Artist and Revolutionary: Panos Terlemezian as an Ottoman Armenian Painter

Probably no painter in the late Ottoman Empire was at war with the ruling block more than the Ottoman Armenian artist Panos Terlemezian (1865-1941). Terlemezian was politically active against the Ottoman state’s periodic repressions of its Armenian subjects during the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) and also during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. As such his early life was scarred by prison and exile. Yet neither his political commitments nor his constant displacements prevented him from becoming the most talented of painters, first, of modern Ottoman art, and then, of modern Armenian art. Focusing on the period 1885-1915, this paper explores Terlemezian’s “initial identity” as an Ottoman-Armenian painter; situating him within both the history of the late-Ottoman Empire in which he became a revolutionary and within the international art world with which he interacted as he was developing as an artist. This paper concludes that Terlemezian’s story points to a cosmopolitan and integrated art world in Ottoman Istanbul, but only in brief periods of historical opportunity, suggesting how the political agendas of a state can create extraordinary circumstance in an artist’s life.