Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey 9780520385924

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METRICS OF MODERNITY

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PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE MILLARD MEISS PUBLICATION FUND OF CAA.

MM THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF FURTHERMORE, A PROGRAM OF THE J. M. KAPLAN FUND, IN MAKING THIS BOOK POSSIBLE.

THE PUBLISHER GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE LITERATI CIRCLE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION, WHOSE MEMBERS ARE: MICHELLE AND BILL LERACH MELONY AND ADAM LEWIS FRED LEVIN JUDITH AND KIM MAXWELL MARGARET PILLSBURY SHARON SIMPSON PETER J. AND CHINAMI S. STERN

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METRICS OF MODERNITY Art and Development in Postwar Turkey

Sarah-Neel Smith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Sarah-Neel Smith Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-38341-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38592-4 (ebook) Printed in Malaysia 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii

1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction. Art and Development: A New Framework for Postwar Art / 1 The Semiperipheral Art Gallery: Gallery Maya, Istanbul / 43 Democratic Abstractions: Bülent Ecevit on Art and Politics / 69 “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”: The Developing Turkey Competition of 1954 / 99 The Artist as Agent of Development: Füreya Koral between Turkey and the United States / 125 Conclusion. Building Istanbul Modern: Art and Development in a Twenty-First-Century Museum / 155 Notes / 167 Bibliography / 191 List of Illustrations / 207 Index / 209

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I STARTED WRITING THIS BOOK the first week of September 2001, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. I was fifteen years old and had just arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for a year as an exchange student. I knew about ten words of Turkish. The two most important ones were “inecek var!” That’s the phrase I shouted at the top of my lungs around eight each morning as the blue and white minibus I had caught at Kızılay Square approached Ankara Anadolu Güzel Sanatlar Lisesi, the fine arts high school where I was enrolled for the year. It translates, roughly, to “let me out!” and remains to this day one of my most important language skills. Bülent Ecevit was prime minister. The Turkish economy had just collapsed, and the lira was valued at 1.5 million to the dollar. The attacks of September 11 happened one week later, and I spent the next year watching from afar, and through the filter of the Turkish media, as my home country was irrevocably transformed while my adopted country lurched through a series of economic and political crises. Eleven years later I found myself passing by my former Ankara high school on my way to visit Bülent Ecevit’s widow, Rahşan Ecevit, and her sister Asude Aral. I was there to record their memories of

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the midcentury art scene as part of my research for a PhD dissertation on modern Turkish art. We drank tea, pored over old newspaper clippings, and discussed the latest episode of Mühteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century), a TV show set in the Ottoman court, in the company of a litter of kittens. Though I had begun grad school imagining hours spent in dusty archives and neatly organized museum collections, this, I quickly learned, was more often what research looked like. And it depended almost entirely on the kindness of strangers. Rahşan and Asude Hanım were two of several dozen individuals in Turkey who made this book possible, starting with the Mengüç family, who fed and housed me through 2001 and 2002. Many others shared stories, contacts, and personal archives as I endeavored to piece together a picture of 1950s Turkey while conducting dissertation research between 2010 and 2012. These included Fersa Acar, Filiz Ali, Ahmet Altınok, Adnan Çoker, Yahşi Baraz, Emel Batu, Metin Deniz, Amélie Edgü and Ayşe Gür at the Milli Reasürans Sanat Galerisi, Clifford Endres, Osman Erden, Turan Erol, Oğuz Erten, Jale Erzen, Hughette and Osman Eyüboğlu, Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Azra and Esra Genim, Mine Haydaroğlu and Abdullah Gül at the Yapıkredi Bank Archive, Ali Teoman and Semra Germaner, Melda Kaptana, Bediz Koz, Kaya Özsezgin, Ferhat Özgür, Mine Söğüt, Yusuf Taktak, and the entire team at SALT, including Lorans Baruh, Serkan Ors, Meriç Öner, and the wonderful Sezin Romi. In Istanbul, Ruşen Aktaş, HG Masters, Zeynep Öz, Merve Ünsal, and Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt were a warm and supportive community who helped keep the dissertation blues at bay. Many of these individuals later provided images for the present volume: Sara Koral Aykar deserves special thanks on this front. This book would not exist without the support of key mentors who encouraged me to pursue my interest in Turkish modernism at a moment when it was far from mainstream. Mentors in the Department of Art, the French Department, and the Fellowships Program at Smith College set me on this path as an undergraduate. Vasıf Kortun helped keep me on it through the simple act of taking me seriously during the transitional postgrad years. Esra Akcan and Saloni Mathur, my primary academic advisor, carried me through the seven years of grad school with their incisive critical feedback and steadying presence. The friendship and guidance of Ian Bourland and Rebecca Brown have been the highlight of the most recent stage of this journey, as I transformed the dissertation into a book in Baltimore. Conversations and collaborations with Farah Aksoy, Nisa Ari, Nicholas Danforth, Chad Elias, Jim Ryan, Ceren Özpınar, and Alex Dika Seggerman energized the project at key junctures. Friends near and far provided endless moral support, especially Alessandra Amin, Jamin An, Nora Beckman, Meg Bernstein, Holly Harrison, Dana Logan, Julia McHugh, Suzy Newbury, Kate Reed Petty and Oliver Baranczyk, Naomi Pitamber, and Christine Robinson. The team behind the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA)—including Jessica Gerschultz, Anneka Lenssen, Dina Ramadan, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout—have inspired and sustained viii

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my work for over a decade, while one of the greatest joys of the last few years has been exploring new art historical territory in the company of the brilliant Duygu Demir. I reserve special thanks for Natilee Harren, who read countless drafts, multiple times. At this point she probably knows more about Turkish modernism than anyone really should. Thanks, too, are due to my colleagues in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, for welcoming me into their warm community, to MICA’s Office of Research for a Marcella Brenner Grant which helped offset the costs of acquiring images, and to the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2018 fellowship that enabled the completion of this book. Hollianna Bryan and Fred Leise made the final phases of proofreading and indexing a breeze. At the University of California Press, Archna Patel, Jessica Moll, Claudia Smelser, and Athena Lakri have taken the manuscript from unwieldy Word document to a beautiful finished product. To my family, who has also been writing this book since 2001, go my greatest thanks: Candace, Neel, and Annecca; Sylvia, Ellen, and Linda; Judy and David; my partner, John; and the entire Cardellino clan. My grandparents Shelley and Jack won’t see the final version, but I’m sure they would have gotten a kick out of this attempt at a historical account of the 1950s, the decade when they came of age. This book is dedicated to them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION Art and Development: A New Framework for Postwar Art

I

N APRIL 1964, THE FRENCH POET , art critic, and translator Edouard Roditi published a short article, “Introduction à la peinture turque de notre temps” (Introduction to Contemporary Turkish Painting), in the Portuguese art magazine Colóquio. Born in Paris and educated at Oxford, the multilingual Roditi had frequented French surrealist circles in the 1930s, served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s, and first encountered modern Turkish art in 1951 when he traveled to Ankara as a translator for the United Nations. In his 1964 essay, he criticizes European museums for treating Turkish art as secondary to art from other countries in the Council of Europe, emphasizing that Europe’s future was “more and more tightly bound” to Turkey’s.1 To make his case, Roditi presents several artworks by Yüksel Arslan, Aliye Berger, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, figures all now recognized as pioneers of modernism in Turkey. At the top of the essay, and covering nearly half the page, is a photograph of a 160-foot-long mosaic wall made by Eyüboğlu for Expo 58 in Brussels, the first international world’s fair to take place since World War II (figure 0.1).

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figure 0.1 Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s mosaic wall at Expo 58 in Brussels, 1958. Courtesy SALT Research (Utarit İzgi archive) and Rahmi Eyüboğlu.

Yet rather than advocating for modern Turkish art in aesthetic terms, as one might expect, Roditi appeals to a political-economic concept: economic development. Roditi exhorts his readers to abandon the common assumption that Turkey’s “underdeveloped economy” (économie sous-développée) predicts an equally underdeveloped art scene. “There is little causal relation between the degree of economic or technical development of a country and the quality of its art,” boldly proposes Roditi in his opening salvo.2 In fact, argues Roditi, the reverse is true. In Turkey, contends Roditi, the very same condition that “ensures economic underdevelopment”—plentiful leisure time—yields a vibrant modern art. By reframing the presumed vice of economic underdevelopment as a virtue, Roditi positions modern Turkish art as equally significant as the European practices privileged by a Western critical establishment. By 1964, when Roditi’s essay came out, such claims about the relationship of art, modernity, and economic development were actually rather commonplace. Since the mid-1940s, authorities at some of the most influential Euro-American organizations of the postwar period, such as UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Museum of 2

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Modern Art in New York, had vigorously debated the connection between artistic sophistication and economic development. Nearly twenty years before Roditi, UNESCO authorities had already concluded that “countries whose technical civilization is not highly developed are often among the most advanced in some branches of art.” 3 In the United States, policy makers and cultural authorities concerned with their country’s diplomatic comportment argued that acknowledging the artistic advancements of economically underdeveloped nations was an important means to smooth relations between nations of unequal economic power. At the same time, many American authorities, such as the influential diplomat George F. Kennan, worried that the inconsistency between the “low” quality of American art and its “advanced” economic development undermined the United States’ legitimacy within an international community.4 But of course none were so concerned with the interrelationship of art and development as cultural elites in the so-called developing world, including Turkey. There, an artistic community had been raised since the 1920s to understand aesthetic modernism and socioeconomic modernization as advancing on parallel tracks within the frame of the nation-state, moving ever forward, and ever more rapidly, into the future. How did discourses of economic development impact artistic modernisms in the developing world? This is the driving question of the present book, which takes the modern Turkish art world as a focused example that illuminates broader conjunctures of art and development after World War II. The early years of the Cold War were defined not only by military tensions between superpowers but also by conflicts about approaches to economic development, in what historian David Engerman calls an “economic Cold War” between Soviet-style state-driven industrialization and US-style capitalism.5 Minor powers like Turkey negotiated their position in this international community through their economic choices as much as their choices of political ideology. Turkey, for example, made a definitive choice in the economic Cold War by abandoning its existing Soviet-inspired policies and signing on to the developmental regime prescribed by Western-bloc organizations such as the United Nations and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later the World Bank). Turkey’s growing alliance with the United States was confirmed when it became one of fifteen European countries to receive funding through the Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, in 1948. Spearheaded by the United States, the Marshall Plan was designed to help a ravaged Europe get back on its feet after World War II, but it was also intended to secure a bloc of anticommunist allies for the United States. Scholars have long acknowledged art’s role as an ideological weapon of the Cold War, traditionally focusing on its use by American, European, and Soviet players to further their spheres of influence. Metrics of Modernity argues that artists, critics, and audiences in the developing world did not think only about aesthetics but engaged just as substantially with the economic dimensions of this global reordering—a widespread but overlooked phenomenon that Metrics of Modernity elucidates for the first time. Introduction

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METRICS OF MODERNITY

This book explores the ways in which members of the modern Turkish art world— artists, critics, and gallery owners—negotiated postwar ideologies of economic development within the realm of modern art. In the wake of World War II, newly created programs and organizations such as the Marshall Plan, European Economic Commission (EEC), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations developed an array of economic metrics through which to measure and enforce nations’ performance. Privatization, individual consumption, and integration into international markets became some of the most prominent metrics of modernity used to regulate the entrance of emergent states like Turkey into the capitalist free market. While originating in the economic sphere, these metrics of modernity also gained traction in the artistic realm. In Turkey, the intelligentsia used these concepts as touchstones for evaluating and improving their country’s “cultural level” (kültür seviyesi) as a correlate to its level of political and economic modernity. Sometimes the conversation between art and economics played out on canvas, where, for instance, the question of how to represent a national landscape transformed by industrialization posed an enduring aesthetic problem. At other times, such metrics of modernity shaped the ways that art was exhibited, consumed, and circulated, both by the staterun institutions that historically dominated the Turkish art world and the new private art initiatives that began to challenge them in the 1950s. Metrics of Modernity focuses on the ten-year period between 1950, when Turkish leadership restructured the national economy in line with American-style models, and 1960, when this development experiment came to an abrupt end, culminating violently in a military coup and the execution of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. In a series of chronologically organized case studies, I reconstruct the activities of influential cultural figures of the day and chronicle this artistic community’s engagement with the most prominent metrics of modernity during this radical economic experiment. My primary objects of analysis are important artworks of the period, exhibition ephemera, and an extensive archive of art criticism and political commentary in Turkish, French, and English. Cross-reading these three types of material, I reveal how the growing belief in the transformative powers of privatization played out at Turkey’s first two modern art galleries, Gallery Maya (Istanbul, 1950) and the Helikon Association Derneği (Ankara, 1953) in the early 1950s. I track how the metric of individual consumption served as a new evaluative term within the Turkish art criticism that flourished alongside these galleries. I also explore the way that, in the mid- and late 1950s, growing doubts about the efficacy of Turkey’s economic program manifested themselves in debates about how to visually represent “developing Turkey” through the distinct media of painting and ceramics. Metrics of Modernity ends in 1960, when a new regime reversed economic procedure, returning to the state-dominated models that had pertained before World War II. In the 1960s, the government began to 4

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implement import substitution policies, building up local industrial sectors in order to reduce a reliance on foreign imports. This approach was similar to those already in use in other developing areas, such as Latin America. Throughout the 1960s, art and economic development continued to intertwine in Turkey, but in new media formats and in connection with a different set of economic issues, including urbanization, rapid industrialization, and the unionization of labor. Metrics of Modernity tells the story of art’s engagement with economic policies with which many nations across the developing world experimented after World War II. Focused on the twin goals of political liberalization and integration into international markets, national governments partnered with the United States to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into shaky new economies, to reorder national markets, and to transform consumer habits on a mass scale. Turkey’s longer-term experience of modernization, which began in the 1830s with a series of modernizing reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839–71), was similar to that of other developing countries.6 But its tenyear experiment in the 1950s was also quite distinct—in the decisiveness with which it began and ended, in the extent of the structural changes that were undertaken and the amount of US capital invested, and in the rapidity of Turkey’s transition from an isolated economic sphere to one integrated into international markets. The case of 1950s Turkey casts into particularly high relief the interrelationship of modern art and economic development in the postwar period, and it stands as a productive starting point for larger considerations about the interrelationship of art and modernization across the developing world. This book’s aim is neither to debate, with Roditi, whether economic development is harmful or beneficial for art nor to provide a qualitative study of an emergent art market in postwar Turkey. Nor do I pursue the rich possibilities of a materialist approach, which might consider how Turkey’s fluctuating economic fortunes and the changing availability of basic artistic materials transformed the very substance of art. Rather, my aim is to show how an ever-present awareness of Turkey’s relative position in an international economic hierarchy shaped the work of its artistic community. If art history has long acknowledged that the United States’ status as the most affluent nation in the world was a central factor in postwar American art, we must also take seriously the ways that artistic producers in sites such as Turkey were shaped by the awareness of their position in an economic pecking order. The notion of metrics of modernity cuts across artificially imposed divisions between the artistic and the economic, which have blinded scholarship to artists’ interest in economic issues of the Cold War. Metrics of Modernity contends that artists do not produce work in an isolated aesthetic realm and then dispatch it to circulate within economic markets. Rather, I emphasize that their work is shaped, from the very outset, by an ambient awareness of the shifting conditions of a global economy, issues that suffuse critical discourse and enframe the question of what art, in the profoundest sense, is. By combining art history’s traditional analytical approaches of formal Introduction

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analysis and social and intellectual history with the insights of economic history and Cold War studies, Metrics of Modernity offers a new lens through which to understand transnational modernisms of the postwar period. CHANGING VISIONS OF DEVELOPMENT, 1920s–1950s

Turkey’s defining dilemma after World War II was whether it should revise its existing economic approaches, based in Soviet-inspired policies, in order to align itself with an ascendant United States. Much of the Turkish debate about this economic issue centered on an American named Max Weston Thornburg. A former oil executive and advisor to the US State Department, in 1947, Thornburg completed a highly publicized fourmonth survey of the Turkish economy at the behest of an American think tank called the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation). At the many press conferences he gave along the way, Thornburg announced his aim to identify ways that the United States could “help the economic development of this beautiful country.” 7 The Turkish press breathlessly tracked Thornburg’s arrivals and departures as he crisscrossed the country in a jeep. While many welcomed the American’s resulting prescriptions, others were more skeptical. In a biting editorial in the newspaper Cumhuriyet, the prominent Turkish economist and sociologist Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu (1901–1974) observed sarcastically that Thornburg had managed to “diagnose what ails postwar Turkey” after visiting for just a few months. Fındıkoğlu caustically summarized the American’s primary conclusion in a single sentence: “Turkey is economically underdeveloped because it has not been accommodating [enough] to private enterprise.” 8 Fındıkoğlu’s reaction was not unprovoked. Thornburg had begun criticizing Turkey’s existing economic policies almost as soon as he’d arrived. At regular press conferences, in the pages of Fortune, and in a 325-page report, Thornburg argued that Turkey should abandon its Soviet-inspired economic philosophy of étatism (devletçilik, or statism), which focused on industrialization under heavy state controls.9 If Turkey wanted to attract American dollars and be competitive in international markets, he announced, the government needed to be more accommodating to private capital, open the economy to foreign investment, focus on agricultural development instead of large-scale industrial projects, and work to integrate into a capitalist world system. With this series of recommendations, Thornburg introduced the metrics of modernity that would preoccupy Turkey for the next decade. “Like all philosophies of histories, this one is exciting,” acknowledged Fındıkoğlu, noting that Thornburg made it seem as if the “spirit of personal initiative” that “made America what it is today” would easily yield the same results in Turkey. But, argued the Turkish academic, the choice between Soviet-style étatism and US-style market capitalism was not as simple as Thornburg made out, and he urged his readers to proceed “with caution” as they considered the American’s proposals.10 Thornburg’s presence in Turkey reflected the growing prevalence of the discourse of development, a new framework for viewing the world that coalesced after World War II 6

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and became hegemonic by the early 1950s.11 The world-scale reorganization of the immediate postwar years—the 1944 establishment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the 1944 creation of the World Bank, the 1948 launch of the Marshall Plan, and the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and NATO in 1949—produced a new way of seeing the world in essentially economic terms, as a collection of “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations that together made up a global economy. As these ideas intersected with the bipolar dynamics of the Cold War, both of the superpowers began to use economic aid to draw new allies into their respective orbits, citing the promise of increased productivity and a higher quality of life. By 1949, the discourse of development was so pervasive that President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would begin using economic aid for “underdeveloped areas” as a complement to its military and ideological strategies for establishing a global democratic order.12 As the 1950s progressed, Turkey became a veritable laboratory for collaborative international experiments in development.13 As in other countries designated underdeveloped in the 1950s, such as India and many countries across Latin America, intellectuals in Turkey catalyzed, critiqued, and shaped the discourse of development in different ways. Sociologists like Niyazi Berkes, historians like Halil İnalcık and Kemal Karpat, and economists like Ömer Celâl Sarç served as expert informants, guides, and translators for an influx of visiting experts like Thornburg. In 1953, for example, the journalist, art critic, and future prime minister Bülent Ecevit formulated his own vision of an economic Cold War in a newspaper article titled “Economic Division,” in which he described the Cold War as a bipolar economic conflict between Soviet and US blocs, in which Turkey must choose a side.14 Members of the Turkish intelligentsia were also in conversation with a small community of Anglo-American scholars, such as Bernard Lewis and Lewis V. Thomas, who were originally trained in Turkish history and became the Western world’s primary informants about contemporary events there.15 In 1958, the American sociologist Daniel Lerner published his landmark volume, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, in which he uses Turkey to explain the basic tenets that defined the postwar discourse of development. The book’s central premise, illustrated concisely in a graphic table, is that all nations follow a common sequence of stages (figure 0.2). Lerner’s thesis is that each nation progresses gradually from “tradition” to “modernity,” a universal end point marked by mass literacy, a high quality of life, and full integration into the world economy. While scholars typically argue that Lerner’s text is significant because it is the first formal expression of American modernization theory, it is also important for another reason. The Passing of Traditional Society amplifies and formalizes an existing discourse of development that had gained force internationally throughout the preceding decade, and Lerner uses Thornburg’s 1947 report and the work of several Turkish academics as key evidence for his arguments. Lerner’s book, and the American modernization theory that proliferated in its wake, helped disseminate the metrics of modernity that soon became a kind of Introduction

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Traditional Turkey

Transitional

Modern HIGH

Lebanon Egypt Syria Jordan Iran

LOW

figure 0.2 Daniel Lerner’s diagram of the different levels of modernity of Middle Eastern nations. From The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East by Daniel Lerner. Copyright © 1958 by The Free Press, renewed © 1986 by Jean Lerner. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Current rendering by Kevin Guyer.

international lingua franca in their own right. It also helped to cement Turkey’s new reputation as an exceptional case in the developing world, a nation whose economic progress observers declared “amazing,” “phenomenal,” and “impressive.”16 Exceptional Turkey was, by the end of the 1950s, both a testing ground and poster child for how so-called degenerate states might be transformed into “respected and robust member[s] of the world community,” as one scholar put it in 1951.17 In fact, “development” had been a defining concept of Turkish life since the Ottoman modernizing reforms (the Tanzimat) of 1839–71. In the early twentieth century, as the Turkish nationalist project gained traction, Ottoman commentators argued that the government should integrate the arts more substantially into the large-scale social and educational reforms it was undertaking. In 1911, for instance, a reader of the Frenchlanguage newspaper La Turquie urged that it was “necessary to develop the instruction of drawing in schools, and the taste for art in all its forms,” so as “to give the Ottoman people this powerful cultural ferment of civilization that emerges from the beautiful.”18 The anonymous writer made their comments at a transitional moment, as the Ottoman imperial order was dissolving but before the republic was established. After the declaration of the republic in 1923, its architects linked such ideas of art and development to the cause of the nation, and in the 1950s they came up for reevaluation yet again. The statement thus attests to the longstanding relevance, from the late Ottoman period to the postwar period, of a consistent belief that art should not only function in the service of national ideals but should also be an integral part of developmental social change.19 8

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figure 0.3 Avni Lifij, Development—The Work of the Municipality (Kalkınma—Belediye Faaliyeti), 1916. Oil on canvas, 173.5 × 505 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy İbrahim Şazi Sirel.

Avni Lifij’s 1916 painting Development—The Work of the Municipality (Kalkınma— Belediye Faaliyeti) is a case in point (figure 0.3). Lifij (1886–1927) was a prominent member of the transitional generation of artists who spearheaded the nationalization of the Turkish art world in the 1920s and 1930s. This group was often called the 1914 Generation, as they had gone to Europe around 1909 and were recalled from their studies at the outbreak of World War I that year. After the declaration of the Turkish republic, Lifij and his peers took up the cause of the nation with vigor, producing triumphant battle scenes; landscapes using loose, impressionist brushwork; and portraits of their new leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). Lifij painted Development for the central office of one of Istanbul’s major municipalities, Kadıköy, where it was originally mounted around and above a doorframe (hence the rectangular gap at its center). As one of three panels intended to be on permanent display there, Lifij’s canvas was designed to illustrate the nature and substance of the improvements that emanated from the municipal authority. The heroes of Lifij’s work are the group of workers who occupy the panel’s foreground, where they lay down new city streets with the aid of a modern paving machine, located in the center of the composition, at its horizon line. It is a scene of progress and transition, in which the ramshackle old wooden houses pictured on the right will soon give way to the more imposing edifices pictured nearby. These include the marble facade on the left, whose columned portico puts the crumbling old houses to shame, and the newly opened Haydarpaşa train station (1909), whose iconic spires loom in the background. The most prominent of the workers is on the far left. Lifij gives special attention to this figure, who faces outward and is illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, while his companions remain in the shade of a nearby tree. Lifting a heavy implement as he moves into the light, the brawny workman provides a human face to the process of development undertaken at the municipal level and, by extension, for the nation at large. Introduction

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With the establishment of the republic in 1923, Ottoman imperial visions of development were newly linked to the nation-state. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Turkey functioned as a single-party system, in which its revolutionary founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his cadre imposed their ideological system from the top down. Atatürk deployed an ideology of Kemalism, or “national developmentalism,” which paralleled that used by early-twentieth-century leaders in Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Mexico.20 Kemalism projected a vision of a unified nation whose citizens were undivided by class interests and were driven by the common mission to secure their homeland’s advantageous position in international markets. While Atatürk and his colleagues experimented with a range of economic approaches in the 1920s, Kemalism generally framed the advancement of the national economic sector as the responsibility of the state, as opposed to the American-style, liberal-capitalist vision of development that Turkey took up later in the 1950s. By the early 1930s, the republican leadership had landed on the state-directed economic philosophy of devletçilik (statism) and launched a Sovietinspired sequence of five-year plans.21 The idea of “national development” (milli inkişafı) remained the new regime’s main rallying cry throughout the long 1930s, the period between the establishment of the republic (1923) and the World War II years (1939–45).22 In order to disseminate his Kemalist political ideology, Atatürk executed a series of radical cultural reforms. He overhauled the political and legal system, abolishing the Islamic caliphate and replacing Islamic law with the Swiss civil code. The reforms suffused the public sphere and reached deep into citizens’ private lives. Individuals’ bodily comportment and daily routines were regulated through a new calendar (Gregorian rather than Islamic), a new day of rest (Sunday rather than Friday), a new clock, and laws requiring everyone to wear Western-style hats and apparel. These were complemented by an ensemble of new civic rituals and national holidays. A 1928 language reform replaced the Arabic alphabet with Latin letters, regularized vocabulary and grammar, and, for a time, rendered the entire nation illiterate.23 Negotiating such a rapid, all-encompassing experience of national development was a defining challenge for modern Turkish art in the long 1930s. What should an art of “developing Turkey” look like? What were its subjects to be? Its styles? Who were its publics? In 1935, a twenty-four-year-old artist named Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (1911– 1975) offered one response to these foundational questions. Age twelve when the republic was founded, Eyüboğlu had experienced the full force of Atatürk’s development program. His painting Villagers Watching the First Train offers an affirmative vision of the resulting transformation of the national landscape (figure 0.4). A line of villagers extends horizontally across the center of the painting, their backs turned toward the viewer as they wave energetically at a train that passes in the distance. The spectators’ alert, upright posture, their raised handkerchiefs, and their intent focus on the train all convey the collective excitement experienced at their first sight of this mobile emblem of modernity. The engine has just passed a large factory and is already halfway across the canvas, its speed accentuated by the three vertical telegraph poles 10

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figure 0.4 Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Villagers Watching the First Train (İlk Geçen Treni İzleyen Köylüler), 1935. Oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Rahmi Eyüboğlu.

that break up its movement into sequential frames. It will soon round a curve where more smokestacks await, bypassing a small village and disappearing into the hazy line of hills that marks the visual limits of the painting. Packed to bursting with the iconography of the developing nation, Eyüboğlu’s brightly colored canvas stands as a painterly endorsement of the Kemalist development program of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1946, eight years after Atatürk’s death, Turkey made a momentous change in its political system, from a single-party to multi-party structure of government. Two new opposition parties, the National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi) and the Democrat Party (Demokrat Partisi), quickly formed as challengers to Atatürk’s original party, the Republican People’s Party (RPP). In May 1950, in a surprising turn of events that shook the country to its core, Turkish voters ousted the RPP from its place at the nation’s helm. For twenty-five years, Atatürk’s party had retained absolute control, ruling according to the maxim “for the people, in spite of the people” (halk için halka rağmen), an approach the RPP justified as an initial phase of democracy necessitated by the ignorance of Turkey’s largely illiterate rural majority. The Democrat Party’s arrival Introduction

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to power marked the definitive end of such “tutelary” approaches to democracy and the close of what would come to be known as the republican period (Cumhuriyet dönemi).24 Even before their ouster, the RPP had already begun to reconsider their statist economic policies and had experimented with introducing private and foreign capital into the national economy throughout the late 1940s. When the Democrat Party came to power in 1950, the new administration took Max Thornburg’s metrics of modernity as a template for an even more extensive overhaul. In keeping with Thornburg’s emphasis on privatization, in August 1950 they founded the Industrial Development Bank of Turkey (Türkiye Sınai Kalkınma Bankası), which they used to sell off major stateowned enterprises. In line with Thornburg’s recommendation to prioritize agriculture over industry, the Democrat Party slowed the construction of factories, began importing thousands of tractors, and increased the amount of cultivated land by 50 percent.25 Finally, and to many the “most astonishing” choice of all in a country so long hostile to foreign intervention, in March 1950, the Democrat Party passed the Law to Encourage Foreign Capital Investment.26 Thornburg was made an official government advisor, returning yearly to offer new prescriptions. The much-publicized friendship of Thornburg and Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who appeared in press photos shaking hands and sharing a vigorous laugh, became an important symbol of Turkey’s American-style approach to development. The resulting economic transformation was so significant that one scholar describes it as nothing less than the transition from “one pattern of capitalist development to another.” 27 The 160-foot-long mosaic wall that Eyüboğlu produced for the Turkish pavilion at the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels, Expo 58, illustrates the ways in which modern Turkish art participated in this new postwar ideology of development (figure 0.1). Studded with brilliant, glinting shards of colored stone, Eyüboğlu’s wall was the centerpiece of an elaborate display showcasing the work of Turkish sculptors, painters, and craftspeople in two modernist glass structures designed by the architects Utarit İzgi, Hamdi Şensoy, İlhan Türegün, and Muhlis Türkmen. The wall was covered in thousands of mosaic fragments that Eyüboğlu; his wife, Eren Eyüboğlu; and a team of student assistants had assembled in Istanbul, where they had glued the fragments onto sheets of paper that were then rolled and shipped to Brussels. A photograph from the fair shows the outdoor section of the wall just before it punctures the interior of the Turkish pavilion, where it continued on the inside. A deep lapis blue forms the ground for a collection of motifs and scenes from different moments in Turkey’s cultural history. A long, leafy white strand at the base of the wall, whose undulating form is an overt homage to the French modernist Henri Matisse, provides a strong left-to-right movement for a row of fish and boats that appear to float inward toward the building. Above them, a series of white, nested U-forms offer fragmentary bird’s-eye views of Istanbul, showing the iconic spits of land that jut into the famed Bosphorus waterway, such as the one where the Ottoman Topkapı Palace is perched. 12

