H
ow are we to understand the aesthetics of habitation within a more globally expansive history of art? In this article, I introduce the transcultural artist’s epistolary interior as an opening towards the contested cultural politics of such an inquiry. The epistolary interior is situated within a spectrum of possibilities. At one end are the artist-collectors’ house museums – places preserved through time or recuperated through museological practices, sites that consolidate a collective cultural memory of the creative practice of their former inhabitants. At another extreme is suitcase aesthetics associated with the tenuous existence of the migrant and the exile (Cherry, 2017). While the former often promotes a fiction of stability, the latter embodies mobility and precarity. The transcultural artist’s epistolary interior shares characteristics of both. It has a supplementary relationship to places of habitation and creative practice while simultaneously foregrounding processes of creating and dismantling such interiors through a rhythm of mobility and stasis.
My case study is the peripatetic Polish artist Stanisław Chlebowski, whose career was forged between Kraków, Istanbul and Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. The formation, reformation and strategic use of Chlebowski’s interiors shifted across his working life under changing conditions of Ottoman, Polish and French art patronage. This is an artist whose diverse oeuvre included battle paintings that bolstered Ottoman state-making, works expressing Polish nationalist sentiment during this century of foreign occupation, and exotic Orientalist paintings for collectors in Europe and North America. This article focuses on the epistolary interiors from his years in Istanbul, 1864 to 1876. His letters, sometimes embedded with drawings, are vivid accounts of creating his own and his family’s interiors in Istanbul and Kraków. These letters, themselves mobile objects, are retrospective accounts, instruction manuals and proleptic projections of interiors that Chlebowski was making, inhabiting and dismantling. They are personal accounts of a transcultural artistic practice forged through forces of global cultural capital.
Chlebowski’s interiors no longer exist. His rooms were created and dismantled numerous times across his career as he moved between countries creating art for diverse international audiences. He was an artist on the move with a profoundly unsteady sense of the audience for his practice. As a consequence of this peripatetic career, Chlebowski occupies a marginal place in Polish histories of art. In nineteenth-century Europe, artists’ studios were semi-public spaces for artists to promote their practice. They were additionally important in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. In an art milieu where there was scarce professional infrastructure for publicly exhibiting easel paintings artists’ ateliers were places for training students and hosting foreign visitors, fellow artists and potential patrons. For Chlebowski, the interior as étui (in Walter Benjamin’s (1999) sense of the interior as a case that holds the imprint of its inhabitant) is riven with pressure and instability. This expatriate artist’s interiors were not static repositories of collecting or studio practice, but rather mobile spaces teeming with the tension of movement.
Chlebowski’s letters offer unique insights into the varied functions of his Istanbul home and his psychic investment in its creation and recreation. But they are not to be understood in isolation – these were networked spaces. His letters reveal that Chlebowski’s orientalist home was intimately linked with others: the Ottoman Palaces on the Bosporus where he worked under Sultan Abdülaziz’s patronage, his family’s home in Kraków and the Parisian orientalist interiors of the leading French orientalist painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and his brother-in-law, the renowned Islamic art collector Albert Goupil. Through Gérôme Chlebowski was facilitating the creation of some of the most (in)famous orientalist paintings (including The Snake Charmer that would become a summative image of orientalist discourse when it was reproduced on the cover of Edward Said’s Orientalism). Through the objects he sold to Goupil, Chlebowski also participated in the formation of one of the most significant nineteenth-century French collections of Islamic art, which was installed in Goupil’s Orientalist interior (Figure 1) (Roxburgh, 2000). Many of these objects are today on display in the galleries of Islamic art at the Louvre, and they have become canonical in histories of Islamic art. Foregrounding Chlebowski’s epistolary interiors reveals that Goupil’s famous orientalist space is the tip of the iceberg, or rather that it is one node within a larger cross-cultural network of spaces. So too, a focus on the interiors this regional Polish orientalist was creating in Kraków and Istanbul ushers into our histories of Islamic art less canonical objects that are nonetheless crucial to a history of modernity across central Europe and the Islamicate world.
