The Trojan War Museum

by Ayse Papatya Bucak

  Turkish baths were modeled on Roman baths. During the Middle Ages, European men and women stayed in their baths so long they sometimes ate whole meals on tables that floated in front of them. In Islam, if water is not available for ritual cleansing, dust or dirt can be used instead. In the Turkish bath, one starts first in a warm room, then moves to a hot room, then lounges, post-cleansing, in a cool room, where entertainment and food are often provided. In the women’s bath, girls were sometimes discreetly displayed and their marriages negotiated. The women of the harem often spent large portions of their day in the bath, talking and napping and eating. But they never sat in tubs of water, what we might think of as a bath, as still water was believed to be unclean, a repository for evil spirits.

  Besides, the harem had a history of drownings.

  In the seventeenth century, Sultan Ibrahim is said to have had his entire harem, 280 women, sewn into weighted sacks and cast into the Bosporus. A passing ship found one concubine, who claimed to have swum free when her sack came untied. A sailor was quickly sent diving to the Bosporus’s bottom, where he supposedly found hundreds of sacks standing upright, some with head and hair floating free, like strange underwater blossoms.

  They were the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He could not stop himself. He took the closest by the hair, pulled her to him, and pressed his lips fervently to hers. The sirens almost took me, he would say later, trying to make a joke of it.

  Prior to becoming sultan, Ibrahim had been kept in quarters known as “the Cage” for twenty-two years, ostensibly to protect him from assassination, but more likely to prevent his plotting the assassination of his brother, the then sultan. It is assumed that this incarceration drove him insane, and that much of his behavior is explained by his insanity.

  Eventually Ibrahim’s own army had him killed. Ibrahim’s six-year-old son, Mehmed IV became sultan.

  It is strange, though, that the story of Ibrahim drowning his harem came out only after his assassination. It is possible the story was created to undermine the surprising posthumous popularity of the supposed madman.

  The Ottomans understood well the value of rumors.

  Khalil Bey, too, understood that his reputation mattered more than his reality. Still, he made a point of never lying. The key to diplomacy is being known for telling the truth.

  In the end, the concubine allegedly rescued from the bottom of the Bosporus was taken to Paris, where she became quite a sensation.

  Ingres was eighty-two when he finished The Turkish Bath.

  It is a history of Ingres’s imagination. An original built of echoes. He didn’t use a single live model to paint it. It is a painting of other paintings. Ingres’s wife, Madeleine Chapelle, dead ten years by then, is at the front with her arms over her head. The guitar player with her back turned is a near copy of Ingres’s painting The Bather of Valpinçon. The Odalisque is there in the bath, not aged a day despite the passage of more than forty years. The face of one woman in particular is repeated over and over, but in different attitudes—angry, bored, ecstatic, desperate, satisfied, mischievous. The infinite nature of a single woman ripples across the room.

  In the harem, women were prisoners, and yet so many of them cried the day they were freed. In 1909, when the empire was in its final dissolve and the sultan had gone into exile, messages were sent to villages all across the Anatolian plains and up into the mountains. Any family who had lost or sold a girl to the seraglio could reclaim her. On the appointed day, the women of the harem lined the assembly hall, and the men of their families, some unseen for decades, some unknown entirely, were admitted. At a signal, the collection of harem women lifted their veils, and a collective gasp went up from the collection of village men. Was it surprise at their beauty? Surprise at their lack of it? Who can say what they saw?

  Fathers struggled to recognize their daughters grown old, brothers learned that their sisters had died in the intervening years, cousins who had never met went home together. Other men left as they came, without even news of their lost girls. And then there were the women who stood waiting, unclaimed. Local homes had to be found for them, and at times in the years after, they could be seen in the city, their well-trained grace still evident beneath the draped folds of their faded finery.

  Khalil Bey left home at the age of nine, and one could say he never truly returned. The empire had many such sons, but few with his influence. Periodically the sultan would fire him for some offense, but always he took him back.