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Eyüboğlu’s use of mosaic calls up Turkey’s Byzantine heritage. But it also references its Ottoman past, and his flat, patterned motifs invoke the textile traditions from which many of these motifs are drawn, such as block-printed fabric and carpet making. Through his medium, motifs, and shifting perspectival vantage points, Eyüboğlu links himself to a complex array of art historical affiliations, including the Byzantine past, the Ottoman landscape of the cultural capital of Istanbul, Turkish folk art, and modernist abstraction. This “soft-focus embrace of [Turkish] cultural traditions,” combined with a strain of European decorative abstraction associated with Matisse, was received as the ultimate emblem of Turkey’s modern, developed status in the 1950s.28 Eyüboğlu’s wall was an audience favorite and won one of the fair’s coveted gold medals. At Expo 58, Eyüboğlu’s wall was integrated into a microcosmic vision of the world as a collection of nations making up a global market, an approach that differed markedly from previous approaches to organizing such fairs according to racial, regional, and cultural hierarchies. The Turkish pavilion, for example, sat next to those of Great Britain and Morocco and not far from those of several supranational organizations, including the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the Benelux Customs Union, and the United Nations. At the same time, the event remained overshadowed by the American and Soviet pavilions, which, according to one Turkish commentator, were locked in the “greatest competition” of all.29 In contrast to his 1935 painting Villagers Watching the First Train, which engaged with the lived realities of Atatürk’s development programs, at Expo 58, Eyüboğlu’s mosaic wall contributed to an optimistic projection of Turkey’s participation in a new world order. Together, the two artworks convey Turkish artists’ continuous engagement with distinct approaches to economic development, from the statist, industryfocused, Soviet-inspired models that Turkey took on before World War II to the American-centric capitalist models its leaders prioritized at midcentury. ARTISTS IN FORMATION, ECONOMY IN FORMATION

Although Atatürk and his colleagues settled on a Soviet-inspired economic plan by 1933, the first ten years of the republic were a period of economic experimentation, as the leaders of the new nation debated whether to pursue national development through agriculture or industrialization (ziraat mi, sanayi mi).30 At the same time that the embryonic national economy was taking form, artists, too, were in the formative stages of becoming “national artists.” By the 1950s, however, both Turkey’s economic situation and its art world had taken on a more definitive form. In the postwar period, Eyüboğlu’s generation were no longer young artists-in-formation but rather the dominant authorities in the art world. It was now simply “common sense” that the American approach—in the economy, military, foreign policy, and personal lifestyle— represented the key to modernization and individual social mobility in the postwar world.31 But in the 1920s and 1930s, Turkish artists were learning on the job, as they Introduction

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responded to Atatürk’s mandate to “work much harder than in the past, and in less time accomplish far greater things.”32 They confronted the strange challenge of generating a new art for “developing Turkey” before the precise direction of their country’s trajectory had become clear—and while they themselves were still developing as creative individuals. Under Atatürk’s national developmentalist regime, artists were treated as both objects and agents of development. Just as Kemalist leaders sought to produce modern, secular citizens through their social and political reforms, they also endeavored to develop a cadre of national artists formed in a modern mold. Aspiring artists like Eyüboğlu were channeled through a network of state-run art institutions designed to “develop” them into this idealized type of cultural producer. At the same time, Atatürk enlisted these artists-in-formation as agents of development. Announcing in 1923 that “a nation without art and artists is like a person with a lame foot and a twisted arm, broken and unable to walk,” he tasked artists with generating a national art (milli sanat) to suit the needs of the new republic.33 Eyüboğlu’s early career, from his entrance into the academy in 1929 to his hiring there in 1936, progressed rapidly. Within this compressed time line, he and his peers took on dual roles, striving to produce a new national art at the same time they were themselves “under development.” When he arrived in Istanbul from his hometown of Trabzon in 1929, Eyüboğlu’s first port of call was the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, which was undergoing its own extensive process of reforms under the leadership of Namık İsmail, a wellknown painter and pedagogue of the 1914 Generation. The academy had originally been founded in 1883 as the Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi (Advanced School of Fine Arts). Under İsmail’s watch, the institution modernized its name to the State Academy of Fine Arts (Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi) and moved from its original nineteenth-century building into a freshly renovated space on the waterfront. During this move, the (previously male-only) institution merged with the Women’s Academy of Fine Arts (İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), and began training both male and female students.34 The academy’s curriculum was already based on European models of Beaux-Arts instruction, which emphasized the formal ideals of Western classical art and architecture within a structured curricular sequence. İsmail instituted additional entry qualifications and further raised the level of instruction at the school.35 In 1932, İsmail published a provocative newspaper article that powerfully expressed republican-era understandings of the artist as an object of development. In it, the director of the academy described the modern Turkish art world as an artist-producing “machine” that he likened to “those which turn raw material into finished products.” 36 In France, argued İsmail, the state was willing to school “tens of thousands” of art students in order to discover a single high-caliber talent such as Delacroix. If Kemalist authorities wished to identify equally significant Turkish artists, they should invest in artists’ education on a greater scale. In the eyes of İsmail and government administrators, artists were objects of development. Starting out as unfinished, unrefined 14

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figure 0.5 Sculpture atelier at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Courtesy SALT Research. Utarit İzgi archive.

individuals, they were to be fed through the distinct institutional components of a republican art machine, emerging at the end of the manufacturing process as polished artists who could serve the needs of the state. In 1929, Eyüboğlu began his studies at the academy, the very engine of this republican art machine, with a standard sequence of courses in art history, anatomy, perspective, and foreign languages. A photograph of the academy sculpture studio during this period portrays the school as a place where men and women work alongside each other as disciplined professionals, duly digesting the Western canon (figure 0.5). Half a dozen students work diligently to produce identical iterations of a male nude, surrounded by a collection of sculptural casts whose classical forms they use as a foundation for their own work. A studio model, identifiable as such by his lack of shirt, can be seen behind the long wooden platform where he likely posed. The image reveals the importance of the classical tradition and copying-based instruction to the academy’s revamped curriculum. It also confirms that working from nude models, long a point of contention at the academy, had by this point become a standard part of artistic training. After a year at the academy in Istanbul, Eyüboğlu moved on to the next requisite stage of the artistic manufacturing process: study in a European atelier. In 1931, he departed for France, where he avidly copied the work of the postimpressionist painters Introduction

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figure 0.6 André Lhote studio, early 1930s. Courtesy SALT Research (Yusuf Taktak archive) and Dominique Bermann Martin (Archives André Lhote).

Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.37 He also spent time studying Matisse, whose decorative abstraction—which engaged the decorative arts and textiles—would remain a touchstone for him throughout his life. Like many of his peers, Eyüboğlu found his way to the Paris studio of André Lhote, a cubist painter who welcomed scores of foreign students to his atelier during the prewar period. A photograph of the French pedagogue in action captures the moment of reckoning that all pupils, including Eyüboğlu, would experience as they were tested on whether they had properly internalized the lessons of the master (figure 0.6). Surrounded by a throng of students, Lhote rests his hand authoritatively on his hip while interrogating a student who inclines his head in deference. In the eyes of the republican authorities, such experiences of foreign tutelage were an indispensable means for Turkish artists to acquire technical and historical knowledge of Western art, lessons they could then bring to bear on their mission to develop a modern Turkish art. Eyüboğlu returned from France in 1932 and dived back into the republican art world. He exhibited regularly at the yearly competitive exhibitions put on by the state, 16

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figure 0.7 İbrahim Çallı, Harvest (Harman), 1928. Oil on canvas, 450 × 530 cm. Ziraat Bankası collection. Courtesy Yaşar Çallı.

where his painting Villagers Watching the First Train won a prize in 1936 (see figure 0.4).38 The painting’s success is perhaps not surprising given that it reprised key features of a monumental work by his teacher İbrahim Çallı, whose work was still a dominant aesthetic model in the 1930s (figure 0.7). As in Çallı’s Harvest (1928), Eyüboğlu’s canvas centers on an irregular line of peasants as an enduring source of national identity, surrounded by lush fields symbolizing Turkey’s agrarian order, although Eyüboğlu marks himself apart from his teacher by bringing postimpressionist color and brushwork to bear on these established themes.39 Because it had won a prize, Villagers Watching the First Train automatically entered the state art collection—a great success for the young artist, who was hired later that year as a teaching assistant at the academy. Soon, ten of Eyüboğlu’s paintings went on display at the new Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (İstanbul Devlet Resim Heykel Müzesi, hereafter the “State Museum”), marking the artist’s entry into the embryonic art historical record of the republic. In less than a decade, between 1929 and 1936, Eyüboğlu had gone from raw material to finished product. Introduction

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At the same time that Eyüboğlu and his peers were being developed into modern artists by the republican art machine, they were also expected to act as agents of development responsible for producing a national art. In need of reliable patronage and a sustainable career, Turkish artists accepted this mission wholeheartedly. “Our cause is so great, the stage that we wish to attain so much higher than today’s, that we can easily balk at it,” observed Nurullah Berk, a contemporary of Eyüboğlu who had received a degree from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1928. Nevertheless, Berk (1906– 1982) urged his fellow artists not to abandon their mission. Using the metaphor of agricultural development, the painter described the bounteous artistic “harvest” that their diligent efforts would yield: “We have tilled our field and readied our tools. Our soil is unusually rich. Our seeds promise an abundant harvest. With a little effort, the great painters, the great sculptors of tomorrow might blossom in Turkey.” 40 In Villagers Watching the First Train, Eyüboğlu confronts some of the most significant formal questions faced by this generation as they worked to develop a national art. Should artists continue to present idealized visions of the nation, like İbrahim Çallı’s Harvest, or should they turn to contemporary realities? While in 1928 Çallı had offered no hint of the industrial changes already transforming the national landscape, Eyüboğlu filled the horizon of his 1935 painting with factory, train, and telegraph. He also repositioned Çallı’s laboring peasants, turning them away from their work in the fields to watch the train’s passing. In so doing, the younger artist transformed the peasants, the central subject of the republican imaginary, from mere laborers to witnesses. He also cast them as agents of modernizing change who mediate the transition from the agrarian past (in the foreground) to the industrial future (in the background). Perhaps, suggests Eyüboğlu’s canvas, a modern national art should engage with the concrete results of the étatist development policies that had already begun to restructure the physical fabric of his homeland, and with the people whose lives were transformed by these changes. Eyüboğlu’s canvas also takes up the widely shared question of whether individual stylistic experiments could be turned to the ends of a national art. In Villagers Watching the First Train, the artist uses nonmimetic color, distinct brushstrokes, and the manipulation of scale to portray one of the favored themes of the early republic: the transition from an old order to new. Ten years prior, the artist Ömer Adil (1868–1928) had approached this same theme using the “accessible academicism” favored by his generation, a form of allegorical history painting coming out of a French tradition.41 Adil began teaching at the academy in 1902 and in 1914 cofounded the Women’s Academy of Fine Arts along with the female painter Mihri Rasim (1886–1954).42 In Adil’s painting Call to Duty (1924), an aging father directs his family’s attention toward a map of Turkey on the wall (figure 0.8). The father, whose outdated fez and snowy white beard mark him as the embodiment of an old order, locks eyes with his son, whose soldier’s uniform and youthful mien position him as the embodiment of the future. The son leans in attentively to heed the patriarch’s call. The “call to duty” of the title is the young man’s requirement to enter military service and fight for the cause of the new 18

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figure 0.8 Ömer Adil, Call to Duty (Göreve Koş), 1924. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 125 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

nation whose territorial contours are outlined so clearly in the map. But the patriarch’s pointing finger also issues a broader call to duty, to his entire family, including the female figures, likely the soldier’s wife and daughter, whose cropped hair and shortsleeved dresses mark them, too, as citizens of the modern nation. In one sense, Adil’s painting, made just a year after the declaration of the Turkish republic, amplifies the Kemalist state’s message to abandon all things Ottoman. The old man’s gesture is an unambiguous command to leave behind the Ottoman past, which is signified by the other image behind him, a landscape painting of the Bosphorus strait. Such Bosphorus views were a staple subject for the Ottoman painters who drew on French impressionist strategies to forge a distinctly Ottoman picturesque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adil’s inclusion of the painting serves as an instantly recognizable icon of an entire Ottoman cultural order that the painting’s subjects have already begun to leave behind. It can also be seen as a moment of modernist metacommentary, painting commenting on painting while standing in dialogue with the territorial nationalism of the new state. At the same time, analyzing Call to Duty through the lens of development reveals the continuities between art of the late Ottoman and early republican eras, which are more often treated as distinct art historical periods. After all, it was not so long before that those impressionistic landscapes had stood as emblems of a modernizing empire. Introduction

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Eyüboğlu takes up the same central theme as Adil—the transition from old to new— but moves away from the tight, symbolism-laden narrative of Adil’s approach. Instead, Villagers Watching the First Train uses patches of interlocking color, which seem knit together on the surface of the canvas, to underscore the theme of the unification of the developing nation. Eyüboğlu’s canvas proposes that modernist artistic strategies are compatible with a republican mandate to produce a national art. Although Eyüboğlu and his peers accepted the shared mission to develop a national art, there was no consensus as to how this mission should translate onto the canvas.43 In two contemporaneous paintings, Cemal Tollu and Nurullah Berk experimented with a different approach. Their respective works Seated Woman (1933) and Still Life with Cards (1933) suggest that a national art might consist of subjects thought to be universally modern, such as still lifes and nudes, rendered in the equally “universal” formal vocabularies of cubism and postimpressionism they had learned in French studios. Tollu’s emphasis on planarity and reduced color palette were both hallmarks of early twentieth-century cubism and served as an instantly legible means to signal his modernity as a painter (figure 0.9).44 Berk’s Still Life with Playing Cards deploys cubism’s foundational strategy of offering multiple vantages at once (figure 0.10). Berk positions the viewer as simultaneously looking down at a tabletop from a slight angle (an effect achieved by his angling of the two gray, diamond-like forms) and observing the still life from the side (since the white fruit bowl, its contents, and a bulbous ewer appearing in silhouette). Four outward-facing playing cards, their suits visible, occupy a third plane parallel to the flat surface of the canvas. Berk’s painting also declares its affiliation with the artist Fernand Léger, in whose studio Berk had spent time in the early 1930s. This is particularly noticeable in his affinity for undulating lines, such as the handle of the ewer, the curved bowl and its base, and the four arcs in a deep brick red, which hold in the composition from the right and left. Eyüboğlu, Berk, and Tollu were all members of Group D (1933–1951), a collective of six artists whose ranks ultimately expanded to sixteen and whose activities reflect the dilemmas posed by being both an object and agent of development.45 They called themselves Group D to indicate that they were the fourth modern art movement in Turkey after the pioneering efforts of late Ottoman and early twentieth-century artists. (In Turkish, “D” is the fifth, not fourth, letter of the alphabet; their adherence to French also signals the European horizons of their joint project.) In so doing, these artists underscored their adherence to developmental frameworks and positioned themselves as the inevitable next step in a teleological and progressive art historical sequence.46 At the same time, the diversity of the Group D artists’ approaches reflects the lack of consensus about how to “develop” a national art during a moment when these young artists were themselves still in formation. Over the next decade, Eyüboğlu and other Group D members supplanted their teachers as the dominant authorities in the local art world. They molded future generations of artists through their teaching, established new evaluative paradigms by 20

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figure 0.9 Cemal Tollu, Seated Woman (Oturan Kadın), 1933. Oil on canvas, 65 × 46 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Ahmet Tollu.

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figure 0.10 Nurullah Berk, Still Life with Playing Cards (İskambil Kağıtlı Natürmort), 1933. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 80 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

writing art criticism, and shaped the distribution and consumption of modern art by organizing exhibitions and founding private art galleries. After World War II, Eyüboğlu and his peers continued to frame their work as artists, critics, and gallerists as “developing” modern Turkish art. But this time around, they pursued the interlinked questions of art and development in line with the priorities of the midcentury era, driven by a new and pressing question: how were they to continue developing the Turkish cultural sphere as their country repositioned itself in the international political landscape of the postwar period? MAPPING A PRECANONICAL ART SCENE: TURKISH MODERNISTS AT MIDCENTURY

Geography has played a determining role in the level of visibility of the artists featured in this book. Here it is useful to compare the art historical fate of Turkish artists pursuing abstract painting in three different locations: Istanbul, Ankara, and Paris. By the middle of the 1950s, Turkish artists were experimenting broadly with abstraction, alternately called soyut sanat or modern sanat, and debating international theories of 22

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abstraction such as those expounded by the French modernist Jean Réne Bazaine (1904–2001), whose Notes sur la peinture d’aujourd’hui appeared in Turkish in 1951.47 In Istanbul, academy professors Eyüboğlu and Berk mined Turkish textile traditions for geometric patterns that they translated onto canvas, while their colleague Sabri Berkel experimented with Ottoman art and architecture as a generative form. In Ankara and beyond, the lesser known painters Cemal Bingöl and Şemsettin and Maide Arel worked at the intersection of geometric abstraction and calligraphic modernism. In Paris, painters like Selim Turan, Nejad Devrim, and Fahrelnissa Zeid engaged with the gestural abstraction that dominated the Parisian scene. In the 1950s, these artists made up what Ranjit Hoskote describes as a “precanonical” community: an artistic network that has not yet been recast in the rigid and linear terms of the art historical canon.48 They were friends and antagonists; they knew each other and exhibited together. Yet as early as the 1960s, the artists responsible for writing the earliest histories of Turkish art, such as Nurullah Berk, began to assign individuals working in these different locations their own distinct places within a canon. The Istanbul artists tend to dominate Turkish-language art histories, in part because Berk wrote many of the earliest accounts of modern Turkish art with the institutional backing of the academy and the museum.49 The Ankara abstractionists were geographically distant from the cultural capital of Istanbul and did not have the same institutional ties. As a result, they are often assigned a secondary role in surveys of the period, and there have been few retrospectives or scholarly studies of their work. The Paris-based artists, by contrast, were incorporated into francophone criticism and reached broader international audiences early on. This primed them for rediscovery in the twenty-first century, when major international museums became interested in what are now called global modernisms. In Istanbul, Nurullah Berk brought together cubist strategies of fragmentation with geometric motifs of Turkish folk arts, adapting ideas of artistic synthesis (sentez) he learned from André Lhote. Textiles, especially flat-woven kilims, had long served as a standard part of nationalist painters’ iconographic repertoire. In Adil’s 1924 canvas Call to Duty, for example, the kilim draped over the table around which the Turkish family gathers symbolizes an irreducible cultural essence that will remain foundational to the Turkish national project despite the changes that lie ahead (figure 0.8). In Berk’s 1954 painting Woman Ironing, kilims and other textiles stretched across the floor, hanging on the wall, and surrounding the women at work continue to function as a prominent symbol of national cultural identity (figure 0.11). Here, however, Berk also uses the textile as a means of disrupting the painting’s perspectival logic. A sturdy woman irons a swathe of patterned fabric that stretches across the table in front of her and swoops upward and to the right, where it is draped over the back of a chair. As the floral-printed fabric extends across the lower-right section of the painting, it becomes one with the surface of the canvas, participating in modernist conversations about surface, fragmentation, and perspectival illusionism. It is not difficult to imagine the fabric’s sinuous Introduction

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figure 0.11 Nurullah Berk, Woman Ironing (Ütü Yapan Kadın), 1950. Oil on canvas, 60 × 92 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

floral forms taking over the entire canvas, blotting out the woman as it encroaches from all sides to become a field of pure form. Indeed, in Berk’s later work, figures disappeared, and such decorative fragments came to cover the entire surface. Eyüboğlu was more interested in how textile techniques, such as block printing on fabric, might be translated directly into the realm of painting. As I recount in chapter 1, Eyüboğlu and his wife, Eren, produced block-printed curtains, tablecloths, and other household textiles decorated with their modernist reinterpretations of traditional folk motifs. They also carried these strategies over into their painting practice, as in Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s 1954 work Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster (figure 0.12). Eyüboğlu’s painting is formatted as a central panel with two borders, much like a kilim or printedfabric panel. Rather than layering and blending the pigments (as with oils on canvas), Eyüboğlu has used quick-drying gouache on paper to produce a single field of flat contiguous forms, echoing the block-printing process. The discrete rectangular areas, separated by strong black dividing lines and filled with zigzags, dots, and geometric forms in turquoise, red, green, and blue, recall the forms generated by a loom. Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster also draws on themes of motherhood and fertility that were central to Turkish textile production. The painting’s upper register is divided into five rectangular columnar figures, each topped with a staring face and anchored by an angular pair of feet. Four of the figures bear a child at their breast, while their stockinged legs are decorated with red and turquoise patterns similar to the woven 24

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figure 0.12 Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster (Kırmızı Bacaklı İğdeli Gelin), 1954. Gouache on paper, 72 × 70 cm. Rahmi Eyüboğlu collection. Photograph by Uğur Ataç, Photography Department, Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Pera Museum.

motif known as “hands on hips” (elibelinde). At the same time, Eyüboğlu, who had written approvingly of Picasso as early as the 1930s, signals his engagement with that artist’s legacy in the rectangular faces of the two central figures.50 Here, he uses a strong black line for the profile and a single, Picasso-esque eye. While Nurullah Berk’s theory of aesthetic synthesis rested on the integration of European modernist and Turkish folk traditions on equal footing, in Eyüboğlu’s work, cultural forms derived from textiles take prominence as the primary path toward abstraction. Among the academy artists, Sabri Berkel (1907–1993) forged the most distinct approach to abstraction.51 Because he had not been formed at the Turkish academy, he was less invested in the legacies of folk art and national identity than his peers. Introduction

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Berkel was born in Skopje, in present-day North Macedonia, an area which was under Ottoman rule until 1912. In the early 1930s, he spent several years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he studied print making, mural painting, and frescoes. Berkel landed in Istanbul in 1935 and stayed until the end of his life, gradually climbing the ranks as an instructor at the academy, where he moved fluidly between disciplines and taught in the departments of print, decorative arts, and painting. These varied experiences shaped Berkel’s approach to abstract painting, which he first took up in the late 1940s following a trip to Paris. Berkel often turned to Ottoman art forms, including calligraphy, as a generative source. In Calligraphy (1958) Berkel alters and reverses traditional features of the Ottoman-Turkish script, which he had learned as a child and used for private correspondence until the end of his life (figure 0.13). The canvas features a centered calligraphic form. Although the letter form is recognizable as writing, it is not immediately legible. It is not the result of a stroke of a pen; it is blotchy, with wobbly contours, as if the painter has enlarged a smaller form and amplified the minute irregularities of the edge. Nor does the central form actually lie atop the two patches of black and tan paint that accompany it, as it initially appears. Instead, the script manifests itself from behind the patches, as a remnant of the painting’s pale base layer. Berkel uses strategies of positive and negative form-making that he had honed in the print studio to explore the visual mutability of letter forms. In so doing, he distances himself from the act of writing in the traditional sense, an approach that aligned him with a broader community of artists pursuing calligraphic modernism across the former Ottoman lands and Middle East at midcentury.52 Berkel was both a beneficiary and a victim of his affiliation with the state art institutions. On the one hand, he enjoyed the lifelong security of a teaching position at the academy, and over four thousand of his works entered the collection of the State Museum when he died. Yet rather than enhance Berkel’s visibility, their location at the museum has limited his exposure and has remained in storage for the last two decades. Given the State Museum’s ongoing troubles (a topic addressed in the conclusion), Berkel’s work may remain unseen well into the future. In Ankara, the underrecognized artist couple Maide and Şemsettin Arel shared Berkel’s interest in Ottoman cultural forms. The Arels pursued their artistic careers jointly, first at the academy and then in a range of different locations following their 1935 marriage. Military schools had been a key site for artistic instruction in Turkey since the nineteenth century, and they were an important source of employment for Şemsettin throughout his life.53 When Şemsettin was not teaching at military academies in Ankara, Erzincan, Konya, and Yozgat, the couple traveled and showed together, including a stint at André Lhote’s studio in 1949 and a joint exhibition at the French Cultural Center in Istanbul in 1951. Like other artists of their generation, the Arels had used the Ottoman script through early adulthood, until it was replaced by the Latin alphabet in 1928. In Composition (1951), Şemsettin brought the Ottoman script into his abstract painting 26

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figure 0.13 Sabri Berkel, Calligraphy (Yazı), 1958. Oil on cardboard, 70 × 87.5 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

(figure 0.14). Şemsettin’s horizontal canvas is divided into four vertical columns of varying width, in tan, black, gray, and muted yellow. Half a dozen letter forms stand atop this striped ground. Beginning with the alif on the far right, the first forms are recognizable as individual letters, and, in keeping with the directionality of Ottoman script, they read from right to left. But they are not linked together, as in their standard written form. Instead of cohering into a word, they remain isolated, acting independently. By the end of the sequence, on the far left, the forms have mutated from letters into mischievous, animated forms with a distinct resemblance to the body, playing on the “double ontology” of Ottoman calligraphy.54 Berkel and the Arels’ work is yet another example of the ways in which Ottoman visual culture resurfaced in the art forms of the mid-twentieth century, in particular in the realm of abstract painting. In the 1950s, Turkish critics applauded the Arels for Introduction

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figure 0.14 Şemsettin Arel, Composition (Komposizyon), 1951. Oil on canvas, 94.5 × 121 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Esin Arel Tunalıgil.

their modernist reinterpretations of Ottoman heritage, which was part of a broader surge of interest in the Ottoman visual arts among Turkish art historians in the 1950s.55 However, the authors of subsequent histories of Turkish art tended to pass over their work, likely because it did not fit easily with a progressive narrative of the development of a national art out of, and away from, its Ottoman precedents. Although the Arels’ names still appear in standard art historical accounts, an in-depth study of their work remains to be written. One of the most important forgotten abstractionists of the 1950s was the Ankarabased artist Cemal Bingöl (1912–1993). Bingöl was a graduate of the Gazi Education Institute (Gazi Eğitim Enstitüsü), a state-run teaching school whose roots lay in early twentieth-century efforts to train Turkish citizens in the mores of secular modernity.56 Bingöl spent his career as a teacher, with a particular focus on children’s education. He was also closely involved with the Helikon Association Gallery, an independent art space that opened in Ankara in 1953 (Helikon is the subject of chapter 2). Like the Arels, Bingöl turned to abstract painting following a period of study in André Lhote’s studio in 1949. Bingöl was not, however, concerned with rethinking Ottoman artistic heritage in modernist painting. Instead, he worked at the crossroads of collage and 28

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figure 0.15 Cemal Bingöl, Painting (Pentür), early 1950s. Oil on board, 67 × 86.5 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Orhan Bingöl.

geometric abstraction. Bingöl composed actual collages, overlaying paper, but he also produced paintings whose fields of solid color visually replicated the effect of paper cutouts laid atop and alongside one another. Painting (early 1950s) encapsulates Bingöl’s collagist approach to geometric abstraction (figure 0.15). Five groupings of geometric forms stand in a row atop a flat blue and green ground. They alternate in color between black and white and vary in their compositional complexity. On the left stand three blocky, relatively simple forms: tall, upright verticals whose tapered edges recall paper cutouts. On the right, separated from the others by a large black dot at the center, are two more elaborate clusters. The large, predominately white grouping of forms on this side of the composition bears the suggestion of a figure. Its varying components hint at a torso and legs, while its conical black topper resembles a head. The angled lines that form a black shadow along its left side introduce spatial depth. Abstract Composition opens up a dizzying number of interpretive possibilities. It is certainly possible to read it as an experiment in “pure” form, given Bingöl’s preoccupation with visual rhythm and balance. But we might also read it in light of the artist’s decades-long practice as a landscape painter. The blue square on the green ground and Introduction

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the semi-figural form hint at a body in a bucolic setting. These forms have simultaneously been translated into a quasi-typographic composition. The Helikon Gallery’s main spokesperson, the journalist Bülent Ecevit, attempted to explain the significance of abstract work like Bingöl’s to the readers of his newspaper columns in the early 1950s. However, Ecevit’s theories were never integrated into canonical art historical accounts. Today, there is even less scholarship on Bingöl than on the Arels. Turkish artists who settled in Paris in the 1950s experienced a dramatically different art historical fate than these forgotten abstractionists. Artists like Selim Turan (1915–1994), a 1938 graduate of the academy in Istanbul, found a welcoming home in the internationalist atmosphere of the postwar capital. Turan arrived in Paris on a French state scholarship in 1947 and soon began working in the format he used consistently through the 1950s, in which a thicket of brushstrokes swoops upward from the painting’s base toward its upper reaches. In Untitled (1950), the blue-black brushstrokes that enter in at the base dissolve into a burst of pinks and orange-reds (figure 0.16). Like Nejad Devrim (1923–1995), another Istanbulite who made a home in Paris during this period, Turan was able to enter a European scene by using forms of gestural abstraction that served as an aesthetic lingua franca transcending other forms of difference at midcentury.57 Turan’s canvas, for instance, can be read as a sly play on the categories of hot and cold abstraction that dominated French criticism at this time. Though such categories were normally used to articulate different uses of line, Turan reroutes these discursive categories by use of his color palette of chilly cobalts and burning orange-reds. Most famous of all the Turkish artists to find a home in Paris was Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–1991). Zeid was a member of a well-to-do Istanbul family that was quite influential in the Turkish art scene. (She was also Nejad Devrim’s mother.) Zeid trained briefly at art academies in Istanbul (in 1918) and Paris (in 1928) and spent the following decades migrating between Berlin, Baghdad, London, and Paris alongside her husband, a career ambassador and member of the Iraqi royal family. In the early 1950s, Zeid became close with the influential French art critic Charles Estienne, who integrated her into his attempts to promote a “Nouvelle École de Paris.” 58 Zeid made her grand entrance onto the French scene when she showed her monumental work, My Hell (1951), at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles that year, where its maelstrom of jagged forms animated the pristine walls of Palais des Beaux-Arts (figure 0.17). The painting’s title references her recent loss of a family member, as well as a storied art historical precedent: Peter Paul Rubens’s The Great Last Judgment (1614–1617), an equally monumental work whose chaotic, swirling composition and gaping central void she reinterpreted in her own canvas.59 Between its 1951 creation and the present day, My Hell has been framed and reframed in a range of competing readings across different geographic contexts. In 1950s Paris and again in 1954, when Zeid had a solo show at the newly founded Institute of Contemporary Art in London, critics received the work in the “nostalgic 30

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figure 0.16 Selim Turan, Untitled, 1950. Oil on canvas, 116 × 73 cm. Öner Kocabeyoğlu collection.

