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Ottoman Studies Group Oxford Ertegun House / Oxford University / 5 June 2015

IN THE MARGINS OF ART HISTORY: OTTOMAN ARMENIAN ARTISTS AND ART HISTORIOGRAPHY [A slightly different version of this paper was presented at a two-day conference dedicated

to the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, Genocide and Global History, held at UCLA in

April 2015 under the title In A Historiographic No Man’s Land: Ottoman Armenian Artists and

Art History. Images follow at the end of the text.]

This paper seeks to introduce an art-historical dimension to the discourse on Armenian and Turkish historiographies. Its focus is on the visual art

production of Ottoman Armenian artists – more specifically oil on canvas painting in a western mode as adopted and practiced by these artists

towards the end of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the ‘long nineteenth century’. The paper advocates critical scrutiny of the visual art production of the Ottoman Empire to expose the artificiality and

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inadequacies of existing canonical art historiographies and highlight the necessity for new methodologies.

I would like to spend a few minutes in introducing several selected images to

tease out some of the questions that this paper wishes to raise. The first four images are the work of one of the best-known Ottoman Armenian artists, a

native of Trebizonde, Arshag Fetvadjian [1866-1947]. [Figure 1] In the first

watercolour, the artist depicts the familiar, ruined walls of the medieval

Armenian capital of Ani, at that time in Russian Armenia, and in the second,

[Figure 2] an Armenian woman in ethnographic dress, one of numerous such

images that Fetvadjian painted. Meanwhile, in the third image [Figure 3]

Fetvadjian depicts a Muslim Ottoman lady feeding pigeons outside a mosque

in Constantinople, and in the fourth [Figure 4] the artist has represented a

battle scene with Ottoman soldiers on the offensive at an unspecified battle. Viewed collectively, these four images encompass the diverse artistic

interests of an Ottoman Armenian artist, engaging with his Armenian as well as Ottoman environment.

Three of the four Fetvadjian images, shown above, were published as postcards, providing the artist with a source of income. An important such

source were commissions for portraiture that had remained the bread and butter for many commercial artists despite the advent of the photographic

studio. Our next image, [Figure 5], a portrait of a bourgeois man, is typical of

probably hundreds executed by the native Constantinople artist, Simon

Hagopian (1857-1921), one of the first students, alongside Fetvadjian, to study painting at, and graduate from, the Imperial Fine Arts School of

Constantinople in the 1880s. This contrasts sharply with the next image

[Figure 6], where the sitter of the highly sophisticated portrait of a migrant

Armenian hamal [porter] from Moush, also by Hagopian, would have clearly

been in no position to commission the work. In a further painting [Figure 7]

depicting four hamals on Galata bridge, Hagopian revisits the theme of the

migrant hamal of Constantinople, many of whom were Armenian villagers

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from the provinces of Van and Moush. A third Hagopian painting, [Figure 8]

depicting a beggar woman from Van, represents a vivid comment on the

precarious position of the provincial migrant, the պանդուխտ, in the urban megalopolis. Revealing a deep interest in the world of the migrant worker and

the urban poor, these three works strongly evoke the social reformist spirit of Hagopian’s Constantinople Armenian Realist contemporaries [Arm: the

Պոլսահայ Իրապաշտ Սերունդ], such as the writers Arpiar Arpiarian, Krikor Zohrab, Hrant, Dickran Gamsaragan, Yeroukhan, Levon Pashalian, and others. Do these paintings represent a convergence between Realist image

and text, a visual arts dimension to a movement hitherto accepted solely as literary? It would be unsurprising that Hagopian – as non-Western artist-

intellectual, participant in the cultural environment of the Ottoman imperial capital and fully cognizant of contemporary intellectual trends – would share

many of the social concerns of the Constantinople Realists.