  Sleep

  GUSTAVE COURBET

  1866

  OIL ON CANVAS

  53⅛" × 78¾"

  Imagine that apartment, the paintings hung ten to a wall. A single painting could leave Khalil Bey speechless; imagine the effect of a hundred. He was overcome five times a day, though he did his best not to show it.

  He was in love with so many things. Sometimes he did not go home for days and then for days more he would not leave home. The buildings, the bohemians, the corrupt politicians and the noble ones, the cultured women and the whores, he loved them all. He could not seem to see reality without transforming it into something both melancholy and joyous.

  “When you wear glasses you are accustomed to seeing everything through a frame,” he joked. “The world is nothing more than a museum to me.”

  During his three years in Paris, Khalil Bey’s primary mistress was Jeanne de Tourbey, a Frenchwoman who had previously been mistress to Prince Napoleon, the emperor’s cousin, who, at the time, had put her on an improving regimen, hiring a tutor to introduce her to writers and musicians and artists, all of whom she later introduced to Khalil Bey. Among those cultural aristocrats was the controversial but popular painter Gustave Courbet.

  When Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans, which depicted an ordinary village funeral in the scale of a historic battle, was exhibited in Frankfurt in 1852, it generated so many arguments as to its quality that cafés posted signs banning discussion of Courbet or his paintings.

  Courbet’s The Stone Breakers shocked audiences because one man had a broken shoe and the other patched trousers.

  Courbet’s The Bathers was criticized not only for the size of the nude bather’s buttocks but the dirtiness of her feet. One critic offered five hundred francs to anyone who could “throw her down,” and Napoleon III was rumored to have swatted her backside with his riding crop. This last rumor was perpetuated most of all by Courbet himself, who reacted to the story first with fury and then with delight, as if he had been spanked and had then found, after his anger, that he liked it.

  Until Courbet, nudes were unrecognizable: their skin glossed, their faces smoothed. But when, in a commission for Khalil Bey, Courbet painted two women, life size, in bed, more naked than nude, one was clearly Jo Hiffernan, the longtime lover of James Whistler, who was himself a protégé and friend of Courbet’s.

  Whistler was outraged, though he staked his anger on artistic grounds. “Courbet and his influence was disgusting!” he wrote sometime later. “The regret I feel and the rage, hate, even. . . . It’s not poor Courbet whom I find repugnant, any more than his work . . . it’s that damned realism. . . . Ah! How I wish I had been a pupil of Ingres.”

  Ingres: the idealist. Courbet: the realist. And which was Khalil Bey?

  “Beauty is real,” he liked to say. Or sometimes, “What’s real is beauty.” The whole world, to Khalil Bey, seemed an exaggeration beyond belief.

  Yet as a gambler, he was known for meeting great wins with the same cool face with which he met great losses.

  When Khalil Bey first visited Courbet’s studio, in the company of Jeanne de Tourbey, he tried to purchase Venus Pursuing Psyche in Her Jealousy, a painting of the goddess looming over the sleeping mortal, her jealousy provoked by the mortal’s beauty. But the painting had been promised to another, who unscrupulously offered to sell it to Khalil Bey for a profit; Khalil Bey, recognizing that the money would not go to Courbet, refused. This pleased Courbet, who offered to paint a second work, a sequel.
This became Sleep.

  The women in Sleep have their eyes closed but they do not look as if they are sleeping. One has her leg hooked over the other, whose lips are pursed just above her companion’s breast, as if she is blowing gently upon it, or about to bestow a kiss.

  They are naked now, just as they were then.

  How did Khalil Bey see Sleep? Were the female lovers nothing more than a catalyst for his erotic imagination? Couldn’t such a thing have been bought more cheaply? It was rumored he, too, had an affair with Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s and then Courbet’s model. Perhaps this added to poor Whistler’s jealousy.

  “I am memorizing beauty,” Khalil Bey would often say when he was alone with a woman and staring at her. It was a line, but also true.

  He liked especially to stand with the real Jo beside him and the Sleepers in front of him, so he could turn from one to the other. Ever the diplomat, he offered once to try to mend Jo’s break with Whistler, with whom she had a little boy, but she declined.