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figure 0.17 Fahrelnissa Zeid, My Hell (Cehennemim), 1951. Oil on canvas, 2.1 × 5.3 m. Eczacıbaşı / Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Collection, Shirin Devrim and Prince Raad donation. Courtesy Raad bin Zeid.

orientalist” terms through which it was standard to celebrate the contributions of Middle Eastern artists to the postwar art scene.60 In the 1960s and 1970s, members of the Turkish art world incorporated the artwork into a number of exhibitions in an effort to weave Zeid more substantially into the Turkish canon. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, My Hell and Zeid were recast as representatives of Arab modernism, a maneuver facilitated through Zeid’s connections in Amman, Jordan, where she lived the last twenty years of her life. The painting remained in the artist’s personal collection until her death in 1991, when her daughter donated it to become one of the seeds of collection for a modern art museum in Istanbul. And in 2004, the painting resurfaced as the crown jewel of the newly founded Istanbul Modern and a central part of Turkey’s campaign for membership in the European Union, as I discuss in the conclusion. Finally, in 2017, My Hell returned to London once more for a retrospective of Zaid’s work at the Tate Modern. There, Zeid was reframed, once again, in the context of twenty-first-century reevaluations of global postwar art, the primary intellectual investment that also animates this book.61 PROBLEMS OF THE ARCHIVE, RETHINKING POSTWAR ART

Art history’s current understandings of the postwar period are still largely based in an established West-centric narrative of the transfer of artistic hegemony from Paris to New York. “Postwar” art continues to be understood as the culmination of a teleological and formalist history of modernism whose roots lie in late-nineteenth-century Europe, a final chapter of artistic production before the advent of contemporary art in the 1960s.62 This seemingly innocuous concept is, in other words, one of the primary mechanisms through which art history maintains the myth of the primacy of EuroAmerican modernism within the canon.

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Recent scholarship has begun to destabilize this idea of the postwar. Hannah Feldman has debunked the very idea of a conflict-free postwar period by reading a history of art in the French metropole as one of ongoing colonial violence. Jaleh Mansoor has shown that American aid programs had far more impact on modern Italian art than previously acknowledged, arguing that the work of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni constituted a critical response to the imposition of American hegemony through the European Recovery Program.63 In addition, a growing number of scholars of modernism in Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are conjointly helping to erode the category of the postwar by uncovering histories of decolonization and nonaligned politics.64 These studies call attention to the political project of nonalignment, articulated in 1955 at the Afro-Asia Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Spearheaded by Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), and Sukarno (Indonesia), the Bandung event brought together representatives of twenty-nine different nations, many of which had just won freedom from colonial rule, to formulate an ideological alternative to the binary model imposed by the US–Soviet conflict. These nations sought, instead, to form an international power bloc by following a third-way policy of neutrality. The question of how art furthered the political project of nonalignment is one of the most recent, and most promising, avenues through which art history has begun to reconceptualize the period previously identified as “postwar.” 65 Turkey’s exceptional status as neither fully European, nor postcolonial, nor nonaligned demands new models for understanding modernism in the wake of World War II. Turkey remained neutral until the very end of the war, endeavoring to retain a “cautious balance” of relations with Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, three of its most important economic and political partners before the war.66 Only in February 1945 did Turkey formally declare itself for the Allies, prompted at least in part by its desire to become a founding member of the United Nations. Britain remained its closest Western ally until 1947, when the United States announced a new foreign policy prioritizing Turkey and integrating it into the Marshall Plan. In the 1950s, Turkey’s primary concern was how to negotiate its unique position at the intersection of these distinct ideological and economic blocs, including a recovering Europe, a threatening Soviet Russia, and an increasingly nonaligned Middle East—all while forging strong relations with its new American partner. In 1957, Life magazine published a two-page map of the international distribution of American aid after World War II that illustrates the complex geopolitical configuration shaping 1950s Turkey (figure 0.18). Turkey sits nestled at the conjuncture of three separate fields of saturated color in black, red, and white. To its west is Europe, mostly rendered in black to indicate the significant amount of American military aid to the region. To its east, a band of red—the color used to indicate a high concentration of both military and economic aid, and also applied to Turkey—stretches through Iran

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Alaska 6

Canada 4 Aleutians 1

East Pakistan

Japan

Burma Laos

South Vietnam

Thailand

Cambodia

South Korea 12 Okinawa 4 Formosa

19 FAR EAST Military 205,000 Dependents 92,000

HAWAII Military 41,000 Dependents 58,000

Midway 1

Mexico

Johnston 1

Guatemala

3

El Salvador Costa Rica

Kwajalein 1

Panama Countries receiving U.S. military aid only Countries receiving economic aid only

Indonesia

Countries receiving both military and economic aid darker tone denotes areas of greatest concentration 2

Indicates number of U.S. bases

figure 0.18 “Nation’s Commitments All around the Earth,” redrawn from Life 43, no. 26 (1957): 20–21.

and West Pakistan. And to its south rests a vast field of white, almost entirely devoid of color. These are the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, many of them emerging and nonaligned, some with communist leanings, to which the United States had extended no aid at all. During the 1950s, Turkish artists found themselves working at the epicenter of this complicated geopolitical terrain under an administration driven by an all-consuming desire to make Turkey a “little America.” 67 As the only Muslim country involved in the rebuilding of Europe, Turkey achieved validation as a European state by contributing to US-driven reconstruction efforts. Between 1947 and 1949, it helped to design many of the key institutions through which Europe rebuilt its economy, including the Council for European Economic Cooperation (1947), the European Recovery Program (1947), the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (1948), and the Council 34

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2 Cub

Hawaii 8

12 Marianas 5

Philippines

ALASKA Military 41,000 Dependents 36,000

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Ca Z

Ecua

Greenland 3

Norway Iceland 1

Netherlands Belgium United Kingdom 18

da

Mexico

temala

lvador

ta Rica

anama

es

EUROPE Military 353,000 Dependents 271,000

Italy 11 5

1 Azores

Denmark West Germany 24

France

Spain

Portugal

Bahamas 1 NORTH AFRICA Haiti Military 18,000 Dominican 1 Dependents 11,000 Republic Puerto Rico 3 Honduras Nicaragua Trinidad 1 Venezuela CARIBBEAN Canal Military 23,000 Colombia Zone Dependents 39,000 3

Greece Tunisia

2 Cuba

Ecuador

Afghanistan

Turkey

6 Morocco

Bermuda 2

3

Yugoslavia

Libya 1

Israel

Iraq

Iran Nepal

Lebanon Jordan Saudi Arabia 1

Ethiopia Liberia

West Pakistan

India

Ceylon

Ghana

Brazil

Peru Bolivia

Paraguay Chile

Uruguay

of Europe (1949). In 1953, after years of being denied membership, Turkey joined NATO as its easternmost member.68 While these alliances practically and symbolically confirmed Turkey’s selfperception as a European power, there was always a sense of precarity to this arrangement. Although, for example, the designer of a Marshall Plan propaganda poster from 1950 made sure to signal Turkey’s participation in European recovery, he also indicated its secondary status within a larger European community (figure 0.19). In the poster, a sturdy allegorical Europe looks to the future, her chin lifted high and her shoulders enveloped in a long banner made up of the interwoven flags of the Marshall Plan countries. It is significant that the Turkish flag is shown at the far end of Europe’s banner, a position (shared with Greece and Norway) that marks Turkey’s lesser importance in the process of European recovery. This process of resurgence is symbolized Introduction

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figure 0.19 Guiseppe Groce, Scarf Made Up of the Flags of European Nations, 1950. Poster, 54.5 × 75 cm. George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia.

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by the upward-pointing staff she grasps in her right hand, just as the dove she raises in her left tells of a long-awaited peace that will define her future, and the factory and wheat stalks at her feet symbolize the agricultural and industrial development that will propel her postwar renascence. Turkey’s single-minded focus on the US–European axis also led to its estrangement from the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and the nonaligned Afro-Asian bloc. Although Turkey attended the 1955 gathering of nonaligned nations at Bandung, it was not as sympathetic a presence as might have been expected. Instead, it acted as a defender of the Western bloc. Turkey’s attitude at Bandung was an overt announcement of its proUS stance, which alienated it from the nonaligned movement. Over the following years, Turkish leaders continued to show their allegiance to the United States by willingly taking on the US-assigned task of acting as part of a protective “northern tier” of noncommunist nations adjacent to the Soviet territories. Denouncing Soviet Russia and communism, Turkey alienated itself from the Middle East and the nonaligned world alike.69 Turkish artists and critics quickly integrated these political priorities into their own thinking about art at midcentury. In 1952, for instance, Cemal Tollu wrote a fiery newspaper column, “Art, Slave to Authority,” in which he reiterated that “art and humanity” had both “divided into two after World War Two,” and that Turkish artists must adhere to the “free world’s understanding of art” if they wished to mark themselves off from the “red artists” (kızıl sanatkârlar) who were mere “slaves to authority” in Soviet Russia.70 More conservative critics, such as the novelist and columnist Peyami Safa, were driven by communist paranoia. In a 1954 column, “The Most Dangerous of the Communists among Us,” Safa expressed fear that the modern Turkish art world was home to “underground activities.” He warned readers that “Communists make use of the fine arts, find ways to cut away at the roots of the national spirit, . . . they even control the arts pages of some of the daily papers.” 71 Safa portrayed the world of modern art as a zone of dangerous political activity of which Turkish citizens should be wary. Together, Tollu and Safa’s public warnings reflect the ways that Cold War visions of the world shaped how artists and critics conceived their work in the cultural sphere. Approaching the category of “postwar” art from the perspective of Turkey, Metrics of Modernity confronts two distinct challenges, one methodological and one material. First is the methodological challenge of the limited relevance of art history’s existing frameworks for understanding cultural production in geopolitical contexts such as Turkey’s. On the one hand, it is imperative to utilize art history’s signature method of visual analysis to demonstrate points of connection—and correction—within an established canon, a task that bears special importance for the teaching of art history. But merely adding artworks to the canon does not sufficiently counteract the discipline’s enduring reliance on West-centric understandings of the relation of socioeconomic modernity and aesthetic modernism, of art and the state, of originality and avant-gardism. Introduction

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I have therefore combined visual analysis with a sociologically inflected approach based on Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational insight that artworks are produced through institutional and discursive apparatuses as much as by the hands of individual makers.72 Working in parallel to scholars of modernism in Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Syria, and Tunisia who reveal how individual artworks are embedded within the social, political, institutional, and discursive conditions of their transnational contexts, I map out a modern Turkish art world located at the conjuncture of EuroAmerican, Middle Eastern, and Soviet blocs.73 In so doing, I position Metrics of Modernity as part of collective scholarly project that, over the longue durée, will shift the basic assumptions underpinning the art historical canon as it stands. The second challenge is the inaccessibility of archives and artworks. Although the state played a prominent role in the modern Turkish art world, Metrics of Modernity draws on almost no archival sources from state art collections, the State Academy of Fine Arts, or the national archives. This is because the last fifty years have, in many ways, witnessed the failure of the optimistic vision of a public art infrastructure that so motivated Turkey’s cultural intelligentsia at midcentury. Most of the artworks that entered into circulation through the short-lived private art galleries of the 1950s have gone the way of history, disappearing with the passing of the generation who shaped the art scene. The records of the academy in Istanbul are off limits to researchers. The Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture, which Atatürk inaugurated in 1937, was closed for the first dozen years of its tenure and has only been intermittently open to the public since the 1970s. And in Ankara, art historical research was dealt a major blow when it was discovered in 2010 that several individuals had smuggled over three hundred canonical works of art out of the Ankara Painting and Sculpture Museum and sold them through private dealers, while replacing them with replicas commissioned from painters in Ukraine. The inaccessibility of archives of the state, the museum, and the academy has required reimagining the archive.74 At the conceptual level, Metrics of Modernity brings into a single field currents of thought often walled off from one another under the categories of the aesthetic and the economic, the public and the private, politics and the market. By cross-reading American and Turkish economic theories with art criticism and artists’ statements, for example, I move away from an official history affiliated with the top-down efforts of a modernizing state and prioritize instead intellectual exchanges between individuals working across geographic zones of unequal power. In so doing, I uncover a narrative of state opposition that is at the same time a history of an elite class. Metrics of Modernity also compiles an alternative body of evidence, one made up of artworks I discovered in interviewees’ living rooms and behind closed doors at private banks, photographs and newspaper clippings that spent decades gathering dust under aging artists’ beds, and an extensive survey of Turkish newspapers and art magazines, some of the only publicly available primary sources of the period. This reimagined 38

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archive looks quite different than that traditionally used by art historians, for whom visual analysis and high-quality reproductions are a key source of evidence. The uneven quality of the images in Metrics of Modernity, for example, directly indexes the ways in which institutions delimit the writing of art history. The lush color reproductions in this introduction were made possible by the state’s sustained guardianship of these artworks at the State Museum since the 1930s, and the museum’s willingness to permit their publication. By contrast, grainy newspaper photographs and written descriptions are the only surviving evidence of the activities of Turkey’s first two modern art galleries, Gallery Maya and Helikon Gallery, the subjects of chapters 1 and 2. This less substantial visual record is an important reminder that these short-lived institutions were never designed as permanent repositories but were intended as distribution mechanisms that would disseminate works of modern art into Turkish homes across the nation. In this sense, the “disappearance” of these artworks from institutional art history and their movement into the domestic sphere can be read as a marker of the galleries’ success. The more substantial visual archive seen in chapters 3 and 4 only exists because of the intervention of private capital. Research for chapter 3 was possible because of the collecting efforts of a private Istanbul bank in the 1950s—although I still had to request official permission and pass through metal detectors at the bank’s headquarters in order to see the paintings, where they hung alone in a series of vast and echoing empty waiting rooms. And my analysis of the work of the ceramist Füreya Koral in chapter 4 was possible because the artist’s family took unusual care of her personal effects and a private ceramics corporation funded a retrospective of her work in 2017. OUTLINE OF METRICS OF MODERNITY

Each of this book’s four chapters is designed to revise cornerstone concepts of postwar art history as it has previously been narrated. The first chapter, “The Semiperipheral Art Gallery,” takes on standard understandings of the art gallery as a purely capitalist institution by theorizing an alternative institutional format that I call the semiperipheral art gallery. Turkey’s first modern art gallery, Gallery Maya, was opened in Istanbul in 1950 by Adalet Cimcoz, an outsized personality equally famous for her voice-over acting in popular Turkish films, her prizewinning translations of modern German literature, and her weekly society columns. Gallery Maya was a hybrid institution whose founders drew on seemingly contradictory ideological strands to market modern Turkish art. On the one hand, the very act of opening a commercial gallery was a powerful expression of the new faith in privatization as a vehicle of development in the economy and the arts alike. On the other hand, Cimcoz and her collaborators continued to engage with the top-down, statedirected models of the republican period and described their own work as a “public service” (kamu hizmeti) and an effort to “train” Turkish audiences to consume art. I contend that the seemingly contradictory impulses that characterized Gallery Maya’s Introduction

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activities were in fact the hallmark of the semiperipheral art gallery, an institutional form that simultaneously sought its place in a public sphere and economic order historically dominated by the state and endeavored to stand as a private enterprise in a moment of liberalization. Chapter 2, “Democratic Abstractions: Bülent Ecevit on Art and Politics,” demonstrates that art-democracy debates long seen as definitive of American and European art in the 1950s bore very different stakes within alternative political geographies such as Turkey. This chapter focuses on the intertwined activities of the art critic, journalist, gallery owner, and future prime minister Bülent Ecevit against the backdrop of Turkey’s multiyear struggle to join NATO. The well-traveled Anglophone Ecevit adhered to individual-centric visions of democracy promoted by a community of American intellectuals who argued in the 1950s that modern art could stimulate the spread of democratic mindsets in the United States and beyond. Ecevit, similarly, contended that artists could help perpetuate democracy in Turkey by exposing citizens to ideas he considered foundational to both modern art and democratic societies: the principles of individual thought and self-expression. While his US-based peers produced their theories of art, citizenship, and development in an affirmative mode, underscoring American dominance, Ecevit wrote in what I call the aspirational mode, approaching this issue from an interstitial rank in an imaginary hierarchy of developed and underdeveloped nations. He also tested out these theories at his own gallery, the Helikon Association Gallery, which he opened with a group of peers in 1953 and conceived as a space to transform underdeveloped individuals into the democratically minded citizens that he saw as the assurers of Turkey’s future. Chapter 3, “ ‘The First Coup in the Turkish Art World’: The Developing Turkey Competition of 1954,” reveals the previously unnoticed importance of the category of development within better-known debates about (democratic) abstraction versus (socialist) realism. This chapter’s central case study is a controversial painting contest, Developing Turkey (Kalkınan Türkiye), that took place in Istanbul in 1954. The artist who won first prize, Aliye Berger, thumbed her nose at established approaches to representing national development by eliminating the staple figure of the peasant and pushing gestural brushwork to the brink of abstraction. When Berger’s painting was awarded first prize by a jury of three famous European art critics—Paul Fierens, Herbert Read, and Lionello Venturi—members of the modern Turkish art world faced a discomforting possibility that perhaps prewar models of development on canvas were no longer relevant. By cross-reading the resulting exhibition-focused debates with contemporaneous debates about Turkey’s role in the economic recovery of Europe, I show that art, too, was caught up in the growing disagreement about the best approaches to national development in an international frame. Chapter 4, “The Artist as Agent of Development: Füreya Koral between Turkey and the United States,” uses the case of the female ceramics artist Füreya Koral to explore postwar understandings of the artist as an agent of development. I focus in particular 40

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on how ideas about the modernizing power of the creative individual intersected with international conversations about economic integration distinct to the 1950s. Around 1950, Füreya began producing artworks that blended the strategies of Ottoman tile making and gestural abstraction to which she had been exposed in late-1940s Paris, producing rectangular, wall-mounted ceramic panels reminiscent of abstract paintings. As Füreya and her work circulated between France, Turkey, and the United States in the 1950s, audiences interpreted her as an agent of development who could catalyze processes of exchange between the United States and the developing world. Through such processes of exchange, argued Füreya’s supporters, artists could propel the frictionless integration of a global capitalist economy and push back against communism in the process. In making these claims, viewers of Füreya’s work emphasized the expressive qualities of her colored glazes, which, fired hard but still retaining an appearance of liquidity, seemed to materially embody a dynamic developmental process of becoming modern that paralleled the modernization of the nation itself. The concluding chapter addresses the ways in which the founders of the Istanbul Modern art museum, which first opened in 2004, renegotiated these twentieth-century debates about art and national development in light of distinctly twenty-first-century circumstances, including Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union and the conservative Islamist politics of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. As early as the 1930s, Namık İsmail and Nurullah Berk, both prominent artists based at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, had explained the significance of modern art in developmental terms, using the contrasting metaphors of industrial and agricultural production. In 1932, İsmail described the Turkish art world as a “machine” and the modern Turkish artist as “raw material” that must be transformed into a “finished product,” connecting art to the ambitious industrialization program of the Kemalist state. Berk utilized instead the image of the artist as laborer, describing his generation as having “tilled [their] fields” and “readied [their] tools” in order to produce an artistic “harvest” for the new nation. These early twentieth-century visions of the artist and development, which took the nation as their determining frame, prefigured midcentury debates that unfolded in an international arena following World War II. From the late 1940s onward, as the discourse of development became truly global in reach, international cultural authorities advanced a range of ideas about art’s role within the transfer of resources between the “developed” and “underdeveloped” worlds. By 1964, when the critic Edouard Roditi wrote his diatribe about Turkish modernism and economic development, with which I opened this book, he was entirely convinced that artists had a role to play in the now-common interchange of economic aid. While the affluent countries of the West might feel they were extending excessive aid to their less fortunate peers, argued Roditi, their generosity would not go unpaid. In fact, he contended, Turkish artists—whose high-quality work, according to Roditi, was enabled by the conditions Introduction

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of economic underdevelopment within which they worked—could use art to “reimburse us for all that we contribute to the technical development of [their] economy.” 75 İsmail, Berk, and Roditi’s statements bookend the midcentury moment that this book addresses and speak to the previously unacknowledged importance of questions of development within the history of modernism. What does it mean for an artist to develop, and what does individual expression have to do with the economic fate of nations? How do development projects conceived within a national frame play out in relation to one another within a global economic landscape? And how should artists account for such conditions within the artworks they produce? By calling attention to a series of questions that are latent but still unnoticed within the history of modernism, Metrics of Modernity offers a new framework through which we might approach global art of the twentieth century: development.

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1 THE SEMIPERIPHERAL ART GALLERY Gallery Maya, Istanbul

I

N JUNE 1954, GALLERY MAYA , a diminutive Istanbul art gallery located in the bohemian neighborhood of Beyoğlu, was on the brink of closure. Over the preceding four years, the tiny tworoom space had played host to more than seventy exhibitions of modern Turkish art and become a favorite haunt of the city’s artistic elites. A photograph from one of its first exhibitions shows gallery founder Adalet Cimcoz as the animated center of this artistic community (figure 1.1).1 Clad in a dark skirt suit, Cimcoz (1910– 1973) gesticulates dramatically with her right hand in order to capture the attention of two young women sitting by her side. With her left, she directs their gaze toward a tall ceramic vase at their feet. The three women are hemmed in on all sides by bespectacled male intellectual types who laugh, smoke, and converse animatedly. To the right, in fur coat and pearls, the aristocratic artist Aliye Berger juggles a handbag, cigarette, and a glass. She is just one of the many well-known figures who were fixtures at Gallery Maya, including the artists Cemal Tollu, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and Eren Eyüboğlu; the novelists Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sait

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figure 1.1 Sadi Diren’s exhibition opening at Gallery Maya, Istanbul, 1953. Courtesy SALT Research, Yusuf Taktak archive, and Müşerref Cimcoz.

Faik Abasıyanık, and Yaşar Kemal; and a steady stream of art students from the nearby State Academy of Fine Arts. As the conversation ebbs and flows around them, Cimcoz orchestrates a focused moment of aesthetic contemplation for her two companions, facilitating their encounter with the painted vase. The photograph reveals Cimcoz’s role as a pioneering cultural maven whose primary mission at Gallery Maya was to expose Turkish audiences to new forms of modern art. In 1950, Gallery Maya was the only art gallery in the country; although others had tried, Maya would remain the only successful, continuously open art space until an enterprising group of Ankara-based intellectuals opened the Helikon Association Gallery (Helikon Derneği Galerisi) in the Turkish capital in 1953.2 One of the few surviving visual documents of Gallery Maya’s activities, the photograph hints at Cimcoz’s particular emphasis on marketing art to women. It also yields a valuable glimpse of the objects she put on display. On the left hang a set of blockprinted curtains featuring the gallery’s logo, a flying stag motif similar to those found in Turkish kilims (figure 1.2). At the photograph’s upper edge appears the curve of a ceramic plate mounted on the wall. During the gallery’s four-year tenure, Cimcoz also exhibited painting, sculpture, political cartoons, photography, lithographs, metalwork, poetry, wood carving, and children’s drawings. Despite the local intelligentsia’s

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figure 1.2 Gallery Maya logo. Illustration by Kevin Guyer.

enthusiastic response, by the spring of 1954, Cimcoz found that she could no longer sustain the financial burden of a gallery whose habitués happily attended its convivial, salon-like gatherings but rarely purchased any art. News of the impending closure of Gallery Maya provoked a flurry of protest in the national press. When Gallery Maya opened in December 1950, local audiences immediately hailed it as proof that Turkey was just as culturally advanced as its EuroAmerican allies in the Western bloc. After World War II, France, Germany, and the United States had all opened exhibition spaces in Istanbul and Ankara as a means of extending their own cultural spheres of influence in this border zone bridging Europe and Soviet Russia. Lacking their own exhibition spaces, Turkish artists used these international galleries, located at the French Consulate, the offices of the United States Information Service (Amerikan Haberler Merkezi), and the German Cultural Center (Alman Kültür Merkezi), to show their work and assert the relevance of Turkish modernism in an international frame. The Turkish intelligentsia were always a bit uneasy about the prominence of these foreign outposts. The painter Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, who had a solo exhibition at the French Consulate in April 1950, noted that it felt “strange” for “a person to thank his foreign friends for their hospitality in his own country,” while others were even more critical.3 When Cimcoz opened Gallery Maya, Turkish audiences welcomed it as a much-needed assertion of their country’s significance within an international political and artistic arena, a sign that its arts sector was developing as rapidly as its political and economic spheres. Though small in size, the former apartment on Kallavi Street became an important symbol of Turkey’s autonomy and artistic sophistication within the international landscape of the early Cold War. The Turkish intelligentsia also saw Gallery Maya’s success as proof that privatization and individual consumption, rather than state support, would catalyze the development of modern art in Turkey. At a moment when the Democrat Party administration and the Turkish public began to question the role of the state in all sectors of national life, local critics praised Gallery Maya as an example of the positive effects of private enterprise (şahsi tesebbüs). The Ankara-based critic Bülent Ecevit

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lauded Cimcoz for doing a far better job than “the municipality and the state” at “emboldening innovative painters and sculptors, and encouraging popular taste to keep pace with [contemporary] art movements.” 4 Critics also expressed excitement that Gallery Maya had enlisted the individual consumer in the shared project of developing the Turkish art world. Gallery Maya had a particularly close relationship to the State Academy of Fine Arts, which was just a short walk down the hill from Kallavi Street to the waterfront neighborhood of Fındıklı. Although visual documentation is scarce, textual sources reveal the busy traffic between the state institution and the private gallery, whose organizers staged dozens of exhibitions featuring instructors, students, and recent graduates of the academy. These included the painters Avni Arbaş, Şeref Bigalı, Adnan Çoker, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nedim Günsür, Nuri İyem, Fethi Karakaş, Fikret Otyam, Abdurrahman Öztoprak, Kemal Sönmezler, and Ömer Uluç; the sculptors Zühtü Müridoğlu, Ali Teoman Germaner (Aloş), and Kuzgun Acar; and the ceramist Sadi Diren. At the same time, Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s ecumenical exhibition program also embraced members of the Ankara scene (İsmail Altınok, Lütfü Günay, İhsan Cemal Karaburçak), caricaturists (Semih Balcıoğlu, Altan Erbulak, Güngör Kabakçıoğlu), and artists who were unaffiliated with the state art machine but who later became very important in the history of modern Turkish art, such as the printmaker Aliye Berger, the ceramist Füreya, and the young self-taught surrealist Yüksel Arslan.5 When Gallery Maya was about to close, Ecevit took aim at Turkish consumers, castigating them for not having taken advantage of the unprecedented opportunity provided by the gallery to purchase more art. “It’s saddening that the people of the great, high-minded city of Istanbul, with all its artistic treasures . . . were unable to demonstrate interest!” he wrote. “If Maya is forced to close because of the lack of interest it received, the residents of Istanbul should be ashamed.” 6 In 1954, the prospect of Gallery Maya’s closure bore disturbing implications: if the Turkish people could not keep a small, independent art gallery afloat, how could they possibly undertake the largescale cultural-economic changes they hoped to achieve after World War II? Then, just a few weeks after Cimcoz announced the gallery’s closure, a ray of hope appeared. In late June, a call went out for donations to a “rescue exhibition” (kurtarıcı sergisi) whose earnings would go toward Gallery Maya’s future needs. “If artists rush to help, the gallery will be able to surmount this crisis,” announced one headline.7 Dozens of individuals donated artworks for the fundraiser. “From a child of seven who picked up his brush for the first time, to amateurs who paint only for pleasure, to young masters like Bedri [Rahmi Eyüboğlu] and Nuri İyem . . . [they all] packed up their paintings and came running,” recounted the painter and Gallery Maya regular Zahir Güvemli.8 With relief, Cimcoz announced that “Maya has been saved, our Maya will live.” 9 Yet the gallery’s financial difficulties continued. Although Cimcoz was able to stage eight more exhibitions over the following year, the space never became

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fully self-sustaining. One year later, on July 31, 1955, Gallery Maya closed its doors forever. THE SEMIPERIPHERAL ART GALLERY