In the next painting [Figure 9], praised for its realism and verisimilitude by a

contemporary art critic, another Constantinople artist, Garabed Nichanian

[1861-1950] offers a monumental representation of a provincial Armenian wedding in Moush, in Ottoman Armenia. In Nichanian’s painting the imagined

dignity of the Armenian peasant in his or her homeland stands in stark relief against the pathetic reality of the migrant hamal’s and beggar woman’s

existence in Constantinople. Yet how authentic or real could such a representation of ‘Armenia’ be, with its strong Romantic undercurrents, when

the artist had never set foot there? The two following images raise further questions of authenticity, perception and representation of ‘Armenia’ by the

artist. The painting, [Figure 10] Lake Van and Mount Sipan Viewed from

Gdouts Island (1915), is a work by probably the best-known Ottoman

Armenian artist, the native of Van, Panos Terlemezian [1865-1941]. Consider

Terlemezian’s heartfelt, deeply sincere representation of an Armenian landscape against Nichanian’s staged and choreographed wedding set. A

second painting referring to Armenia is Armenia: Ploughing [Figure 11], one

of a series of ten works also published as postcards, by the artist and art

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teacher Sarkis Der Azarian (1865-1915) a native of Izmidt, near the Marmara Sea. Here the artist offers an almost dreamlike, naïve depiction of peasants in

a timeless land. Yet this is a representation of Armenian village life in North Western Anatolia, far from Ottoman Armenia. If we consider Fetvadjian’s

watercolour of the ramparts of Ani alongside the last three images, we end up with four varying, but also interestingly connected, interpretations of the

idea of Armenia as physical or staged entity, both experienced and imagined.

I would like to end this part of the paper by contrasting two further works by

Hagopian. The first, [Figure 12], is a late nineteenth century commission for

a sacred work for the church of Sourp Kevork in the artist’s native

neighbourhood of Samatia in Constantinople. The second, [Figure 13],

depicts two Turkish soldiers defending the Empire against invasion painted in 1916. Emotional and pregnant with Turkish nationalist symbolism and

jingoistic content, this work was executed by an Ottoman Armenian artist at the precise moment when the entire Ottoman Armenian population had been

targeted with annihilation by its own government. Despite having no time to intimately and individually engage with these

paintings, I hope it is obvious that they offer very rich veins that art historians can mine in so many different ways. Yet, how has a diverse body of work

such as this been treated in art history? How can such material be woven into an art historical narrative that can accommodate rather than reduce the

complexities and nuances that these images represent?

In his 2006 essay Is Art History Global? the art historian James Elkins dispels

the assumption that ‘art historians are driven by purely personal passions, unconnected to politics or by a disinterested sense of historical veracity’,

thereby exposing close affiliations between art history and national and regional identities as being the driving force behind art historians’ interests.

He explains that ‘senses of nationalism and ethnicity have been sometimes the explicit impetus behind art historical research from its origins in Vasari

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and Winckelmann’. The cultural historian Shelly Errington argues that both art history as discipline and the nation state were inventions of the nineteenth

century, alongside the accomplishment of European colonial expansion

[Errington, 417]. In view of these observations, it is unsurprising, therefore, that world art historiography is dominated by canonical, linear Eurocentric /

western-centric narratives, frameworks and categorizations, in which the work of the non-western Other is sidelined, either through the fabrication of

categories such as ‘Islamic’ or ‘Primitive’ art, or, in the case of non-western artists working in western modes of production – such as oil on canvas

painting and photography – simply deemed unworthy of study and dismissed as mimetic and derivative of a western art tradition. It is to rectify this

problem that, starting with the art historian John Onians in 1996, calls for a concept of world art studies where the subject can be approached from a

global perspective across time and place, and studied from all relevant disciplinary viewpoints, have been made. Yet to this day, the art production of non-Western artists, such as the work we have just seen, is absent from

dominant art histories that betray a strong Western bias.

Meanwhile, the art-historiographies of the successor states and communities emerging from the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, replicating the

above models, have imposed them on the constructed spaces of the nation or national group, through the invented category of ‘national art’. The deeply

nationalistic motivation of these art histories has strongly affected their content [Elkins, 10]. In our case, these range from histories that seek, the

wholesale appropriation and ‘Turkification’ of large tracts of an Ottoman art historical past to its outright rejection. What these art histories all have in

common is the extraction of specifically selected works of art and artists, removed from social and historical context, and their absorption into the

newly constructed teleological narratives of the nation to be projected through a distorted lens. In the Ottoman case, an imperial past is sieved

through the prism of the nation to construct reductive histories at the

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expense of complexity and nuance, and disregard for empirical foundation and context, and re-invented.

