikmet Bey.” See, Hüseyin Tuncer, Yücel Hacaloğlu,
Ragıp Memişoğlu eds., Türk Ocakları Tarihi: Açıklamalı Kronoloji 1912-1997, Vol.I (Ankara: Türk
Yurdu Yayınları, 1998), p.38.
17 Hamdullah Suphi, “Türklükte Nefis Sanatlar: Son Resim Sergisi,” Türk Yurdu 89 (30 Temmuz 1331/12
August 1915). This study uses the transliterated collection of the Türk Yurdu Magazine. Türk Yurdu,
Murat Şefkatli ed. Vol. 4 (Ankara: Tütibay Yayınları, 1998), p.195.
98
Today, may [these artists] be sure that the neglect that has surrounded
them thus far will cede place to universal tribute and affection.18
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this article was that a comment was appended to the
review by an anonymous editor of the magazine expressing discontent that military
scenes comprised only a minority of the paintings, even though “these art works are the
products of war years.”19 The expectation that artists create positive militaristic images
corresponding to the war conditions probably seemed natural for someone writing in the
Türk Yurdu, the mouthpiece of the Türk Ocağı (the Turkish Hearth), the most influential
nationalist organization of the period.
1916: The Golden Year of International War Culture
The year 1916 was indeed pivotal in terms of the public perception of the conflict,
wartime events, and the visual propaganda machines on both sides of the war. This
cultural response was due to the growing realization that the war would not be as brief as
might have been thought in the beginning. The number of war exhibitions increased, and
cities started to host various exhibitions of war-related paintings created by official war
artists or independent artists, and also exhibited popular war posters, postcards with
mottos and propaganda images. The Ministry of Fine Arts and the Ministry of War in
France, for instance, decided to exhibit works created by artists serving in the war. The
aim was to exhibit these art works in official war exhibitions under the sponsorship of
18 Hamdullah Suphi, “Türklükte Nefis Sanatlar: Son Resim Sergisi,” Türk Yurdu, Vol. 4, p.195.
19 Ibid., p.197.
99
the Salon des Armées.20 Under the sponsorship of the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz (German
Red Cross), a war exhibition was opened to the public in Berlin as well.21 Among many
other events, London also hosted an exhibition of watercolour sketches of the British
and Ottoman positions in the Gallipoli Peninsula by the famous British „soldier painter,‟
Sapper Moore-Jones.22
In cultural terms, Vienna was probably one of the liveliest capitals during the
war. Besides the famous War Exhibition, Kriegsausstellung, started in July 1916 in the
imperial park of Prater, where war material seized from the soldiers of the Allied Powers
were exhibited to the Vienna public,23 the city hosted more than fifty exhibitions
between 1914 and 1918 – ranging from exhibitions of artillery captured from the battle
zones to works created by wounded soldiers, to dog shows and paintings collected from
the allies.24
20 For the poster of this exhibition, Salon des Armées: Réservé aux Artistes du Front, see the website of
the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/frenchposter/images/art243.jpg.
21 For the poster of this exhibition, Deutsche Kriegsausstellung, see the website:
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/large.php?uid=27902.
22Anonymous, “Pictures of Gallipoli”, The Times (April 15, 1916). These water-color sketches and
drawings were also taken to Buckingham Palace on April, 19 for the King‟s inspection. See, “The King
and the Gallipoli Pictures,” The Times (April 19, 1916).
23 As we learn from a Times correspondent in Lausanne, the Viennese public were apparently boasting
about their War Exhibition, comparing this big organization to others, or more precisely, to the lack of
these cultural activities in Berlin: “The government has just opened in the Prater a War Exhibition. It is the
only thing in the city which is everywhere spoken of with admiration. The Viennese are really proud of it
and are especially delighted that the Berliners have not been able to do the same thing.” Anonymous,
“Life in Vienna,” The Times (October 31, 1916).
24 Maureen Healy, “Exhibiting a War in Progress: Entertainment and Propaganda in Vienna, 1914-1918”,
Austrian History Year Book, Vol. 31 (2000), pp. 57-85. From the same author, see, also, Vienna and the
Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p.111.
100
For seventeen days between 28 December 1916 and 14 January 1917, a
nineteenth-century art exhibition building in Vienna, Künstlerhaus Wien,25 also hosted
portraits of prominent Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian commanders painted by
the famous contemporary Viennese portrait painter, Wilhelm Victor Krausz (fig.16).
This specific exhibition was first opened in the Academy of Fine Arts in April 1916
before it was brought to Künstler Wien. The Ottoman politicians and commanders – the
Grand vizier Said Halim Paşa; Enver Paşa, the Minister of War and Deputy
Commander-in-Chief of the Army; and Talat Paşa, the Interior Minister– were displayed
alongside the Austria-Hungarians and Prussians – Marquis Johann von Pallavicini, the
Austria-Hungarian Ambassador at the Sublime Port; Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, the
Prussian Field Marshal; Liman von Sanders, the German Generalleutnant and the
military commander for the Ottoman Empire during the war (fig.17, fig.18, fig.19,
fig.20). The release of the exhibition catalogue followed in the same year,26 published in
Vienna by the Austrian Ministry of War, in which the portraits were reproduced above
the signature of each figure, with the exception of the very first portrait, that of Sultan
Mehmed V Reşad (fig.21). The message of such an exhibition was remarkable for its
political implications. Besides the international propaganda achievement, the most
striking element was probably the dedication of the work to the Young Turks, rather
than to the Ottoman Sultan. Though the date of the enthronement of the Sultan Mehmed
V Reşad, 27 April 1909, is stated as the “national rebirth” [nationale Wiedergeburt] for
25 Halil Edhem remembers the place of the exhibition as the Vienna Imperial Museum. See, Halil Edhem,
Elvah-ı Nakşiye Kolleksiyonu (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1970 [1924]), p.50. However, as the poster of
the exhibition clearly indicates, the exhibition was held in the “Künstlerhaus Wien.”
26 Die Türkei im Weltkrieg: Bildnisse und Skizzen von Wilhelm Victor Krausz (Wien: Kriegsministeriums,
1916).
101
the Empire, the emphasis on the Young Turks as having directed the “fate of Turkey
since 1908” was very much linked to the contemporary strength of the CUP and of its
leaders in the war cause.27
In 1916, Istanbul also saw an interesting architectural competition, the
competition of the German-Turkish Friendship House (Das Haus der Freundschaft),28
organized by the Deutsche Werkbund (German Work Federation), a German artistic
organization founded by architects, industrialists, craftsmen in 1907.29 The project,
however, was only opened to German architects, though it would have otherwise been
contributed to by well-known contemporary Ottoman architects, such as Mehmed Vedad
and Ahmed Kemaleddin, or the younger generation, such as Arif Hikmet and
Muzaffer.30 Though the Ottoman state only provided a venue for the project
(Çemberlitaş, an important and historic area of the city), it was certainly a significant
official relationship between the Ottoman state and Germany.31 Among eleven
proposals, German Bestelmeyer‟s project, with a bland classicist design that was
regarded as the least controversial,32 won the competition. The site was cleared and the
27 Krausz later received a third-class Mecidi order for his work. BOA, MV, 242/29, 02 Cemazeyilahir
1334 [May 06, 1916].
28 The idea of building a „Friendship House‟ was introduced by Ernst Jackh, executive secretary of the
German Werbund, and the German-Turkish Association based in Berlin and Istanbul, to the Deutsch-
Türkische Vereinigung (German-Turkish Association) which had been founded in 1913.
29 See the exhibition catalogue, 100 Jahre Deutscher Werkbund, 1907-2007 (München:
Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität München, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2007).
30 Suha Özkan, “Türk-Alman Dostluk Yurdu Öneri Yarışması, 1916,” Journal of the Faculty of
Architecture, Middle Technical University, Issue:2, Vol: 1 (1975), pp.177-210.
31 Yüksel Pöğün Zander, A Comparative Study on the Works of German Expatriate Architects in Their
Home-Land and in Turkey during the Period of 1927-1950 (Unpublished PhD Diss., İzmir Institute of
Technology, 2007), p.110.
