Making the modern Middle East: The new artist-illustrators, 1842-1890

In their earliest years, between 1842 and 1890, editors of the new illustrated newspapers solicited travelling artists who worked between the worlds of high art and the popular press to create drawings on the spot. Funded by the ARC, this project explores the role of drawing as a media technology through a study of major diplomatic events and conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. It is a geographically expansive study encompassing Russia, Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Afghanistan. Attending to the cross-cultural work of the artist-illustrators’ reveals the complexities of the modern Islamicate world, and how the representation of this region was mediated through the illustrated press in ways that have shaped lasting global attitudes. The Persian Shahs, Ottoman Sultans, and Egyptian Khedives quickly recognised the power of the illustrated press in promoting their political and economic interests to international audiences. This study will illuminate the ways in which these heads of state and rebel leaders from North Africa to the Caucasus sought to control their representations in the illustrated newspapers. It will also explore the ways in which urban modernity in the Islamicate world was at the heart of emerging theories of aesthetic modernism in France.  

In this roundtable three members of the team will be in dialogue about the intellectual ambitions of this project through case studies that exemplify some of its central themes. We look forward to a wide-ranging conversation. 

Mary Roberts (Chief Investigator) 

Baudelaire’s flâneur is firmly entrenched as a preeminent figure of the Parisian modern artist, but, as Mary Roberts argues, Baudelaire’s artist as convalescent is a less familiar, but no less significant, avatar of modernity who emerges through Guys’ drawings in Istanbul and the Crimea. Attending to the international politics of Guys visual translations, his war reporting emerges as a fulcrum between Baudelaire’s modernism, Victorian news media, and Ottoman statecraft. Modern art, in turn, is rooted in transnational encounter. 

Ekaterina Heath (Research Associate) 

This talk examines Russian caricatures of the Ottomans during the Crimean War. The conflict triggered a flourishing of the genre once caricature was recognised by the Russian government as a powerful weapon for wartime propaganda. N. A. Stepanov's 1855 album is analysed alongside Nevsky’s drawings and the lubok print tradition, through which the figure of the Turk emerges as an unstable type: by turns a credulous ally duped by his Anglo-French "friends," and, in sharper political sheets, a cynical strategist who bends the allies' rhetoric of civilisation and barbarism to his own ends. 

Lucy Pittman (Research Associate) 

Lucy Pittman will explore the role of the Illustrated London News’ “Special Artist” in representing the work of the Afghan Boundary Commission as it sought to tour and map the limits of the Russian and British Empires in Afghanistan in 1884-1885. It will explore how portraits, landscapes, and various forms of collaboration and exchange with local officials and elites produced a “worlding” of a contested frontier zone that lay at a confluence of cultures and empires. 

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and Nick Croggon, and presented by the Power Institute and the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney.

Join via Zoom