This chapter uses the case of Gallery Maya to pursue the following question: how has the commercial art gallery, the capitalist art institution par excellence, operated in contexts marked by “peripheral” or “transitional” economic conditions? Sociologists and historians of art have traditionally treated the commercial art gallery as a EuroAmerican phenomenon.10 More recently, scholars of postcolonial modernisms have begun to explore the significance of commercial galleries within previously neglected art worlds in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia.11 Yet few have undertaken an in-depth study of the economic conditions and institutional formats that defined the gallery in contexts outside the capitalist West.12 In this chapter, I utilize the case of Gallery Maya and the notion of the semiperiphery, a concept drawn from political economy, to theorize what I call the semiperipheral art gallery, a hybrid institution that was neither solely public nor solely private and that defies standard art historical distinctions such as the gallery versus the salon, artwork versus commodity, and state versus individual. The notion of the economic semiperiphery comes from Immanuel Wallerstein. In Wallerstein’s world-system paradigm, the semiperiphery is one of a three-part political-economic system that also includes “core” and “peripheral” zones, each marked by their relative dominance of production on a world scale. The semiperiphery is made up of states that are neither in the core nor the periphery, and it is marked by “an overall fairly even mix” of “core-like and peripheral activities.”13 Originating in the 1970s, Wallerstein’s ideas are closer historically to the period under study here, the 1950s, than to the present day, and they have been extensively critiqued. With its reliance on notions of center and periphery, such models risk reifying an old binary and positioning locations such as Turkey as of secondary significance to a Euro-American center.14 At the same time, scholars across the humanities have continued to draw on the notion of the semiperiphery to explore forms of cultural production marked by their engagement with distinct market structures, and to analyze art worlds that are, in the words of Jacob Stewart-Halevy, “suspended in between.”15 The concept of the semiperiphery is particularly useful for the case of Turkey because it illuminates the specific socioeconomic conditions of the country at midcentury. In the immediate postwar period, there came into being a specifically Southern European semiperiphery—Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey—whose constituent nations shared a common pattern of political-economic development. All five of these states were shaped by statist (étatist) economic approaches under authoritarian rule in the early twentieth century; similarly, all five saw the state rapidly withdraw

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from the economic sphere during the era of US hegemony that followed World War II. Over the following two decades, Turkey would alternate between import substitution policies (like those favored by India) and a US-supported free trade policy, finally losing its semiperipheral status with the aggressive liberalization tactics of the 1980s. In the 1950s, however, the circulation of capital—and I argue, the consumption and distribution of modern art—was defined by the semiperipheral mix of economic and ideological currents that pertained in Turkey and across this regional bloc. The semiperipheral art gallery is an institutional form that simultaneously sought its place in a public sphere and economic order historically dominated by the state and endeavored to stand as a private enterprise in a moment of international liberalization. At Gallery Maya, Adalet Cimcoz and her main collaborator, a prominent literature scholar named Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, engaged with both the étatist principles with which they had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s, in particular the pedagogical impulse to “train” the masses in the habits of modern life, and the liberal capitalist models increasingly seen as ensuring Turkey’s postwar future under US hegemony, often centering upon questions of private consumption. Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu vehemently denied any desire for financial gain, contending that Gallery Maya was the collective property of the nation and a logical next step in a teleological model of state-driven cultural modernization. Cimcoz, for instance, insisted that Gallery Maya engaged in an “artistic, not a commercial, exchange” and reasserted her point by demanding, “Did we ever speak a word of goods and money as part of this noble exchange? Never.”16 Yet, at the same time, the question of sales figured prominently in their private plans for the gallery, and Cimcoz consciously aligned the acquisition of modern art with emergent, and often feminized, consumption practices that accompanied Turkey’s economic liberalization in the 1950s. For example, Cimcoz announced that she had “decided to sell artworks on installment, just like one would a radio or washing machine,” in an effort to present modern art as a household commodity.17 These seemingly contradictory impulses reflected an effort to integrate modern art into the shifting socioeconomic landscape of the postwar period and were the hallmark of the institutional format I call the semiperipheral art gallery. ADALET CIMCOZ AND SABAHATTIN EYÜBOĞLU, CHILDREN OF THE REPUBLIC

The daughter of an Ottoman soldier and a German mother, Adalet Cimcoz began her Turkish professional career as a translator at the state Office of Agricultural Products (Toprak Mahsulleri Ofisi) in Istanbul in the early 1930s, after several years living in Germany about which little is known. Introduced to the local film world by her brother, a well-known voice-over actor, Cimcoz began dubbing films on the side. She was soon doing so full-time, voicing the most famous female actresses of the day and earning celebrity status as Turkey’s “Dubbing Queen” (Dublaj Kraliçesi). Often described as Turkey’s first gossip columnist, throughout the 1940s, Cimcoz wrote 48

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weekly society columns under the pen name Fitne Fücur, and she hosted a personal advice show on the radio. She was, according to one reporter, “Istanbul’s most interesting woman,” an arts and culture maven who somehow found “time outside her dubbing work to send off her once- or twice-weekly art columns to an art magazine and a daily paper” before “dropping by Maya to chat with friends.”18 Cimcoz used her celebrity status and her conversational columns to align the acquisition of modern art with feminized practices of consumption, urging Istanbul’s well-to-do housewives to consider art as an integral component of their interior decor, and promoting the commodification of art through her gallery and writings alike. Cimcoz’s main collaborator at Gallery Maya was Sabahattin Eyüboğlu (1908–1973), a leftist scholar and translator who had studied literature in France in the late 1920s, taught at Istanbul University in the 1930s, and become closely involved in the state education system in the 1940s. Eyüboğlu was well known for his literary and cultural criticism, which appeared in mainstream art and literature magazines such as Tan, Varlık, and Yeditepe, as well as in the arts and culture magazines he cofounded, including Yaprak (first printed in 1949) and Yeni Ufuklar (launched in 1952). Eyüboğlu soon moved with his wife, a Swedish pianist named Magdi Rufer, into the apartment immediately above Gallery Maya. He acted as Cimcoz’s anonymous business partner, helping select and acquire artworks for display. Like Cimcoz, who gave lively accounts of the gallery’s openings in her society columns, Eyüboğlu regularly reviewed Gallery Maya’s exhibitions in the guise of the anonymous art critic Cim-Dal, somewhat disingenuously declaring his “impartial perspective” while encouraging his readers to embrace the novel art forms on display at the gallery.19 Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s work at Gallery Maya was heavily informed by their personal experiences growing up under the modernizing reforms of revolutionary leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who insisted on the importance of arts and culture in shaping a collective sense of nationhood. Architectural historian Sibel Bozdoğan argues that the distinguishing characteristic of the Kemalist regime was “the inordinate time and energy invested in . . . the official production, supervision, and dissemination of a distinctly republican visual culture of modernity,” while historian Hale Yılmaz emphasizes that “it was in the sphere of culture, rather than social structure, that the Turkish Revolution was truly revolutionary.” 20 Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu were members of the Kemalist elite who helped promote the state’s reformist program. The two cosmopolitan thinkers soon joined a growing corps of writers, translators, and artists who engaged in a variety of cultural activities, such as dubbing films, translating literature, and designing national curricula, to promote the lifestyle changes demanded by the Kemalist state. Such was their commitment to the Turkish modernization project that Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s generation came to be known as “the children of the Republic” or, in the alternate phrasing of sociologist Çağlar Keyder, the “agents of modernity” in Turkey.21 Cimcoz, Eyüboğlu, and their peers devoted themselves to what the republican leadership called “popular training” (halk terbiyesi): the task of “mold[ing] a unified social The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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body and a unified nation out of ethnically, linguistically, and civilizationally diverse groups living in our country . . . [so] that the thinking, feelings, and desires of individuals [would] fully coincide with national ideals.” 22 They engaged this mandate across their work in both formal and informal ways. Cimcoz, for example, subscribed to the Kemalist principle that language was a crucial means for Turkish citizens to forge a sense of national solidarity, to modernize, and to westernize. As Turkey’s Dubbing Queen, Cimcoz informally participated in the Kemalist practice of popular training as a voice-over actor in films. Before recording, Cimcoz would edit the film scripts, replacing lingering Ottoman terms with the standardized Turkish vocabulary through which the state endeavored to consolidate a national consciousness. She did so with the explicit intention of reaching the ears of the millions of citizens who were still in the process of making the reformed “pure Turkish” (öz Türkçe) their own. As Cimcoz once explained to the readers of her column, “The consolidation of a [common] language represents the unity of the national mind. It is not possible to break away from the East and become Western, to think like a Westerner, in Ottoman Turkish. Our Westernization, our ability to think like Westerners, will take place through [reformed] Turkish.” 23 Later, in the 1960s, Cimcoz helped make modern German literature available to Turkish audiences by translating the works of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Bernard Traven. Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu were part of a leftist intellectual community that flourished in Turkey in the 1920s and early 1930s but was violently repressed by Atatürk’s successor, İsmet İnönü, after he came to power in 1938. This community’s work was marked by a number of ideological contradictions.24 In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu participated in a state project of cultural reform during the same years that they smuggled the leftist poetry of the dissident poet Nazım Hikmet (1902– 1963) out of the country for publication in France.25 While the visual arts escaped the full force of the repressions the state directed at leftist writers and poets, the government continued its anticommunist and antisocialist campaign during the years leading up to Gallery Maya’s 1950 opening.26 When the Democrat Party came to power that year, it continued to do so, forcing the left-leaning intelligentsia to work clandestinely. Like Cimcoz, in the 1930s and 1940s Eyüboğlu contributed to republican efforts to “train” a national citizenry through the codification and dissemination of a shared national lexicon. As a student at the country’s sole university, Istanbul University, Eyüboğlu observed firsthand as nearly one hundred German exiles engaged by the Turkish government aligned the institution with international standards and transformed it.27 There, the aspiring critic served as a teaching assistant to the prominent literary scholars Eric Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, translating their lectures from French to Turkish. He also experimented with their methods of literary analysis, rooted in a European philological tradition, in his own studies of Turkish folk tales and poetry. Eyüboğlu endeavored to secure the place of Turkish vernacular traditions in a canon of world literature, while simultaneously introducing European analytical models into the 50

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Turkish intellectual landscape.28 The young writer subsequently took up posts at the Ministry of Education (Talim ve Terbiye Kurulu Başkanlığı) and the Translations Bureau (Tercüme Bürosu), where he helped direct the state’s translation of the Western literary canon into Turkish. Most significant among all of Eyüboğlu’s popular training experiences were his efforts to teach the Turkish masses to appreciate art through an experimental education initiative called the Village Institutes, a project in which he was deeply immersed in the years immediately before the opening of Gallery Maya. Established in 1940 in response to the shortcomings of the existing education system, the Village Institutes were designed to improve on the People’s Houses (Halkevleri), a network of community centers in operation between 1932–1949, where arts and cultural programs conjoined with social reform programs in village improvement, social welfare, and vocational training. These institutions played a key role in introducing Turkey’s rural populations to a range of cultural expression, including the fine arts, literature, and theater.29 The Village Institutes were based on the revolutionary premise that the state should develop a corps of teachers not drawn from the ranks of city-centered elites but sourced in the countryside. At the Village Institutes, “city intellectuals” (şehir aydınları) like Eyüboğlu were brought in to instruct future teachers with preexisting social ties to the area; the latter would remain after the city intellectuals’ departure to serve as permanent, on-site “agents of the state” (devlet temsilcileri). Between 1940–1946, Eyüboğlu worked at the Hasanoğlan Village Institute of Higher Learning, just outside of Ankara, endeavoring “to explain the masterpieces of daily life [to villagers] in a manner free of metaphysics and humbug.” 30 Eyüboğlu, who in 1945 declared his work at Hasanoğlan “the most significant of all the work I have done,” focused his energies on developing a department of fine arts and incorporating this subject into the preexisting curriculum.31 In this way, Eyüboğlu insisted that art appreciation was just as important as the other life skills taught at the institutes, such as building, animal husbandry, and home economics. Eyüboğlu was brokenhearted when he was forced out of Hasanoğlan by a new minister of education in 1946, but he continued to pursue many of the same projects at Gallery Maya and in the columns he wrote under the pseudonym of Cim-Dal. Eyüboğlu brought his experiences of building institutions and educating the general public about art to Gallery Maya, where they combined with Cimcoz’s seemingly boundless energy and influential role in the social world of Istanbul’s cultural elite. Eyüboğlu remained unapologetic about his communist beliefs until the end of his life; in 1960, he was sent to prison as one of “the 147,” a group of left-leaning academics that a military junta expelled from their posts after staging a coup that year. In the early 1950s, however, Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu seem to have intentionally disassociated Gallery Maya from their own political affiliations, marking it off as distinct from the overtly leftist salons that had helped foster writers such as Hikmet back in the 1920s. For instance, when a prominent member of the Democrat Party took issue with an The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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upcoming exhibition of satirical cartoons in 1952, Cimcoz defended Gallery Maya by describing it as devoted “solely, and one hundred percent, to the interest of art,” a haven of aesthetic appreciation, free from the influence of political “partisanship.” 32 This may also have motivated Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s use of pen names to write about the gallery. If Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s left-leaning politics are difficult to square with their advocacy of individual consumption and private enterprise, this should be understood as part of the larger problems shared by a Turkish left, which was simultaneously critical of the Kemalist regime but also selectively supported aspects of its reform program in the name of a national future. By the time Cimcoz shared with Eyüboğlu her plan to open a gallery in the fall of 1950, both were established public figures in search of fresh pursuits. After his dismissal from the Village Institutes, Eyüboğlu had begun to lose faith in the state institutions that had previously sustained him, and Cimcoz began to write more and more frequently of Turkey’s need for an art gallery. A decade earlier, in 1938, Eyüboğlu had himself tried (and failed) to open a gallery, and he seized the opportunity to make a second attempt. The writer, who not long before had described himself as “discontented and lacking in purpose” (isteksiz ve küskün), now excitedly wrote to a friend that Gallery Maya might “be a more expedient way to reshape our life.” 33 Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu enlisted the prominent novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar as a real estate scout and secured start-up capital from Cimcoz’s lawyer husband.34 Gallery Maya opened its doors on December 25, 1950. PRIVATIZATION OF THE ART WORLD

I want to return for a moment to the snapshot of Cimcoz at Gallery Maya (figure 1.1) and compare it to a publicity image of the fourteenth State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, which appeared in the national paper Ulus around the same time (figure 1.3). The pair of photographs captures the way in which privatization and individual consumption, two of the new metrics of modernity that came to prominence in the postwar period, newly manifested themselves in the art world and at Gallery Maya. The first photograph, I have suggested, emphasizes Cimcoz’s role as a dynamizing figure within a lively postwar art scene; she has attracted so many visitors to the gallery that the art on display is barely visible. Comparing this photograph to the image of the 1953 State Exhibition underscores Gallery Maya’s radical differences from existing, state-driven exhibitionary models and clarifies the gallery’s connection to new beliefs in the transformative powers of privatization. The State Exhibition photograph centers on two obedient citizen-viewers who observe a cluster of paintings hung on the wall. On the right, a bust of Atatürk, a proxy for state power, surveys them with a watchful eye. Dressed in modern urban apparel— he in a trench coat, she with a scarf tied loosely over her hair and an exhibition brochure in her hand—the two spectators dutifully respond to the state’s imperative to appreciate modern art as part of the broader collective process of becoming modern. 52

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figure 1.3 Official publicity photograph of the 1953 State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Ankara, where spectators view artworks under the watchful eye of an Atatürk bust. Printed in Ulus, April 16, 1953, 5.

The stark, modular setting further emphasizes the hegemonic role of the state within the exhibition and consumption of modern art. The exhibition space is located at Ankara University’s Faculty of Language, History, and Geography, designed by modernist architect Bruno Taut in the late 1930s as a key site for the Turkish state’s mass pedagogical project. Dozens more paintings, all selected by an official state jury, extend into the distance, in an endless parade of state-sanctioned artistic production. The State Exhibition photograph is a scene of choreographed viewership, and it speaks to the pervasive role of the state that Gallery Maya challenged. In the gallery snapshot, for example, the long lines of government-approved landscape paintings have been replaced by a chaotic mix of art objects, and the dutiful citizen-viewers have been supplanted by a lively community of art lovers who act of their own free will. This is a space of private enterprise, precisely what the Democrat Party and their American economic advisor, Max Thornburg, believed to be the answer to Turkey’s postwar development. We can now see Cimcoz not merely as a dynamizing intellectual figure but also as a business owner, the central authority who directs this space of artistic consumption and summons into being the enthusiastic customer base that surrounds her. Before the 1950s, artists were the primary catalysts of nonstate exhibitions in the Turkish art world. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Turkish artists banded together to host informal exhibitions in shops, apartments, and covered passages.35 Fahrelnissa Zeid’s self-organized exhibition, which took place in the Ralli Apartment Building in Nişantaşı in 1945, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu’s own self-organized show in the Narmanlı Han building, were immediate precedents that served as inspiration behind Cimcoz’s opening of Gallery Maya.36 But most significant were the Galatasaray Exhibitions (Galatasaray Sergileri), an annual salon-style exhibition held between 1916 The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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and 1951 at the elite French high school, the Lycée de Galatasaray, just a couple minutes’ walk away from the future Gallery Maya.37 The Galatasaray Exhibitions were launched by members of the 1914 Generation. A crucial means for artists to reach broader publics, these exhibitions were one of the most progressive spaces of the Ottoman cultural sphere. For instance, they provided a public forum for women artists, and the inclusion of nude paintings in the exhibitions aligned the exhibitions with broader discussions across the post-Ottoman world about the nude as an indicator of modernity.38 The Galatasaray Exhibitions also sustained many of the internal contradictions of the “democratic” yet hierarchical European salon. Anyone who paid a fee could participate, but the artworks were distributed hierarchically; a central hall was devoted to master painters, and amateurs, students, and other participants were relegated to smaller surrounding rooms. The Galatasaray Exhibitions did not bear the heavy legacy of court patronage and aristocratic taste making that had shaped the European salons since the eighteenth century.39 However, they did continue the normalizing role of the European salon by rewarding more mainstream submissions. When the Galatasaray Exhibitions were discontinued in 1951, Gallery Maya picked up chronologically where they had left off. Members of the Turkish art world had argued for the need to privatize Turkey’s national art world since at least the 1930s. In 1937, the prominent art historian Celâl Esad Arseven argued that excessive state protectionism compromised artists’ creativity, effectively “paralyzing the individual.” 40 In 1938, over a decade before Gallery Maya’s opening, Eyüboğlu wrote a polemic essay titled “The Art Gallery,” in which he contended that the private art gallery offered the best means of channeling the support of individual consumers toward the arts. Noting with consternation that “Turkish art is entirely sustained by state protection,” Eyüboğlu argued that Turkish artists should only accept this “atypical situation” “on a temporary basis.” Eyüboğlu’s main concern was that state support could all too easily transform from a positive force into a negative constraint. As he put it, “The state’s acquisition of paintings sustains the artist up to a point, but it is unproductive to hope that the Turkish artists will develop from there.” Instead, argued Eyüboğlu, the best way to drive artistic development is to let “Turkish society give life to Turkish painting.” Eyüboğlu concluded that a private art gallery would bring individual consumers face-to-face with artworks for sale, thereby “sav[ing] painting from state protectionism” and enabling it “to start living on its own terms.” 41 By providing a means for citizens to purchase art free from the influence of the interventionist state, the art gallery would catalyze the development of modern Turkish art. Eyüboğlu made these comments in the late 1930s, when Turkey’s economy was still under state control, like the other authoritarian states that would subsequently join a Southern European semiperiphery. But his vision of an art gallery as a space of negotiation between étatist and liberal capitalist economic models foreshadows the semiperipheral art gallery that he and Cimcoz would open a dozen years later, once Turkey had righted itself after World War II. 54

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By the 1950s, Eyüboğlu’s arguments about private enterprise and individual consumption had become mainstream within the art world. Arguments for privatization often took the form of criticism of state policy. The local intelligentsia complained that the Turkish art world had a “placelessness problem” (yersizlik meselesi) and lamented the fact that the Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture had been closed for ten of its twelve years of existence.42 By 1948, Eyüboğlu announced that he thought it no longer “possible to undertake effective projects through Government channels” at all.43 And when Gallery Maya opened, the academy professor Cemal Tollu, who would become one of the gallery’s greatest champions, wrote an angry column cataloguing local artists’ many years of previous efforts to work with local officials. “We wanted to succeed at something, to be of use to the people with frequent exhibitions and painting classes,” explained Tollu, but “our dreams were crushed. When we asked the municipality officials of the time for a small gallery, to open an exhibition space, they said: ‘Be patient a little longer.’ ” Yet even after years of discussion, grumbled Tollu, “the city of Istanbul still had not managed to grant [its] promises.” 44 Tollu and others welcomed Cimcoz’s gallery as a long-overdue solution to the state’s insufficient efforts, arguing that it was time to take things into their own hands. Gallery Maya’s founders were far from alone in translating these new metrics of modernity into the art world. There was a marked upsurge in private arts initiatives in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In her own newspaper columns, Cimcoz frequently reported on the activities of the Friends of Art Society (Sanat Dostlar Cemiyeti), an Istanbul-based art-appreciation group established in 1948 by the journalist, art collector, and Gallery Maya habitué Fikret Adil. In Ankara, several other arts groups organized events in the visual arts, music, and theater, including the Art Lovers’ Society (Sanat Severler Cemiyeti), the University Student Music Association (Üniversiteliler Müzik Derneği), and the Association of Voice and Strings (Ses ve Tel Birliği). Inspired by Gallery Maya, two more galleries soon opened: the Helikon Association Gallery (Helikon Derneği Galerisi) in Ankara in 1953 and Galeri Milar, which was established by the architect and furniture designer Selçuk Milar in Ankara in 1957. While varied in their aims, all of these initiatives were motivated by the growing consensus that the state should not hold a monopoly over culture but rather that private businesses, organizations, and individuals should play an equally significant part in the development of a national art world. Gallery Maya was one of the most successful iterations of the Turkish intelligentsia’s broader efforts to deploy privatization and individual consumption as vehicles of development within the arts, a means to complement and counterbalance the étatist models of the Kemalist state. And, for a brief time, it seemed that these efforts might take hold. In 1953, Bülent Ecevit surveyed the many new initiatives that had sprung up in Ankara since the beginning of the decade. Just two years prior, he had used the common Turkish idiom “not a bird nor caravan passes by” (kuş uçmaz, kervan geçmez) to describe the local art scene as a barren and deserted landscape. Two years later, Ecevit The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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found himself revoking his earlier verdict. Now, he announced, “birds and caravans” alike visited a host of local exhibitions that only increased in number each day.45 Gallery Maya, its supporters’ enthusiastic essays, and the broader community of independent initiatives that blossomed at the same time indexed the increasingly mainstream belief that private enterprise and consumption on an American model represented the key to Turkey’s future. CIM-DAL, ABSTRACT ART, AND NEW FORMS OF POPULAR TRAINING

Gallery Maya’s founders saw themselves as the drivers of a process of national development leading to the Turkish art world’s inevitable convergence with the standards and practices of the capitalist West. In the 1920s and 1930s, these Kemalist elites’ primary problem had been “to cultivate viewers” for art, as the painter Zahir Güvemli explained it. Now, in the 1950s, the “second problem” was “to accustom future generations to an entirely new understanding of art.” 46 Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s efforts to accustom audiences to “the new” (which, in 1950s Istanbul, often meant abstract painting) constituted an alternative form of popular training, a continuation of the approaches of the republican period that can therefore be understood as one strand of the gallery’s semiperipheral mix of practices.47 During its half decade in operation, Gallery Maya’s organizers wrote scores of articles about the art space. No writer was as productive as Eyüboğlu himself, who used the pen name Cim-Dal to publish nearly two dozen anonymous reviews of the exhibitions he helped organize. At his most active point, Eyüboğlu’s Cim-Dal writings appeared in the newspaper Akşam every two to four weeks, although his identity remained unknown to even his closest friends.48 Sympathetically replicating the perspective of a novice viewer, Eyüboğlu used his columns to model the process of learning a taste for abstract art. In so doing, he perpetuated the popular training model of the all-knowing intellectual who schools the nation’s citizens in the ways of modernity. But there was a key difference in the demographic at whom Eyüboğlu directed his pedagogical writings of the 1950s. Although his previous work at the Village Institutes had aligned with the state’s attempts to reach the 80 percent of the population who were illiterate, his Cim-Dal columns were pitched at the educated readership of a major daily paper. Eyüboğlu’s shift in location also entailed a shift in the population that was the object of his “popular training,” from rural to urban and illiterate to literate. Eyüboğlu summoned Cim-Dal into existence in order to instruct a literate urban public in new ways of seeing and to prime them as customers for his Istanbul gallery. Eyüboğlu devoted the bulk of his Cim-Dal columns to the topic of abstract art, describing the seascapes and Bosphorus views that dominated the State Exhibitions as representative of an “old” aesthetic paradigm that the Turkish public should leave behind in favor of “new” approaches. Eyüboğlu’s insistence on the importance of abstraction positioned the gallery as a purveyor of cutting-edge art forms with 56

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international currency. Soyut sanat (abstract art) gained prevalence in Turkey in the late 1940s and quickly became the defining artistic debate of the 1950s Turkish art world. “That which you will enjoy is neither the beloved Bosphorus, a sun-dappled spring, or glittering fish,” he announced to his readers, directing them instead to seek out artworks that are “entirely cut off from nature.” 49 Learning to appreciate abstract art, suggested Cim-Dal, was part and parcel of citizens’ collective obligation to continue cultivating the modern habits they had adopted over the past thirty years of national development. The visual markers of modernity were shifting in the postwar period, and Turkish citizens needed to adjust accordingly. Whereas, not so long before, the intelligentsia had argued for the importance of appreciating the figural iconography of the emergent nation-state, now Eyüboğlu argued that the Turkish public should open themselves to abstraction. Cim-Dal often began his articles by feigning anger or outrage in order to subsequently lead his readers through a transformative lesson in viewership. Reviewing the 1953 exhibition Parallel: Art-Music (Paralel: Sanat-Müzik), in which artists were asked to respond to music in visual form, Eyüboğlu announced that “When I saw that the invitation for this exhibition was so sought after, I was surprised—or, more accurately, I was angry. . . . Abstract painting I can accept, children’s painting I can accept, a meeting of ancient Greece with the modern I can accept. . . . But it seems a bit strange to say to the poor artist, ‘use your brush to make music, not art.’ ” 50 The art critic’s fictional persona then modeled the process of abandoning his outdated preconceptions. At first, claimed Cim-Dal, he had struggled mightily to forget the idea that music is music and painting is painting. Yet once he had done so, “at that moment I started to see that . . . in the year 1953, maybe painters, at least the ones I am familiar with, can discover certain values beyond those that I know about.” 51 Even as he promoted the new formal idiom of abstraction, Eyüboğlu nevertheless continued the republican-era practice of linking the acquisition of a taste for such artworks to a shared project of national development. Writing under the guise of Cim-Dal, Eyüboğlu returned repeatedly to the work of the painter Ferruh Başağa, just one of several early experimenters with abstraction to whom Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu gave solo exhibitions. Başağa (1914–2010) had graduated from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1940, although the outbreak of World War II canceled his subsequent year of study in Europe. After two years of required military service, Başağa reentered the art world, continuing his studies at the Fine Arts Academy and participating in 1945 in the government-sponsored Homeland Tours, which sent artists across the country. Başağa was involved in two notable efforts among Turkish artists to self-organize during the postwar period. In 1940, he and several of his peers from the academy formed the Newcomers Group, also known as the New Group or Harbor Painters. When this group ceased its activities around 1952, Başağa set up a private painting studio and began offering classes under the name Attic Painters (Tavanarası Ressamlar), working in collaboration with the painters Nuri İyem The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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figure 1.4 Ferruh Başağa’s canvas (left) was one of several abstract paintings shown at the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara during the fall of 1953. Printed in Ulus, June 10, 1953, 5.

and Fethi Karakaş.52 In 1954, Karakaş would find himself in the limelight when he won second place at the controversial painting competition that is the subject of chapter 3. As it did for many of his peers, Gallery Maya provided a crucial space for Başağa to maintain a public presence during this important early stage of his career. He held no fewer than three solo exhibitions at Gallery Maya between 1952 and 1953. A decade later, Başağa would land on the signature painting method he used for the rest of his life, in which he divided his canvases into sharp, triangular shards. Although no photographs of Başağa’s Gallery Maya exhibition survive, one from his 1953 solo exhibition at Helikon Gallery in Ankara gives some sense of what the artist may have shown in Istanbul (figure 1.4). Başağa’s large, horizontal canvas is covered with a swooping net of forms made with a single line, whose internally created fields the artist has filled with color. Başağa’s approach renders transparent a process of refracting or splintering reality into a visual abstraction—the very aesthetic shift to which Eyüboğlu sought to accustom his readers’ analytical eye. Using Başağa to explain the importance of adjusting one’s approach to the interpretation of painting, Cim-Dal wrote, “Of course, if you look at these with the preconception that this is not a legitimate approach to painting, you will not be able to appreciate them. . . . But if you concede that this is a legitimate approach, if you expect not what you want from the artist but what the artist gives to you, perhaps in your eyes opened by curiosity a new value, like a smell or a taste, a different human warmth, will begin to spread throughout you.” 53 Having abandoned 58

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attachments to the standard idioms of the past and having accustomed themselves to such abstractions, promised Eyüboğlu, tasteful modern viewers might access new aesthetic pleasures more in keeping with the stage of modernity where Turkey aspired to be at midcentury. As private enterprise became a priority on the national economic agenda, the Gallery Maya intellectuals’ vision of who needed arts-related “training” shifted away from the rural masses and toward an audience much more narrowly defined—an urban, middle- or upper-class public with the financial capital to become a sustaining body of consumers for modern art. That Cim-Dal’s columns ceased to appear when Gallery Maya closed testifies to his writings’ essential supplementarity to the gallery’s activities. Eyüboğlu used art criticism as an explanatory device through which he directed visitors to new forms of abstract art and conveyed the stakes of its consumption. THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION

As private enterprise and individual consumption rose to the top of the Turkish economic agenda, the Gallery Maya circle identified a third undertaking for the gallery: teaching the public to purchase art for the home. “It is obvious that art has not yet entered our homes,” declared one anonymous commentator who commended the gallery’s founders for encouraging Turkish citizens to integrate art into their daily lives.54 The Turkish public should not only learn to appreciate modern art, contended these intellectuals and many approving observers; in the consumer-driven 1950s, they must also learn to buy it. The US-funded reconfiguration of Turkey’s economy marked its transition into a semiperipheral participant within a global international order, a process it shared with the other members of the Southern European semiperiphery. It also transformed the way that people thought about modern art as an everyday commodity. Seemingly overnight, the values of thrift and frugality that had pertained in preceding decades were supplanted by a culture of consumption. This cultural sea change was emblematized by the new pervasiveness of household appliances, including the much-touted buzdolabı, or refrigerator, that “object-fetish for the new modernized home.” 55 Buying on installment became a popular way for Turkish households to purchase the consumer durables, whose import increased some 270 percent between 1946 and 1950.56 The Democrat Party’s unanticipated triumph in the 1950 national elections, following a campaign that promised further economic liberalization, confirmed that the Turkish people saw private competition on the free market as the way forward. Responding directly to these emergent consumer practices, Gallery Maya’s organizers presented artworks as a compulsory accoutrement of the well-equipped home. Three of the only surviving photographs of the gallery show that Cimcoz staged the space as a domestic interior where small decorative objects (vases, sculptures, ceramics), home furnishings (shelves, carpets, curtains), and modern paintings were seamlessly integrated into a tasteful whole. In the first photograph, taken at a 1952 The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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figure 1.5 Exhibition at Gallery Maya, likely of art and poetry, February 1952. Reprinted in Melda Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz (Istanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1972), 34. Courtesy Koman Foundation, Istanbul.

exhibition in which artists responded to poems of their own choosing, kilims cover the parquet floor, and a painted lampshade and vase of flowers sit atop a low bench (figure 1.5). Above them hangs a handwritten copy of a poem from modernist poet Orhan Veli’s 1949 collection Karşı, accompanied by the visual interpretation of artist Fikret Otyam. Smaller paintings are stacked along the floor and at the base of a nearby easel, where a set of nude figural studies are on display. A set of floor-length curtains transform the right-hand wall into a showcase for Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu’s textile-based work. Playing off the space’s original purpose as a residential apartment, the exhibition conjured a sophisticated bourgeois inhabitant, precisely the middle- and upper-class urbanites, privately described by Cimcoz as “our own snobbish circle,” whom Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu targeted as a customer base and whom Cimcoz sought to convince that locally produced artworks were “cheaper and more tasteful than the shoddy goods imported from Europe.” 57 60

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figure 1.6 Exhibition at Gallery Maya, early 1950s. Reprinted in Melda Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz (Istanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1972), 53. Courtesy Koman Foundation, Istanbul.