32 Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), p.21. According to the competition, the building was expected to have
102
construction started in 1918, yet the House of Friendship as imagined by Bestelmeyer
and other German architects would be never realized, being halted by Germany‟s defeat
in 1918.33
Although the architectural competition of the German-Turkish Friendship House
could not be realized, the year 1916 was indeed a significant year for the artistic
flourishing of the imperial capital. The journalist Ahmed Emin [Yalman] later wrote
about the interest of the Government in the fine arts during the First World War:
A provisional law made it compulsory upon the authorities to organize
annual exhibitions of paintings. These exhibitions were regularly held
from 1916 on. The Government, and the leading members of it,
individually, likewise aided painters by giving them large orders. This
encouragement inaugurated a period of flourishing in Turkish painting.
Several young artists, both men and women, acquired prominence, and
some excellent work was produced.34
In fact, an official document in the Ottoman archives dating February 1916 very much
proves his point; as the document states: “in order to serve for the progress of fine arts in
our country, exhibitions will be opened in Istanbul under the appellation of fine arts
every year in April, May and June.”35 This law was brought into force, as we shall see,
with the painting exhibitions organized in the imperial capital from 1916 onwards.
numerous facilities; exhibition spaces, conference rooms, libraries, two large auditoriums, and a spacious
café.
33 Özkan, “Türk-Alman Dostluk Yurdu Öneri Yarışması, 1916,” p.207.
34 Ahmed Emin [Yalman], Turkey in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), p.173.
35 BOA, MF. MÜZ 3/59, 06 Şubat 1331 [February 19, 1916]. According to the document, the exhibitions
were opened both to Ottoman and foreign painters, and would offer certain awards - gold, silver and
bronze - for the chosen painters. I would like to thank Edhem Eldem for drawing my attention to this
specific document.
103
The 1916 and 1917 “Galatasaray Exhibitions”
From La Societa Operaia to Galatasaraylılar Yurdu
With the outbreak of the war, many citizens of the Allied powers had to leave the
Ottoman capital. One of the vacated places was the club of La Societa Operaia in Pera,
which had been founded in 1863 as an association for workers.36 The club was converted
to a dormitory for the nearby Lycée de Galatasaray in February in 1916.37 Of course, this
change in the demography of Pera, the most cosmopolitan district of the Ottoman
capital, was very much related to the CUP‟s aim to nationalize and Turkify the state by
removing the foreign elements, particularly after they were freed from the restrictions of
the capitulations in October 1914. The cosmopolitan face of Pera was changed
drastically; on the orders of Talat Paşa in late 1915, for instance, all French and English
signs over the shops were painted and replaced by Arabic characters and even with
national colours of red and white in many places.38 It was during the following year that
the old La Societa Operaia and the new Galatasaraylılar Yurdu (Dormitory of
Galatasaray) in this district started to host three art exhibitions; the first two would be
36 İlknur Polat Haydaroğlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Yabancı Okulları (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı,
1990). Paolo Girardelli, Istanbul e L’Italia, 1837-1908: Confronto e Interpretazioni Reciproche di due
Tradizioni Architettoniche (Unpublished PhD Diss. Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico I. Naples,
1994).
37 This news was announced in Türk Yurdu. Anonymous, “Galatasaraylılar Yurdu”, Türk Yurdu, Issue:
106, 24 Mart 1332 [April 06, 1916] in Türk Yurdu, Vol. 5, p.40. A more specific state report also declares
that the association was not active anymore by the year 1916. BOA, DH. EUM, 6/11, 06 Şaban 1334 [June
08, 1916].
38 The German correspondent journalist of Kölnische Zeitung newspaper in Istanbul during the war years
of 1915-16, Harry Stuermer, mentions the Young Turks‟ hostility to foreigners. Harry Stuermer, Two War
Years in Constantinople: Sketches of German and Young Turkish Ethics and Politics, trans. Harry
Stuermer and E.Allen (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917), p.155. The original German version
of the book, Zwei Kriegsjahre in Konstantinopel: Skizzen Deutsch –Jungturkischer Moral und Politik
(Lausanne: Payot, 1917) was published in neutral Switzerland.
104
held in the spring of 1916 and 1917, and the last one, which hosted paintings about the
war – what would later become known as the Şişli Studio – was held in late 1917 before
being brought to Vienna.39
The 1916 Exhibition
Both the 1916 and 1917 Galatasaray Exhibitions were opened in spring at the new
Galatasaraylılar Yurdu, or “on the street next to the Karlman Derun shops” in Beyoğlu,
as it is written in the exhibition catalogues. The 1916 exhibition hosted 190 paintings by
forty four artists, of whom most (28) were Muslim men, and very few of whom were
female (9) or non-Muslim (12).40 Of 190 paintings, less then ten percent depicted
religion-related subjects, and there were no history paintings in the exhibition. While
most of these works can properly be described as impressionist landscapes and genre
paintings, only 25 pictures, or thirteen percent41 of the works in the exhibition, were
39 It was only in 1918 that Galatasaraylılar Yurdu did not host an exhibition, but between 1919 and 1951
these annual exhibitions were held regularly in summer, and not at old La Societa Operaia this time but at
Galatasaray Mekteb-i Sultanisi (the Royal School of Galatasaray). Today these regular annual exhibitions
are collectively known as the „Galatasaray Exhibitions‟ in Turkish art historiography. Ömer Faruk
Şerifoğlu, ed. Resim Tarihimizden Galatasaray Sergileri: 1916-1951 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları,
2003).
40 According to the arrangement in the exhibion catalog, Galatasaraylılar Yurdu Resim Sergisi: Birinci
Sene (Dersaadet, 1332 [1916]), these artists were: Cevad Bey, Mösyö Renemax, Matmazel Mari Bahar,
Sedat Simavi Bey, Mehmed Said Bey, Midhat Rebii Bey, Mahmut Bey, Hüseyin Rıfat Bey, Matmazel
Mari Kıbrıslıyan, Hüseyin Avni Bey Lifij, Sami Bey, Halil Paşa, Muazzez Bey, Kemaleddin Bey, Mufide
Esad Hanım, Rupen Seropyan Efendi, Namık İsmail Efendi, Vahan Atamyan Efendi, Matmazel Eleni
İlyadis, İzzet Bey, Zekai Paşa, Şeref Bey, Halid Bey, İsmail Hakkı Bey, Müzdan Said Hanım, İbrahim
Bey Çallı, Hikmet Bey, Mösyö Arslanyan, Ruhi Bey, Arif Hikmet Bey, Dimitraki Trifidi Efendi, Galib
Efendi, Tovmas Efendi Baldazar, Celile Hikmet Hanım, Şevki Bey, Harika Hanım, Vecih Bey, İbrahim
Feyhaman Bey, Nazmi Ziya Bey, Madmazel Hinkeni, Madam Rafael, Samson Efendi Arzuruni, Ali
Cemal Bey, İzzet Ziya Bey.
41 These figures are based on estimates of the paintings‟ content judging from their titles, as listed in the
original exhibition catalogue, for many of the original works have been lost or are kept in private
collections.
105
directly related to the war, such as Ali Cemal‟s A Watchman in Maydos (fig. 22) and
İbrahim Çallı‟s A Private Soldier (fig.23).42
Interestingly, Sami wrote an appraisal of the exhibition, and, rather than talking
about the war-related works in the display, his main concern was the impressionist form
of the paintings:
By learning and taking courage from the Western technique, what
wonderful works Turkish brushes have created! Instead of the eye-tiring,
photographic drawings of Italian art, here is a lucid expression asserting
nature with its mellifluous and meaningful lines, a storm of colour
showing the trembling of the object under the rain of light […].43
More than fifty years after the exhibition, one of the painters who had exhibited only one
painting in 1916, Vecihi [Bereketoğlu], memorialized this artistic initiative as an artistic
leap forward. He agreed with Sami about the significance of the display:
That exhibition was prepared with art works by Halil Paşa, Çallı, Hikmet,
Namık İsmail, Nazmi Ziya, Feyhaman and other artists. For long years,
the painters and students of Valeri and Warnia, the instructors from the
Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi, pursued a dark and dry technique … That
exhibition was the start of a new epoch.44
Critically speaking, what Vecihi means by this „new epoch‟ remains rather obscure, and
he does not acknowledge any of the non-Muslim painters‟ contributions to the
42 Among the painters who were awarded with the silver Sanayi-i Nefise Madalyası (Fine Arts medal), it
was only Çallı Ibrahim who had exhibited works related to war: “Siper”, “Nöbette bir Nefer” and
“Çanakalle Muharebatı Menazırından.” Besides Çallı Ibrahim, other awarded artists were: İbrahim
Feyhaman, Hüseyin Avni Lifij, and Matmazel Elena Ilyadis. BOA, DUİT, 66/38, 28 Temmuz 1332
[August 10, 1916].
