"Painting, Photography, and the Long Duration of History in the Work of Osman Hamdi"
Beginning in the 1880s, the Ottoman painter, archaeologist, bureaucrat, and member of the modernizing elite Osman Hamdi undertook a series of paintings that depicted imposing, historical, and invariably fictitious mosque façades. In this talk Gülru Çakmak will examine the ways in which such images engaged both contemporaneity and the deep structures of history through an emphatically modern navigation of architecture, archaeology, photography, painting, and time.
Gülru Çakmak is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s (Liverpool University Press, 2017), and currently at work on a second book entitled Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History, examining the work of the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey as meta-paintings thematizing time and history.
This lecture took place March 27, 2019, in the Dumke Auditorium of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT. Made possible through the generous support of the Carmen Morton Christensen Endowment, the Department of Art & Art History, the College of Fine Arts, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