One only has to look at works such as Metin And’s Turkish Miniature

Painting: The Ottoman Period (1974), Gunsel Renda’s (ed) History of Turkish

Painting (1987), Serpil Bağci’s (ed) Ottoman Painting (2010), Ararat

Aghasyan’s The Ways of the Development of Armenian Fine Arts of the XIX-

XX Centuries, (2009), the multi-author History of Armenian Art, (2009), and

Catalogues such as The Collection of Istanbul Museum of Painting and

Sculpture – Mimar Sinan University (1996), The National Palaces Painting Collection (2010), or the Catalogue of the State Gallery of the Republic of

Armenia (1992) to make out the deeply troubling essentialist currents

underwriting such projects. While Turkish art historiography constructs an

artificial Turkish-Ottoman art historical canon, aimed at specifically eradicating all non-‘Turkish’ Ottoman artists, Armenian art historiography privileges the output of mostly Russian Armenian artists as subservient to the

cause of an imagined national liberation ideology. Needless to say the Ottoman Armenian artist is excluded from both historiographies. The

Armenian and non-Muslim identities of the artists (and often subjects) disrupt the nationalist Turkish imagination, complicate and challenge the project of

‘Turkification’, that appropriates the Ottoman art historical space for the Turkish nation. Meanwhile, any representation of, and interaction with, the

artists’ Ottoman context and cultural environment complicate myopic nationalist Armenian views, bolstered through the additional traumatic prism

of the Armenian Genocide, that render all aspects of Ottoman and Armenian coexistence and experience as negative. Furthermore, in the rare instance

when Ottoman Armenian artists, such as Fetvadjian and Terlemezian, have been conscripted into the straightjacket of an Armenian ‘national’ canon,

they have been stripped bare of any ‘Ottoman-ness’. Certain, more recent approaches by Turkish art historians, using binary interpretations of

postcolonial methodologies that advocate ‘speaking back’ to and disrupting

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a Western dominated canonical historiography have so far merely replaced one dominant gaze for another, the ‘national’.

The art historian Wendy Shaw explains the exclusion of most non-Muslim

artists from Turkish art historiography as ‘an oversight’ due to the ‘emphasis of Turkish ethnicity during the republican period’ [Shaw, 2010]. That is an

understatement: prejudice and chauvinism manifest themselves in ways that range from the subtle yet deliberate erasure of all non-‘Turkish’ voices to the

crude, unscholarly and racist. It is therefore quite correct when the historian Edhem Eldem forcefully writes that ‘Turkish historians should not be allowed

[his italics] to write Ottoman history alone’ which he sees as reduced to a

‘glorified prelude to a unilinear and oversimplified narrative of the history of the Turkish nation’. Eldem continues: ‘now that the obsession with nation

building should be over and done with […] [w]hat needs to be done is for non-Turks to reclaim […] their part of the Ottoman past, however painful this may be’ [Eldem 2009, 39]. In a similar vein, the historian Eugene Rogan has

observed that the standard practice that had emerged by the early twentieth century to refer to the Ottoman Empire as Turkey ‘neglected the ethnic and

religious diversity of the Ottoman Empire, where Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, and Armenians had as much claim to an Ottoman identity as Turks did’ [2015, xi].