Chlebowski’s letters reveal that he was frenetically multitasking between interiors. He planned his family’s orientalist interior in Kraków in letters he wrote inside the Sultan’s Dolmabahçe palace, while waiting for the Ottoman ruler’s feedback on the battle paintings he was creating for the imperial collection. He worked on these Ottoman paintings inside his orientalist interior in Pera, a space where he also hosted Gérôme and Goupil. But this epistolary record of the entanglement of paintings, persons and interiors, of Ottoman and Orientalist artistic practice and collecting, also offers unique insights into the pressures and the instabilities of this Polish expatriate’s artistic identity.
The Pera fire of 1870, a catastrophic event that destroyed most of this cosmopolitan district of Istanbul, was an existential threat to Chlebowski’s home and a catalyst for the first of his epistolary interiors. The day after this fire Chlebowski wrote to his mother and sisters: “I could not have done anything better in my life than to have packed you off to Kraków…here a total disaster has occurred.” He reflects on his random good fortune: “Thank God I have survived it safe and sound, yet many…have not been so lucky” (Chlebowski, 10 June 1870). In the shadow of this fire the artist sent a package of gifts to his family with diagrammatic instructions for their installation in their sitting room. The package included two Chinese plates, a Turkish rug, two Kavukluks (Ottoman decorative wall racks), some red fabric for an Ottoman sofa and Chlebowski’s portrait. This self-portrait installation was a keepsake of the family’s shared life in the Ottoman capital. The Chinese plates speak to longstanding patterns of trade between China and the Ottoman Empire along the silk road trading routes, but for Chlebowski they signal the family’s cosmopolitanism in Kraków.
In these years Chlebowski was also fashioning a new professional self-image as painter to the Sultan through photographic portraits in which he is wearing the stambouline and fez. Adopting elements of Ottoman clothing has a longstanding history in Polish culture, even during periods when the Ottoman Empire was a major threat to the Polish state. From the seventeenth century Polish and Hungarian noblemen, motivated by Samatian and Scythian origin myths, dressed in Ottomanizing fashion (Jasienski, 2014). Henryk Weyssenhoff’s portrait of two Polish collectors shows the continuing fascination with this Polish-Ottoman dress into the nineteenth century. Here two Polish collectors and connoisseurs dressed in eighteenth-century Kontush are surrounded by trophies of war from historic Polish-Ottoman conflicts. In the nineteenth-century, when Poland was divided among three foreign powers of Prussia, Russia and the Habsburg monarchy, this cultural cross-dressing was an expression of Polish nationalism. Chlebowski’s portrait in Ottoman uniform distinguishes itself from this nostalgic, nationalist self-fashioning. The modernity of his court dress, the stambouline and fez, contrasts with their sartorial visual historicism. But like them, his interiors in Kraków and Istanbul were self-portrait installations.
On the eve of his move to a new home in August 1871, before it was dismantled, Chlebowski commissioned Maltese artist Amedeo Preziosi to memorialise his atelier in a watercolour that he sent to his family for installation in their home (Chlebowski, 27 August 1871). Within the folds of Chlebowski’s letter accompanying Preziosi’s watercolour of the artist at work, Chlebowski draws a schematic version of the painting. Our postage stamp size interior, with its precisely proportioned rectangular mount, is carefully framed on the top right of the page, hung on ink thread and steadied along its lower edge by two ink hooks, precisely curated within the text of the letter. This painting is a visual inventory of Chlebowski’s studio and collection for posterity “to keep real memories of my lodging of several years.” It bridges a gulf between places, “What an item it is; one, but it covers dozens of other items, which are there, and which could be there.” This sentence, with its equivocal grammar of objects – that “are there” and “could be there” – distills the paradox of the epistolary interior’s absent-present objects between Istanbul and Kraków, capturing the link between the collector’s interior and its representation that momentarily bridges distance through a transcultural chain of objects and images. The remnants of these multiple visual translations foreground the precarity of the expatriate’s Istanbul interior.
