'A logical and luminous study': How One Dealer Constructed the Collector of Islamic Art

By the time of Henry Walters's death in 1931, the art collector had purchased nearly 1,700 objects — mostly of Near Eastern provenance — from Dikran Kelekian, an Ottoman Armenian art dealer, whose New York gallery at one point served as the Persian Consulate. In addition to Walters, Kelekian's client list included J.P. Morgan, Charles Freer, Louise and Henry O. Havemeyer, and several institutions, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Marilyn Jenkins-Madina has remarked, "Although [Kelekian] was to sell [Islamic] objects directly to the Met over the years, it was his role as a tastemaker that he proved to be even more important for the young institution" ("Collecting the 'Orient' at the Met: Early Tastemakers in America," Ars Orientalis 30 [2000]: 76). While Kelekian's role as a, if not the, tastemaker in the early development of the field of Islamic art has been acknowledged, his writings have been largely ignored. The question thus remains, what rhetorical strategies did Kelekian use to construct an identity for the collector of 'Islamic art,' at a time when the category was still new and unstable? In this paper I seek to fill that lacuna by engaging in a critical analysis of Kelekian's catalogue publications and personal correspondence. I argue that in his rhetoric, Kelekian selectively reconciled with and mobilized his multivalent otherness to promote the collection of Islamic art as an intellectual and thoroughly modern pursuit.