This problem has been further exacerbated by approaches of establishment

art historians in Armenia. Shahen Khatchatryan, for example, claims that ‘the modern period of Armenian painting begins in 1828’, the date when Persian

Armenia was annexed by the Russian Empire, giving Armenian literature and art a new impetus, ‘which was characterised by the close relationship with

Russian and European culture’ [Catalogue, 81]. Further in the same

paragraph, he insists that these interactions ‘naturally brought new insights into the national art’ and talks of an integration of these insights into a

‘national’ style’. What Khatchatryan’s comments do is deny any possibility for

the existence of a meaningful Ottoman (and Persian) Armenian artistic development, which in his view, can only occur, tied to what is perceived as

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‘Russian / European culture’. Meanwhile, the art historian Ararat Aghasyan is convinced that, despite ‘Western’ [meaning Ottoman] Armenian art having

been studied insufficiently by Soviet and Republican Armenian art history, which he readily admits is owed to insufficient information, that compared to

Eastern [meaning Russian] Armenian art, any advancements [he uses the

word բարենորոքումներ / reforms] in ‘Western’ Armenian art have been slower, and have not always attained the same depth or taken root [2009, 30]. Yet

this unequivocal verdict on the inferiority of the visual art production of Ottoman Armenian artists is based on ignorance rather than any evidence or

analytical thought process. These inaccurate claims are made even more problematic by their being driven by political, not art-historical,

considerations, and as such cannot withstand any scrutiny.

It is a welcome development, therefore, that over the last decade, new voices have began to challenge the historiographic status quo. The most significant

is Garo Kurkman’s two-volume compendium Ottoman Armenian Painters

(2004), an ambitious survey of Ottoman Armenian artists, whose works had been hitherto unknown or inaccessible to art historians. Due to Kurkman’s

work, recent art histories, including Aghasyan’s, have been unable to ignore the existence of these artists’ diverse work. While Kurkman is not an art

historian, and as such his text needs to be approached with some caution in that it often adheres to the dominant framework of nationalist Turkish

historiography and is biography based, his valuable work has opened the way for serious academic treatment and evaluation of the art production of

the previously invisible Ottoman Armenian artist.

I would like to end by returning to the question of how to incorporate the

collective, very diverse body of work of these, and other, artists into a

common art historiography that also addresses the nuances of Ottoman art production, display and consumption in a critical, complex and inclusive

manner. This paper advocates, firstly, moving beyond the artificial nationalist narratives where the ‘nation’ is accepted as a hermetically sealed unit

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through discourses of ‘cultural purity’, by acknowledging the existence of networks of cultural exchange and influence, both within and beyond the

unit; and secondly aiming towards an inclusive, re-evaluated discipline of art history with a true world view where art is contemplated as a global human

enterprise, away from narrow, Western-centric, biases and canons and unafraid to open up beyond established boundaries. The image, as historical

document in its own right, needs to be read and be subjected to rigorous analysis as any other text, not merely serve as illustration. Diverse

methodologies from across disciplines can to be developed and applied to regard artworks within the context of the intellectual, social, economic,

political and historical environment in which it was produced. In-depth micro-historical analyses too, concentrating on precise historical moments with

their own specificities, can help deepen our understanding of a diverse and complex Ottoman society and its art production. Furthermore, a move

beyond binary interpretations of postcolonial theory can be useful in allowing the multiple voices of the considerable number of Ottoman Armenian (but

also Greek, Jewish, Levantine, Assyrian, Arab and other) artists, that have until now been kept silent, into the discourse in order to complicate and

disrupt the above inherited, or newly constructed legacies.

It is clear that in the case of Ottoman Armenian artists, the invention of ‘national art histories’, alongside their state sponsored national art

institutions and collections, and especially the 1915 genocide and its aftereffects have been at the heart of the century long neglect that their work

has suffered. As a result much painstaking corrective groundwork needs to

be carried out to reintroduce these artists into the art historical discourse. Yet, their very presence open vistas of overlapping and shared cultural

spaces that necessitate the building of bridges between hostile, parallel historiographies that still inhabit their own exclusive historiographic

universes, towards the production of inclusive and integrated common art histories. Furthermore, critically challenging accepted frameworks and myths, such as moving beyond the obsession for artificial, and untenable,

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categories such as ‘Turkish art’ and ‘Armenian art’, can effectively help integrate the silenced and subaltern voice of the non-Western artist-

intellectual into a truly global art history.

SLIDES / IMAGES

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Vazken Khatchig Davidian is a final year doctoral candidate in art

history at Birkbeck College, University of London. The working title of

his thesis is Representing the Nineteenth Century Hamal (Porter) of

Constantinople: Art, Realism and Society.