“Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Khalili Collection”, by J.M. Rogers

304 pages, Art Services International, ISBN-13: 978-0883971321 

The Turkish holdings in the Khalili Collection constitute the most comprehensive collection of Ottoman art outside of Turkey, with examples from the 15^th to the early 20^th Centuries, the Collection being especially strong on calligraphy, providing an important corrective to the Western view of Ottoman art as consisting principally of ceramics and textiles. Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Khalili Collection is the official book on the exhibition which opened at the Musée Rath, Geneva, in 1995 and was then shown at the Brunei Gallery, London, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1996-97. The American tour of the exhibition covered 13 venues between 2000 and 2004. Sadly, I missed every event as I wasn’t even aware that the thing was going on, so I have to make do with this book, which I picked up for a pittance at the Detroit Institute of Arts when the gift shop did a purge of old books that didn’t sell. It is what it is: a companion work to the pieces that were shown at the exhibitions, with brilliant photographs and descriptions of each object – and, being what it is, it is a flat, academic description of that which is hard to describe (Want to kill a desire for art? Get an art historian to write about it). Seriously, if you can find one of these, buy it for the pretty pictures and skip the dry-as-parchment writing, and mediate on what a bummer it is to have missed the real thing.