Persian Lessons: Islamic Art in America, circa 1876–1925

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the prehistory of academic Islamic art history in the United States through the lens of American cultural history. It shows that between the US Centennial in 1876 and the inauguration of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran in 1925, aesthetic theory and American citizenship were debated in the United States through objects identified, regardless of actual provenance, as “Persian.” This cultural phenomenon coincided with the acceleration of the transnational market for Islamic art, including architectural tiles, single-page paintings, and hand-knotted pile carpets. Examining instances of collecting, classifying, displaying, and otherwise handling and beholding Islamic art within different scales of home (family, nation, and international Christianity) and spaces of pedagogy (the living room, commercial gallery, advertisement, schoolroom, voluntary association, museum, and world’s fair), "Persian Lessons" reveals that notions of Persian art were instrumentalized in the service of competing American identities and ideologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Through an analysis of published writings, museum archives, and government documents, the study shows how the art critic S. G. W. Benjamin, who also served as the first US diplomat to Iran in 1883–85, constructed an ideal of the Persian artist to champion liberal individualism and public art education. An investigation into the presence of Muslim prayer carpets in American Christian homes reveals that Sarkis Nahigian and other diasporic entrepreneurs from the Ottoman Empire became partners to middle-class women, who jointly turned the Oriental carpet into a symbol of obligation to the American nation. Lastly, an examination of visual and textual evidence recasts a collection of more than 20,000 objects—given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and William Hayes Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University by design pedagogue and museum patron-administrator Denman Waldo Ross between 1888 and 1935—as a tool of “training for citizenship.” Ross regarded Persian textiles and single-page paintings as value-neutral objects for the design education that he believed bolstered participatory democracy.

The fifty-year history that this dissertation covers concludes in the late 1920s and '30s with the establishment of the first official positions in Islamic art history at universities and museums in the United States. "Persian Lessons" thus shows that the founding of Islamic art history as an academic discipline was not simply imported from Europe. Professionalization stabilized a half century of domestic engagement with Persian art as a polysemic guiding light for American culture and society.