43 Sami Yetik, quoted in Ipek Duben, Türk Resmi ve Eleştirisi: 1880-1950 (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi
Universitesi), p.149.
44 Vecih [Bereketoğlu] wrote a short article on Feyhaman Duran for a 1970 exhibition catalogue for the
artist. In this article, he remembers the exhibition as being held in 1917. Writing exactly 54 years after the
first exhibition, Vecih must have remembered the year wrong. In fact the specific painting he referred to,
“Doctor Akil Muhtar Bey” (The Doctor Akil Muhtar Bey) by Feyhaman was exhibited in 1916, the year
when Vecih himself also participated. See, Vecih Bereketoğlu "Feyhaman" in Sergi Broşürü (Istanbul
Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yüksek Lisans Bölümü, 1970), p.7.
106
exhibition. Even after 50 years, his negative attitude towards the foreign instructors of
the Academy of Fine Arts also very much resonates with the debates which had been
taking place in the Society‟s Journal.45
The 1917 Exhibition
In the second exhibition, held in 1917, the number of artists decreased to thirty seven,
while the participation of the non-Muslim painters increased to more than forty percent,
compared to twenty seven percent in previous year.46Among the non-Muslim artists,
considering the CUP policy of Armenian deportations from Anatolia and the increasing
aggression of the Muslim Turkish majority against the non-Muslim populations, the
increase in the number of the Armenian painters from 4 to 5 (or from 9 to 14 per cent) is
perhaps surprising. However, these numbers may also remind us that as much as the art
world that the Ottoman Society of Painters was part of and was influenced by the
nationalist ideologies of the CUP, the „liberal‟ artists of the Society and their art can
neither be reduced to nor merely explained by the exclusive Turkist nationalist policies
of the CUP.
In 1917, the percentage of religion-related paintings decreased to less than 6
percent, while the majority were still landscape and genre paintings. The CUP-supported
45 Chapter III.
46 These artists were; Arslanyan Efendi, Bakkalyan Efendi, Celile Hikmet Hanım, Cevad Bey, Çallı
İbrahim Bey, Fehmi Bey, Frenkyan Efendi, Fuad Bey, Halil Paşa, Harika Hanım, Hikmet Bey, İbrahim
Feyhaman Bey, İmadüddün Vehbi Bey, İzzet Ziya Bey, Kalfayan Efendi, M. Arakelyan, Madam İzbet
Hakel, Madmazel Eleni İlyadis, Madmazel Mazarya, Madmazal Pezas, Madmazal Tamar Françes,
Madmazel Yanakopulou, Melek Ziya Hanım, Mösyö E. Malla, Mösyö Feldman, Mösyö Milman, Mösyö
Şink Parahavez, Namık Bey, Nazmi Ziya Bey, Ömer Adil Bey, Ruşen Zamir Hanım, Sami Bey
(Bahriyeli), Sami Bey, Seyyid Bey, Şevket Bey, Zekai Paşa. Galatasaraylılar Yurdu Resim Sergisi: İkinci
Sene (Dersaadet, 1333 [1917]).
107
magazine, Yeni Mecmua (New Magazine),47 featured a four-page spread of the
exhibition, embellished with reproductions of six paintings from the exhibition;
Hikmet‟s “Beşiktaş”, Namık İsmail‟s “Tefekkür” and “Lale Devri”, Şevket Bey‟s
“Mihrab” and “Cami Kapısı” and Çallı İbrahim Bey‟s “Büyük Ada.”48 The Yeni
Mecmua, however, neither emphasized the war-related paintings in the exhibition nor,
surprisingly, criticized their low quantity; out of 159 paintings, only a very small
minority (3, or less than 2%) were war paintings. Furthermore, these war-related
paintings in the exhibition did not necessarily idealize war in heroic battle scenes; on the
contrary, they were often realistic portraits of wounded and isolated soldiers, such as
İbrahim Çallı‟s Wounded Soldier49 which portrays two exhausted soldiers, one of whom
has a head wound, walking by leaning on each other through an otherwise abandoned
landscape (fig.24). How, then, were these exhibitions perceived? To what extent could
they have satisfied the authors like the ones in Türk Yurdu who would expect fine artists
to produce military images regarding the war conditions?
In fact, in late June 1916, Türk Yurdu published part of a letter written by a
journalist about the Bulgarian national theatre committee in Vienna.50 The journalist
47 As a weekly magazine, Yeni Mecmua, was published between 12 July 1917 and 26 October 1918, a few
days before the Mudros Armistice. The Magazine was founded by Ziya Gökalp, the nationalist ideologue
of the period. Erol Köroğlu notes that the magazine used relatively high quality paper which was a great
privilege in a time when even normal paper was fairly scarce. This fact was very much related to the
privilege position of the magazine as supported by the CUP. See, Erol Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda and
Turkish Identity, pp.93-6.
48 Anonymous, “Sanayi-i Nefise,” Yeni Mecmua, Issue: 8, (August 30, 1917), pp.149-51.
49 This painting would also be displayed one year later in Vienna.
50 T.Y. “Viyana‟da Milli Bulgar Temaşa Heyeti”, Türk Yurdu, Issue: 112 (29 Haziran 1916 [June 26,
1916]), in Türk Yurdu, Vol. 5, pp.121-4. The journalist was indeed right in his observations about the
Bulgarian war propaganda. During World War I, theatre became the most popular wartime entertainment
for Bulgarian soldiers at the battle front. Each Bulgarian infantry and cavalry division had their own
theater groups. Evelina Kelbetcheva, “Between Apology and Denial: Bulgarian Culture during World War
108
wrote admiringly about how successful the Bulgarians were in promoting their national
art. Besides Vienna, he also mentions a Bulgarian fine arts exhibition in Berlin. He
continues: “Have you seen how national propaganda should be? […] By benefiting from
every opportunity with a determined and pervasive ambition, Bulgaria has at last
achieved her purpose in only forty years.” The anonymous writer adds his personal
comments after the letter, “If we want to introduce ourselves to Europeans, in fact to our
European allies and brothers in arms, as equal fellows, it is not sufficient to trust only
our recruitment […] we also have to show that we are strong in civilization, or at least
capable of it.”51 As we have already seen from the journal, the Ottoman interest in
Bulgarian fine arts was something which grew significantly after the Balkan Wars.
Besides the debates in the Journal of the Society itself, another Ottoman magazine
Şehbal, for instance, also published articles on Bulgarian arts, comparing them to those
of the Ottoman Empire, to the disparagement of the latter.52 From their position as
subjects of the Sultan before the Balkan Wars to being enemies during the war, now the
Bulgarians came to represent a paragon of artistic success, and one more reason for
contemporary Ottoman intellectuals to criticize the insufficiency of visual propaganda in
the Empire.
I” in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites eds. European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment
and Propaganda, 1914-18 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.210.
51 T.Y. “Viyana‟da Milli Bulgar Temaşa Heyeti” in Türk Yurdu, Vol. 5, p.123.
52 Anonymous, “Bulgaristan‟ın uyanmasında sanayi-i nefisenin derece-i hizmeti, Türkün keyfi” Şehbal,
Issue: 89 (15 Kanunisani 1329 [January 28, 1914]), p.329.
109
International Exhibitions of War Paintings:
Istanbul and Vienna, 1917 & 1918
In many ways, the year 1917 marked the major turning point of the Great War, as it was
the beginning of the end. The belligerent countries were exhausted from fighting. The
Bolshevik Revolution forced Russia out of the war, overthrew the Czar in March and
established a communist government by October. America‟s entrance into the war in
April 1917 on the side of the allies would very much change the course of the war.
Regarding visual culture, the Great War in general had already seen an
unprecedented number of art works travelling abroad, and more frequently than ever
before. This sense of internationality gained an even stronger hold in 1917. The
Cleveland Museum of Art, for instance, initiated a significant art exhibition organization
in late 1917, in which almost two thousand war posters and handbills from European
countries could be seen by the American public.53 Yet this novel international spirit
came with its own constraints. For the countries which had had artistic ties with each
other before 1914, the war caused a severance of these cultural connections where it
turned them into enemies. In the first year of the war, the famous French art journal
L’Art et les Artistes published two blank spaces in its review section of foreign artistic
movements, announcing that the place of Germany and Austria-Hungary would
henceforth be taken by these “two notable „carvings-out.‟”54 The Ottoman Empire also
suffered from its own share of such cultural exclusion. The long artistic relationship
53 The exhibition, opened on September 22, 1917, hosted a private collection of posters and handbills from
England, France and Germany. “Exhibition of War Posters,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art,
Vol. 4, No: 7 (September-October, 1917), pp.115-6.
