The modernity of Istanbul
Born in Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, Ahmed Ali Pasha (1841-1907), better known as Seker Ahmed Pasha, is a major figure - by his influence - of Ottoman art. His first name means "sugar", as he was said to be easy-going. Trained as a doctor, he entered the Ottoman Military Academy, but preferred painting. Spotted by Sultan Abdülaziz, he was sent to Paris to study with Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme. After 7 years, he returned to Istanbul and organized his first exhibition of landscapes and delicate still lifes. He received all the military honors and he is the most famous of the Ottoman military painters who followed the Tanzimat reform movement which opened the Ottoman culture to Europe.
A contemporary of Seker Ahmed Pasha, Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) remains today a key figure in Ottoman painting. Born in Istanbul, he was also an archaeologist and founder of the first archaeological museum of Turkey in his native city. He also trained in Paris with Boulanger and Gérôme. After official and military missions in Baghdad, he founded a new art school in 1883 opposite the archaeological museum. This school now houses the Museum of the Ancient East. An important figure in the preservation of Ottoman heritage, he was the instigator of a law passed in 1884 to repatriate all excavated objects in the territory to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The same year, he moved to a summer house in Eskihisar, a village on the outskirts of Gebze, and transformed it into a workshop. Today it is owned by the state and since 1987 has been a museum under the name of the House of Osman Hamdi Bey. The Turtle Tamer (1906) is one of his world-famous mature masterpieces. He made two versions of it. The first is kept in the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the second, done a year later, in the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. An Indian man, dressed in traditional Ottoman religious costume, attempts to train turtles with a flute while they eat salad, impassive. This painting ironizes the inertia of the Ottoman Empire, which was unable to reform itself at the time this masterpiece was painted.
Born in Istanbul, Hoca Ali Riza (1858-1930) grew up in the Ottoman Empire. He studied and taught for thirty years in the Harbiye school. Having finally obtained the title of Hoca, which means "master" in Turkish, he left his position in the Ottoman army in 1911, and retired while continuing to teach in high schools. He then deploys all his talents as a painter and devotes himself entirely to his painting, to the point of creating his most famous works today. His main subjects are shimmering, impressionistic landscapes and, contrary to what one might think, there are no paintings of military men from this period.
Ibrahim Çalli (1882-1960) showed an early interest in painting and began to paint scenes of Ottoman life. In 1899, he moved to Istanbul where he held several jobs while continuing to paint. During this time, he took drawing lessons from an Armenian painter Roben Efendi and with the support of Şeker Ahmet Paşa, he entered the School of Fine Arts (now Mimar Sinan University) in 1906. He received a scholarship to study in France when cubism was in full swing, but chose to interpret impressionism in his own way. He was back in Istanbul, now the second city of the Turkish Republic since 1923, when the Second World War broke out. He continued to paint. Very marked by his trip to France, he painted seaside scenes and magnificent portraits with a style that is still not well known and that could be described as Oriental impressionism. His painting Yeşil Elbiseli Kadın Bayan Vicdan Moralı'nın Portresi (a portrait of a woman in a green dress) reveals both the artist's pictorial mastery and his deep roots in his culture. This extraordinary hybridization between Eastern traditions and Western modernity is unique to his painting.
The Turkish avant-garde
The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923 and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu (1911-1975) began his studies a few years later, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, in 1929. Two years later, he went to France with his brother, because he wanted to learn French, but soon, when he met his future wife, a young Romanian woman named Ernestine Letoni (Eren in Turkish), he learned painting from André Lhote in Paris. He stayed two years in France and finally returned to finish his studies at the academy. He founded the Group of Ten, and began a career that led him to achieve several works: frescoes for the restaurant Lido in Istanbul (1943), for the Opera in Ankara in 1946, for the company KLM or the Hilton Hotel. He even made a mosaic of 260 m² for the Brussels Fair in 1957 which earned him a gold medal. We can also see a fresco in Paris in the headquarters of NATO (now the University Paris-Dauphine). Works for Turkish hospitals, hotels and public buildings followed. In 1950, he went back to Paris and visited the Musée de l'Homme where he saw African art for the first time. Stamping then became one of his favorite techniques. In 1960, thanks to a grant from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation, he taught as a professor at the University of California at Berkley. Bedri Rahmi is also a poet and throughout his life has published popular collections in Turkey where he is better known for his writing than for his painting. From 1952 to 1958, he was a regular columnist for the center-left Turkish daily Cumhuriyet. This artist made a very personal synthesis of all the European avant-gardes and, with a simplification of the form, his figurative painting marks by its formal freedom. His style could well make him a Turkish Chagall.
