Saturday, February 20, 2021, 9 am–1 pm EST
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In a long and illustrious career as curator, teacher, mentor, and much more, Esin Atıl (1938–2020) left a profound mark on the field of Islamic art. Her groundbreaking exhibitions and publications covered a wide range of topics that introduced Ottoman, Arab, and Persian art to the public, and they set new standards in the field for their content, design, and presentation. Leading international art historians will reflect on the remarkable career of one of the first female curators in her field of expertise and assess her success in bringing unrivaled attention to the arts and cultures of the Islamic world.
Program | Abstracts | Speakers
Program
Saturday, February 20, 2021
9–10 am
Introduction
Massumeh Farhad, Chief Curator and The Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art; Interim Senior Associate Director for Research; Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
“What an Interesting Hobby!” Esin Atıl and the “Sixties Generation” in Islamic Art History
Walter Denny, University Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Dr. Esin Atıl, a Close Friend and Colleague
Günsel Renda, Professor, Koç University
10–11:10 am
Esin Atıl and the Publishing of Islamic Art
Julian Raby, Director Emeritus, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
The Renaissance of Islam Revisited
Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Professor Emeritus, SOAS University of London
The Art of Full Descriptions: Esin Atıl’s Studies on Metalwork
Oya Pancaroğlu, Professor, Boğaziçi University
11:10–11:20 am
Break
11:20 am–12:20 pm
Esin Atıl and The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent
Zeynep Simavi, Director, Istanbul Branch at American Research Institute, Turkey
Esin Atıl as Museum Model and Mentor
Marianna Shreve Simpson, Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania
Some Memories with Esin
Zeren Tanındı, Professor, Uludağ University
12:20–1pm
Discussion and Q&A
Abstracts
“What an Interesting Hobby!” Esin Atıl and the “Sixties Generation” in Islamic Art History
Walter Denny, University Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The challenges faced by newly minted PhD recipients who completed graduate study in Islamic art history in the 1960s and began their careers immediately afterward may seem like some distant and improbable legend when we look at the way the field has developed in the twenty-first century. It is interesting in examining the trajectory of Esin Atıl’s career to remember that it began in a very different world from that of today. Resource scarcity, travel and research barriers, and attitudes toward women in scholarly careers in the academy and the museum created unique problems in those days. With neither established templates nor defined institutional paths available, Esin had to chart her own new course, often facing obstacles that today are thankfully less formidable than they were in that bygone era. This short talk will discuss Esin’s accomplishments in this particular historical context.
Dr. Esin Atıl, a Close Friend and Colleague
Günsel Renda, Professor, Koç University
Dr. Esin Aka Atıl has been a school friend and colleague through the years. Attending Robert College High School in Istanbul together for eight years, we came to know each other closely. This was followed by our graduate years in the United States, where we both studied art history. She joined the Smithsonian Institution as curator of Islamic art at the Freer Gallery of Art and I started my academic career at Hacettepe University in Ankara. That paved the way for us to join international projects, conferences, and congresses in Turkey and various other countries. Spending my sabbatical year in Washington in 1982 in affiliation with the Freer Gallery and Walters Art Gallery, we had the chance to continue our academic projects, one of which was The Age of Süleyman the Magnificent exhibition Esin was planning. When I returned to Ankara I assisted in getting permission from the Turkish government for artworks to travel to other countries. Her project ended up as a unique exhibition held in Washington’s National Gallery of Art and traveled in the coming years to other major cities in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia with great success. Through the other exhibitions she organized and the several articles and books she published, she initiated further research and scholarship in Turkish and Islamic art.
The Renaissance of Islam Revisited
Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Professor Emeritus, SOAS University of London
This presentation will focus on Esin Atıl’s publications Art of the Arab World (Smithsonian Institution, 1975) and Renaissance of Islam, Art of the Mamluks (Smithsonian Institution, 1981). I will discuss their significance to the study of Islamic art and my personal experience with them as a teacher and a researcher specialized in the arts of the Arab world.