54 Anonymous, “Le Mouvement Artistique À L‟Étranger,” L’Art et les Artistes, Tome XIX (Avril-
Septembre 1914), p.298.
110
between Istanbul and Paris came across a fatal hitch, and the Empire now had to find
other European capitals in which to promote its artistic expression.
Looking back at those war years, a painter and art historian himself and the
municipal head of Istanbul‟s Kadıköy district during the First World War, Celal Esad
[Arseven] wrote about how much he had been engaged in writing on the necessity of
propaganda in contemporary magazines.55 Regarding this issue, he submitted a report in
early 1917 to the head of the Intelligence Service, Seyfi Paşa:
Under the influence of publication against the Turks for centuries, even
our allies consider us as a primitive nation. [In order to change] the
inaccuracy of this consideration, [we shall] organize exhibitions and
concerts in the capitals of our allies and prove our civilization and
competence.56
Here Celal Esad specifically stated it would be valuable to organize an exhibition of
Turkish paintings in Vienna and in Berlin as it would charm these allies who only
recognized the Empire because of its “bravery and strength in wars.” Seyfi Paşa very
much approved the project, yet on one condition; some of the paintings would be about
the war.
As a promoter and defender of propaganda art, Celal Esad immediately took the
initiative to organize an atelier for artists in the Şişli district and arranged to import the
necessary painting materials, paints and canvases from Germany:
[In Şişli], trenches were dug, and a group of soldiers carried their guns,
horses and artillery. Instantly, the paints and the oilcloths brought from
Germany were distributed to the artists. Painters, such as Çallı İbrahim,
55 Celal Esad [Arseven]‟s memoirs were published in Turkish newspapers Yeni Istanbul with the title of
“Türk Resim Sanatında 70 Yıllık Hayatım” and in Dünya with the title of “Yıldız Sarayından Mütareke‟ye
Kadar Celal Esad Arseven‟in Hatıraları” in 1955 and 1960 respectively. The 1993 version of a book
edition is used here. See, Celal Esad Arseven, Sanat ve Siyaset Hatıralarım (Istanbul: İletişim, 1993).
56 Ibid., p.126.
111
Feyhaman, Namık İsmail, Hikmet Onat, Sami Yetik and Ali Sami sat in
front of their easels in this big hangar with a glass roof. This crowd and
sense of national mission gave them great enthusiasm for their work. On
the one side, soldiers posing with their guns, on the other side, artillery
[…] This was an opportunity for our painters.57
In some Turkish Art history writing, Enver Paşa is indicated as the initiator of these
exhibitions.58 This idea might well be connected to Enver Paşa‟s interest in cinema
during the war. When Enver Paşa became the Minister of War in 1914, he gave orders to
establish a film department in the army, which was founded under the name of Merkez
Ordu Sinema Dairesi (the Cinema Department of the Central Army) in 1915.59 We do
not know exactly whether Enver Paşa in particular or the CUP in general played a direct
role in these exhibitions. Yet considering the harsh economic conditions of the war,
when, most of the time, the Empire faced famine and the extraordinary increase in the
prices of staple foods, particularly bread,60 it should not be hard to imagine how
necessary was the patronage of the state for visual culture.
57 Celal Esad, Sanat ve Siyaset Hatıralarım, pp.62-3.
58 Cf. Seyfi Başkan, Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye’de Resim (Ankara : T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 1997);
Cf. Kemal Erhan, “Hüseyin Avni Lifij,” Antik-Dekor, Issue:16 (Istanbul: Antik A.Ş. Yayını, 1992), p.82.
59 As it is known, Sigmund Weinberg, a Polish Jew from Romania, served as head of the Merkez Ordu
Sinema Dairesi, for which he filmed military, royal and other official visits. Weinberg had to quit when
Romania and Ottoman Empire declared war on each other. His assistant, Fuat Uzkınay, an army officer
who had taken an interest in cinematography, took over the department and continued to make war
documentaries. For the regulations of the center, see, Erman Şener, Kurtuluş Savaşı ve Sinemamız
(Istanbul: Ahmet Sarı Matbaası, 1970), p.15. For the Turkish cinema, in general, see, Giovanni
Scognamillo, Türk Sinema Tarihi (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1987); Scognamillo, Cadde-i Kebir’de
Sinema (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1991); Nezin Erdoğan and Deniz Göktürk, “Turkish Cinema” in Oliver
Leaman (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film, (London: Routledge,
2001).
60 One of the correspondents of a newspaper from the Balkan Peninsula writes on the “Famine Prices” in
the Empire: “Constantinople is threatened with famine, and now depends mainly on precarious supplies of
provisions shipped from [Constanta‟s] port…Not only bread but almost all other food stuffs are now
distributed on the ticket system…deaths from starvation now occur daily, and are not unknown even
among the Turkish population. Business is practically at a standstill, and prices have increased
enormously. Sugar, petroleum, rice, coffee, potatoes, and beans fetch from 15 to 20 times their normal
cost… the only bread procurable is black and unpalatable.” Anonymous, “Famine Prices in Turkey,”The
112
The paintings created in the Şişli Atelier were firstly exhibited in late 1917 at the
Galatasaraylılar Yurdu before they were sent to Vienna for an exhibition between May
15 and June 1918.61 There were 128 paintings exhibited in Istanbul, while this number
increased to 142 in the Vienna exhibition. Of the 128 paintings of the 1917 exhibition,
around thirty five percent of them were related to the war, and, unsurprisingly, most of
these works were about the Gallipoli front.62
Compared to the high number of artists who had participated in the previous
Galatasaray exhibitions, only 19 artists contributed their works to the Galatasaraylılar
Yurdu exhibition of late 1917, all of whom were Muslim Ottomans, and only two were
female artists; Harika Hanım and Ruşen Zamir Hanım.63 Unlike the previous exhibitions
held in Galatasaraylılar Yurdu, no non-Muslim artists participated in this one. Though
the number of the Armenians living in the Empire had decreased tremendously by this
point, there were still some Armenian painters living in the capital, such as Viçen
Arslanyan and Simon Agopyan. Agopyan in particular was well-known for his works
depicting battle scenes and ordinary soldiers (fig.25). So in opposition to the 1916 and
1917 Galatasaray exhibitions, the Şişli Atelier was exclusively a Muslim „formation.‟
Times (May 18, 1916). Constantza was regarded as the nearest point of observation for Istanbul on neutral
European ground. On the First World War economy see, Vedat Eldem, Harp ve Mütareke Yıllarında
Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun Ekonomisi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1994).
61 The most comprehensive study on Şişli Atelier belongs to Ahmet Kamil Gören, Türk Resim Sanatında
Şişli Atölyesi ve Viyana Sergisi (Istanbul: İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzeleri Derneği, 1997).
62 Except the one work on the Caucasian Front by Cevad Bey (“Kafkas Cephesi”). “Kafkas Cephesi”,
however, was not taken to the Vienna exhibition. Instead, a landscape by Cevad Bey entitled “Burgazada
(Antigoni)” was taken to Vienna.
63 Differently from the previous years‟ catalogues, the late-1917 catalogue does not carry a date, rather, it
only states: “Galatasaraylılar Yurdu Resim Sergisi” (Galatasaraylılar Yurdu Painting Exhibition) and the
price of the catalog which was 2 kuruş. As indicated in the catalogue, the artists were: Sami Bey, Namık
Ismail Bey, Hikmet Bey, Çallı İbrahim Bey, Ruşen Zamir Hanım, İbrahim Feyhaman Bey, Ali Sami Bey,
Zekai Paşa, Şevket Bey, Adil Bey, Cevad Bey, Halil Paşa, Harika Hanım, Hüseyin Avni Bey, İsmail
Hakkı Bey, Ruhi Bey, Seyid Bey and Tahsin Bey.
113
This might well be because the idea came from an Ottoman bureaucrat rather than the
painters themselves. Furthermore, though the exhibition included various paintings
different from war-related ones, it was still organized with a highly patriotic and
propagandistic agenda. When one remembers Enver Bey‟s 1911 speech during the
opening ceremony of the Abide-i Hürriyet where he included the Muslims and
Christians as “fellow patriots,”64 the absence of non-Muslims from this „patriotic‟ visual
show in 1917 very much proves the increasingly exclusivist and Turkist policies of the
Ottoman state, and how these informed and restructured the artistic world.