  Ottomans, by the way, believed all children to be legitimate, regardless of the married or unmarried state of their parents.

  Several of Whistler’s most famous paintings are of Jo. But there is one, Harmony in Blue and Silver, in which a small full-length figure, a man with his back to the viewer, faces out to sea, nearly fading into the sandy shore, which dwarfs him. It is Courbet.

  Over the years, Courbet painted four portraits of Jo. One he kept in his possession his entire life, including during his exile in Switzerland after he was imprisoned for the politics he had once been celebrated for. The same Courbet, who once said, “My love does not go so far as a trip with a woman. Knowing that there are women everywhere in the world, I see no point in dragging one with me.” The same Courbet who wrote one former mistress demanding that she return two portraits he had painted of her. “Or,” he wrote, “destroy them yourself before a witness and then I will pay [you] for the use that I had of your body for a year.” (She had offended Courbet by bringing her new lover along to the train station to see Courbet off—after Courbet refused to bring her on his trip.)

  In an early version of Venus Pursuing Psyche in Her Jealousy, the painting Khalil Bey first tried to buy, Courbet sketched himself asleep, in the position where Psyche now lies. The goddess was intended to loom over him. In another painting, The Wounded Man, Courbet painted himself reclining, with his eyes closed, a red stain on his chest where he has been stabbed. In an earlier version, Courbet lay in bed next to a woman. She was replaced by his wound. The truth was, Courbet had trouble painting men and women together.

  According to the French papers, when Khalil Bey wanted to seduce a woman, he would buy her a tea set. Supposedly he had a man on hire to supply him with tea sets. But when someone owned the paintings Khalil Bey did, when someone had an apartment such as his, why use anything aside from that apartment and those paintings to seduce women?

  Khalil Bey collected other things as well. He had a Russian bear shot by Emperor Alexander, a gift from the emperor himself. Coins, inlaid chests, chessboards. He had fur coats made out of nearly every animal he could name. And books. But it was the paintings that drew the most attention. Politicians came to see his collection, artists, writers, women, gamblers—anybody Khalil Bey wanted to see would come for his collection. Whoever he wanted to meet, for whatever reason, he could. It was not only women he could seduce.

  The Origin of the World

  GUSTAVE COURBET

  1866

  OIL ON CANVAS

  18⅛" × 21⅝"

  Khalil Bey commissioned one more work from Courbet. A painting in which, a critic jokingly suggested, Courbet forgot to paint the arms, legs, and head of the model. Khalil Bey kept her in his dressing room behind a green veil.

  It was said he was building a secret museum of sexuality.

  She is life size, though that is not so big when you think about it.

  Courbet sometimes brought visitors to see The Origin, but often he came alone, to learn from what he himself had done. “You don’t visit me anymore,” Khalil Bey joked. “You only visit her.” Jo, too, came often. She had been the model once again, though this time not so recognizable.

  Her body is an echo of one of Courbet’s grottos. Something to be entered, explored, admired. She is her own arabesque: the curve of the sheets pushed above her breasts, the curve of her breasts, the curve of her belly, the curve of her buttocks and her thighs, the imagined curve of her interior.

  Jo would stare the longest. Her body as she had never seen it. The viewer’s eye drawn up along her thighs and straight inside her. Courbet had shown her a hidden part of herself; she would always defend him.

  Later someone would find a painting of a head and claim it was The Origin’s—lopped off to protect Jo’s identity. A far bigger violation than painting her without a head in the first place. Courbet would never have done it. Nor would Khalil Bey.

  It is often believed that Muslims are not allowed to depict human forms in art, but that is not exactly right. Muslims are not allowed to worship human forms in art. Most of the sultans had their portraits painted. Turkish artists are known for having drawn the sultans as they were—old and tired and thin; strong and willful and handsome; sometimes too fat for their horses, which were shown to sag under their weight.

  When Bellini came to paint the portrait of Mehmed II, it is said that the artist referenced The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, causing the sultan to complain that the painting contained anatomical inaccuracies: the neck of the decapitated was elongated when it should have been contracted. When the artist protested, the sultan is said to have had a slave brought forth and beheaded, and so was proved correct.