Such display strategies positioned the gallery as mediating space between the domestic and the artistic, and between Turkish histories of art and a European modernist tradition.58 In the curtains, for example, the Eyüboğlus made use of a longstanding tradition of block-printing fabric and patterns from Turkish folk art, including the flying stag silhouette that made up the curtains’ decorative border and served as the gallery’s logo. The motif simultaneously echoed the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse (1869–1954), one of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s favorite European modernists. Matisse’s importance to Turkish artists is reiterated by the presence of a copy of the French painter’s 1934 work The Romanian Blouse (probably Eren Eyüboğlu’s) in another exhibition shot, where it can be seen featured prominently above a row of smaller framed works lined up on the floor below (figure 1.6). The flying stag motif also appeared on a ceramic plate, hung high in one of the gallery’s upper corners, cutting across different media as well as geographic, temporal, and cultural divisions (figure 1.7). Matisse was widely known for drawing on the decorative arts, including the Islamic decorative arts, to produce his distinct forms of abstraction. The Turkish modernists thus considered Matisse’s work as an applicable model for how they might grapple with an OttomanTurkish visual culture in their own work. Matisse was, to them, a canonical European The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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figure 1.7 Exhibition at Gallery Maya, early 1950s. Reprinted in Melda Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz (Istanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1972), 18. Courtesy Koman Foundation, Istanbul.

master whose own artistic project was closely aligned with their own, and could therefore be used to inspire and validate their own approaches. Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu endeavored to accustom their audience to the practice of consuming art by offering low-priced objects for sale. Central to Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu’s sales strategy were the many objets d’art that filled the shelves and tables of the small gallery space, including reproductions of famous European paintings and sculptures, block-printed textiles, and ceramic vases. Smaller and less expensive than original paintings, these objects formed the backbone of a five-point sales plan that Eyüboğlu proposed for the gallery. In a private letter to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu, Sabahattin suggested that Gallery Maya’s “areas of activity” might include the following:

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1. Sale of paintings (assess, advertise sales)



2. Selling molds and reproductions

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3. Ceramics (assess the stock, make and sell new)



4. Local textiles (assess the stock, make and sell new)



5. One or two introductory catalogs, publications, posters, etc., each year59

The bulk of the list consists of relatively affordable objects, produced in multiples, that were easy to integrate into a domestic interior, including reproductions of paintings and sculptures, ceramics, and textiles. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu played a central role in the production of such objects. By sourcing inexpensive clay vessels from southeastern Turkey and overpainting them with stylized abstract motifs, the Eyüboğlus marked them as artworks that were nevertheless available at only fifteen lira. “These vases sell so well that the gallery goes through its stock of vases and pitchers nearly daily,” observed one critic about the ceramics that feature prominently in all the photographs.60 Thus, as a counterweight to the costly and unfamiliar abstract paintings that Sabahattin Eyüboğlu promoted in his Cim-Dal columns, the Gallery Maya organizers offered a body of objects both aesthetically and financially more accessible to a general public. Finally, Gallery Maya’s organizers sought to naturalize the consumption of modern art by making the more expensive artworks available for purchase on a payment plan (taksit). Though the paintings and sculptures for sale at Gallery Maya were closer in price to a radio or television than to a refrigerator, they remained a significant investment, even for the gallery’s relatively well-off patrons.61 By offering artworks for sale on installment, Cimcoz encouraged gallery visitors to consider modern art as just another household commodity, similar to the televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators that Turkish citizens were buying in such quantity. Like these previously unattainable appliances, modern art was to become, in Cimcoz’s vision, a commodity once rare but now a household staple. FITNE FÜCUR AND HOW TO BUY A WORK OF MODERN ART

The Gallery Maya founders’ desire to encourage the individual consumption of art was reflected in a new genre of writing they developed to explain the purpose of their gallery: consumer how-to texts. Appearing as part of these writers’ regular newspaper columns, these informal consumer guides instructed the Turkish public how to go about purchasing modern art for their homes. They typically begin with an opening dilemma, in which the novice art lover desires to purchase a painting, often as a wedding or birthday gift. This is followed by the wrong turn, in which the consumer foolishly seeks artworks in the wrong place, often in local secondhand shops. Prominent journalist Şevket Rado’s 1950 essay “For Those Who Seek Artworks” typifies the genre. “If you want to purchase a painting by a high-quality artist and hang it on the wall of your room, where can you find a vendor who understands art and can point you in the right direction?” opens the author, before enumerating the many pitfalls that awaited the aspirational consumer of modern art: “In Turkey, it is unclear The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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what the paintings you find at secondhand stores are, or by whom they were made. The things that are actually for sale are everything else; [the shopkeepers] simply hang any old thing on the wall in the hopes that a customer might materialize out of the blue. If the customer does materialize, it is difficult for him/her to know what (s)he has bought.” 62 Yet, concludes Rado, there is now a solution to this conundrum: Gallery Maya, whose “lovely owner is at the service of those who wish to enhance their homes with a work of art.” 63 Thanks to the art gallery, argues Rado, the consumer can be confident in their purchase, local artists can gain a new source of income, and Turkish homes can be filled with tasteful and original works of art. Cimcoz composed her own specific version of these consumer how-to texts, in which she aligned the acquisition of modern art with specifically feminized practices of consumption. The gallery owner had been commenting on the social lives of Istanbul’s elites in the guise of Fitne Fücur since the mid-1940s, and her columns, which appeared under titles such as Istanbul Gossip and Were You There Too?, continued to appear for nearly a decade after the gallery closed. Writing in a humorous and irreverent tone, Fücur reported on society weddings, balls, cocktail parties, theatrical productions, concerts, fashion shows, film screenings, poetry readings, and nightclub openings, often multiple times a week.64 Her columns offered a running commentary on people’s fashion choices (“Madam Up, I don’t know what stockings you’re wearing but you’ve got great legs”) and moral character (“The new Austrian Consulate man is a smart young man. If his tall, slender blonde wife were a bit less lofty in her astrakhan coat, we would all find her more likeable”).65 In these columns, Cimcoz critiqued the very same social circles that she welcomed into the salon-like atmosphere of her art gallery. Rather than concealing her alter ego, as Eyüboğlu did, Cimcoz emphasized the interconnections between her multiple celebrity personas—Turkey’s Dubbing Queen, Fitne Fücur, the owner of Gallery Maya—in order to consolidate her authority as an arbiter of modern consumer lifestyles and those of the modern woman in particular. It is likely that Cimcoz herself solicited the promotional spread about Gallery Maya that appeared in the popular illustrated weekly Hafta, in which the author rhapsodically describes the gallery as “two sparklingly clean, beautifully lit tiny little rooms” that “survive thanks to the efforts of our dubbing queen.” 66 The accompanying photographs portray Cimcoz as the animated hostess of a fashionable social event, surrounded by a crowd of smiling, well-dressed women and posing with great style amidst the artworks she offered for sale (figure 1.8). Another feature, “Let’s Gossip a Bit,” shows Cimcoz in her dual roles. Posing at Gallery Maya with her hand to her ear, as if receiving whispered news, she is simultaneously presented as Cimcoz the gallery owner and as Fücur the gossip. “As for the miraculous nature of this wonderful undertaking—that is directly attributable to the woman of the day [günün madonası],” recounts yet another editorial about Gallery Maya, whose author claims that “without Cimcoz, it would never have been possible to bring all these people together.” 67 64

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figure 1.8 Nurettin Nur, “One Hour at Maya Art Gallery,” Hafta, April 4, 1952, 8.

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Cimcoz’s writings target a female readership, including both the well-to-do women who attended these events and an aspirational faction to whom she offered virtual access to the elite spheres of arts and culture. Fücur’s colorful account of a 1954 exhibition opening at Gallery Maya, which includes an amusing anecdote about a freshly engaged woman who is busily acquiring all the domestic necessities for her future married life, is representative of the conjuncture of modern art, consumerism, feminine domesticity, and modernity that Cimcoz promoted. In Cimcoz’s telling, the woman is so taken with a painting that she not only purchases it on the spot but snatches it right off the wall, with thrilling disregard for bourgeois propriety: “On the first day of the exhibition, I ran into Naim Tirali. Tirali is getting married, didn’t you know? She’s going to furnish her house with all modern, beautiful things. Not long ago, she bought one of the strange canvases of Kuzgun [Acar]. This time when visiting the exhibition she couldn’t tear herself away from a large-eyed portrait [by Nuri İyem]. ‘I’m buying this portrait,’ she said, [tossing] her money [down] and pulling the painting off the wall. ‘Wait until the end of the exhibition,’ people protested, but she didn’t listen.” 68 Recounting this episode with breathless approval, Cimcoz conveys multiple messages: first, that furnishing one’s home with “modern, beautiful things” is something to which to aspire; second, that an uncontrollable attraction to the “strange” forms of modern art is a marker of individual modernity; and, finally, that the consumption of modern art is a liberatory activity that gives the constrained bourgeois woman license to go beyond the traditional bounds of acceptable behavior.69 It is no coincidence that Turkish intellectuals’ decades of attempts to open a commercial art gallery finally came to fruition during the first half of the 1950s, a period when open economic policies marked an exception to otherwise-closed economic approaches that endured for fifty years between the mid-1920s and the late 1970s. As Gallery Maya neared its fourth year in operation, its activities continued to track closely with the fluctuations of the semiperipheral economy. Gallery Maya had flourished in the unexpected economic boom of the early 1950s, when liberalization seemed a miraculous solution to Turkey’s economic woes. But the art space found itself on shakier ground by the middle of the decade, when the government began to reinstate many of the economic controls that it had put aside for a few years and adopted a policy of industrialization under state protection that sent Turkey down a different economic path than the other members of the Southern European semiperiphery. Gallery Maya’s supporters were despondent, reading the gallery’s closure as the dreaded proof that Turkey was not so modern as they had imagined. “I blame the people who are responsible for the art and culture of the homeland. How regrettable it is that there appear to be no artisans or dealers in this segment of society,” proclaimed one letter to the editor, casting Gallery Maya’s closure as a failure of the nation’s artistic elites to properly steward their country’s cultural sphere.70 Cimcoz was more analytical about the reasons for her gallery’s demise. She suggested that the problem lay 66

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with a fledgling consumer base too underdeveloped to sustain a commercial art gallery. “There are not many buyers for modern art. The rich come and look, even say they like [the artworks], but depart with a strange comment such as, ‘this artwork doesn’t match my furniture,’ ” she explained to one journalist. Although “the young show a praiseworthy interest and buy works to the extent that their budgets allow,” continued the gallerist, “other middle-class groups . . . don’t buy art.” 71 Cimcoz, in other words, had created a commercial art space in a context where new consumer practices may have begun to take root but the requisite culture of artistic consumption simply did not yet exist. If, in the end, Cimcoz was forced to close the gallery because of a lack of sales, this does not point to her elite audience’s inability to afford the artworks but rather suggests that an equivalent culture of consumption surrounding art had not yet fully taken hold. A few months after Gallery Maya’s 1955 closure, violent antiminority pogroms broke out in the streets surrounding the former art space; by the end of the decade, the Democrat Party’s increasingly oppressive policies led to their ouster in a violent coup d’état. Although Cimcoz and her peers argued for the salutary nature of American-style consumption, her gallery’s closure should also be seen as part of a conflicting set of collective reactions to Turkey’s rapid liberalization, in which Gallery Maya was caught up in the 1950s. In an era when Jackson Pollock’s drips served as backdrops for haute couture and Clement Greenberg’s art-filled living room graced the pages of Vogue, Gallery Maya took full part in the conjunctures of modernist taste, domestic life, and consumer culture that were a hallmark of the postwar period. Yet the founder of this semiperipheral art gallery also denied her ownership and described the gallery as the property of the nation, writing, “In the end, I was not the owner of Maya. . . . This masterpiece was the masterpiece of the Turkish artist and his/her supporters.” 72 Even as they emphasized the principles of collectivity and pedagogy, Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu dwelled on the question of sales and privately discussed their goal to make a living from its profits. These seemingly antithetical impulses index the gallery’s profound connection to Turkey’s experience of semiperipherality in the first half of the 1950s, a moment when two new metrics of modernity, privatization and individual consumption, gained new value even under a still-dominant statist ideology. In the 1930s and 1940s, Cimcoz, Eyüboğlu, and their peers had witnessed firsthand the radical social change that could be made through the mass enforcement of new cultural practices, and they sought to continue the forward march of national modernization in their own work at Gallery Maya. Yet they also believed that it was necessary to adapt the nature and focus of cultural brokerage in Turkey as the country entered a new era at midcentury. They argued that it was now no longer a question of instructing individuals how to walk, talk, and read like a secular citizen of the modern world but of how to consume culture like one. This uneasy ideological mixture—of statism and liberal capitalism, of The Semiperipheral Art Gallery

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pedagogy and consumption—was definitive of the Istanbul gallery. Many of the same tensions soon arose at the Helikon Association Gallery, the second modern art gallery in Turkey, which opened in the national capital of Ankara in 1953. Yet Helikon’s story unfolded slightly differently than Gallery Maya’s, both because of its different location and because of the distinct intellectual profile of its organizers. Chief among these was a towering political figure in world politics, the art critic, gallerist, and future prime minister Bülent Ecevit.

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2 DEMOCRATIC ABSTRACTIONS Bülent Ecevit on Art and Politics

O

N THE LAST DAY OF OCTOBER 1954 , a crowd of commu-

nity members from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, filed into the local arts council hall, filling it to capacity. As the audience members found their seats, the speaker of the day arrived: Bülent Ecevit, a thirty-year-old journalist from Ankara, Turkey, then a visiting reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. One of the local staff writers later described him as “a gentle little fellow . . . quiet . . . olive-skinned . . . deer-eyed . . . sensitive as a sunburned back in summer,” noting that Ecevit seemed “cut from a strange pattern for a newsman.”1 At the Arts Council, Ecevit gave a dynamic performance, reciting modern Turkish poetry and using color slides to inform his audience about Turkey, one of the United States’ newest postwar allies and a subject of growing public interest. Ecevit’s Winston-Salem talk was the young intellectual’s first attempt to communicate to a foreign audience his thoughts about the interrelationship between art and democracy in Turkey, a topic that he had theorized at some length while working as a 69

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journalist, art critic, and gallery owner in Ankara over the previous four years. Ecevit told the crowd that a great surge of creative energy had been released in 1923 when Turkish nationalists had overthrown the Ottoman Empire and established a singleparty democracy. “It was as if all the plastic elements which had been imprisoned for centuries on the lifeless miniatures and stylized tiles, away from nature and sun and human feeling, were now rushing forth into real life,” he rousingly explained. With the transition to a multiparty system in 1946, argued Ecevit, artists had been definitively released from the ideological pressures of the single-party state, gaining “artistic freedom” and “open minds” that enabled them to produce truly original works of art for the first time in the nation’s history.2 While Ecevit is best known for his political accomplishments—by the time of his death in 2006, he had served as prime minister of Turkey no fewer than five times—in the early 1950s he was equally involved in journalism and the visual arts. Ecevit began working as a foreign news editor of the major Turkish daily Ulus (“nation”) in 1950. A fluent English speaker, he regularly participated in NATO-sponsored and British government-sponsored press trips to Europe and Canada. He also sought out opportunities to observe American democracy in action, first on a three-month US State Department grant in Winston-Salem in 1954 and then on a one-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, in 1957 (figure 2.1). Throughout this period, Ecevit incorporated over one hundred articles about art into his daily political column and served as the secretary for the Turkish branch of the International Association of Art Critics.3 When back in Ankara between travels, Ecevit collaborated with a group of like-minded journalists, musicians, and professors to establish the Helikon Association Gallery (Helikon Derneği Galerisi), where they staged regular exhibitions of modern Turkish art, hosted concerts, and offered art classes. Contending that it was “hardly possible” for an intellectual like himself “to distinguish between cultural problems . . . and the social problems and political issues of his country,” Ecevit devoted considerable effort to convincing his Turkish and international audiences that art and democracy should be treated as interdependent phenomena.4 In this chapter, I analyze Ecevit’s intertwined activities as a traveling journalist, an art critic, and the co-owner of a gallery in relation to theories of art and democracy that circulated internationally after World War II. Ecevit subscribed to what historian Fred Turner has called “person-centered” understandings of democracy, then in wide circulation.5 This strain of thought held that the success of a given democracy depended on the democratic habits of the individuals who, in aggregate, made up the body of the nation; as Ecevit glossed it for his Ulus readers in 1951, “where the individual is not free, society cannot be free.” 6 Ecevit argued that Turkish citizens should not merely emulate the forms of government of England and the United States, which he dubbed “the successful democracies,” but should live out democratic principles in 70

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figure 2.1 Bülent Ecevit departs from Ankara for the United States, where he spent eight months on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University in 1957. Courtesy Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation of Science, Art and Culture.

their daily lives.7 Ecevit also echoed a growing international consensus that the arts were an effective means through which to encourage citizens’ democratic impulses, asserting in 1953 that “in a society with a well-developed taste for art, the rules of art will, with time, also rule lifestyles.” 8 Ecevit’s statement captures the way in which international elites perceived economic, political, and cultural development as interlinked processes, each of which might catalyze the others as they unfolded over time. The development of democracy in Turkey might begin with the individual exhibition visitor, argued the writer, but would soon scale up to the level of society itself. Ecevit used his newspaper columns to transmit the person-centric understandings of art and democracy he cultivated during his travels to some fifty thousand daily Democratic Abstractions

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readers. The only surviving images of Ecevit’s gallery, Helikon, are the blurred, blackand-white photographs that he regularly published on the front page of Ulus. This limited visual archive offers little information about the artworks on display and frustrates traditional art historical analysis. Yet these grainy photographs remain crucial evidence for understanding Ecevit’s larger project. His regular publishing of such images was not just a publicity stunt; it also attests to the young intellectual’s desire to make the newspaper a kind of virtual art gallery, to provide a democratic viewing experience for the readers of Ulus across the nation. Ecevit described Helikon as a stage for viewing experiences that would develop more democratic citizens, arguing that exhibitions of abstract painting by Turkish artists would foster citizens’ democratic skill set by helping them practice free thought and self-expression. In so doing, he positioned the modern Turkish artist as a guiding light for Turkey’s postwar transition from an autocratic, single-party state to a multiparty democracy oriented toward individual participation, liberal capitalism, and integration into the world economy. So important was the figure of the artist to Ecevit’s theory of democracy that he asserted that “there can be no democracy in countries where the artist is not actively involved in politics.” 9 Attending to Ecevit’s interconnected activities in the 1950s expands current understandings of the art-democracy debates so important to the postwar period and illustrates the ways that these debates unfolded in connection with the international discourse of development that became hegemonic after World War II. The immediate political frame for Ecevit’s arguments was Turkey’s multiyear battle to join NATO. Turkey had requested to join the organization in the late 1940s yet had been repeatedly denied entry. NATO’s reasons for rebuffing Turkey were primarily strategic, rooted in a variety of its member states’ concerns, including the desire to funnel more of the organization’s funds toward their own needs, a reluctance to commit to any future military engagement on Turkey’s behalf, and internal rivalries between the US and the UK about who would become the dominant Western power in the Middle East. However, NATO’s member states did not always overtly explain these motivations and instead justified their protests on the grounds that Turkey did not possess the JudeoChristian cultural tradition that united the other members.10 By 1952, when the NATO states’ anxiety about the spread of Soviet communism came to outweigh their concerns about cultural homogeneity, they granted Turkey entry. In the wake of this momentous event, Ecevit argued that Turkish citizens needed to renew their collective efforts to make democratic principles part of their day-to-day lives. “Now that we have entered NATO . . . we must not only join the life and fate of the West through our military strength, but also with our worldview, with our ways of life,” the journalist urged his Ulus readers.11 Turkey had already received several promising indications that it would soon move out of the ranks of the “underdeveloped” world, including the American Max Thornburg’s glowing 1947 report and

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the country’s participation in the many Western political-economic organizations it had joined between 1947 and 1949, such as the Council for European Economic Cooperation, the Marshall Plan, and the Council of Europe. Now, with NATO membership achieved, it appeared that Turkey’s unstoppable will to enact political and economic change had successfully conquered the barrier of cultural prejudice. In the United States, intellectuals working with the confidence of American hegemony argued that carefully designed exhibitions would affirmatively reinforce Americans’ existing democratic character traits. In Turkey, working to prove Turkey’s possession of Western cultural credentials, Ecevit argued aspirationally that citizens’ encounters with abstract painting would instill in them the still-novel democratic principles of independent thought and self-expression he saw as part of the Western way of life. In chapter 1, I use the case of Adalet Cimcoz’s Gallery Maya to illuminate how private enterprise and individual consumption, two new metrics of modernity that entered the agenda in the 1950s, transformed the very conditions of the exhibition and distribution of modern art in postwar Turkey. In this chapter, I demonstrate how these new economic priorities conjoined with debates about American-style democracy. Ecevit’s many engagements of the 1950s illuminate the shifting stakes of postwar debates about art and democracy across different geopolitical contexts, as they came to be shaped by diverse intellectual currents, including the language of international affairs, emergent modernization theory, and art criticism. FROM LONDON TO ANKARA

By the time Ecevit arrived in Winston-Salem in the fall of 1954, he had been immersed in Anglophone culture for fifteen years. Ecevit attended Istanbul’s premier Englishlanguage high school, Robert College, in the early 1940s, where he showed a particular affinity for literary translation and poetry. While still a student, he began publishing his own poems and English-to-Turkish translations of an impressive roster of international authors, including T. S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, David Mallet, Ezra Pound, and Rabindranath Tagore. After graduating, Ecevit worked for a year translating English-language newspapers and BBC broadcasts for the Turkish General Directorate of Press and Publication (Basın-Yayın ve Enformasyon Genel Müdürlüğü). Ecevit’s infatuation with Tagore inspired him to audit classes in Sanskrit, Bengali, and art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he and his wife, Rahşan, moved in 1946 so that Ecevit could take a job as the assistant press attaché at the Turkish Embassy.12 In postblitz London, Ecevit’s primary task was to manage Turkey’s public image as his country jockeyed for an advantageous position within a rapidly cohering postwar international order. As part of the Turkish diplomatic apparatus, Ecevit watched as Muslim-majority Turkey’s requests to join the newly formed NATO were repeatedly denied on the grounds that it was not culturally compatible with the other member

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states possessed of a Judeo-Christian history. Most important, Ecevit helped explain to Western audiences the significance of his country’s 1946 transition from a single- to a multiparty democracy, an undertaking that garnered much approval in Western political circles. Ecevit might have remained in the United Kingdom were it not for the unprecedented political upset that rocked Turkey in 1950. In May of that year, the oppositional Democrat Party unseated Atatürk’s original party, the Republican People’s Party. The RPP had held a monopoly on power under a single-party political system since 1923, the year the Turkish Republic was founded. In 1946, Turkey transitioned to a multiparty system and allowed the formation of opposition parties for the first time. Echoing much of the Western press, the London Times hailed these changes to the Turkish political system as “an example unprecedented in modern history of attempting to convert a quasi-dictatorial regime . . . into a free democratic institution.”13 Still, it came as a surprise when, in 1950, the Democrat Party won the national election. “The atmosphere immediately after the elections was almost apocalyptic,” reported a young Bernard Lewis, already well on his way to becoming an experienced “Turkey hand”: Near Bursa some peasants began to divide up the big estates, and when asked what they were doing replied: “Now we have democracy” . . . Light-coloured patches of wall-paper appeared on countless walls, where once the portrait of [the leaders of the RPP] had rested. Off-the-mark vendors sold “Democrat Lemonade” in the street . . . and an eminent Turkish historian wrote of the election as “the greatest revolution in the history of Turkey, accomplished without bloodshed . . . and leaving no further obstacle to her progress.”14 Ecevit was so shaken by the 1950 election results that he resigned from his London post immediately and returned to Ankara. A staunch supporter of the RPP, Ecevit considered the Democrat Party’s arrival a threat to Atatürk’s political legacy. Within months of his return, the twenty-five-year-old had signed on as the foreign news editor at Ulus, the primary mouthpiece of the RPP, with the express intent of agitating against the new administration. As he explained, “My reason in joining ‘Ulus’, organ of the People’s Republican Party, when I decided to resign from Government Service to become a journalist following the 1950 elections in which that party had lost power was that, as a newspaper founded by the late Kemal Atatürk, ‘Ulus’ was committed to his revolutionary principles.”15 At Ulus, Ecevit soon began writing a regular political column. He issued a steady stream of articles critiquing the Democrat Party, in the hope of drawing popular support back to the RPP. He also moonlit for other local papers, including Dünya, Pazar Postası, and Turkish-American News, a short-lived publication put out by the United States Information Service in Ankara, where his wife, Rahşan, had an administrative 74

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job. During this time, Ecevit honed his signature writing style, using short, polemic sentences composed in an accessible, modernized Turkish. He also began writing about art. Ecevit’s art criticism was suffused with the same spirit as his political commentary and centered on one concern above all: how the experience of viewing modern art could stimulate individual viewers to develop the modern mentality (zihniyet) needed to play their role as citizens within a Turkish capitalist democracy. ECEVIT’S GALLERY: HELIKON

In the early 1950s, Ankara and Istanbul were in direct competition for the title of Turkey’s cultural center. In 1923, Atatürk had established the national capital at Ankara, transforming it from a sleepy Anatolian town to the bureaucratic center of the new republic. During the following decades, many of Turkey’s top thinkers and politicians moved to Ankara, and Istanbul fell into physical decay. When the Democrat Party came to power in 1950, however, party leader Adnan Menderes instituted an ambitious set of urban renewal projects in an effort to revive the city of Istanbul. Menderes’s policies added fuel to the existing metropolitan competition between the two cities, while Turkish artists kept up a busy traffic of exhibitions and events in both.16 It was in this context that Ecevit and his cadre opened the country’s second, and Ankara’s first, modern art gallery, Helikon. Freshly settled in Ankara in 1950, Ecevit turned his attention to the most prominent art event in the city: the State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, which took place in late April every year. Ecevit saw the State Exhibitions as a barometer of the negative effects of state patronage on modern art in Turkey. In half a dozen reviews penned between 1951 and 1953, he railed against the hegemony of what was called klasik (classic) painting, a category encompassing the bland portraits, landscapes, and still lifes encouraged by the juries. At the 1953 exhibition, for instance, an irritated Ecevit logged 137 landscapes, twelve portraits, and twenty-four still lifes, including Ayetullah Sümer’s, which the journalist reproduced alongside his critical review (figure 2.2). Born Mehmet Nüzhet, Sümer (1905–1979) was one of the first generation of Turkish students to pursue an education abroad after the establishment of the republic. In 1925, Sümer moved to Marseille, where he discovered a passion for painting. He spent the next two years studying informally under the landscape painter Théophile Bérengier (1850–1928), while completing his studies at the École de Commerce. After an additional period learning fresco techniques in Paris, this time on a Turkish state scholarship, he returned to establish a fresco studio at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul.17 In Sümer’s 1953 canvas, a bowl of grapes, a red glass goblet, and a flagon of wine are arranged on a cloth-covered table. The contrasting shades of the fruit, the objects’ left-leaning shadows, and the visible folds in the pale cloth, rendered with trompe l’oeil precision, all signal that Sümer’s primary concern is with the mimetic and compositional rules of the genre.18 Ecevit complained that the juries’ insistence on such formal paradigms unfairly penalized artists on the other side of the “klasik-modern debate.”19 Artists working in Democratic Abstractions

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figure 2.2 Ayetullah Sümer, Still-Life with Grapes, date unknown. Oil on canvas, 51 × 72.5 cm. Türk Cumhuriyeti Merkez Bankası collection. Courtesy Nazan Sümer Akpınar.

the abstract or semiabstract idioms encompassed by the term modern sanat (modern art) were left with two options, argued the critic. They could boycott the exhibitions, as some did in 1951.20 Or, they could capitulate to the juries’ demands. In 1952, Ecevit wrote no fewer than three reviews of that year’s State Exhibition, protesting the works’ enforced uniformity and arguing angrily that state patronage “does not do any good if it hobbles the artist.” 21 In January 1953, the front page of Ulus had prominently featured a photograph of an alternative exhibition model (figure 2.3). Where publicity images of the State Exhibitions tended to focus on klasik paintings, the artworks reproduced in Ulus feature arresting faces rendered in thick, black lines, surrounded by kaleidoscopic fragments of color—a far cry from Sümer’s flask and grapes. In front of the paintings stand a dozen men, women, and children who listen attentively to Hasan Kaptan (b. 1942), a young painting prodigy from Ankara. The Ulus photograph is a scene of aesthetic initiation. The precocious Kaptan gazes up at one of his recent paintings, his mouth open in speech, as he elucidates his audience about a form of painting that was, at the time, still distant from the mainstream of Turkish taste. The caption directs readers interested in such unusual artistic experiences to the Helikon Association Gallery, an independent art space that had opened just the day before. In this inaugural announcement of Helikon’s activities, undoubtedly placed there by Ecevit, the gallery’s cofounder designated it as a site for radically new viewing practices that stood in stark opposition to the State Exhibitions’ klasik-focused paradigms. 76

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figure 2.3 Photograph announcing the opening of the Helikon Association Gallery on the front page of Ulus, January 18, 1953.