The Vienna exhibition hosted 20 artists; Zekai Paşa, who had exhibited only one
work in the late 1917 exhibition, “Bir Konak Dahili” (Interior of a Mansion) did not take
part in the Vienna show, while the Prince Abdülmecid Efendi, the honorary president of
the Society, who had not attended the 1917 exhibition, sent four paintings to Vienna.
Another artist, who had not participated in the 1917 exhibition yet contributed to the
Vienna one was Mehmed Ali. Though Mehmed Ali had taken an active role in the
Ottoman Society of Painters, his works were not exhibited in any of the Galatasaraylılar
Yurdu exhibitions. His exclusion, voluntary or not, was also surprising considering the
fact he had fought in the Balkan Wars with Sami and also in the Dardanelles. On the
contrary, Nazmi Ziya, after voluntarily taking a trip to the Gallipoli front with Ibrahim
Çallı in 1915, took part neither in the Şişli Atelier nor in the Vienna exhibition, though
he had sent a few landscape paintings to the Galatasaraylılar Yurdu exhibitions of 1916
and 1917. Muslim artists such as Çallı Ibrahim, Ibrahim Feyhaman, Namık Ismail,
Cevad Bey, Harika Hanım and Hikmet Bey, took part in all the Galatasaray exhibitions
64 See the Introduction of this thesis.
114
and the Vienna exhibition, and consequently seem to have been most popular in the art
circles of that time.
The opening of the Vienna exhibition was conducted by the Archduke himself.
The exhibition, as Celal Esad pointed out, was well received by both Austrian visitors
and the press. A poster was designed (fig.26) and the exhibition was accompanied with a
German catalogue, Ausstellung Türkischer Maler (Exhibition of Turkish Painters).65
Contemporary newspapers also showed interest in the exhibition; the Österreichs
Illustrierte Zeitung66 published a long essay together with reproductions of some
paintings from the exhibition; the Wochen-Ausgabe des Berliner Tageblatts67 published
a comparatively short essay with a photo of the exhibit taken at the University of
Vienna. Both articles emphasized the contributions by the Prince Abdülmecid, and
specifically his two works about Western culture: “Goethe in the Harem” and
“Beethoven in the Harem”. Though Prince Abdülmecid did not exhibit any work in
1917, he had visited the artists in their Şişli Atelier regularly. Besides these works which
staged the introduction of Western culture into the Ottoman world, Prince Abdülmecid
exhibited two other paintings in Vienna; a self-portrait showing him on his armchair,
“Self-Portrait” (fig.27) and the portrait “Sultan Selim I” (fig.28).
In addition to the Prince Abdülmecid, the Berliner Tageblatts was also highly
impressed by the symbolic, neo-classical paintings created by Harika Hanım:
65 Katalog der Ausstellug Türkischer Maler: Veranstaltet vom osmanischen Kriegspressequartier in den
verbündeten ländern (1918).
66 “Türkische Maler in Wien”, Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung (28 Mai, 1918), pp.601-2. The snapshots of
these newspapers are published in Gören, Türk Resim Sanatında Şişli Atölyesi ve Viyana Sergisi.
67 Arnold Höllriegel, “Die türkische Kunstausstellung in Wien,” Wochen-Ausgabe des Berliner Tageblatts
(5 Juni, 1918), p.7. Gören, Türk Resim Sanatında Şişli Atölyesi ve Viyana Sergisi.
115
Miss Harika, a Mohamedan Turk, half a millennium after the destruction
of Hellenic-Byzantine culture, paints the Greek gods … what a triumph
of the Hellenic idea! Turkish cannons devastated the Acropolis over and
over what else?68
Though the German-language newspapers seemed to be more interested in the „names‟
of the painters, such as the contribution by the Prince Abdülmecid Efendi (“the future
Sultan”) or a Muslim-woman painter, the exhibition itself contained a great variety of
painting genres: there were picturesque landscapes by Cevad Bey, Halil Paşa, Ruşen
Zamir Hanım and Harika Hanım (fig.29, fig.30); marines by Ismail Hakkı Bey and
Tahsin Bey (fig.31., 32); interior sketches by Şevket Bey (fig.33); images of ordinary
people and everyday life by Namık İsmail and Hüseyin Avni; (fig.34, fig.35); and of
course, the images of ordinary soldiers and of war landscapes by Ali Cemal, Feyhaman,
Hikmet, Hüseyin Avni, Mehmed Ali, Namık İsmail, Ruhi, Sami and İbrahim Çallı (fig.
36, fig.37, fig.38, fig.39). The images of enthusiastic yet exhausted and fatigued
ordinary soldiers fighting for the vatan (fatherland) were certainly informed by the
contemporary war sprit. Though each work adopted different visual tools in its
depictions of warfare, many paintings from the exhibition – such as Hikmet‟s curious
soldiers reading letters back from home in their trenches(fig.40) and Ali Cemal‟s
soldiers shooting at the enemy (fig.41) – resolutely portrayed the Ottoman fatherland as
protected by its unknown soldiers.
68 Quoted in Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the
Turkish Republic (London: New York, I.B. Tauris, 2011), p.150.
116
Painting the Ordinary Soldier Safeguarding the Fatherland
The imagery of the vatan (fatherland) was already in use in the Ottoman literary and
visual language in the first half of the nineteenth century, as inspired by the French
patrie. The performance of Namık Kemal‟s play “Vatan Yahut Silistre” (Fatherland or
Silistra)69 in 1873 was probably a milestone in the word acquiring its full meaning and
popularity. For Namık Kemal, vatan was the sacred land for which people were
sacrificed and loved in the name of Islam and the Sultan; “Long live the Sultan”, “Long
live the fatherland”, “Long live the Ottomans!” were chosen as the last words of the
soldiers at the end of the play. Though it was certainly not as popular as Namık Kemal,
an Ottoman woman, Zafer Hanım, wrote a novella entitled Aşk-ı Vatan (Love for
Fatherland) in 1877.70 The plot itself did not aim to raise patriotic feelings, (it is based
on a story of two slave girls brought from Spain to Istanbul), yet Zafer Hanım wrote an
adamantly patriotic introduction: “I was dreaming about sacrificing my life with my
fatherland brothers” she wrote, and finished by informing her readers that she would
donate the total revenue of the book to the “Sultan‟s armies.” In these plays and novels
the Ottoman fatherland was, as Ahmet Ersoy has observed, “portrayed as a sacred
domain that was won in the battlefield by a dynasty which safeguarded it under the
banner of Islam,”71 and also in the name of the glorious sultan. The imperial imagery
embodied in the celebrated and glorified Ottoman sultan was extremely powerful. So,
69 Namık Kemal, Vatan Yahut Silistre, (Istanbul, 1872). For a full list of Namık Kemal‟s works see,
Mustafa Can, Namık Kemal Bibliografyası (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1988).
70 Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan (Istanbul: 1877). The novel was also transcribed into modern Turkish by
Zehra Toksa and published recently. Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan (Istanbul: Oğlak Yayıncılık, 1994).
71 Ahmet Ersoy, On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse
during the Abdülaziz Era, 1861-76 (Unpublished PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2000), pp.338-9.
117
for the late-nineteenth century painters, such as the Polish-born orientalist artist Stanislas
Chlebowski who was commissioned by Sultan Abdülaziz between 1864 and 187672 or
the Italian court painter of Fausto Zonaro who worked under the commission of Sultan
Abdülhamid between 1896 and 1909 (fig. 42), or for the Ottoman self-trained painter
Hasan Rıza whose historical paintings adorned the pages of the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi (fig. 43), celebrated Ottoman war victories were always to be
portrayed with the glorious sultans in the centre leading their armies. Unsurprisingly, the
most painted battle scenes of these times were the conquests of Sultan Selim I (r.1512-
20) and Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r.1520-66), from times when the Empire was
perceived to have reached its peak of power and prestige. As Ersoy argues, these images
corresponded to the “historicist” spirit of the late-Tanzimat period when identification
with “the glorious days of yore offered relief from the grim realities of the present,”73
and when the public sentiment resonated with “a romantic yearning for the founding
years of the Ottoman Empire.”74
Yet reinforced with the effectively powerless and symbolic image of the Sultan
Mehmed V Reşad, and particularly after the temporary loss of Edirne during the Balkan
72 In fact, for Chlebowski‟s historical paintings, Sultan Abdülaziz himself supplied some sketches to this
new court painter showing his preferred compositional arrangements. In 1912, the famous British fine arts
magazine, The International Studio published the reproductions of these drawings. M. Pawlikowski, The
Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine& Applied Arts, Vol. 57, No. 235 (1915), pp.162-3. These
drawings were also published two years later, in 1914, in the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi. M.
Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim”, Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, Issue: 14 (1 Mart 1330 [March
14, 1914]). Today the Sultan‟s drawings for the painter are kept in a commemorative album held in the
National Museum of Cracow. See, the exhibition catalog War and Peace: Ottoman-Polish Relations in the
Fifth-Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Selmin Kangal, trans. Bartlomiej Swietlik (Istanbul, 1999), p.432.
73 Ahmet Ersoy, “Osman Hamdi Bey and the Historiophile Mood: Orientalist Vision and the Romantic
Sense of the Past in Late Ottoman Culture,” in Zeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts eds., The
Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2011),
p. 146.
74 Ersoy, On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance,’ pp.340-1.
118
Wars (the city once served as the Ottoman capital), the strong sultan imagery leading the
Ottoman army in war paintings would very much give way to the ordinary soldier
fighting for the national cause. Starting with the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman painters‟
palette of imagery had already started to include the spectre of the unknown soldier. We
have already seen the escalation of debates on „national‟ art in the Osmanlı Ressamlar
Cemiyeti Gazetesi after the Balkan Wars. As a matter of fact, after suspending the
publication of the Journal for almost two years due to these wars, the fourteenth issue
was launched with extensive numbers of paintings of ordinary soldiers. Quite
remarkably, these images of unknown soldiers were created by Hasan Rıza himself, the
painter who was known for his depictions of the glorious sultans, as we have seen. Yet
Hasan Rıza produced these images during the Balkan Wars and, in fact, the
representations of ordinary soldiers were certainly novel and popular channels of visual
expression for painters during and after the Balkan Wars, when the Ottoman state
attempted to mobilize the whole Ottoman population, regardless of religious differences,
using mass propaganda (fig.44, fig.45). And yet this war ended in a massive defeat and a
tremendous disruption both in the size and the demographic configuration of the
„fatherland.‟ So it was this new dialogue with the present, and with the recent shocking
change in the face of the fatherland, that lies behind the new directions in the images of
the paintings; not the glorious and conquering sultan but the ordinary man willing to
sacrifice his life for the national cause. During the First World War the imagery of
unknown heroic soldiers would more than at anytime inform the visual language of
paintings, and the visions and ideals of the painters during the Vienna exhibition were in
tune with this novel understanding and representation of the fatherland. The model hero
was no longer Süleyman the Magnificent approaching Viennna but Sergeant Mehmed
119
desperately defending Gallipoli. It is also important to note that though these new
representations of the fatherland safeguarded by ordinary soldies are very different from
those of Hoca Ali Rıza‟s humble landscapes in terms of their content, there are parallel
bourgeois sensibilities between Ali Rıza‟s mundane/everyday life spaces and the
mundane reality of the ordinary/nameless soldier.
The aim of the exhibition was also to bring the Vienna art works to Berlin, to the
German ally‟s capital. By June 1918, however, it became apparent that the tide of war
had changed in favour of the Allied armies and an exhibition in Berlin became an
impossible proposition. The Vienna exhibition would remain the first and the last
international exhibition for the Ottoman painters, as their 600-year-old Empire would
experience its final breakup at the end of the Great War.
A Reconsideration of the Art of the First World War
It is an indisputable irony that the Ottoman artistic field flourished with the support of
the Ottoman state during the war years. Despite the desperate material conditions of the
First World War, this new state sponsorship certainly created a new dynamic of
patronage for the artists of the Empire. Compared to the crises in patronage during the
years immediately after the Constitutional Revolution, the war years provided a lucrative
alternative to the economic reluctance and stagnation of the differentiated art market.
One committed nationalist poet, Yusuf Ziya, for instance, was reprotedly given enough
cash to buy a four-room house in 1916 for his pro-war book Akından Akına (From One
120
Raid to Another).75 The equipping of the Şişli Atelier itself demonstrates the extensive
financial support of the state for visual culture, particularly in the high quality painting
materials imported from Germany in the midst of the economical hardship. Yet besides
these fresh „economic opportunities‟ and the flourishing of visual and literary culture
under the sponsorship of the state, artists were also compelled to nationalism and, given
the harsh military censorship against the slightest oppositional view, were actively
discouraged from publicly expressing any anti-war ideas. Given these pressures, is it fair
to say that the whole Ottoman artistic establishment was jingoistic, patriotic and pro-war
between 1914 and 1918?
There were, in fact, a few Ottoman intellectuals who developed more ambivalent,
humanist and anti-militarist positions during the war. Though it is hard to talk about a
settled tradition of anti-war art in the late-Ottoman Empire, there were still a few
Ottoman intellectuals who managed to raise their voices against the militarist status quo.
Recent studies, particularly those of Laurent Mignon, offer fresh insights for an
alternative literary discourse of post-Tanzimat Literature against official/nationalist
historiography.76 The philosophical essays of Baha Tevfik and late poems of Tevfik
Fikret, for instance, both construct alternative humanist positions in the last decade of
the Ottoman Empire.77 In his 1914 monograph “Felsefe-i Ferd” (Philosophy of the
Individual), Baha Tevfik wrote with a positivist universalism: “The matter which is
75 In his autobiographical work, Yusuf Ziya wrote about these years. Yusuf Ziya [Ortaç], Bizim Yokuş
(Istanbul: Akbaba Yayınları, 1966), pp.41-5.
76 Laurent Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar: Türk Edebiyatı ve Kültürlerarasılık Üzerine Yazılar
(Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları, 2009): particularly his essay “Tanzimat Sonrası Türk Edebiyatında Alternatif
Okumalar,” pp.151-82.
77 Ibid, pp.153-4.
121
united into the same primary elements of the universe has here whatever value it has in
Germany, England, America and India.”78 His universalist perspective, which includes
the „enemies‟ of the Ottoman state (England, America and India) during World War I,
was very far from the contemporary jingoistic sprit. Similarly, in one of his late poems,
“Tarih-i Kadim,” Tevfik Fikret was explicitly anti-militarist and anti-heroic:
Heroism … at base is blood and savagery
Overrun towns, ruin armies
Slash, snap, shatter, drag, grind, burn, destroy
Know no „mercy!‟ Hear no „woe!‟ no „pity!‟
Swell the roads you pass with death and grief
No ear of grain, nor grass, nor moss
Burned out houses, banished families
Let no place rest unbeaten
Let every hearth become a tomb
Let the roofs cave in on the orphans‟ heads.79
If these Ottoman intellectuals felt able to voice counter positions and critiques of the
war, what then of the Ottoman Society of Painters? How did they respond and react to
the conditions of the First World War? Did they become and remain apolitical
supporters of the war effort or, on the contrary, could we sense a critic of the war cause
by some of them?
It is perhaps not surprising that the official/nationalist Turkish literary and art
history canons have not raised these challenging questions, though they would certainly
78 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Ferd (Istanbul: Keteon Bedrosyan Matbaası, 1914), quoted in Ibid, p.152.
79 Tevfik Fikret, “Tarih-i Kadim,” quoted in Ibid, p.154.
122
bring about fresh and alternative discussions of the artistic production of these years.
The Turkish Republic that was founded in 1923 following the independence struggle
that was the outcome of the Empire‟s defeat by the Western powers, constructed and
reproduced itself through a highly heroic and patriotic visual language, inspired in part
by these wartime paintings. One example of this is the still ubiquitous image of Corporal
Seyid carrying a 300 kilo shell behind his back up to the waiting artillery during March
18, 1915 naval battle in the Dardanelles (fig. 46, fig.47).
Conversely, for most of the people living today in the formerly belligerent
countries of the First World War, propaganda has been largely forgotten or ironised, and
wartime art has become synonymous with anti-war art; such as in the poems of Wilfred
Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Klemm and the paintings of
Paul Nash and Otto Dix.
Certainly, the lack of biographical sources and documentary evidence on the
Ottoman artists and their specific experiences of the war mean that any too hasty
interpretation of their work as oppositional carries the risk of an „over-interpretation‟.
