Gülru Çakmak | University of Massachusetts Amherst (original) (raw)

Papers by Gülru Çakmak

Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean

Making modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean, 2022

GRAVES, MARGARET S., and ALEX DIKA SEGGERMAN, eds. Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean.... more GRAVES, MARGARET S., and ALEX DIKA SEGGERMAN, eds. Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean. Indiana University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv27qzrc4.

This essay traces the emergence of the panoramic apparatus in a cross-historical and intercultura... more This essay traces the emergence of the panoramic apparatus in a cross-historical and intercultural context, and demonstrates how the theoretical principles of nineteenth-century panoramic apparatus have continued to inform modern and contemporary visual practices.

In a group of drawings accompanying the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salom... more In a group of drawings accompanying the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome, Aubrey Beardsley invented a grotesque imagery of complex symbolism that interjected the text of the play, exacerbating the latter’s thematic association of female libido with death and destruction. When analyzed against the background of contemporaneous scientific discourses on evolution, sexual differentiation and pathological female atavism, the world as imagined by Beardsley can be shown to have been in alignment with a novel definition of nature that established the disquieting alterity of the female as its foundation. In this essay I demonstrate that depicting the Biblical Judean princess Salomé as harbinger of pathological atavism and degeneration, Beardsley selectively drew his inspiration from nineteenth-century scientific texts and illustrations by naturalists, embryologists, criminal anthropologists and others, a discourse which increasingly defined the woman as an uncanny agent of nature, and a symptom of evolutionary reversion.

As they reconsidered the role of surface and depth in art, both Gérôme and Rodin took their cue f... more As they reconsidered the role of surface and depth in art, both Gérôme and Rodin took their cue from, and attempted to reinvigorate, earlier theories about the contiguity between the exterior and the interior in sculpture. In the process, both stumbled upon a new approach to facture. If there is an aura to be talked about in this new facture, it is not one of immediacy, but of an invisible interior. The resulting works imagine grounds that are highly charged as interfaces—between the present moment inhabited by the viewer, and the past buried below.

A relatively little understood aspect of nineteenth-century visual culture is the impact of moder... more A relatively little understood aspect of nineteenth-century visual culture is the impact of modern technologies of spectacle on conventional easel painting. Beginning in the 1820s, pervasive transformation of conditions of spectatorship under the influence of emerging technologies of sequential vision such as panorama and diorama, coupled with a growing sense of an insurmountable distance between the modern subject and the historical past, put unprecedented pressure on the conventions of grand history painting. In what follows, I offer an archaeology of the early history of the panoramic principle as I explore a brief moment in nineteenth-century French art when the panoramic format offered something like an expanded field of fantasized action to the viewer of historical scenes. This new painting aimed radically to activate the imagination of the modern viewer, and to address one of the most urgent questions that haunted ambitious painters in the nineteenth century: how to make history relevant to contemporary viewers?

Reconsidering Gérôme (Mary Morton and Scott Allan, eds). , 2010

Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands, 2011

This article appeared in a collection of essays edited by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout and ... more This article appeared in a collection of essays edited by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout and published online in conjunction with the exhibition _Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands_ that was on display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology from September 26, 2010 to June 26, 2011.

Representation Matters: (Re)Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World , 2010

WENDY M.K. SHAW, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turk... more WENDY M.K. SHAW, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London & New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011), Pp. 288, $ 70.00 clothWendy Shaw's Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic is a history of Ottoman painting in the Western style over approximately a century and a half of artistic production, beginning with landscape murals employing single-point perspective produced at the end of the eighteenth century during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid I (1774-1789) and culminating in the art of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the book consists of six chapters.In Shaw's own words, the book is about a corpus of art that "has been left 'outside the pale' of art history: neither part of Islamic art, which generally 'ends' in 1800 and in which Ottoman art is considered a sub-categor...

This lavishly illustrated book illuminates Camille Pissarro's remarkable transformation from a Ba... more This lavishly illustrated book illuminates Camille Pissarro's remarkable transformation from a Barbizon-style landscape painter to one of the leaders of the emerging Impressionist movement. This is the first book to examine the revolutionary landscape paintings Pissarro created between 1864 and 1874. During this pivotal decade in the artist's career, Pissarro produced his most beautiful and innovative canvases and his experimental techniques and vision laid the groundwork for an entire generation of painters. The catalogue brings together approximately fifty of these exquisite paintings, from key works included in the Salon exhibitions of the 1860s to a powerful selection of landscapes seen in the first Impressionist show of 1874. Many of these paintings are drawn from major museums around the world and rarely shown private collections.

