baris wants to show me something that brings the world depicted within the painting to life. so what have you got here? this is a vr headset. so i m becoming osman hamdi bey for the day? kind of. you visit his studio. just put it on. carefully put it on like that. and here are my hands. ok, that s really quite weird. this is amazing. so this is his studio. it s wonderful seeing the actual room. i can walk around, can i? you re going to tell me if i m going to walk into a priceless work of art in a museum, right? oh, here s the painting. right. ah! i m inside. i can hear some birds. there s a tortoise. ooh, look! pick up the lettuce leaf and then he can eat it. and at this high point in my career as an art critic. ..i think maybe i should come back into the real world. great. how are you? well, i m completely disorientated, and that was a lot of fun. it certainly got me in the right zone for considering the painting,
but without any lettuce props, perhaps. baris, this is a really imposing painting, which i think i m right in saying comes from towards the end of osman hamdi s life, right? yes. yes, exactly. can you just tell me a bit more about the artist, because he s a really important figure here in turkey? yes, he was important because he did lots of things in arts and culture. he was a museologist and he was the head of the first art school. he was an archaeologist and he wanted to become a painter. i guess the big picture idea is that he actually travels to paris and he encounters painting there including, of course, orientalist painting by european artists, which inspires him. and when he returns to turkey, he starts to make his own version of orientalism. yes, we can say that even
he can say, look, if you dress up in this, i ve brought this as well, i ve got the dress here. you could look as beautiful as mimica. is that sort of the idea? exactly. european people, everybody was interested in ottoman culture, and everything related with it. it s interesting to sort of think that this was almost like a very high, classy advertisement for what he could do. this is an image which is projecting status, fashionability the elite taste of the time. i mean, ok, cosplay may be not quite the art historically appropriate term, but there s a sort of sense of dressing up that clearly, his clients, they wanted that. yeah, exactly. the beginnings of all of that fantastical side, if you like, of orientalism. i feel there s glimmerings of that here. so fundamentally, orientalism is about the west s imagined vision of the east, but the pera is also home to work by a fascinating artist, long considered a turkish orientalist osman hamdi bey. his masterpiece is the tortoise tr
at the corner, the painter wrote that ottoman ladies are not allowed to leave their houses. that s why they invite friends to their homes, and they spend their time in their houses. i see. so i guess it stands at the start of this tradition where western artists have heard about the harem as this sort of forbidden realm, where turkish women would well, this is an entertainment with guests, and it somehow has immediately fired the imagination, and it s what they want to paint. exactly, yeah. the allure of what went on behind closed doors later stimulated a somewhat different vision of a female only space. by the 19th century, western artists were happily producing work for an audience eager to see their fantasies exposed. until turkey s own orientalist osman hamdi had his say. he opted to depict women in his society in a more respectful, less voyeuristic
the interior of the arch, and lots of people have thought ah, painted 1906 the very final years of the ottoman empire . and they ve put all of these things together and given a sort of subversive political reading to this painting. but i m sensing it s not one that you buy. chuckles. no, i don t buy that. but i buy this. he wasn t a typical orientalist. i mean, orientalism liked idle figures doing nothing. but he painted people reading or making music. what s really attractive is this idea that here is someone from turkey who s engaging with this quite problematic tradition of orientalism and somehow, what? he s subtly transforming it, he s he s reclaiming it? yes, we can say that. he was painting the orient within the orient. whether you think that hamdi in the tortoise trainer was not so covertly criticising ottoman power, he was, at least, i believe, still operating within the parameters of western orientalism, while, if not subtly resisting or subverting them, then at least r