Yet we can perhaps suggest parallels with the position of European artists, drafted into
wartime service by their militaristic states. Paul Nash, a British painter, was sent by
British High Command as an official war artist to the Western front, and wrote the
following in a letter to his wife, in which he declares his intention to, however feebly,
resist the intolerable contradiction of his position:
I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from
the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever.
Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and
may it burn their lousy souls.80
80 Quoted in Margot Eates and Paul Nash, Paul Nash, The Master of the Image, 1889-1946 (London: J.
Murray, 1971), p.23.
123
True, we lack many first hand narratives about the horrors of the war from the late-
Ottoman artists. Yet, a lack of narratives can never turn us into passive onlookers. As a
matter of fact, the Ottoman war paintings are above all works of art, and thus make
special demands on us as interpreters. Paintings are created carefully and slowly by their
producers, most of the time after days, weeks and even months of conscious preparations
and plans, and yet it is always possible for what the artist feels to leak unconsciousy into
the work. In fact, even if we had all the documentary evidence in front of us, it would
still be naïve to expect to discover and recover the „true‟ meaning of these art works or
the „real‟ intention of the artists, if such a thing was at all possible or even meaningful.
What, for instance, are we to make of Ibrahim Çallı‟s painting Night Attack or
Hüseyin Avni Lifij‟s War or Mehmed Ali‟s Dardanelles After the Bombardment? Surely
these must be read as paintings which portray the horrific reality and sufferings of the
battlefronts rather than glorifying the war as cause. Night Attack positions the soldiers of
the two sides so close to each other that the rifles lay on the floor while the enemies try
to kill each other with bayonets or bare hands, and at the very centre of painting we meet
the wide eyes of an extremely terrified man with eyes and mouth wide open, terrorised
to the point of madness by the violence surrounding him (fig.48). Avni Lifij‟s War is an
allegory of a disastrous „universal war‟ in which devastated and scared women huddle
among the ruins; the battle behind the figures has just finished and its brutality and
savagery have left everything broken, empty, dry and destroyed (fig.49). The simple
sketch Dardanelles after the Bombardment, portrays a silent dead city, ruined and
abandoned by people; the demolished walls and the bare terrain very much representing
124
the „soundless‟ finality of departure and death (fig.50). The strong imagery in these
paintings represents the brutal struggle of war as an extreme condition of life, full of
destruction, savagery and grief. Another painting from the exhibition which takes an
apparently critical position to the cause of the war is Adil Bey‟s His Memory, though it
does so this time by depicting the domestic sphere (fig.51). The painting presents a
woman crying and mourning in a humbly decorated room for the loss of the life of the
one she loves. Different from other images of the war, in His Memory, the focus is
turned away from the fighting on the battlefield to the sorrow left behind. Above all,
Adil Bey‟s work makes a straightforward statement about war, its losses and griefs.
Paradoxically, İbrahim Çallı‟s painting Night Attack is today exhibited in the
collection of the Istanbul Military Museum (Askeri Müze), drawing on a „militarist‟
interpretation of the image by a country which has traditionally legitimized its existence
through a highly militarized nationalism. It is no coincidence that more than a century
after this disastrous war, these „ambivalent‟ art works have either been given militarist
or nationalist interpretations or been totally excluded from the official/nationalist
Turkish art history canons, as with Mehmed Ali‟s and Adil Bey‟s work.
Indeed, the First World War has had a paradoxical character in the historical
memory of the Turkish Republic. While it has mostly been dismissed and despised as a
CUP cause, or, at best, as the background and trigger of the Independence War, the
Gallipoli campaign has equally been commemorated and celebrated with a specific
emphasis on the role of the commander Mustafa Kemal, the future founder of the
Republic, and on the devotion of the ordinary soldiers to the country‟s salvation. Though
it has been more than hundred years since this first total war, today, the metonym
“Mehmetçik” is still used for the soldiers of the nation, after Mehmed Çavuş, the famous
125
ordinary sergeant Mehmed, who “fought without fear” in Gallipoli. Yet looking at this
specific moment of history with „nationalist‟ and „militarized‟ eyes has only muted and
obscured the alternative voices from the period. Rather than adopting a statist
perspective which centres on propaganda and a pro-war perspective, more nuanced and
multi-faced ways of looking at this period are a necessary step towards an alternative
reading of the extraordinary circumstances of World War I, the first great human-made
catastrophe of the twentieth century. Today, I believe, fresh insights are needed to stand
up for and speak of what has been misinterpreted and distorted on the pages of Turkish
art history.
126
CONCLUSION
As art history in Turkey developed in tandem with the modern nation-state of the
Turkish Republic, its epistemological tools were very much in the service of nationalist
impulses. Writing in a country which adamantly constructed itself as a counter-model to
the Ottoman Empire, the challenge for early-Republican art historians was to write about
the art of a „tainted‟ empire using the terminologies and ideologies of the new nationstate.
In this particular kind of narrative, distortions, marginalizations and exclusions
were inevitable. The very fact that this version of history was written in line with certain
political and cultural agendas of the early-Republic makes it necessary to look at this
period afresh and understand it in its own terms and its own creative specificities. This is
precisely what I aimed to do in this study by focusing one part of that distorted history,
the Ottoman Society of Painters.
The final decade of the Ottoman Empire was certainly a unique decade, starting
with a revolution and continuing with rebellions, wars and massacres. These harsh and
complex political dynamics led me to write a history of the Ottoman Society of Painters
by understanding it as part of these catastrophic years. Thus, while I referred back to the
late Ottoman and post-Tanzimat context of the Society, I primarily focused on the reign
of Sultan Reşad Mehmed V, or the era of the Committee of Union and Progress. The
major conflicts of the early twentieth century, the Balkan Wars and the First World War,
marked a turning point in the national consciousness of the Ottoman Empire, and their
influence on visual culture was immense. As in the case of the Ottoman Society of
Painters, I proposed that the painters and their art works were very much affected by the
historical circumstances of these disastrous war years.
127
Several major points that have arisen repeatedly in this study seem important to
reiterate again in the Conclusion. First and foremost, Ottoman painting has generally
been approached from a formalist and nationalist perspective, which was very much
imposed by the Franco-centric and traditional art history writing we see in early-
Republican art historiography. It is in no doubt that modern Ottoman painting cannot be
thought without making reference to Western art trends, or aesthetic developments in
Europe, as many Ottoman artists were trained in the West or by Western instructors in
the Academy of Fine Art (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi). Nevertheless, any attempt to judge
the meaning of these art works with Euro-centric terminologies and prejudices would
leave us with a partial and unfair picture of this specific art world. Such models might
provide insight into the development of Western art styles, such as Impressionism‟s
challenge to Academism in French painting, or the Italian Futurists‟ opposition to old
Italy, or the Russians Avant-garde‟s rejection of traditional Russian literature. In the
culture of late-Ottoman painting, however, form never became and seen as the central
concern. For the „new‟ painters of the late-Ottoman Empire, and for the members of the
Ottoman Society of Painters, former painters such as Şeker Ahmed Paşa and Osman
Hamdi Bey were seen as role models who had believed in and worked for the progress
of civilization in the Empire, not a decadent generation to be challenged, opposed and
replaced. These figures were publicly admired and respected by their early-twentieth
century successors, and the debates that took place in the Society‟s Journal, as we have
seen in the third chapter, very much prove this point.
As much as I attempted to understand the Society in its continuity with the
previous discourse and its relation to former painters, I explored the breaks and ruptures
in this history and how these differences were associated with their specific historical
128
conditions. In fact, Şeker Ahmed and Osman Hamdi‟s academism was replaced by the
impressionist styles of the Ottoman Society of Painters, and by their images of bourgeois
portraiture, everyday-life and heroic, military and nationalist themes. Yet this shift and
rupture cannot be explained by a Modernist formalist approach or by ready-made
Western terminologies. As I attempted to show in the second chapter, this shift was
parallel to a change in the class structure of the painters themselves (from Ottoman high
bureaucrats to professional artists, school teachers and full-time wage laboured painters).
The Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1883 during the Hamidian era, offered an „equalopportunity‟
merit-based artistic education to the future professional Ottoman painters,
and the institutionalization of arts eventually created a great number of professional
painters in the first decade of the twentieth century. So, as we have seen in the second
chapter, this increase in the number of free-lance painters in no way coincided with the
demand for their art works, hence the foundation of an artistic society was a necessary
step for Ottoman painters partly due to a bourgeoning crisis in patronage.