Chlebowski was prescriptive about the placement of this watercolour in the family home. He used this studio portrait for professional self-promotion, hanging a photograph of it in his next Istanbul home and gifting them to fellow artists. Chlebowski intended to exhibit Preziosi’s watercolour in Kraków and a further visual translation was published in the Polish magazine Kłosy in 1877 (Figure 2). Here is the artist’s working studio crowded with a collector’s objects, items that Chlebowski writes about in his letters - trophies of European arms, a cabinet of Greek vases on the right, and a “Jewish chandelier” is among the many objects from Kraków that Chlebowski commissioned his family to send for his densely ornamented studio.
This crowded studio portrait animates the relationship between painting, persons and things. The most prominent art work in the room is the massive battle painting to the right of Chlebowski. The angle of this outsized painting, the Battle of Varna, destined for the Ottoman palace collection, cuts across the room’s recessional lines. Work in progress is underscored by the folios of sketches in the foreground and the life-sized manikin of horse and Ottoman rider, the silent audience for his work. This figure has its own steady presence in the room, silhouetted against the bright canvas, with the melee of battle raging around him like a panoramic backdrop. The energy of this battle painting is insistently drawn into this room, into the prevailing art-making logic of the space, foregrounding the artist’s physical vulnerability.
These concatenating signifiers of the pressure of artistic work are compounded within an impossibly compressed space on this side of the image. The gridded battle painting is work in progress, yet this is insistently interrupted by the cabinet of antiquities installed too close to the canvas to enable any work. It is not a temporary installation that could be easily moved – fragile antiquities take up every inch of its shelves spilling over onto the top of this display case. This side of the room is both orderly and disturbing. The work of the collector competes with the work of the artist. An insistent structure of framing encases our artist in his studio heightening the psychological intensity of this space. A carpet-frame encompasses the artist, the recessional lines of the ceiling are enclosed by elaborate rows of patterned cornices. The gridded window is matched by the gridded painting. Our artist is surrounded, enclosed, framed. Collector and painter, working across cultures, activities in flux and competing for Chlebowski’s time. He is an expatriate in a city where the art audience is diverse and transitory, commissioning a studio portrait in a career phase when his major patron is the head of state of an empire that is not his own, and at a moment of crisis within the palace. Painting, both the act and the object, in this interior are freighted with an affective intensity.
While the Polish artist’s portraits from his Istanbul years and his self-portrait installation in Kraków signal a self-crafting of identity across cultures, it is Chlebowski’s Istanbul interior that betrays the psychological weight of such career wayfinding for the peripatetic artist. This conflicted subject position of the regional orientalist pushes against our nationally circumscribed histories of art. So too, foregrounding a transnational artistic practice connected to patterns of collecting and displaying historic and modern Islamic art, the nested interlinking of Ottoman and Orientalist interiors, and the complexities of an artistic subjectivity forged on the move between cultures, reveals an entangled history of Ottoman and Orientalist visual culture. The artist’s epistolary interior becomes a fulcrum for a more globally expansive history of art, a space that is crucial to our understanding of the co-implication of multiple national and imperial narratives.
References
Benjamin, W (1999) The Arcades Project, Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Cherry, D (2017) Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s. Art History, 40, (4): 785-807.
Jasienski, A (2014) A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe. Muqarnas, 31: 173-205.
Roxburgh, D (2000) Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880-1910. Ars Orientalis, 30: 9-38.
Stanisław Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Kraków, Przyb.Rkp 240-04 T1.
Mary Roberts, Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney, studies nineteenth-century European Orientalist and modern Ottoman art, with particular interest in artistic exchanges, histories of collecting, and the various ways in which Orientalist images are mediated in paintings, travelogues, interiors, and news media. Her work lies at the intersection of modernism and Orientalism, and pursues the global networks that inform nineteenth-century European and Islamic art.