Books by Gülru Çakmak

Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean

Making modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean, 2022

GRAVES, MARGARET S., and ALEX DIKA SEGGERMAN, eds. Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean.... more GRAVES, MARGARET S., and ALEX DIKA SEGGERMAN, eds. Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean. Indiana University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv27qzrc4.

This essay traces the emergence of the panoramic apparatus in a cross-historical and intercultura... more This essay traces the emergence of the panoramic apparatus in a cross-historical and intercultural context, and demonstrates how the theoretical principles of nineteenth-century panoramic apparatus have continued to inform modern and contemporary visual practices.

In a group of drawings accompanying the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salom... more In a group of drawings accompanying the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome, Aubrey Beardsley invented a grotesque imagery of complex symbolism that interjected the text of the play, exacerbating the latter’s thematic association of female libido with death and destruction. When analyzed against the background of contemporaneous scientific discourses on evolution, sexual differentiation and pathological female atavism, the world as imagined by Beardsley can be shown to have been in alignment with a novel definition of nature that established the disquieting alterity of the female as its foundation. In this essay I demonstrate that depicting the Biblical Judean princess Salomé as harbinger of pathological atavism and degeneration, Beardsley selectively drew his inspiration from nineteenth-century scientific texts and illustrations by naturalists, embryologists, criminal anthropologists and others, a discourse which increasingly defined the woman as an uncanny agent of nature, and a symptom of evolutionary reversion.

As they reconsidered the role of surface and depth in art, both Gérôme and Rodin took their cue f... more As they reconsidered the role of surface and depth in art, both Gérôme and Rodin took their cue from, and attempted to reinvigorate, earlier theories about the contiguity between the exterior and the interior in sculpture. In the process, both stumbled upon a new approach to facture. If there is an aura to be talked about in this new facture, it is not one of immediacy, but of an invisible interior. The resulting works imagine grounds that are highly charged as interfaces—between the present moment inhabited by the viewer, and the past buried below.

A relatively little understood aspect of nineteenth-century visual culture is the impact of moder... more A relatively little understood aspect of nineteenth-century visual culture is the impact of modern technologies of spectacle on conventional easel painting. Beginning in the 1820s, pervasive transformation of conditions of spectatorship under the influence of emerging technologies of sequential vision such as panorama and diorama, coupled with a growing sense of an insurmountable distance between the modern subject and the historical past, put unprecedented pressure on the conventions of grand history painting. In what follows, I offer an archaeology of the early history of the panoramic principle as I explore a brief moment in nineteenth-century French art when the panoramic format offered something like an expanded field of fantasized action to the viewer of historical scenes. This new painting aimed radically to activate the imagination of the modern viewer, and to address one of the most urgent questions that haunted ambitious painters in the nineteenth century: how to make history relevant to contemporary viewers?

Reconsidering Gérôme (Mary Morton and Scott Allan, eds). , 2010

Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands, 2011

This article appeared in a collection of essays edited by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout and ... more This article appeared in a collection of essays edited by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout and published online in conjunction with the exhibition _Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands_ that was on display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology from September 26, 2010 to June 26, 2011.

Representation Matters: (Re)Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World , 2010

WENDY M.K. SHAW, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turk... more WENDY M.K. SHAW, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London & New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011), Pp. 288, $ 70.00 clothWendy Shaw's Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic is a history of Ottoman painting in the Western style over approximately a century and a half of artistic production, beginning with landscape murals employing single-point perspective produced at the end of the eighteenth century during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid I (1774-1789) and culminating in the art of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the book consists of six chapters.In Shaw's own words, the book is about a corpus of art that "has been left 'outside the pale' of art history: neither part of Islamic art, which generally 'ends' in 1800 and in which Ottoman art is considered a sub-categor...

This lavishly illustrated book illuminates Camille Pissarro's remarkable transformation from a Ba... more This lavishly illustrated book illuminates Camille Pissarro's remarkable transformation from a Barbizon-style landscape painter to one of the leaders of the emerging Impressionist movement. This is the first book to examine the revolutionary landscape paintings Pissarro created between 1864 and 1874. During this pivotal decade in the artist's career, Pissarro produced his most beautiful and innovative canvases and his experimental techniques and vision laid the groundwork for an entire generation of painters. The catalogue brings together approximately fifty of these exquisite paintings, from key works included in the Salon exhibitions of the 1860s to a powerful selection of landscapes seen in the first Impressionist show of 1874. Many of these paintings are drawn from major museums around the world and rarely shown private collections.