GÜLRU ÇAKMAK Lecture!

On Wednesday, March 27th, I went to Gulru Cakmak's lecture at the Utah Museum of Fine Art. Gulru is a scholar on French artwork and is from Turkey. However, the topic of her lecture was not on a french artist, but rather on a Turkish artist who trained in France and then went back to Turkey. This artist is Osman Hamdi Bey, and the lecture focused largely on one painting of his, "At the Mosque Door", seen to the left.

The high interest in the painting is mainly due to Hamdi showing a progression through history in a still image. The mosque that composes the top 3/4ths of the painting is not referenced from one particular mosque in Turkey, but instead uses elements of different mosques built at different times. For example, the solid, huge blocks of stone make up the earliest mosque architecture, and then the carved band of writing and design was implemented in mosques built in a much later time. Even further in the future, the blue stained tile came into play. There is not real mosque in existence that looks like this, but there are many mosques built at different times through history that have specific parts of this mosque. Some of the figures in the foreground, specifically the fancy ladies on the left, represent the contemporary time this painting was created - 1891. At least 4 different periods of history are shown in this work, which is important because it shows how Turkey has changed and evolved, and the new cultural influences of modern dress interacting with traditional ideals and traditionally minded individuals.

This lecture was interesting to me because I appreciated how minor details could have such a major aspect on the theme. It's definitely a lot to research, and Hamdi must have know than many viewers of this work would not understand the message employed by these small details, but he did it anyway. Hamdi was also one of the only artists in Turkey working in oil paints, and this was due to his French education. I like how he crossed cultures by taking what he learned in France and applying it to Turkish themes.