With an attempt to understand continuities and breaks in the late-Ottoman
intellectual milieu, I focused on the debates took place in their Journal, the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, in my third chapter. As we have seen, the graduates of the
Academy of Fine Arts, also largely the members of the Ottoman Society of Painters,
often had quite different aesthetic and social anxieties, and the articles in the Journal
showed us these peculiar concerns and sensibilities. The Society‟s priorities and agendas
per se also changed remarkably between the years 1911 and 1914. Specifically the
issues published after the Balkan Wars illustrate that the current of Ottoman art became
harshly integrated into political and „national‟ anxieties. The Balkan Wars were a
turning point for the artistic debates within the Journal in that sense, which paved the
129
way for fervent diatribes against the non-Muslim instructors of the Academy of Fine
Arts in their inability and failure to promote „national art.‟ The Journal also published
sketches and painting of ordinary soldiers created by Ottoman painters during the
Balkan Wars. This representation of unknown soldiers safeguarding the fatherland was
quite a novel visual tool for the painters of the Empire. These familiar images of heroic
soldiers also helped ordinary men and women imagine the „abstract category‟ of the
nation. Therefore it was not surprising to see the proliferation of the heroic ideas
embodied in these images of unknown soldiers during the First World War when
popular nationalism was at its height. Wartime paintings were immensely interesting for
certain reasons. They were, first of all, created by artists in the extraordinary
circumstances of the war. Artists responded to this disastrous event in their own ways,
and in my fourth chapter I attempted to explore the diverse narratives of these images in
order to achieve a deeper and more multi-faceted understanding of these war paintings,
instead of looking at them only from the perspective of propaganda and pro-war efforts.
In the light of the discussion about visual production during the war years, it
must be added that nationalist and militarist narratives of the First World War have been
confirmed and reformulated again and again in Turkey, not only in art historiography
but also through mass media, history books and school curricula. It has been almost
hundred years since the war ended, but Turkey has always failed to „reconcile‟ itself to
its World War I memories. Though the past couple of decades have seen a radical
rethinking of the nationalist discourse of the country in academic circles, these studies
still remain a minority. On the popular level, many events have unfortunately shown us
the residual nationalist and militarist sentiments of the country, such as the assassination
of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist, in 2007. More alternative studies of
130
these years are needed which might, and I hope will, contribute to the way Turkey visits
and thinks about its past.
I want to conclude with some questions that I faced in writing this study. As
much as I have attempted to approach the Society as a diverse and heterogonous
formation with varied and changing ideas, I did not, most of the time, focus on the
biographies and personalities of the Society members. I believe, a future prosopographic
study on these artists, though one still situated within the political, cultural and
intellectual dynamics of the period, would greatly further and enrich our understanding
of the Society in particular and late-Ottoman visual culture in general. The Ottoman
Society of Painters often functioned in this study as a social prism through which late-
Ottoman visual culture was split into its constituent colours. Thus I am well-aware of the
fact this is still only a history of a fragment or detail of a broader visual culture. In other
words, while the Society itself is a tempting case study to illustrate the wider social and
cultural scene of the late-Ottoman Empire, the „important‟ detail we choose to focus on
very much informs the methodology of our study. What would the results have been, for
instance, if I had focused on an artistic organization in the periphery of the Empire?
What kind of broader social scene would we have ended up with if I had explored the
conditions of Armenian painters living in Istanbul during the First World War? There is
certainly something enticing about the „other‟ stories of late-Ottoman Empire visual
culture, and I hope in the future more studies will appear about these ignored and muted
narratives of Ottoman/Turkish art history.
131
FIGURES USED IN THIS STUDY
132
Fig.1 Ahmed Ziya, Untitled (the garden of Yıldız Palace).
Fig.2 Unknown painter, Untitled (the garden of Yıldız Palace).
133
Fig.3 Süleyman Seyyid’s Still-life with Oranges.
134
Fig.4 Hüseyin Zekai Paşa’s Still-life.
135
Fig.5 Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s The Quinces.
136
Fig.6 Osman Hamdi Bey’s In front of the door of Sultan Ahmed Mosque.
137
Fig.7 Prince Abdülmecid Efendi, the honorary president of the Ottoman Society of
Painters. The cover of the Inaugural Issue of the Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi.
138
Fig.8 Hasan Rıza’s portrait of Sultan Osman. The cover of the 11th Issue of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi
139
Fig.9 Hasan Rıza’s portrait of Hayreddin Barbarossa. The cover of the 12th Issue of the
Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi
140
Fig.10 Halil Paşa’s A Camel Driver in Egypt. The cover of the 13th Issue of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi
141
Fig.11 İzzet Bey’s portrait of Sultan Selim III. The cover of the 16th Issue of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi.
142
Fig.12 Tovmas Efendi’s painting of the three martyred Ottoman pilots who lost their lives
in an aircraft crash just after the Balkan Wars. The cover of the 17th Issue of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi.
143
Fig.13 İsmail Hakkı’s portrait of Hoca Ali Rıza. The cover of the 18th Issue of the Osmanlı
Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi.
144
Fig.14 Hoca Ali Rıza’s Snow in Üsküdar.
Fig.15 Hoca Ali Rıza’s Pink House.
145
Fig.16 The poster of Die Türkei im Weltkrieg: Bildnisse und Skizzen von Wilhelm Victor
Krausz, 1916.
146
Fig.17 The Grand vizier Said Halim Paşa.
Die Türkei im Weltkrieg, 1916.
Fig.18 Enver Paşa, the Minister of War and
Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the
Army. Die Türkei im Weltkrieg,
1916.
Fig.19 Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, the
Prussian Field Marshal. Die Türkei
im Weltkrieg, 1916.
Fig.20 Liman von Sanders, the German
Generalleutnant and the military
commander for the Ottoman Empire.
Die Türkei im Weltkrieg, 1916.
147
Fig.21 Sultan Mehmed V Reşad. Die Türkei im Weltkrieg, 1916.
148
Fig.22 Ali Cemal’s A Watchman in Maydos. The Exhibition of Galatasaraylılar Yurdu,
1916.
149
Fig.23 İbrahim Çallı’s Private Soldier. The Exhibition of Galatasaraylılar Yurdu, 1916.
150
Fig.24 İbrahim Çallı’s Wounded Soldier. The Exhibition of Galatasaraylılar Yurdu, 1917.
(This painting was also exhibited one year later in Vienna).
151
Fig.25 Simon Agopyan’s Wounded Soldier Shooting.
152
Fig.26 The poster of the 1918 Vienna Exhibition.
153
Fig.27 Prince Abdülmecid’s Self-Portrait. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.28 Prince Abdülmecid’s Sultan Selim I. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
154
Fig.29 Ruşen Zamir Hanım’s Against Arc. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.30 Harika Hanım’s Harmony. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
155
Fig.31 İsmail Hakkı’s Yavuz (Goeben). The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.32 Tahsin Bey’s Barboros and Turgut. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
156
Fig.33 Şevket Bey’s The Narthex of Hagia Sophia. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
157
Fig.34 Namık İsmail’s Lost in Thought. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.35 Avni Lifij’s The Wall Decoration for the Town Hall of Kadıköy. The Vienna
Exhibition, 1918.
158
Fig.36 Ruhi’s Triptyque. The Vienna
Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.37 Feyhaman’s War Experience. The
Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.38 Namik İsmail’s Soldier. The Vienna
Exhibition, 1918.
Fig.39 Hikmet’s Passing through his
Village. The Vienna Exhibition,
1918.
159
Fig.40 Hikmet Bey’s Letter from Home. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
160
Fig.41 Ali Cemal’s In Dobruja. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
161
Fig.42 Fausto Zonaro’s depiction of Sultan Mehmed with his army in Istanbul.
Fig.43 Hasan Rıza’s The Victory of Eğri.
162
Fig.44 Hasan Rıza’s drawing of an ordinary soldier.
Fig.45 Hasan Rıza’s drawing of an ordinary soldier depicted from his back.
163
Fig.46 The photograph of Corporal Seyid carrying a 300 kilo shell behind his back up to the
waiting artillery during the naval battle in the Dardanelles.
Fig.47 An example of the ubiquitous image of Corporal Seyid in today’s Turkey. (A
Turkish coach).
164
,
Fig.48 İbrahim Çallı’s Night Attack. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
165
Fig.49 Avni Lifij’s War. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
166
Fig.50 Mehmed Ali Laga’s Dardanelles after the Bombardment. The Vienna Exhibition,
1918.
167
Fig.51 Adil Bey’s His Memory. The Vienna Exhibition, 1918.
168
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