Let us also mention the work of Erol Akyavas, known as Erol (1932-1999). He devoted himself entirely to Eastern arts, and in particular Islamic art and Sufi tradition, in search of non-Western modernity after the Second World War. From cubism to surrealism, from Islamic miniatures to prehistoric murals and from calligraphy-based practices to the symbolism of monotheistic religions, Erol remains one of the great Turkish artists of the 20th century.
From photography to modern art
Ara Güler (1928-2019) is a Turkish photographer of Armenian origin who has tirelessly photographed the magic of his native city, Istanbul, documenting its daily environment for nearly half a century. He started very young as the newspaper Yeni Istanbul recruited him at the age of 22. Later, noticed for his exceptional talent, the Turkish daily Hürriyet hired him and he collaborated as a correspondent with Time-Life, Paris Match and Der Stern. The Ara Güler Museum, opened in 2018 in Istanbul, traces his entire career as a photographer. From the backstreets of Istanbul to Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia, he has built an unparalleled body of work around Turkey and in both black and white and color.
Born in 1937 in Uşak, Turkish painter Devrim Erbil was also director of the İstanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture in 1979 and a teacher. After training at the Istanbul School of Fine Arts, he worked in the studios of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Cemal Tollu and Cevat Dereli. Founder of the Mavi Grup (Blue Group) in 1963, his work travels around the world, especially the Paris and Venice Biennials, as well as in Istanbul and Ankara. He has painted or silk-screened Istanbul many times.
Burhan Cahit Doğançay (1929-2013) is the son of Adil Doğançay, who trained him. He then left to study with another famous painter, Arif Kaptan. Then, from 1950 to 1955, in parallel with his law studies, he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. After a brief career in the Turkish diplomatic service, Dogançay decided in 1964 to devote himself entirely to art and to settle in New York. His most famous work is a series on walls, which mixes painting, engraving, photography and sculpture that he continued in the 1970s, creating a photographic archive of urban walls around the world. It contains more than 30,000 shots of walls that he took during his multiple trips to 114 countries.
From contemporary art to street art
Born in Istanbul in 1971, Ali Kazma studied in New York at the New School in 1998. Based in Istanbul since 2000, he is now a mid-career artist, confirmed as a photographer and video artist. In his work, he travels in search of singular environments where a specific activity unfolds that he can question from a social, economic or scientific point of view. The Jeu de Paume in Paris devoted a large exhibition to him in 2018.
Taner Ceylan was born in Germany in 1967, but studied in Istanbul at the Mimar Sinan University. In 2003, he participated in the International Istanbul Biennial. His work revolves around the themes of orientalism, homosexual culture and Turkish nationalism. Erotic and hyper-realistic, his paintings depict transgressive lovers and women who challenge the viewer's gaze. He represented Turkey in its national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with an exhibition of videos titled "Resistance" in which the man alters his physical body, with tattooing, bodybuilding, tanning, and other practices, in an effort to control it or even be liberated from it.
İnci Eviner was born in 1956 in Polath, Turkey, and lives and works in Istanbul. An artist of dissent, she works on gender issues and the oppression of patriarchal society. This artist continues to explore these themes, mainly through drawing, murals and video. In 2009, she entitled her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London "Harem" and humorously bypassed the orientalism of certain icons of Islamic art.
Street art in Istanbul has exploded with creativity in recent years. You have to see the Mickey Mouse, Spongebob Squarepants and Rigby of Regular Show by Fist. As for the graffiti artist Gamze Yalçın, she imposes with her humor and her own poetic style. But Mert Tügen, a talented illustrator, and Semi.ok, an outstanding street artist, also paint the walls of Istanbul with a certain frenzy. The most famous of them is No More Lies, who is building a whole world of stenciled animals in the streets of Istanbul. From butterfly-winged elephants to molten hippos and giant pink-eyed rabbits, Istanbul becomes a phantasmagorical zoo thanks to his murals.
In 2020 the city welcomed the French-Swiss artist Saype to continue his Beyond Walls project. It is a fresco of giant intertwined hands traveling through the cities of the world. Adept of land art, which means that he uses nature as a framework and material, the paint he uses is made of natural pigments, therefore destined to disappear. Of this ephemeral project, only photos and videos remain, but his message of hope and solidarity endures.