  Then again, a similar story was told about a Greek painter, Pairhasios, and yet another similar story was told about Michelangelo.

  In the end, Bellini’s portrait of Mehmed II, known as Mehmed the Conqueror, for his 1453 conquest of Constantinople, was sold off in a bazaar by the sultan’s son and heir, who did not approve of Western art.

  Most of Khalil Bey’s paintings were landscapes. But that is not how they are remembered.

  Whose world is it that has found its origin in The Origin of the World? Courbet liked to say he wrote his autobiography in self-portraits. Others put it less kindly: “Courbet waving. Courbet walking. Courbet at a standstill. Courbet reclining. Courbet sitting. Courbet dead.” Perhaps The Origin of the World is yet another self-portrait. There at the vanishing point, beyond where our invasive eye can travel, is Courbet conceived.

  “To paint a landscape you have to truly know it,” Courbet once said. It is no wonder Whistler was so angry.

  The police arrived at one Courbet exhibition having heard that The Origin of the World would be there. They hoped to arrest Courbet on charges of obscenity, but the rumor was false. It was a painting much talked of and little seen.

  When Khalil Bey auctioned his collection, Sleep and The Origin of the World sold privately to different buyers, and The Origin of the World disappeared. It surfaced briefly in 1899, then again in 1913, when a grainy photograph appeared.

  Only now do we know that in 1945 The Origin was stolen by the Nazis from the Hungarian who owned it, then stolen again by the Russians and sold back to the Hungarian, who transported it to Switzerland. The Origin was kept in a double frame, covered by a painting called The Castle in the Snow.

  Behind every picture there is another picture. Behind every story another story.

  One Courbet work long known as The Preparation of the Dead Girl turned out to have originally been titled The Preparation of the Bride. It is an unfinished portrait of a stiff and unmoving girl having her toilette prepared by a host of helpers. It is not known how or where the painting’s title got changed, though the why is perhaps obvious.

  Courbet is known now for having painted things that already looked like paint. Such as snow. And flesh.

  It was not until 1963 that The Origin was revealed to be in the possession of famed psychoanalyst an
d Freudian Jacques Lacan. Like the Hungarian, like Khalil Bey, Lacan kept the Origin hidden, this time behind a clever hilly landscape that followed the curves of Jo Hiffernan’s naked and headless body, a landscape painted by Lacan’s brother-in-law, the famed surrealist André Masson. Masson is known for, among other things, imposing strict and arbitrary conditions upon the creation of his art, like refusing to eat or sleep until a drawing was finished. It is said that after escaping the Nazis, who called his work “degenerate,” Masson arrived in New York only to have his portfolio of drawings shredded by customs agents who called his work “pornographic.”

  The Origin of the World was not exhibited publicly until 1988, more than one hundred years after it was painted. It hangs now in the Musée d’Orsay, where patrons are often embarrassed to linger too long in front of it. Or they force themselves to stare, perhaps imagining their own faces where Jo’s would be.

  “She is a metaphor,” Khalil Bey liked to say.

  “For what?” his guests would inevitably ask.

  Khalil Bey would never answer.

  At least one critic insisted that The Origin was a portrait of a woman in orgasm. Another called her obese.

  When first put on display at the Musée d’Orsay, The Origin of the World was placed behind armored glass. Now its postcard sales are second only to Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette.

  In 1792, Sultan Selim III had begun a series of reforms, known as the “new order,” meant to modernize the ailing empire. Young Ottomans were taught French, and embassies were established in all the major cities of Europe. Thirty years later, Khalil Bey was born, learned French, became a European ambassador. The empire may have been on its last legs, but of it was born the republic.

  “We cannot fear change,” Khalil Bey would say in his negotiations. “We must manage it.”

  In the days and years after he sold his collection, which paid his debts, Khalil Bey thought sometimes of Süleyman the Magnificent, whose heart was buried on the battlefields of Hungary, though his body was buried in the grand mosque built in his name in Istanbul. Khalil Bey’s paintings, it turned out, were nothing but a body. Their heart was buried in him.