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The young painter Kaptan had made his international debut in Life magazine the year prior, in 1952, as “the Turkish delight of the art world” (figure 2.4).22 His presence in the pages of this major American weekly indicates that discussions about the importance of developing a cadre of national artists for the new nation were not limited to the Turkish context but also had international purchase. In the full-page photograph, the “young man of modern art” sits atop an oversized stool, ringed by more than a dozen of his brightly colored paintings, propped on easels and receding into the background. To his left rest his paint-daubed palette and knife, requisite accoutrements of the artistic photo op. Holding his brush in one hand and a paint rag in the other, the ten-year-old rests his face on his hand, staring at the camera with a world-weary expression. His nonchalant and sophisticated attitude stands in comical contrast to his little-boy overalls and cropped shorts. The paintings shown in Life exhibit the distinct repertoire of “naïve” forms that adult audiences connected to advanced abstraction, including bright color palettes and dark outlines, fragmented pictorial fields, the interjection of pattern, and schematic bodies and faces. The Life feature thus reveals the connection of international discourses about artistic maturity and abstraction to political discourses about national development; the precocious Kaptan may indeed be young, implies Life, but like Turkey itself, he advances toward modernity on an accelerated time line. Between early 1953 and mid-1955, Ecevit and the other intellectuals in the Helikon circle organized approximately twenty-five exhibitions of modern Turkish art.23 Helikon’s founders focused on supporting modern sanat of the sort not accommodated by the State Exhibitions. In Istanbul, Gallery Maya provided a platform for an extraordinarily wide array of production, from painting to ceramics, reproductions to political cartoons. In Ankara, Helikon’s visual arts program was more focused, reflecting its founders’ desire to support artists who pushed the limits of abstract form. Chief among these artists was Cemal Bingöl, an Ankara-based painter and devoted pedagogue who exhibited at Helikon and offered regular painting classes there. As noted in the introductory chapter, Bingöl was originally from the eastern Anatolian city of Erzurum, and studied painting at the Gazi Education Institute in Ankara in the mid1930s, and in the Paris studio of André Lhote in 1949. Because Bingöl and his work did not circulate widely outside the Ankara art world, they are often neglected in art historical accounts of the period. But he was front and center at Helikon, where he showed paintings and collages. One of Bingöl’s works from this period gives a sense of what Ankara audiences would have encountered at Helikon. The vertical, trichromatic painting consists of a bright red background with several black and white geometric forms ranged across its surface (figure 2.5). A number of Turkish artists, including Maide and Şemsettin Arel and Sabri Berkel, also experimented with using letter forms of Ottoman script as a generative source for abstract painting in the 1950s. Like the Arels and Berkel, Bingöl shifted from representational to abstract idioms following a trip to Paris in 78

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figure 2.4 Painting prodigy Hasan Kaptan featured in Life magazine, May 12, 1952. Courtesy Hasan Kaptan. Photograph by Gordon Parks, Getty Images/LIFE Picture Collection.

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figure 2.5 Cemal Bingöl, Composition (Komposizyon), circa 1950s. Oil on board, 121.5 × 75.5 cm. Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Orhan Bingöl.

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the late 1940s. But Bingöl did not adhere as closely to Ottoman letter forms as these other artists, whose painted compositions hover on the border of illegibility but always retain their recognizability as script (figures 0.13 and 0.14). Bingöl’s work differs from these other calligraphic modernists in two ways. First, it is rooted in collage. Bingöl often used collage as a means to work out arrangements of color and form that he would subsequently translate into oils, as is likely the case for this painting. At other times, he incorporated paper cut-outs into the final artwork itself. Second, Bingöl’s lettristic forms are more ambiguous than the Arels’ and Berkel’s overtly scriptural forms. It is equally possible to read Bingöl’s angular geometric forms as schematized renditions of letters from either the Ottoman/Arabic alphabet or modern Turkish (Latin) alphabet. Further, Bingöl’s lettristic forms are stacked atop one another, not ranged along a horizontal axis. In altering their axial orientation, Bingöl also plays with the question of script-as-body and body-as-script, a long-standing tradition in Ottoman and Turkish art that continues across his work from this period.24 Bingöl’s distinct contribution was to synthesize the scriptural impulse of calligraphic modernism with strategies of fragmentation and arrangement coming out of modernist collage. In the winter of 1953, Ulus featured a short article about Bingöl’s Helikon exhibition, which encapsulates the problems the organizers faced introducing new forms of abstraction to mainstream audiences. The article’s author made special note of Bingöl’s adherence to the painting style of an unknown artist named Nafi Güratif: “The painter Cemal Bingöl has opened an exhibition on Mithat Paşa Avenue full of paintings in the style of Nafi Güratif, an emergent style that has existed since 1946 . . . [and] uses as its means the balance of lines and color.” 25 “Nafi Güratif,” it transpired, was not an artist at all but a distortion of the Turkish word non-figüratif, a term borrowed from French to refer to abstract painting. In an era when newspaper articles were frequently dictated over the telephone, such errors were not uncommon. Yet this seemingly minor typographic error in fact speaks eloquently to the novelty of the concept of abstract art that the Helikon circle was attempting to promote in a more mainstream context.26 Most of the Helikon group had spent time abroad, and they sought to establish in Turkey an “association that enables the possibility of advanced (avant-garde) art movements” like those “in other Western countries” they had visited.27 They named their new space after the mountaintop where the muses of Greek myth made their home. Through this designation, the Helikon circle claimed ownership over the classical heritage that NATO and the intra-European political formations of the postwar period, such as the Council of Europe, took as a common cultural foundation.28 It also signaled that the Ankara gallery would serve as a site of creative inspiration for multiple art forms. The composer Bülent Arel, for instance, led the Helikon String Orchestra, which performed regular concerts and continued to play together even after the Democratic Abstractions

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figure 2.6 Ecevit published two photographs of Füreya’s exhibition at the Helikon Association Gallery, including this one, which appeared in Ulus on November 26, 1953. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

gallery’s closure in 1956.29 Bingöl offered elementary painting courses, while artists including Arif Kaptan (Hasan Kaptan’s father), İhsan Cemal Karaburçak, Füreya Koral, and Cemal Tollu gave talks at the space. At least half of Helikon’s exhibitions were documented in the pages of Ulus, where Ecevit used his editorial position to spotlight modernists excluded from the State Exhibitions. In so doing, Ecevit inscribed modern art in a daily news cycle, using the newspaper layout to reiterate the arguments he also made with the written word—that art and politics were equally important parts of the fabric of Turkish life and that Helikon was a key site of their conjuncture. For instance, Ecevit organized one of the first exhibitions of the artist Füreya (1919–1997), wrote two reviews of the show, and published photographs of it in Ulus. Füreya, who went by her first name only, had begun working in ceramics in her late thirties, when she decided to abandon the role of the modern republican woman and wife that she had played for several decades and devote herself to art making full time. Born into a family of means, Füreya moved to Paris in the late 1940s, where she studied with the ceramist Georges Serré (1889–1956) and fired her work in a kiln she shared with graduates of the École des Arts et Métiers before moving back to Istanbul in 1951. Although the grainy black-and-white photographs Ecevit published are unable to capture the brilliant color of Füreya’s glazes or the details of her brushwork, they manage to familiarize readers with the three main formats in which the artist worked at the time (figure 2.6). These include broad, round plates that she embellished with abstracted animal forms (fish, birds) reminiscent of Turkish folk art and organic forms that recollect plants or coral (figure 2.7). Füreya also developed a signature profile for glazed teacups; the narrow base open to broad, open mouths, each with a unique motif painted on the surface or scored into the clay and small enough to hold easily in the palm of the hand. Unfortunately this format also primed them for petty theft. Füreya’s 82

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figure 2.7 Füreya, ceramic plate, 1951. 30 cm. Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Huber Mansion collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

cups were such a hit when they were used at the Turkish pavilion’s cafe at the Brussels world’s fair, Expo 58, that visitors kept stealing them (figure 2.8). Ecevit’s newspaper photograph reflects the importance within Füreya’s oeuvre of a third format, which would prove the most significant (both positively and negatively) to the way audiences in France, Turkey, and the United States received her. These were brightly colored, rectangular ceramic panels that spoke the international language of abstraction but utilized ceramics rather than traditional canvas as their support. By crossing established divides between media (ceramics and painting), Füreya put pressure on the long-standing binary of art versus craft and a host of related associations regarding artistic quality and significance. Her vertical rectangular ceramic panels, for instance, are unique objects that cannot be considered simple “tiles,” whose existence Democratic Abstractions

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figure 2.8 Füreya, ceramic teacup, 1950s. Approximately 5 × 7 cm. Müşerref Cimcoz collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

is justified by being part of larger collection of uniform others. Their vertical rectangular form invokes the canvas, and her use of glaze recalls an abstract painting. These works alternately confounded and excited audiences in the 1950s. In one example, four white cloud-like forms float across its surface (figure 2.9). Behind them, rounded blots of yellow, orange, and pale green glaze, interspersed with the briefest of linear strokes, evoke the blossoms and stems of a summer garden. At the same time, the cloud-like forms provoke a shift in scale, giving the impression of a deep valley or a landscape viewed from afar. Such perceptual shifts are amplified by the fact that the object can be held in the hand and observed up close, or hung on the wall and approached like a painting. On the one hand, the blotches stand as the artist’s signature mark, a sign of her irreproducible originality. But Füreya also willingly subjects these marks of her artistic individuality to the unpredictable workings of the kiln, as in the upper right, where orange and yellow glazes bleed into each other and fuse to become one. Working together as parts of a single rhetorical whole, Ecevit’s exhibition, reviews, and photographs of Füreya’s work brought into the public eye an up-and-coming artist whose hybrid objects were at first coldly received when she debuted them at Gallery Maya in 1951. Ecevit explicitly set out to legitimate an artist whose innovative combination of abstract painting and Ottoman ceramics disqualified her works from inclusion in the State Exhibition but whose challenge to traditional divisions of arts and crafts media would lead to her successes in international markets (see chapter 4). As a sphere of nongovernmental arts activity, contended Ecevit, Helikon would counteract the “dangerous” effects of state patronage and democratize the Turkish cultural sphere.30 The Helikon founders’ use of the term dernek (association) in the gallery’s name functioned as an explicit declaration of their aim to democratize the Turkish art world. A legal designation first introduced when Turkey adopted the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, the dernek is the institutional expression of the belief that a healthy 84

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figure 2.9 Füreya, ceramic panel, early 1950s. 30 × 20 cm. Elif Erdem collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

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democracy depends on the existence of nongovernmental organizations as a complement to state activity. The dernek is also about collective participation; the verb from which it derives, derinmek, means to convene or gather together. The Helikon founders’ decision to label their undertaking in this way established its separation from a state apparatus. It also projected for the gallery a specific role within civil society, as a gathering place where citizens might practice their right to convene and their right to creative expression. If, argued Ecevit, the State Exhibitions encouraged “partisanship, demagoguery, and reactionism” in the cultural sphere, then a grassroots organization like Helikon would serve as a crucial counterbalance to the autocratic state’s harmful involvement in the arts.31 NARRATIVES OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT

Ecevit shared his interest in modern art and democratic social change with an influential community of intellectuals of the postwar period, including many working in the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of prominent American anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists proposed that multimedia exhibitions staged in the museum could be used to develop American citizens’ “democratic personalities.” 32 These thinkers argued that fostering the individual’s latent democratic impulses is the first step toward achieving a larger democratic polity that would be psychologically resistant to the ideological assaults of fascism and totalitarianism. What is more, these American social scientists collaborated with émigré artists from the Bauhaus to design immersive exhibition environments at the Museum of Modern Art that, they believed, would cultivate the democratic character trains of “flexibility, creativity, and individuality.” 33 “By the early 1950s,” writes Turner, “the pursuit of the democratic character had become a defining feature of American life,” and by the end of the decade, the US government had begun distributing these ideas on a global scale through displays at international fairs in Afghanistan, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Russia, and Spain.34 The US-based intellectuals who saw themselves as developing Americans’ democratic personalities were confident in their vision of “a world managed from afar by an all-seeing and technologically all-powerful United States.” 35 But the stakes were rather different in Turkey. Although Turkish citizens had done a laudable job adopting the formal structures of multiparty democracy, argued Ecevit, they had yet to fully internalize the democratic principles that Americans had already made so profoundly their own. In Turkey’s distinct political climate, the task of culture was not to reinforce a preexisting democratic self, as proposed by the US-based intellectuals. Rather, argued Ecevit, art was to catalyze a process of becoming, and initiate the transformation of obedient Turkish subjects into free-thinking democratic citizens—a developmental process. Ecevit’s writings echo the discourse of development that was foundational to emergent theories of modernization that took Turkey as a central case study. Not long before Ecevit moved to Ankara in 1950, a group of Turkish social scientists sponsored 86

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by the Voice of America had arrived in Balgat, a village about five miles outside the city. There, they interviewed local residents to learn about their radio-listening habits, compiling some three hundred interviews that, a few months later, made their way to the desk of prominent American sociologist Daniel Lerner. Out of this data, Lerner devised his famous three-part schema for categorizing the citizens of countries that “we no longer speak of as ‘backward’ but euphemistically as ‘under-developed.’ ” 36 At the lowest tier of Lerner’s hierarchy are the Traditionals, a demographic to whom, he announced, “the ‘modern’ term—individual—. . . applies . . . only with qualifications” because of their “paucity of abstract images of self and society.” 37 Above the Traditionals stand a second tier of Transitionals, those who “have moved a long way towards the awareness of alternatives for such abstractions as ‘Turkey.’ ” 38 At the top of Lerner’s hierarchy are the Moderns, marked by a “high self-consciousness and other-consciousness . . . which seems typical of the most advanced sectors of Western society.” 39 The Modern Turks, according to Lerner, “read Time, travel abroad, have British and American friends, and in most if not all respects are at home with the ‘international’ (shall we say, late-Bauhaus) style in personality as in architecture.” 40 A worldly, free-thinking individual whose personality and aesthetic tastes represented a unified, democratic ethos—this is the type of citizen that Ecevit himself embodied and that he sought to create at Helikon. Ecevit’s unique contribution was to bring the figure of the modern artist into the framework sketched out by thinkers like Lerner. The artist, according to Ecevit, had a crucial role to play in making “democracy, personal freedom, and the rule of law” part of Turkish citizens’ day-to-day lives. Of all a nation’s citizens, contended Ecevit, artists are the most devoted to the cause of the individual, for “man, in all the breadth and depth of his psychological world, is the artist’s primary subject and material.” By modeling the principles of individuality and self-expression, “writers, and in the broadest sense artists” teach “citizens” about their own “individuality and personhood.” Artists, in other words, would be the vanguard leaders of grassroots social change that would assure Turkey’s democratic future. “The most significant proof of how effective artists can be in such a process,” he wrote, “is the importance given in all dictatorships to placing artists under heavy pressure.” Ecevit used the figure of the crowd versus the individual to describe what would result once Turkish citizens had internalized the principles laid out for them by artists. As “individual members of the crowd, which currently appears to the authorities as a nebulous mass, . . . begin to stand apart from one another and come into focus,” Turkey would gradually become a truly democratic polity within a community of nations.41 Ecevit’s project of cultural democratization must be seen as a direct response to Turkey’s ongoing struggle to enter NATO. In 1951, Ecevit had been one of six Turkish journalists hosted by the British government at a press event devoted to explaining the Western powers’ continuing refusal to allow Turkey entry.42 Following Turkey’s admittance to the organization in 1952, Ecevit elatedly reported from a NATO gathering in Democratic Abstractions

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Paris that “fourteen nations had become one,” declaring it “a miracle!” 43 But a few days later, a more sober Ecevit sent back another dispatch from Paris, urging his Turkish readers to renew their efforts to acquire the cultural capital that the NATO charter was designed to protect. “Aside from Turkey, all the other NATO members share common civilizational and cultural foundations,” wrote Ecevit, “whereas Turkey has only started realizing its reforms since the Republic. [Turkey] turned toward Western civilization and began to go down the road to making Western culture its own.” 44 He added that “we owe it not only to ourselves but also to the countries whose community we have now joined . . . to move with even greater speed along this path. We must not only join the life and fate of the West through our military strength, but also with our worldview, with our ways of life.” 45 First inducted to Western-style modernity in the 1920s, Turkey’s recently manufactured citizens bore potential, argued Ecevit, but must continue to strive.46 Ecevit’s writings are narratives of self-improvement, focused on the disciplined development of the Turkish self and composed in what I am calling the aspirational mode. Ecevit adopted the teleological and comparative frameworks of postwar theories of modernization. But he did so from an interstitial rank within their hierarchical matrices for viewing the world of nations. In contrast to American intellectuals, for whom such theories represented a triumphal affirmation of American superiority, for Ecevit, they generated narratives of self-improvement on a national scale. Ecevit’s aspirational writings of the 1950s combine a critical evaluation of Turkish democracy with an unrelenting optimism for the future and an insistence that it was perfectly possible for Turkish citizens to collectively join the ranks of the Moderns. Ecevit returns repeatedly to the image of the nation as child, a citizen-in-formation, writing that “our country is like a child whose bones have not yet developed, we can give it direction like a child.” 47 Ecevit’s aspirational texts argue that the Turkish subject bears latent democratic potential but must act on themselves in a critical, self-aware manner in order to realize the fullest expression of these traits. Ecevit’s 1954 essay “The Artist and Politics” condenses his aspirational arguments into a single column. “In our country, which has only recently passed through democracy’s gates, people’s individuality and personhood have not yet begun to be considered as a social problem,” announces Ecevit in his opening lines.48 Of all the tasks facing Turkey at this juncture in its history, argues the critic, the most important one is to “eradicate the lingering mindset of thousands of years of dictatorship, which gives no importance to the rights and interests of the individual alongside the interests of society.” Since “most of the state authorities and politicians refuse to consider the people for whom they are responsible as psychological singularities, as entire and singular worlds unto themselves,” argues Ecevit, the task of demanding due recognition of the individual now fell to individual citizens. Ecevit concludes, “Politicians and state authorities will only feel the need to abandon this mindset when a local citizenry compels them to do so.” In Ecevit’s framing, Turkey’s citizens face a choice; they can 88

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either strive to give just as much importance to the rights of the individual as they already place on the interests of society, or they can follow the path of the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, like “Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.” 49 For American modernizers like Lerner and Thornburg, as well as for Ecevit, the stakes of cultural democratization were high. Thornburg, for instance, regularly told his Turkish interlocutors that Turkey had to provide more “opportunit[ies] for creative activity on the part of the Turkish citizen regarded as an individual” if it wanted access to American aid.50 The new worldviews produced by such cultural engagements were not merely abstract principles but also requirements for economic aid from the United States. The process of teaching citizens to realize their democratic selves, argued Ecevit in his columns, would take place at a venue of his design, Helikon, and through individuals’ encounters with a particular form of culture: modern art. ABSTRACT ART, DEMOCRATIC LOOKING

Ten days after the photograph announcing Helikon’s opening appeared on the front page of Ulus, the newspaper published a second image of the same exhibition. Once again, the young artist Hasan Kaptan is shown leading a group of visitors on a tour of his work. Surrounded by paintings on all sides, five figures of descending height fix their gaze on the painting to which Kaptan directs their attention. Their bodies and their shared sight line plot a diagonal perceptive trajectory, aimed with resolute precision at its target on the wall. Ecevit is in the center, and the other viewers are dwarfed by US ambassador George McGhee on the left, who is prominently identified in the accompanying caption (figure 2.10). At its most basic level, the subject of the photograph is the shared act of looking. But, seen as a polemic component of Ecevit’s political theories, it is also a scene of modern citizenship. Here, well-dressed visitors equipped with all the sartorial accoutrements of Western-style modernity freely engage in a public activity, the consumption of modern art. The image of Helikon’s opening contends that the official representative of the world’s most powerful democracy and urbane Turkish citizens share a common taste for such activities. Like the first photograph of the exhibition’s opening, this one, too, draws a powerful connection between the viewing of modern art and the practices of democratic citizenship. Furthermore, they advertise Helikon as the primary site where such democratic looking takes place. Ecevit positioned Helikon as a place where Turkish individuals could develop into democratic citizens through a transformative viewing experience. He presented the gallery as a place where citizens could learn from modern artists the key principles of self-awareness and self-expression, which, he argued, “must become as integral a part of our daily lives as they are in Western democracies.” 51 Like his contemporaries in the United States, Ecevit endeavored through his art gallery to “build a framework of principles, draw visitors into that framework, and there allow them to see themselves as free individuals among a world of others.” 52 At Helikon, suggested the journalist, Turkey’s Democratic Abstractions

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figure 2.10 Photograph of Hasan Kaptan’s exhibition published in Ulus, January 29, 1953. Courtesy Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation of Science, Art and Culture.

recently enfranchised citizens might learn to exercise their individual rights by engaging with the realm of culture and with modern sanat in particular. Ecevit favored modern sanat because, to him, it represented the most condensed expression of the individual self. He made the case to his Ulus readers that “art is an expression of our consciousness or even subconscious” and that it is valuable because it “enables us to grasp many things that are difficult for the intellect or logic to account for.” 53 In Ecevit’s view, citizens’ encounters with such distilled views of individual consciousness would teach them to see themselves as distinct entities, who might “raise their voice above the crowd” and demand their rightful due from a domineering state.54 Indeed, argued Ecevit, it is only as individual citizens make use of their right to self-expression that democracy firmly takes root and thrives. As members of the Turkish public confronted modern artists’ visual expressions of their personal interior worlds (iç dünyaları) and the interior depths of the soul (ruh derinliği), they would become increasingly aware of their own individuality.55 This awareness, in turn, would inspire them to become more vocal participants in Turkish democracy. Ecevit saw abstract art as the culmination of a teleological progression of national culture common to all democracies. The critic put this idea forward in a review of an exhibition of American handcrafts held at Ankara University in 1953, a review that is as much about Ecevit’s vision for the arts in Turkey as it is about the exhibition. Ecevit argues that Turkey was at an early stage of a twinned trajectory of abstraction and democracy that the United States had already completed. The United States, notes the journalist approvingly, had achieved its own development as a “homogenous nation” following its break from an imperial power by gradually allowing formal standards of abstraction to seep into the folk art of the new nation-state.56 “The American of today, has a tendency for simplicity and clarity of lines, in the fields of painting, industry, architecture, furniture, and clothing,” he writes, adding that “the over-crowded patterns of the folk arts of most countries” are “scarcer in America” and had “developed” into “abstract forms.” 57 Ecevit argues that Turkey had gone through a parallel process 90

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of establishing democracy in the wake of an imperial past and was well on its way to making abstract forms as central to its national culture as the United States had done. So closely related were abstract forms to a democratic order in Ecevit’s mind that he repeatedly claimed that abstract art had first appeared in Turkey in 1946 as a direct result of the transition to multiparty democracy that year.58 Turkish artists had, indeed, taken up abstraction in the late 1940s, after several prominent painters (including Nurullah Berk and Sabri Berkel) made return trips to Paris and began to promote the more abstract approaches they encountered there. But Ecevit’s use of this specific, politically significant date also reinforced his arguments about the direct connection between abstract painting and the state of Turkish democracy. Ecevit vividly describes the transformative effects of viewing modern sanat in a 1953 account of a conversation he overheard at the State Exhibition between two strangers who were discussing Sabri Berkel’s From a Corner of Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye’den Bir Köşe) (figure 2.11). Berkel’s canvas was one of five abstract paintings that the jury had allowed to appear alongside some two hundred klasik works at the State Exhibition that year. Though the original painting (ca. 1952–1953) is now lost, Berkel later produced a second version, in which he altered the color palette but retained the exact composition. The painting’s central subject is a famous sixteenth-century Ottoman mosque, Süleymaniye Camii, located in Istanbul and emblematic of the Ottoman golden age under the famous architect Mimar Koca Sinan (1489–1588).59 The eye is drawn, immediately, to the image of the mosque that forms the painting’s core: its famous domes, portrayed at a slight slant so as to provoke the sense of looking upward at the monumental hilltop structure. From a Corner of Süleymaniye registers multiple, sequential moments of architectural encounter all at once. The leftward-leaning grid that juts into the painting’s frame from the lower right recollects the iron window grilles of the mosque complex, and the experience of viewing the structure through the window of a lower building. At the same time, Berkel’s canvas hints at the experience of looking upward, into the interior of the mosque’s mighty dome, once the viewer is inside. This effect is achieved through the three overlaid circles that cascade down, increasing in size, from the upper left to the lower right of the canvas. The right-hand edges of the first two are marked off in a bright blue, and the third in a yellow-orange. While the blue at first suggests the sky, the small crescents of decorative edging that rest along the bottom lip of the top two circles imply interior architectural detail. It is a painting with multiple vantage points and temporal moments, which seeks to turn the tools of abstract painting toward an appreciation of a pre-modern, Ottoman artistic tradition that many considered at odds with such modern idioms. From a Corner of Süleymaniye built on a number of recurring themes within Berkel’s work. Berkel was originally from Skopje, in present-day North Macedonia, and moved to Istanbul in 1935 following six years of studies in Florence. As a young artist, Berkel assiduously recorded the urban landscape of Skopje resulting from some five centuries Democratic Abstractions

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figure 2.11 Sabri Berkel, From a Corner of Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye Bir Köşesinden), 1981 version of painting originally produced circa 1952–53. Oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

of Ottoman rule (1392–1912), sketching the pencil-thin minarets and piled domes that were the hallmarks of Ottoman mosque architecture. A 1934 etching, Hamamönü, takes the name of a Skopje neighborhood that references the Ottoman bath, or hamam (figure 2.12). Berkel uses the mosque as a structuring component of a picturesque landscape in which a lone figure enters a warren of stone-walled buildings and uneven 92

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figure 2.12 Sabri Berkel, Skopje, Hamamönü (Üsküp, Hamamönü), 1934. Zinc etching, 39 × 49 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

streets. A lone minaret punctures the empty sky. In this work, Berkel exploits the distinct qualities of the medium of etching to produce moments of visual abstraction. For instance, in the irregular stretch of street in the foreground, he utilizes the high contrast of black and white, achieved through the careful buildup of marks. The artist meticulously maps out the rough and variegated surfaces—roof tiles, irregular walls, and rutted cobblestone streets—as they recede into a tighter and tighter thicket of fragments at the image’s heart. In both Hamamönü and From a Corner of Süleymaniye, the artist experiments with the ways that complex fragments can cohere into architectonic volume to capture the experiential dimensions of encountering Ottoman architecture. Many contemporary viewers found the experience of viewing From a Corner of Süleymaniye discomforting. As he recounts in his article, Ecevit observed two strangers deep in conversation in front of the painting, one young, one old, who responded differently from one another to Berkel’s artwork: Democratic Abstractions