The Art of Full Description: Esin Atıl’s Studies on Metalwork
Oya Pancaroğlu, Professor, Boğaziçi University
One of Esin Atıl’s first major publications after obtaining her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1969 was a lengthy article about two inlaid candlesticks that appeared in the journal Kunst des Orients in 1972. A topic altogether different from her PhD thesis about Ottoman painting, her study of these candlesticks in the collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art undoubtedly originated as part of her graduate training under Oleg Grabar’s direction. Impressive for its thoroughness in documenting the figural ornamentation of the two objects and neatly delineating the iconographic variations across a body of comparanda, the article offers a subtle reflection on image-making as a process rather than simply as a given product. Thirteen years later, a similar ethos informed the exhibition titled Islamic Metalwork in the Freer Gallery of Art (1985) for which Atıl collaborated with her colleagues in the Freer Gallery’s Technical Laboratory (renamed the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research in 1988) to produce a catalogue exceptional for its comprehensiveness. These two publications, as well as other exhibition catalogues in the intervening years, reveal a methodical and perceptive approach to the complexities of inlaid metalwork as both object and site of image-making.
Esin Atıl and The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent
Zeynep Simavi, Director, Istanbul Branch at American Research Institute, Turkey
When The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art on January 25, 1987, it was the first major international loan exhibition that traveled from Turkey to the United States in more than twenty years. Curated by Dr. Esin Atıl, the making of The Age of Süleyman spanned almost her whole curatorial career in the United States, from early 1970s to the late 1980s, while major transformations were taking place in the art historical landscape of Turkey. This paper will explore the career of Esin Atıl along with changes in Turkey to assess the success and impact of The Age of Süleyman in drastically shifting the perspective on Ottoman art in the United States. As The Age of Süleyman became the first blockbuster exhibition of Islamic art with a record breaking 393,000 visitors in four months, Esin Atıl was lauded for creating a great public interest in Ottoman art both in Turkey and the United States.
Esin Atıl as Museum Model and Mentor
Marianna Shreve Simpson, Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania
During her distinguished career, Esin Atıl sponsored graduate and post-doctoral students in Islamic art history to work with her as Smithsonian fellows and research assistants. Those of us who had that privilege learned so much under her tutelage: the history, development, and care of collections; the concept and organization of exhibitions; the research and writing of publications. Above all, Esin was our model for how to succeed as a museum scholar and curator at a time when an academic profession was still the expected norm for art historians. She also inspired us with her elegance, wit, and love of travel and adventure.
Some Memories with Esin
Zeren Tanındı, Professor, Uludağ University
As far as I remember, I first met with Esin in Topkapı Library around 1969, when she started to work on her PhD thesis. In 1972, Filiz Çağman and Nurhan Atasoy were working on a catalogue about Turkish miniature painting while Esin was in İstanbul. I think she was planning an exhibition on Turkish art in the Freer Gallery. Esin translated their book into English while she was in Istanbul. Meanwhile, her exhibition catalogue was published in 1973, a year before the miniatures book was published. Before the opening of the Anatolian Civilizations exhibition in Istanbul in May 1983, Esin was in the city during the winter planning an exhibition on Süleyman. Our last meeting was at the International Congress of Turkish Art in Budapest in 2007.
Speakers
Doris Behrens-Abouseif is a professor emerita at SOAS University of London. She studied at the American University in Cairo and received her PhD from the University of Hamburg and her habilitation from the University of Freiburg in Germany. She was the Nasser D. Khalili Chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at SOAS (2000–2014) and held positions at American University in Cairo and the Universities of Freiburg and Munich in Germany, as well as numerous visiting professorships. Her publications cover a wide range of subjects from the early Islamic period to the 19th century with focus on Egypt and Syria, including the history of Islamic architecture, urbanism, Islamic cultural history, concepts of aesthetics and Orientalism, and material culture and the decorative art (particularly metalwork). Her most recent publication is The Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (1250–1517): Scribes, Libraries and Market (Brill, 2018).
Walter B. Denny is a distinguished professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has taught since 1970, specializing in the art of the Islamic world. From 2007 to 2017 he served as senior consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After undergraduate education at Robert College (Istanbul), Grinnell College, and Oberlin College, and graduate studies at Harvard and at Istanbul Technical University, he completed his PhD dissertation at Harvard in 1970. His research interests in Islamic art include architecture; design and painting; carpets; silk textiles; ceramics, especially in the Ottoman sphere; and the thousand-year history of East-West interchange in European artistic culture. He has served as consultant for dozens of museums around the world, and his seminar in museum studies has prepared many University of Massachusetts graduate students for art museum careers.
Oya Pancaroğlu received her PhD in Islamic art and architecture from Harvard University in 2000 and is currently a professor in the Department of History, Boğaziçi University. Her research interests include Islamic architecture in medieval Anatolia, ceramic production in the medieval Persianate world, and figural representation in Islamic art. Her recent publications include “İsmail Ağa, Beyşehir and Architectural Patronage in 14th-Century Central Anatolia” in Cultural Encounters in Anatolia in the Medieval Period: The Ilkhanids in Anatolia (VEKAM, 2019) and “Conditions of Love and Conventions of Representation in the Illustrated Manuscript of Varqa and Gulshah” in The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World (Gingko, 2019).
Julian Raby is director emeritus of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He received his bachelor’s degree with honors from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford (1971), where he also earned his doctorate in Oriental Studies (1981). His affiliation with Oxford grew to include a prominent role as university lecturer in Islamic art and architecture (1979–2006), chairman of curators of the Oriental Institute (1991–1993 and 1995–2000), and chairman of the board of the Faculty of Oriental Studies (1993–1995). Raby supervised over sixty special exhibitions at the Freer and Sackler from 2002 to 2017. Raby is the author of numerous papers, articles, and books in the field of Islamic art, including Venice, Dürer and the Oriental Mode (1982); Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (London Alexandria Press, 1989), Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Century: The Foundation of a Court Style (Azimuth Editions, 1993), and Qajar Portraits (Azimuth Editions, 1999).
Günsel Renda is presently professor in the Archaeology and History of Art Department at Koç University in Istanbul. She worked at Hacettepe University in Ankara and chaired the Department of History of Art for several years. She has served as advisor to the Turkish Ministry of Culture. She has participated in many international research projects, exhibitions, and conferences and has lectured at various universities in the United States and Europe. She specializes in Ottoman painting and the interactions of European and Ottoman art and culture. Among the books she has edited, co-edited, or written are A History of Turkish Painting (Palasar, 1988), Woman in Anatolia: 9000 Years of the Anatolian Woman (Turkish Ministry of Culture, 1994), The Sultan’s Portrait (Isbank, 2000), The Ottoman Civilization (Turkish Ministry of Culture, 2002), The Book of Felicity (M. Moleiro, 2007), Piri Reis 1513 (Boyut Yayin Grubu, 2013), The Sultan’s World: The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art (Ostfildern Hatje Cantz, 2015), and Ottoman Painting (Turkish Ministry of Culture, 2006, 2019). She has been a close friend and colleague of Esin Atıl since high school.
Zeynep Simavi is the Istanbul branch director of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT). Previously she worked as a program specialist for scholarly programs and publications at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She is currently a PhD candidate in art history at Istanbul Technical University. Her dissertation focuses on the curators, collectors, and major exhibitions of Turkish art from the early 20th century in the United States to the 1987 exhibition The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. She examines the landmark exhibition’s role as the first major international exhibition of Ottoman art, with the aim to provide a long overdue assessment of its lasting legacy and to contextualize its significance for the reception of Turkish art.
Marianna Shreve Simpson (PhD, Harvard University) has published, taught, and lectured about medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. She held various Freer fellowship and research appointments, and subsequently served as curator of Islamic and ancient Near Eastern art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries. Her professional career also included administrative and curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art and the Walters Art Museum, as well as numerous visiting professorships throughout the United States. She currently is a research associate at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Zeren Tanındı graduated from the Department of Art History at Istanbul University in 1965 and completed her doctorate in 1971. From 1967 to 1984 she was curator for the Manuscript Library at the Topkapı Sarayı Museum before joining the Bursa Museum and Bursa Uludağ University, where she chaired the Department of Art History until in 2010. She served as a consultant at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum and Sadberk Hanım Museum. An authority on Turkish and Islamic art of the book, Tanındı has contributed to many publications, including Harmony of Line and Color: Illuminated Manuscripts, Documents, and Calligraphy in the Sadberk Hanım Museum, vol.1–2 (Sadberk Hanim Müzesi, 2019).