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“Just look at that, my friend,” said [the older man], “Is there anyone on earth who likes this type of painting?” The young man, who had been staring at Sabri Berkel’s From a Corner of Süleymaniye for the last half hour, answered rather harshly: “Of course, sir. . . . Are we supposed to look at your Bosphorus landscapes forever? Enough already. Why don’t you take a closer look at this painting instead.” In Ecevit’s hands, the two men’s conversation becomes a modern parable about the transformative power of the individual’s encounter with abstract painting. The younger man stands for those who are already comfortable with the new perceptual demands of paintings such as Berkel’s and, by extension, “the new” more generally. The older man stands for those who remain tethered to the perceptual idioms of days past. He represents the obedient acceptance of the increasingly outdated political and cultural paradigms of the single-party era: “Where should I look, brother, I can’t make head or tail of these convoluted lines!” [said the older man to the younger one]. “You have to be attentive in order to understand, sir. You don’t look at this painting like you do at the other! Use your head a little.” “All right, in that case, what are these lines? Explain it to me so that I might also understand!” 60 Although he is initially resistant, the older man bears within himself the potential to adapt to this novel cultural form. He demonstrates flexibility and a willingness to immerse himself in Berkel’s abstractions. Through this series of commands (“take a closer look,” “be attentive,” “use your head a little”) the youthful spectator urges his older companion to consciously adjust his individual perception. This is the very process that Ecevit had argued would transform Turkey’s subjects into democratic personalities. The parable’s central lesson arrives in its final line, when the older man willingly opens himself up to a novel perceptual framework, assenting, peki (all right), and asking his enlightened fellow citizen to explain the logic of this new cultural expression to him so he “might also understand.” Even the most traditional and aged of Turkish citizens, even those who greatly value the political and lifestyle paradigms of the republican past, suggests Ecevit, possess the capacity to consider new points of view. Indeed, they must do so if Turkish democracy is to survive. Ecevit complemented his written arguments about art and democracy with a series of visual arguments made through the photographs of Helikon that he assigned to Ulus’s staff photographers and published regularly in the paper. In the fall of 1953, for example, Ulus featured a new abstract painting each month. On October 6, a photograph of a painting by well-known painter Ferruh Başağa (1914–2010) showed a large 94

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canvas covered in a web of arcing lines alongside a small portrait of a woman. Taken at a slight angle so as to encompass the gallery space in which the paintings are displayed, the photograph implies that visitors might experience Başağa’s artwork for themselves if only they visit Helikon (figure 1.4). On October 17, Ulus readers were greeted by a work by a lesser-known artist, Nail Paza, in which schematized figures are distributed evenly across the painting’s field. In November, the loose, gestural brushwork and saturated colors of Füreya’s ceramic panels were translated into a black-and-white newsprint abstraction in the pages of Dünya.61 And on December 2, Ulus published a photograph of a canvas by Cemal Bingöl, whose paintings used fields of solid color to replicate the effect of boxy paper cutouts laid atop and alongside one another. These images made Ulus itself into a display space, a means of distributing modern Turkish art in reproduction to distant national publics. They introduced into the standard grid of the daily paper visual forms that differed markedly from those of the handshaking politicians and international military engagements that they abutted. In this way, the Ulus photographs extended existing practices of circulating artworks in reproduction, such as postcards and magazines. They also resonated with the premises of André Malraux’s well-known 1951 volume Les Voix du Silence, published in English in 1953 as The Museum without Walls. Malraux’s book, which aimed to circulate great works of art in photographic reproduction as a democratically accessible “museum,” reached Turkey quite rapidly in the early 1950s.62 By demanding from the reader a new type of visual engagement, they served as a preview of the novel modes of looking that took place at Ecevit’s art gallery. If, in his writings, Ecevit offered his readers a social and political justification for why they should consume such art forms, in these photographs, he primed them visually for the artistic encounter that was intended to develop democratic citizens of the modern world. In February 1956, Ulus published its last photograph of Helikon, showing three spectators visiting a group exhibition of work by a half-dozen local artists. Four months earlier, angry crowds had broken windows, looted shops, and attacked the sizable Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities of Istanbul in response to the setting off of a small bomb at the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Greece, next door to Atatürk’s childhood home. The bombing was later found to have been engineered by the Democrat Party leadership to foster anti-Greek sentiment. During the period of martial law following this state-sanctioned violence, the government temporarily shut down Helikon, citing as its reason the fact that the gallery’s name referenced Greek mythology. The administration also closed most of the major national papers, including Ulus. It was apparent by this point that many of the democratic promises of the early 1950s had begun to dissolve. As intellectuals across the country debated how to “effectively oppose the steps the government has already taken to do away with Turkish intellectual life,” Ecevit turned his attention more toward politics.63 In August 1956, he applied for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to spend the 1957 calendar year at Democratic Abstractions

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Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Four months later, he and his wife, Rahşan, took up residence at 13 Chauncy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Helikon never again resumed operation; the 1956 group show was its last. Ecevit’s effort to remain active in both art and politics was the defining challenge of his early career. When he moved to London in 1946, he had discovered with regret that he “had to work very hard at the office” and could not devote as much time to his humanistic pursuits as he wished.64 Ever the keen observer, the owner of Gallery Maya, Adalet Cimcoz, identified Ecevit’s career-defining conflict in 1954, when she quipped in one of her society columns that “some people think this sensitive poet friend should drop politics and get back to art.” 65 Over the following years, Ecevit continued to describe his main “problem as a journalist” as that of maintaining “a balance between [his] literary interests and the requirements of a daily political column in a party newspaper.” 66 Tensions between art and politics defined Ecevit’s year at Harvard. On the one hand, he pursued his stated goal of acquiring “more knowledge on social and economic subjects” by auditing classes in the social relations department and reading widely about the history of the press and Ottoman political history.67 He attended the International Press Institute Seminar at the United Nations in New York and gave a talk titled “Democratization of Turkey” at Harvard’s International Seminar. 68 But Ecevit also pursued his declared goal of seeing all the modern art the United States had to offer. He and Rahşan made a special trip to New York to see a landmark Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and began planning a trip to visit art collections in Chicago. The telegram that put Ecevit on the path to the country’s leadership and drew him away from the world of art arrived at his Cambridge home on September 7, 1957. Back in Ankara, the Democrat Party had advanced the national elections to the following month in an effort to ride a wave of popular approval and secure the presidency for a third time. “New developments in Turkey compel us to return home immediately,” Ecevit wrote to his Rockefeller Foundation sponsors, canceling his planned visit to art museums in Chicago.69 “I feel that it would be my duty to be in Ankara during the election campaign,” explained Ecevit, adding that “I feel it is simply a matter of moral obligation for me not to stay away during a period when most of my colleagues will face so much trouble and risk, and when, as a columnist, one would have to base his comments on day to day developments on the spot.” 70 A week and a half later, the Ecevits were back in Ankara, where events took another surprising turn. Although he had returned in order to cover unfolding political events, he was nominated as a candidate. Within the month, Ecevit was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi). So began the fifty-year political career that Ecevit pursued until the final years of his life. By 1960, Rockefeller Foundation reports on the former fellow noted that Ecevit was “now the leading figure of Ulus” and “really running it.” 71 A year later, he 96

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became minister of labor. By 1972, he had assumed the leadership of the RPP, the very party that he had returned from London to defend some two decades prior. Ecevit had already twice served as prime minister when, in 1988, he took up his pen to write about the gallery one last time in an essay simply titled “Helikon.” In the essay, which appeared in a short-lived arts and culture magazine called Gergedan, Ecevit recounts the gallery’s origins in the distinct political climate of early 1950s Ankara. The Helikon circle “were all young people who had assimilated democracy . . . [who] thought that expecting the state to provide everything in the realm of arts and culture was problematic,” writes Ecevit.72 Ecevit’s final Helikon essay reiterates, once again and nearly forty years after the gallery’s opening, that the stakes of his writings, his work as a gallerist, and his political career remain the same: nothing less than the success or failure of Turkish democracy itself.

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3 “THE FIRST COUP IN THE TURKISH ART WORLD” The Developing Turkey Competition of 1954

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N SEPTEMBER 11, 1954, THREE EUROPEAN ART critics found themselves staring down a long row of monumental canvases hung in the Istanbul Sports and Exhibition Hall, an imposing modernist edifice overlooking an athletic arena in the center of the city. The exhibition was just one of many events that Paul Fierens, Herbert Read, and Lionello Venturi— who hailed from Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Italy, respectively—had attended over the previous week in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), which took place in the Turkish cultural capital that year. Each day, some two hundred AICA members convened conference panels and visited the city’s famed historical monuments; in the evenings, they attended a flurry of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, and formal dinners hosted by local dignitaries and members of the art world. As three of the most prestigious visiting critics, Fierens, Read, and Venturi had also been invited to serve on the jury of Developing Turkey (Kalkınan Türkiye), a competitive exhibition organized

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figure 3.1 Cemal Tollu, Composition with Goats (Keçili Komposizyon), 1954. Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm. İş Bankası collection. Courtesy Ahmet Tollu.

by Yapı Kredi Bank. The Istanbul bank had an established history of supporting the arts and wished to take advantage of the presence of so many international visitors to draw the world’s attention to modern Turkish art. Developing Turkey was part of a suite of art competitions organized to celebrate the bank’s history of arts philanthropy and the tenth anniversary of its founding. While the most substantial prizes, some 16,000 Turkish lira in total, went to the winners of the painting contest, the bank also disbursed a dozen awards across the categories of poster design, music, theatrical scripts, and books, and it staged an ambitious folk dancing competition.1 At Developing Turkey, Fierens, Read, and Venturi were asked to select ten prizewinners from three dozen uniformly sized paintings focusing on an assigned theme: “the diverse activities in Turkey’s economic life,” articulated elsewhere as simply “labor and production” (iş ve istihsal).2 In order to maintain the artists’ anonymity, their names were hidden from the jury during their review. The paintings were given individual numbers and referred to by a common title, Production (İstihsal). Developing Turkey attracted a wide array of participants, from unknown amateurs and art students to senior members of the local art world, such as Cemal Tollu. Tollu’s canvas later came to be known as Composition with Goats (Keçili Kompozisyon), after the herd of goats that occupy the painting’s midground (figure 3.1).3 A breed native to Anatolia, long-haired Angora goats were often deployed as a symbol of autochthonous 100

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national identity in Turkey. Tollu’s canvas deployed the well-established iconography that he and his peers had forged in the long 1930s as part of their shared mission to develop a national art for the new republic. This included a focus on the region of Anatolia as the Turkish heartland, and an emphasis on the peasantry as the vehicle of the nation’s cultural and economic development. In Tollu’s painting, Turkish peasants bearing sheaves of wheat converge from all sides upon a lush green field, dotted with trees, that lies at the center of the painting’s horizon. In the foreground and holding down the composition in each of its corners stand two anchoring figures wearing the signature garments of the Anatolian peasantry. On the right is a woman with a red, flat-topped head scarf; on the left is a seated man, his arms outstretched to hold the long, thin neck of a saz, a traditional stringed instrument. The central herd of goats is tended by a shepherd, clad in a flat cap and rough, white woolen cloak used for protection from wind and rain. Tollu’s 1954 painting draws on the lessons of the European atelier to build a symbolism-laden image of national development. Tollu had studied in Paris and Munich in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he spent several months in each place training in the studios of André Lhote, Fernand Léger, Marcel Gromaire, and Hans Hoffman.4 The fragmentation of the landscape into a series of abutting geometric forms, and his obdurate pyramidal composition, to which each stylized human body must bend, indicate that Tollu had absorbed the formal lessons taught in these artists’ studios. The meeting point of peasant, field, and sun marked by the intersecting diagonals of the painting’s pyramidal composition is both the compositional and narrative apex of Tollu’s allegory of development. The painting predicts a prosperous future thanks to the ongoing labor of the Turkish people and the richness of the country’s natural resources, the latter represented in the form of the cotton, wheat, and baskets of produce borne by the peasants. Tollu’s canvas simultaneously celebrates the Turkish people’s ongoing efforts to develop their country and exhorts its anticipated national audience to continue this noble work. Like Tollu, most of the artists who participated in Developing Turkey produced monumental scenes of industrious humanity at work. The artist Zeki Faik İzer (1905–1988) had gained fame in the 1930s with his gigantic canvas Road to Revolution (İnkilap Yolunda) (1933), a reinterpretation of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 Liberty Leading the People in which İzer swapped out the allegorical figures of the French revolution for those of the Turkish revolution. As in this previous work, İzer filled his 1954 canvas Production with established symbols of Turkish nationhood (figure 3.2). At its center sits a placid female figure with a child at her breast, surrounded by a halo of golden wheat fields. This is the Anatolian ana, or mother, embodiment of the fertile Turkish heartland and the recipient of various agricultural riches that an array of figures bring her from all sides. İzer, who had finished a term as director of the State Academy of Fine Arts not long before the contest, shared Tollu’s investment in the highly codified rules of composition, including the common pyramidal format of their canvases. But where Tollu deployed “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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figure 3.2 Zeki Faik İzer, Production (İstihsal), 1954. Oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm. Yapı Kredi Bank collection. Courtesy Ayşegül İzer.

cubistic strategies to knit together his vision of “labor and production,” İzer opted for a softer, more lyrical brushstroke that emphasized the lushness of the nation’s resources. Alongside established figures like Tollu and İzer, the contest also included submissions by up-and-coming artists like Salih Acar (1927–2001), who was in his final year of studies at the academy. Acar’s Production consists of an Edenic scene of four nude figures gathering fruit, rendered with bold graphic forms and a trichromatic palette of reds, whites, and browns. The painting harkens back to an imaginary preindustrial moment in the history of Turkish labor and productivity. At the same time, two anachronistic smokestacks, symbolizing a later phase of production, draw the timeless scene back into the present moment (figure 3.3). As they progressed down the row of paintings at the exhibition, Fierens, Read, and Venturi stopped in front of a canvas whose swirling vortex of brushstrokes interrupted the many images of peasants tilling the land, sowing crops, and herding flocks (figure 3.4). Against a livid red-brown sky hung a burning yellow sun, white hot at the center and spiraling outward. Its lower edge brushed the painting’s dramatically tilted horizon line, which careened sharply upward and to the right. This prominent form subsequently gave the painting its unofficial title, Sun Rising (Doğan Güneş).5 Unlike its neighbors, Sun Rising did not cohere into a unified allegorical whole. Instead, it offers an ambiguous scene of natural dynamism in which the theme of “labor 102

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figure 3.3 Salih Acar, Production (İstihsal), 1954. Oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm. Yapı Kredi Bank collection.

and production” is difficult to discern. As the sun touches the horizon, its spiraling rays join the roiling stream of blues, greens, and reds below, though it is not clear whether the sun gives or takes its energies from the dynamic stream of color. Nor is it clear whether the thick skeins of paint designate the furrows of a tilled field or the moving surface of the sea. In the painting’s lower right, three shades—dark silhouettes wearing long skirts, each bearing a burden on her back—progress toward the right. Where they are going, whether they float or walked, what they carry, all is ambiguous, obscured by the painter’s brushstrokes, which repeatedly bring the viewer to the brink of recognition only to make the illusion dissolve into an unreconcilable mass of tangled strokes. When the jury announced at the exhibition opening that evening that they had awarded the first prize of 5,000 lira to Sun Rising, “the room exploded,” recalled the art critic and gallerist Bülent Ecevit.6 Four days later, Tollu, whose Composition with Goats won sixth place, published a vitriolic response in the newspaper Yeni Sabah. In his lengthy and wide-ranging article, Tollu attacked the artist, the jury, and the exhibition organizer alike. Condemning the contest’s “laughable verdict,” Tollu described the winning painting as nothing more than a “small corner of a Van Gogh enlarged.” 7 The academy professor’s essay launched a heated debate that soon split the Turkish art world in two. The winner was not, as many had predicted, an established professor from the academy but an aristocratic printmaker—and a woman, at that. Aliye Berger (1903–1974) came “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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figure 3.4 Aliye Berger, Production (İstihsal), 1954. Oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm. Yapı Kredi Bank collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

from a famous Istanbul family, the Şakir Paşas, who counted amongst their ranks some of Turkey’s most important modern artists. These included the painter Fahrelnissa Zeid (Berger’s sister, whom she visited in Berlin and Paris frequently in the 1930s), the painter Nejad Devrim (Zeid’s son), the novelist Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı (Berger’s older brother, who wrote with the pen name Fisherman of Helicarnassus), and the ceramist Füreya Koral (Berger’s cousin, also a woman, and the subject of chapter 4). The family’s collection of talent was so unusual that one reporter called it the “Şakir Paşa family miracle.” 8 Berger was already followed by a hint of scandal. In 1947, she had married her childhood violin teacher, a Hungarian musician named Karl Berger, with whom she had long carried on an illicit affair. Tragically, her new husband died of a heart attack just six months after the couple formalized their relationship. Following his death, Berger fled to London, where Zeid was in residence at the Iraqi embassy along with her husband, Prince Zeid al-Hussein. While little is known about Berger’s pivotal three years in London, she spent a substantial portion of the time training under the printmaker John Buckland Wright, producing several hundred prints along the way. Berger returned to Istanbul in 1950. The following year, at the age of forty-eight, she made her artistic debut with a solo show of a hundred engravings, held at the French Consulate, a frequently used exhibition space for Istanbul’s artistic community. Much of Berger’s early work portrays scenes from her privileged life. In London, she produced picturesque landscapes set in Regents Park and the gardens of Kensing104

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figure 3.5 Aliye Berger, Bedroom (Yatak Odası), late 1940s. Etching, 35.5 × 36 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

ton Palace. Once back in Turkey, Berger often cast a nostalgic eye on “old Istanbul,” showing the city’s grandiose mosques and teeming bazaars. Other prints offer a window into her family’s leisurely lifestyle in their mansion on one of the Prince’s Islands, just off the Istanbul coastline, under titles like Listening to Mozart and A Cup of Coffee. Berger’s prints are atmospheric and picturesque, sometimes verging on gothic: she returns repeatedly to themes of death and loss, and she uses the print medium’s darklight contrasts to amplify her themes of sorrow and hope. In one early print, Bedroom (circa mid-1940s), a tall, narrow candlestick and a chaotic pile of papers and books rest atop a table. An inky black curtain holds back the light from a window beyond (figure 3.5). To the right is a metal bed frame, whose proximity to these intellectual accoutrements speaks to a life immersed in thought. Further to the right hangs a pale, ghostly form. At first, it seems simply to be another “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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curtain, obscured by the room’s darkness. On a second look, however, it becomes clear that the spectral form, which hovers just above a violin resting on the bedclothes, is also Berger’s evocation of the spirit of her deceased musician spouse. At the contest, Berger’s critics pointed to these features of her work to argue that she did not deserve to win first prize. Noting that Berger had previously worked primarily as a printmaker, and on a far smaller scale than the monumental Sun Rising, her detractors contended that she had abandoned her true artistic investments in pursuit of the cash prize. They also argued that Berger’s focus on scenes from her own privileged life reflected her indifference to the collective project of national development that the contest aimed to promote. To this day, the scholarship tends to present Berger’s work as primarily romantic and autobiographical.9 Yet these interpretations overlook Berger’s substantial engagement with ongoing processes of modernization, especially as evidenced in the city where she had grown up, Istanbul. Construction, a narrow, vertical etching Berger likely made in the early 1950s, exemplifies this overlooked dimension of her work (figure 3.6). At its luminous center stands a heroic worker, legs spread wide and arms upraised. The force of his hammer’s blow shatters the pictorial field into bright shards of white which splinter the surrounding darkness. The artist’s declared subject is “construction,” at a moment when Istanbul underwent a complete transformation, and Berger approaches the topic with a critical eye.10 The angular scaffolding on which the worker stands has flattened a series of smaller, more humble dwellings, including a diminutive tilted house in the lower left corner, obscured by slashes of gray. In the lower right, a line of pedestrians hasten away, bearing their belongings with them. Berger’s contrasting use of line—a rounded, hand-drawn contour for the figures and a sharp, angular line for the worker and the edifice he builds—underscores the conflict between the hostile forces of progress imposed from above and the vulnerable population fleeing the change that has made their city so inhospitable. Modernizing development, suggests Berger, may well proceed in the name of the national good but it also takes a toll on human life. As I elaborate at the end of this chapter, prints such as these offer a more expansive framework in which to interpret Sun Rising, beyond the biographical questions that preoccupied her critics at the time. While Berger’s detractors couched their criticism in terms of gender, class, and artistic training, the public debate extended far beyond these personal questions. The international jury’s verdict seemed to prove, once and for all, that established approaches to representing “developing Turkey” were no longer relevant in the postwar period. The local art world was thrown into crisis. Scores of anonymous citizens wrote letters to the editors of local papers, acrimonious losing artists penned editorials, and Fierens, Read, and Venturi enlisted local supporters to help them defend themselves in the Turkish press. “Suddenly the tiny exhibition announcements buried in the back pages of the newspaper have become one of the most important topics of discussion,” commented the artist Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, noting that everyone 106

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figure 3.6 Aliye Berger, Construction, early 1950s. Etching, 64.5 × 27 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

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seemed to have caught “the competition disease.”11 Berger’s painting became a succès de scandale, her triumph so divisive that one critic dubbed it “the first coup in the Turkish art world.”12 This chapter mines the extensive archive of public debate about Developing Turkey in order to reveal the ways that the Turkish artistic community critically rethought established approaches to art and development in the early Cold War. At Developing Turkey, long-standing paradigms for understanding art and development intersected with a new set of Cold War–era questions around abstraction and figuration, democracy and authoritarianism, nationalism and internationalism. The dozens of responses that proliferated in the wake of the exhibition constitute one of the most extensive written records of Turkish thinking about these questions in the 1950s, a record all the more important in a context with few accessible archives. This collection of texts is also a valuable index of the Turkish art world’s dialogue with an international community present in Istanbul under the auspices of AICA, a UNESCO subsidiary founded in 1948 that counted among its members many of the top international critics of the day. Although Turkish art histories commonly mention the importance of the contest and the AICA meeting of September 1954, the French and Turkish archives have never been analyzed together in depth, and never before in English.13 As a multilingual discussion focused on one central question—how should one represent national development on canvas?—the Developing Turkey debate provides a window into transnational conversations about painting and national development at the peak of the early Cold War. A MOMENT OF CRISIS

The Developing Turkey debate might never have taken place had Yapı Kredi Bank’s art advisor, Vedat Nedim Tör, not made two contradictory choices in the organization of the event. By the time the exhibition opened, Tör (1897–1985) had been working at the intersection of cultural and economic development for nearly thirty years. His first important decision—to privately counsel painters to emphasize figural rather than abstract forms—reflects an attachment to the visual idioms of the earlier moment in which his career had begun. In the days following the contest, several artists alleged that Tör had told them to submit paintings that were “legible” (anlaşılan) rather than abstract. One anonymous commentator explained that Tör had told participating artists “that their overly modern paintings would not be received favorably” and that “even their bunches of cotton and sheaths of wheat should look lively and legible, ‘as if you could hold them in your hand.’ ”14 Decades of conditioning at the juried State Exhibitions had taught Turkish artists the profitability of catering to the personal tastes of exhibition authorities. Anxious not to pass up the opportunity to win a prize, the majority of participants “did everything they could to make cotton look like cotton, wheat look like wheat, fish look like fish, and men look like men—even those artists otherwise inclined towards abstraction,” explained the same anonymous writer.15 108

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Tör’s second critical choice was to call in a jury of European critics to adjudicate the event and lend it an air of international legitimacy. Somehow, Tör failed to foresee that the jury he had invited might perceive in an unfavorable light the “legible” approaches he had encouraged artists to use.16 As continental critics affiliated with the cause of a democratic Europe, Fierens, Read, and Venturi read the collection of monumental, figural canvases at Developing Turkey as indicative of a conformism that reflected badly on Turkey’s attitude toward freedom of expression. Drawing on postwar discourses about political and artistic liberty, and in direct opposition to Tör’s metric of legibility, the jury used what they called “measures of freedom” (hürriyet ölçüleri) to anoint those paintings they thought demonstrated the freest expression of artists’ “powers of imagination.”17 In rewarding Aliye Berger’s Sun Rising, Fierens, Read, and Venturi prioritized individual expression and nonconformism, values associated with democratic political models in a global fight against totalitarianism. They bluntly stated their reasoning: “None of the other painters managed to work as freely as the one that received first prize.”18 The Turkish art world generally welcomed Berger’s painterly coup. Critics like Adnan Benk, Bülent Ecevit, and İhsan Cemal Karaburçak described the European critics’ verdict as a wake-up call for the modern Turkish art world, proof that the artistic and institutional approaches that had accrued over the previous three decades were no longer effective in the postwar period. In the long 1930s, when Tollu and his peers had first begun to forge a new art for the young republic, allegorical figuration had seemed one of several equally viable solutions. Now, however, such approaches looked embarrassingly outdated. Further, the jury’s celebration of Berger, rather than an individual who had trained at the academy, cast into doubt the entire Turkish art machine itself—that complex of institutions, practices, and premises that Tollu’s generation had constructed with the goal of turning artists from “raw materials” to “finished products,” as the academy director Namık İsmail had put it in 1932 (see the introduction to this book). For many, Berger’s win confirmed what other members of the Turkish art world had already begun to argue: artists should prioritize individual vision above all else, and abstract painting was a particularly effective means to this end.19 Beyond confirming a set of formal prescriptions for the future, however, Developing Turkey also suggested that Turkish artists needed to rethink and redouble their efforts to cultivate a modern “mentality” (zihniyet) in art. “On hearing the verdict, a young painter exclaimed, ‘This means that everything we’ve learned about painting is wrong!’ ” recounted Ecevit in a three-column account of the controversial exhibition and the popular response. Ecevit used this anecdote to encourage others to adopt the European critics’ metrics of modernity, in which self-expression, not conformism to official decree or pursuit of monetary gain, was to be the guiding value. “If [the jury’s verdict] raises the suspicion, for even a single Turkish painter . . . that everything they had learned about painting might have been wrong,” argued Ecevit, “then this jury has done a great service to Turkish painting.” 20 For the optimistic Ecevit, the young artist’s “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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revelation was a positive sign that Turkish artists were already well on their way to obtaining a new mindset for the contemporary moment. The sense of crisis surrounding Developing Turkey was only enhanced by the crises already pervading national politics and the economy. Developing Turkey took place during an economic downturn, when the previous years’ optimism about Turkey’s rapid liberalization and growing bonds with Europe was cast into doubt. Although Turkey had emerged impoverished from World War II, it made great economic strides in the late 1940s, helped in no small part by $349 million in Marshall Plan funding. Between 1950 and 1953, the national economy grew at an astounding rate of 13 percent and many citizens experienced a new level of affluence; the number of cars on the road quadrupled.21 Turkey’s entrance into NATO in February 1952 further confirmed its growing acceptance within a Euro-American community. “It seemed in 1953 that all would go well,” writes sociologist Çağlar Keyder of this optimistic time, “and that a happy fulfilment of the liberal model of the economy, with its implications for modernisation, was just around the corner.” 22 In the months leading up to Developing Turkey, however, the Turkish economy had taken a nosedive, foreshadowing the economic collapse that would take place by the end of the decade.23 In an effort to right the national economy, the Democrat Party reasserted state economic controls, an approach they soon began to take in other spheres of national life as well. In 1954, the government shut down the Village Institutes; a month later, in response to protests about the closing, the administration immobilized the free press. International and Turkish observers alike took this series of decisions as a sign of democracy derailed. These events raised concern about Turkey’s precarious position within the European community, captured so evocatively by a Marshall Plan propaganda poster in which Turkey is shown as less important to European recovery than its mainland European peers (figure 0.19). The aesthetic crises at Developing Turkey were worsened by these political and economic crises of 1954, as the optimistic atmosphere of the early 1950s began to dissolve, replaced now by a sense of unease about what lay ahead. Developing Turkey marked a moment when Turkish artists who were acutely aware of their country’s precarious position as a member of the Marshall Plan community took a hard look at the cultural practices of the early twentieth century. Jaleh Mansoor has studied the ways that artists working in another semiperipheral state, Italy, responded to the Marshall Plan by turning away from the aesthetic (often figural) strategies associated with early twentieth-century nationalisms to prioritize instead distinctly international artistic currents, such as “chance, the ‘readymade’ and related forms recovered from the history of Dada and surrealism.” 24 Mansoor defines the resulting artworks as “Marshall Plan modernism,” which she considers “the last gasp of interesting, indeed formally original painting” in the history of European modernism.25 Unlike their Italian counterparts, members of the Turkish art world were not interested in rethinking early twentieth-century European avant-gardism (which, indeed, 110

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they had rejected in the 1920s). For them, the more pressing task was to renegotiate the aesthetic and institutional paradigms put in place during the period of national developmentalism of the long 1930s.26 In Turkey, it was less a question of forging a set of formal strategies (what Mansoor calls “a proper ism”) and more about the ongoing challenge to cultivate a modern “mentality” in art, regardless of specific formal prescriptions. The case of Developing Turkey thus adds nuance to art history’s growing understanding of how international artists grappling with the world-scale economic reorderings of the postwar period rethought local formations and national cultures forged in the early twentieth century.27 ORGANIZING DEVELOPING TURKEY

Like Adalet Cimcoz and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, the founders of Gallery Maya, the contest organizer Vedat Nedim Tör had been closely involved in the construction of the Turkish cultural sphere in the 1930s and brought these experiences to bear on the 1954 painting contest.28 Tör got his start in economics. After completing a doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1921, he returned to Turkey to head up the National Economy and Savings Society (Milli İktisat ve Tasarruf Cemiyeti), while writing regularly for the newspaper Cumhuriyet and cofounding an influential political journal called Kadro. At the Economy and Savings Society, Tör began to explore the power of staging international exhibitions as visual propaganda to promote Turkish products. In 1933, he was appointed head of the Directorate General of the Press (Matbuat ve İstihbarat Müdüriyeti Umûmîsi), where he launched La Turquie Kemaliste, an impeccably designed magazine, in Turkish and French, that promoted republican modernization programs domestically and abroad. Before landing the job as Yapı Kredi Bank’s inaugural arts advisor in 1945, Tör held high-level positions at the national radio and the Ministry of Tourism; he remained at Yapı Kredi Bank until 1970, when he moved to a similar position at another bank. Banks had long played an important role in the Turkish art world. Between 1924 and 1935, republican leadership established four major banks: Ziraat Bankası, İş Bankası, Sümerbank, and Etibank. While these institutions’ primary mission was to regulate the emergent national economy, Atatürk also assigned them to act as patrons and collectors of art, a key role within the nascent Turkish art world at a moment when the consumption of art by individuals was still rare. At Atatürk’s behest, the state banks commissioned large-scale paintings for their headquarters and regularly purchased work from the State Exhibitions, building up collections of modern Turkish art that still rival the government’s today. When Yapı Kredi Bank was established as Turkey’s first private bank in 1944, its founders continued and extended this tradition of arts philanthropy, making it an integral part of the bank’s strategy for building up a customer base. Yapı Kredi Bank quickly surpassed its peers’ activity in the arts.29 With Developing Turkey, Tör drew on two important republican-era precedents: the State Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture (established in 1939) and the Homeland “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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Tours (Yurt Gezileri, 1939–1943), a government-sponsored travel program that Tör had spearheaded in the early 1940s. Like the organizers of the State Exhibitions, Tör aimed to use a large-scale competitive exhibit to encourage, but also to control, the development of a national art. By bringing a nationwide selection of practitioners together in one place, both the State Exhibitions and Developing Turkey provided an opportunity to survey and evaluate the state of modern Turkish art as a whole. At the same time, these exhibitions were intended to accelerate the development of a national art by offering artists a financial incentive to create new work, and to shape a national aesthetics by rewarding certain types of painting and not others. A small brochure published by the bank in the lead-up to Developing Turkey, and almost certainly penned by Tör, reflects the exhibition organizer’s enduring allegiance to the republican-era cultural approaches of his early career. On the third page of the brochure and beneath the prominent header “PAINTING PRIZE” is a ten-item list of instructions for participants. At the very top is listed the exhibition’s subject: “Paintings showing the diverse activities of Turkey’s economic life (iktisadi hayatı).” 30 By assigning this theme, Tör communicated from the outset that Developing Turkey was not to engage with the radically new but rather to focus on national development, the central theme of republican art and politics. Tör goes on to provide detailed instructions regarding the required size, medium, and content of any artworks and the bank’s future custodianship of them, decreeing that “paintings will be 2 × 3 meters, and done in oils” (rule one); that “It is possible for multiple subjects to be composed within the same painting” (rule two); and that prize winners and image rights would become the property of the bank (rules ten and eleven). Like the organizers of the State Exhibitions, Tör hoped to limit the visual appearance of the artworks submitted and to control the conditions of their future display. A second important precedent for Developing Turkey were the Homeland Tours, a state-run arts program that sent fifty artists to sixty-four national provinces, where each produced an assigned quota of images. The program’s primary aim was to encourage Turkish modernists to incorporate vernacular cultural forms into the national art they were developing.31 Tör also intended the Homeland Tours to help generate a cache of artworks for eventual display in public buildings across the nation. There, Tör imagined, modernist images of a vibrant, developing Turkey would impress upon everyday citizens the significance of the shared national project to which they were meant to contribute. For reasons that remain unclear, the Homeland Tours failed. In 1953, just a decade after its completion, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu wrote a long newspaper column about his recent discovery of the forgotten collection of Homeland Tours paintings in the basement of an Ankara primary school, waterlogged and covered in dust.32 This discovery, and Eyüboğlu’s article, may very well have contributed to Tör’s desire to organize Developing Turkey. With the 1954 contest, Tör endeavored once again to bring largescale images of Turkish modernization to national audiences, this time by showing 112

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them in the bank’s branches across the country. Tör’s requirements that artworks be two by three meters and that they be “legible” were directly connected to his aim to build a collection of artworks that would speak beyond the elite spheres of the art world and to as wide a national public as possible. Developing Turkey also connected with a new interest in integrating art into hotels, shopping centers, and other public and commercial spaces. Throughout the 1950s, a growing number of architects began to collaborate with artists (including Füreya Koral, the subject of chapter 4). Although it never came to fruition, there was extensive discussion of a “one-percent law” assuring that 1 percent of all state architectural budgets would go toward the integration of art in newly constructed buildings.33 “Finally the fine arts have found a way to intermingle with the masses: rather than the palaces and mansions of old times, they now occupy post offices, government offices, banks, the streets, and public squares,” announced one journalist of this trend.34 His optimistic assessment was echoed by an anonymous writer who explained to the readers of Cumhuriyet that Developing Turkey would provide a source of income to artists, help cultivate public taste for the fine arts, and combat what (s)he evocatively called “the empty walls problem” in civic spaces.35 Although Tör adhered closely to many republican-era practices, he departed crucially from such precedents in his selection of a foreign jury.36 By the 1950s, Turkish artists had grown accustomed to the yearly ritual of submitting artwork to competitive State Exhibitions adjudicated by juries drawn from an artistic community of no more than “forty people, all of whom know each other” (as Eyüboğlu once described it).37 Such government-sponsored art programs taught artists to adhere to certain topics and styles in order to be considered for a prize, rather than pursue new aesthetic directions. The painter Turan Erol, for example, recounted that Homeland Tours participants were pressured to represent certain topics “whether or not they wished to do so,” while the Ankara-based painter İsmail Altınok wrote an entire memoir describing his “war” to produce original work under conditions that seemed tailor-made to frustrate such efforts.38 “With their passion for profit and self-promotion, the dominant painters on the juries used the State Exhibitions as they pleased,” recalled Altınok, with the result that “the majority of artists pandered to the juries and true art was forgotten.” 39 Developing Turkey was the first time that a Turkish artistic community had come under foreign scrutiny on such an extensive scale, in such a public manner, and at an event with such high symbolic and financial stakes. The local intelligentsia frequently described their nation’s long-standing reliance on foreign economic advisors as a “mania,” a “neurosis,” and a “chronic illness,” a broader phenomenon to which reviewers of Developing Turkey were not slow to link Fierens, Read, and Venturi.40 “We journalists have a flaw that we joke about amongst ourselves,” wrote one commentator writing under the pen name Va-Nu. “As soon as a famous foreign pilot arrives at Yeşilköy [airport], we run up to him and ask his impressions of Turkey. We’ve done the “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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same thing this time . . . we demanded of the foreign critics who had just arrived: ‘Choose one of these [paintings]!’ ” 41 Despite the presence of such outside evaluators in other areas of national life, however, Developing Turkey was the first time that the arts had come under inspection by such foreign experts. The problem of foreign expertise thus became the subject of some of the most strident public debates about how the exhibition was adjudicated. ADJUDICATING DEVELOPING TURKEY

Fierens, Read, and Venturi had not originally come to Istanbul to evaluate the state of modern Turkish art but rather on a shared quest for international dialogue, one rooted in their personal experiences of two world wars and their commitment to promoting international understanding through the arts. The Brussels-based Fierens (1895–1957), who published widely on Flemish art, was the president of AICA, which he helped establish in 1949 for “the defense of art, its liberty and that of authors on art.” 42 He was also a founder of the International Council of Museums (ICOM, established in 1946). Read (1893–1968), a cofounder of the London Institute of Contemporary Art, had gotten his start in literature and poetry and possessed an ecumenical and interculturally oriented philosophy of art that embraced non-Western traditions. He once wrote that “there are no immutable canons of criticism, no perfect critics” and helped establish the International Society for Education in Art (InSEA), which was brought under UNESCO’s umbrella in 1954.43 Venturi (1885–1961), an expert on the Italian Renaissance, frequently engaged with modern art worlds in geographic areas outside his area of scholarly expertise. Not long after his Istanbul trip, Venturi traveled to India at the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru and published newspaper columns about his experiences giving lectures to Indian audiences and his visits to Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.44 While in Istanbul, Venturi penned a column for the Italian readers of La Stampa in which he expressed admiration for “the Turkish republic, once a state of sultans and caliphs, and now run with occidental-style secularism,” though he also wondered whether it was possible to “change the life of a people so much in just thirty years.” 45 For all three thinkers, art criticism was to be pursued not merely in isolation but also in dialogue with a global community of artists and scholars in the name of international understanding. These internationalist ideals were on full display at the sixth AICA congress in Istanbul in 1954, where Fierens, Read, Venturi, and the other visiting critics performed the role of ambassadorial representatives of their respective nations, as at an official diplomatic gathering. “Who wasn’t there to hear the opening speech that day. Absolutely everybody showed up!” exclaimed Adalet Cimcoz of the congress’s opening reception, which was attended by representatives of some two dozen countries.46 Cimcoz offered a vivid description of the multinational crowd that gathered at the Yıldız Palace, describing the German attendees as “fatherly types with round stomachs” and the English as “skinny and tall as a needle.” “Most of the Americans have 114

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glasses,” she added, and “the French have already learned the wine brands and have spent a fortune,” though “the Italian delegation doesn’t get out much.” 47 Once in the more formal setting of the congress itself, which took place at the State Academy of Fine Arts, participants from twenty-three nations sat beneath a line of national flags arranged according to alphabetical order so as to communicate that “all countries are equal in A.I.C.A.’s eyes.” 48 Local officials, including the mayor of Istanbul, gave welcoming speeches in the convening’s two official languages, English and French. As the AICA congress proceeded, the gathered scholars endeavored to “further relations between East and West” by collaboratively crafting an art historical narrative of East-West interactions from the ancient period to the contemporary moment.49 “It is no longer a question of conducting an inquest on the diverse expressions of one and the same culture but of placing face to face two sets of culture, two worlds,” announced Fierens in his opening speech. Fierens framed the conference as a shared effort to open wide the gates of a Western canon and to rewrite history along an East-West cultural axis—an endeavor of particular significance given that Turkey had only recently gained entry to NATO. During the first session, for example, European, American, and Turkish presenters pieced together an art historical sequence that highlighted dialogues between “Orient and Occident” and included a comparison of Islamic and Irish miniatures of the sixth and seventh centuries, a discussion of Gentile Bellini’s time at the Ottoman court, and a presentation of the importance of “oriental art” to modern European artists Delacroix, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Klee.50 Although the Turkish organizers fretted privately about committing any “diplomatic errors” at this highly politicized event, all proceeded smoothly, though the same could not be said for Fierens, Read, and Venturi’s experience judging the Developing Turkey exhibition later that week.51 Despite the diversity of artistic approaches at Developing Turkey, the jury divided the paintings into two categories, using the binary aesthetic-political frameworks of the early Cold War. The day after Tollu published his antagonistic article in Yeni Sabah, Fierens, Read, and Venturi enlisted two allies in the local art world to “set the record straight”: Azra Erhat, a young classicist, and Zahir Güvemli, an Istanbul-based painter and AICA member.52 Their interviews were conducted in either English or French and were subsequently translated into Turkish for a local readership. On the one side, explained the critics to their interviewers, stood the “majority of participating artists” who had adhered closely to “specific and previously established frameworks for representing this topic” and had relied on existing “molds and clichés,” as Read rather cuttingly put it. On the other side stood the rare few who had “expressed [their] individuality.” 53 The jury announced that they had “placed greater value” on the work of those who had emphasized individuality. Fierens described these artists as having “given themselves over to their imagination” to produce the “most dynamic, freest” paintings.54 Together the jury explained their belief that an artist’s importance bore a proportionate relationship to their resistance to established norms: “The quality of an artist “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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figure 3.7 Özden Ergökçen, Production (İstihsal), 1954. Oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm. Yapı Kredi Bank collection. Courtesy Adil Akbaşoğlu.

can be measured according to how (s)he works to depart from the framework of a specific principle (s)he is given, [the extent to which (s)he] thinks and works freely,” summarized Venturi.55 Conceptualizing artistic freedom as movement away from established procedures, the Italian critic reiterated that the jury had rewarded “the painting that distanced itself the most from the topic”—Aliye Berger’s Sun Rising.56 The events of September 1954 might have unfolded very differently had Fierens, Read, and Venturi not adhered to such strict Cold War categories. The three thinkers might, for instance, have had substantive things to say about Özden Akbaşoğlu Ergöçken’s experiments with framing, perspective, and viewership (figure 3.7). Ergöçken (b. 1937) was one of the lesser-known participants who did not make it into subsequent art historical accounts. Although her painting deploys staple iconographic features—peasants, scythes, Angora goats, sheaves of wheat—she splices and layers her canvas into a series of episodic scenes so as to undo straightforward interpretation. In the upper register, for example, Ergöçken experiments with spatial depth and hieratic scale, placing two diminutive central figures between larger persons on either side. In so doing, she causes the viewer to question whether the figures’ different sizing has to do with their relative importance or whether instead this is a perspectival effect intended to indicate distance or proximity. Ergöçken displays her familiarity with the standard iconography of national development, even as she undoes the spatiotemporal frameworks on which such hegemonic narratives rely. How might the critics have 116

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responded to the competing temporalities of Ergöçken’s canvas if they had used a more expansive evaluative framework? The jury’s ideas about art and freedom of expression were hardly new to the Turkish artistic community. Ironically enough, just two years prior, Tollu himself had articulated a similar set of ideas in a 1952 column titled “Art, Slave to Authority.” In this essay, he condemns artists who uncritically take up the “external appearance of objects and subjects” in response to the demands of an official power. Tollu celebrates the fact that in Turkey, as in other “free nations that accept democracy,” the artist “does whatever (s)he likes, whatever (s)he wants, and nobody bothers him/her.” 57 Tollu defends those freedoms and underscores Turkish artists’ distinction from those who work in “totalitarian . . . nations . . . behind the iron curtain” and are little more than “slave[s] obligated to act in accordance with the orders of the communist regime.” By the end of his 1952 column, Tollu has clearly defined the opposing artistic models that the European jury, two years later, would utilize to adjudicate Developing Turkey: on the one hand stands “modern [democratic] art,” and on the other, “official art.” He describes the latter category as “bad art,” the type that “Hitler wished for,” and “academic” in a pejorative sense. Yet in 1954, in an effort to undermine Berger and reinstate his own authority, Tollu would defend his own use of such academic approaches. And, in an unexpected turn, critics like Benk and Ecevit would use Tollu’s own definition of “bad art” to put the academy instructor in his place. CRITIQUING DEVELOPING TURKEY

Two of the most scathing responses to Developing Turkey came from Bülent Ecevit, who wrote a three-installment series about the exhibition titled “The Storm Whipped Up by the Jury,” and the well-known critic Adnan Benk, who penned a fiery rebuttal to Tollu titled “Cemal Tollu’s Criticism.” Benk and Ecevit seized the opportunity to critique the formal and institutional practices currently in place in the local art world. They condemned the existing system of competitive exhibitions riven with conflicts of interest, and accused senior academy instructors like Tollu and Eyüboğlu of perpetuating outdated formal standards.58 At the same time, Benk and Ecevit were hopeful that the Developing Turkey controversy might finally put an end to such practices, and they addressed their columns directly to a younger generation in an effort to encourage change. Announcing that “I, too, have some advice for young people,” Benk urged up-and-coming artists to discount the “master-apprentice myth” with which they had been raised, to question the authority of their instructors, and to forge their own formal and intellectual paths. “So Tollu will make the political connections, enter the contests, sell his work and earn money, while on the other hand young artists remain shut up between four walls, with the work they produce shoved onto a shelf, pursuing their artistic ‘struggle,’ right?” asked Benk sarcastically.59 With their caustic reviews, Benk and Ecevit offered encouragement to students at the academy who grew increasingly critical of their instructors in the mid-1950s.60 “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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Benk and Ecevit did not offer a specific aesthetic prescription about whether or not Turkish artists should “err more towards abstract art,” as Azra Erhat had asked the European jury in her interview with them. Rather, they considered this to be a larger problem of artists’ “mentality” (zihniyet), a subject about which Ecevit had written extensively in his daily column in Ulus (see chapter 2). Over time, argued Ecevit, Tollu’s generation had encouraged artists to adopt a mindset focused on obedience to authority and adherence to established formal paradigms, but it came at the cost of originality. Ecevit contended that continuing to “emprison the artist’s imagination” in such a manner would spell “the death knell of modern art in Turkey” and would have a detrimental effect on its quality and international reputation.61 Just as other journalists argued that a change in Turkish citizens’ “agricultural mentality” or “economic mentality” was necessary in order for Turkey to continue the forward march of progress that began with the founding of the republic, Ecevit and Benk urged the artistic community to cultivate intellectual openness beyond the bounds of the familiar.62 “The Turkish artist, who has only just acquired creative freedom of expression, should not shoulder the yoke that oppressed his forefathers for centuries!” exclaimed Ecevit, suggesting that it would be all too easy to revert to the “dead art” (ölü bir sanat) produced by artists working under a central authority in the Ottoman Empire.63 Many of Benk and Ecevit’s critiques were aimed directly at Tollu, whose lengthy article of September 15 had such a catalytic effect on the subsequent debate. Tollu began his essay by accusing the jury and the organizer of collusion; he devoted the rest of it to disparaging Aliye Berger and dissecting her painting. A few days later, on September 20, fellow academy professor Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu came to Tollu’s defense, reiterating and adding to his colleague’s claims. The academy professors attacked Berger on two fronts. First, they came at her through the interlinked questions of labor, class, and gender, arguing that Berger was a frivolous “woman” who had “participated in the contest just for fun” and who had not engaged in the “artistic struggle” of formal academic study.64 Next, Eyüboğlu and Tollu critiqued Berger’s painting on formal terms, arguing that its aesthetic shortcomings revealed her fundamental inability to grasp the significance of the larger collective cause of “developing Turkey.” Since Berger did not qualify as a legitimate artist in the first place and since her painting did not sufficiently engage with the contest’s assigned theme, they suggested, she could not even be considered a legitimate participant. Before turning on Berger, the academy professors got the jury and the exhibition organizer out of the way by accusing them of engaging in a variety of “tasteless” machinations (tatsızlıklar) behind the scenes.65 Tollu claimed that Fierens, Read, and Venturi had only spent two hours reviewing the artworks and suggested that there was, therefore, a high likelihood they had made the “wrong” decision.66 Eyüboğlu endeavored to stoke public outrage by appealing to readers’ sense of national pride, arguing that the critics “would not act this way in their own country” and implying that they had 118

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insulted the Turkish artist, and, by extension, the nation.67 Tollu also alleged that the contest organizer Vedat Nedim Tör and an unnamed critic had inserted themselves into the decision-making process, intentionally confusing the European critics and thereby contributing to their “surprising decision.” Eyüboğlu capped his and Tollu’s joint critique of the jury by noting that he had initially regretted his inability to attend the AICA congress but no longer did so “once [he] saw the kind of painting they liked.” Next, Tollu and Eyüboğlu turned on Berger, highlighting her elite class background and her lack of formal academic training. While the high-profile women of the Şakir Paşa family exhibited in Turkey and internationally throughout the postwar period, none of them possessed a degree from a traditional Beaux-Arts academy. Instead, all three had pursued their artistic formation with the aid of their family wealth, Zeid and Koral in Paris and Berger in the London studio of the printmaker John Buckland Wright. That all three women had taken up their creative pursuits after experiencing domestic trauma— Zeid after the death of a child in the early 1920s, Füreya during a prolonged residence in a Swiss sanatorium in the late 1940s, and Berger following the unexpected death of her husband in 1947—was a central component of the Şakir Paşa family myth. Tollu capitalized on this aspect of Berger’s public reputation to argue that she did not pursue art as a legitimate vocation but as an elite, feminized leisure pursuit. He presented this as yet another reason why she did not qualify to participate in the contest at all. In calling Berger’s credentials into question, the academy professors deployed a series of opposing concepts, including artist versus amateur, male versus female, and art versus craft, to police the boundaries of a community and a canon that prioritized male painters trained within the academic system. Tollu and Eyüboğlu attempted to discredit Berger by arguing that a person could only claim to be an artist if he or she had “experienced the struggle [çile] of the profession” through formal academic study.68 Eyüboğlu announced that he “did not see” in Berger’s painting “a work of art resulting from this same struggle” and called into question her basic capacity to produce a qualifying artwork. In a final dismissive line, Eyüboğlu counseled her to “get some schooling.” 69 Tollu and Eyüboğlu’s vision of artistic struggle is linked to gender.70 In arguing for the artists whom they considered to be more deserving of first prize, Tollu and Eyüboğlu compared Berger to several male artists who, Eyüboğlu noted, had “engaged in the struggle of the vocation” at the academy. By closely linking the notions of amateur/woman and professional/man, the academy professors added heft to their claims. Finally, the academy professors pointed to Berger’s previous work as a printmaker, suggesting that the female, amateur Berger only possessed a capacity for “craft labor” (zanaat çilesi), as distinct from artistic labor (sanat çilesi). By interweaving such value-laden assumptions around academic training, gender, and art versus craft, Tollu and Eyüboğlu represented Berger’s painting as little more than privileged dabblings of an unskilled amateur. Tollu and Eyüboğlu also critiqued Berger’s painting on formal terms, arguing that Berger’s fragmented brushstrokes, ambiguous figures, and unusual composition “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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reflected the elite artist’s disconnect from the collective cause of national development. “The sun is represented [by Berger] as a significant factor in production merely because it warms the earth,” griped Tollu, contending that the painter had anachronistically cast the sun as a driving agent of national history rather than honoring the Turkish citizens who had actually labored for the cause.71 The critic writing under the pen name Va-Nu agreed, reiterating Tollu’s point by adding, “Although the idea of ‘production’ was represented in this painting through ‘sun-water-earth,’ . . . the human element and the labor element are negligible.” 72 For these observers, Berger’s choice to omit the laboring peasant body, the central figure of republican-era cultural production, and to portray instead an ambiguous landscape under an excessive sun was a sign of her disconnect from all that had gone into Turkish modernization so far.73 “This is the worldview of a person from a privileged class,” continued Va-Nu. “To leave the factor of Turkish labor so much in the shadows in a painting of labor—now that is worthy of criticism.” 74 These critics continued to adhere to the republican-era premise that in making her own contribution to the larger cause of “developing Turkey,” the artist bore an obligation to acknowledge first and foremost the factions of Turkish society on whose labor and productivity the nation’s future relied. Berger’s formal choices, contended her detractors, demonstrated that she was fundamentally incapable of envisioning what the labor of national development truly entailed. PAINTING DEVELOPING TURKEY

Whether defending or attacking Berger, none of the critics registered the connections between Sun Rising and her contemporaneous body of work about the experience of modernization in Turkey. Construction (figure 3.6) is just one of several prints in which Berger explored this theme in the early 1950s. In these prints, Berger returns repeatedly to scenes she saw on the Istanbul waterfront, where she regularly took ferries between the city’s European side, where she had her studio, and the Princes’ Islands, the location of her childhood home. In prints such as Building the Bosphorus Bridge and Passengers, Berger documents scenes from the redevelopment of the Istanbul docks, focusing in on how such changes impacted the less affluent residents of the city.75 The vertical print Passengers continues Construction’s critique of the human toll of urban development (figure 3.8). In the upper third of the print, Berger uses the same angular, slashing lines to represent the hostile environs of the city in flux. In Passengers, however, the disenfranchised lower classes have become the primary subject of the work, replacing the worker who dominated Construction and filling two-thirds of the pictorial field. The travelers named in the title form a lumpen mass of bodily forms, seen from an indeterminate angle. At some junctures, the viewer seems to look down on the figures from above, as if looking down into the hold of a ship. At other junctures, the figures seem to be viewed from the side. The most easily discerned individual is the sleeping man whose legs enter in from the left. His head 120

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figure 3.8 Aliye Berger, Passengers (Yolcular), early 1950s. Etching, 86 × 35 cm. Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar

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and torso tilt down to the right, while he wraps a sheltering arm around his head; just beneath him, a C-shaped line of travelers huddle together for warmth. Passengers illuminates the significance of what Berger’s critics called “illegible” form within her work. In their critiques of Sun Rising, Tollu and Eyüboğlu contended that Berger’s avoidance of distinct iconographic elements and a transparent composition reflected a lack of artistic skill. Passengers, however, indicates that Berger utilized an obscurantist line and indeterminate spatial cues to make a statement about her human subjects and their experience of modernizing change. In the central third of Passengers, for example, Berger uses the sharp point of the etching tool to form an ambiguous mass of individuals and their possessions. Her short, hand-drawn strokes de-individuate the figures, communicating instead a sense of collectivity rooted in a shared state of disenfranchisement. The subjects’ collective alienation from modernizing change is further amplified by Berger’s rejection of a clear perspectival orientation in space in favor of a two-part composition split between the unwelcoming cityscape (in sharp and angular line) and its denizens (who are represented in more rounded and organic forms). Alienation is not merely a theme of this work; it is also embedded in the artist’s use of line and the print’s two-part compositional schema. Such formal strategies diverged dramatically from those advocated by the academy professors. In his critique of Sun Rising, Tollu, for instance, argued that a painting’s “beauty and strength” is only as strong as its “forms and lines” and decreases with the “breaking up of form.” 76 He added that a painting must, above all else, contain a “balance” of “rhythmically” organized forms, tones, and colors and that without these foundational features an object ceases to be an artwork as such. Given the overarching question of the nation, argued Tollu, Berger should first and foremost have “represent[ed] Turkey” in her submission to the contest.77 In addition, he continued, the artist should have taken up the question of productivity in either the “subterranean, agricultural, or maritime industries.” Finally, concluded Tollu, Berger should have “above all else” given “the people living in Turkey . . . a place in the foreground of the paintings,” as it was they who were responsible for the nation’s production. Tollu does not simply call for a metaphorical foregrounding of the Turkish people as the drivers of national development but for a literal one. In Tollu’s paradigm, visual hierarchies (foreground and background, primary and secondary subjects) are mapped directly over conceptual hierarchies (citizen and product, a nation and its future); a painting’s efficacy is to be gauged according to the proximity of the two. Labeling Berger’s painting as “impossible” to interpret, Tollu argued that she had represented little more than “a randomly selected fragment of [the] cosmos.” 78 In Sun Rising, Berger uses the same strategies of visual ambiguity as in her prints but appeals additionally to the distinct material qualities of oil paint, with its capacity to blend and flow, in order to produce an affirmative image of national development (figure 3.4). Sun Rising represents productive national subjects as just one contributor within a national-natural world that is primarily energized by the natural resources of 122

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figure 3.9 Aliye Berger, untitled engraving, early 1950s. Dimensions unknown. Yapı Kredi Bank collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

sun, sea, and land. Berger’s sponge gatherers, for instance, are distinct from this landscape but also part of it, and the trailing yellow brushstrokes that extend downward from the hem of their skirts serve to unite them with the school of fish that flutter in the lower right. A preparatory study for Sun Rising shows Berger experimenting, in the medium of print, with how to integrate these figures into the painting’s larger flow, later obtained in the canvas through the thick buildup of paint on the surface (figure 3.9). A series of even smaller, easy-to-miss symbols of human productivity are also subsumed into the painting’s flow of pigment. Slightly below the sun and to its right, a dark patch reveals itself to be a minute factory, smokestacks blazing; from its left approaches a tiny, toy-like horse and cart, outlined in orange. Several of these diminutive vignettes are nestled throughout the streams of paint, including a group of harvesters and a cluster of tiny houses, located above Berger’s signature in the lower left. Berger’s own statements at Developing Turkey illuminate the significance behind this approach. On September 19, four days after Tollu’s screed first appeared and three days after Fierens, Read, and Venturi took to the pages of Yeni İstanbul to defend themselves, the winning artist finally entered the fray. Like the jury, Berger enlisted a sympathetic interviewer, a young critic named Tunç Yalman, to transmit her thoughts to the public. Announcing that “I don’t like forms that impact the eye excessively and “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”

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jump out from the canvas,” Berger explained that she had intentionally included and then obfuscated the many standard symbols of production called for by Tollu.79 To clarify her point, Berger listed the contents of her canvas, including a cart loaded with grain, women sifting grain, a factory, a flock of sheep, seaside sponge gatherers, and fishermen readying themselves for the day. Yet, explained the painter, she had endeavored to capture the combined productive energies of all these forces of national life rather than accredit a single entity. “It is necessary to move away from the external appearance of a room, a village, a city, or a person,” argued the artist, in order to “see life holistically.” In what was almost certainly a dig at Tollu, Berger capped off her explanation by vehemently declaring that she would never simply “insert gigantic rams as a symbol of production!” 80 While Berger’s use of inchoate line and form seemed to place her in conflict with the academy professors, both parties remained faithful to the shared cause of Turkish “productivity.” Staged at a transitional moment, Developing Turkey and the resulting debate index an important shift in the Turkish art world’s thinking about art and development that took place in the intervening time. At Developing Turkey, a wide range of individuals came together in a good-faith effort to forward the development of modern Turkish painting. There was Tör, the organizer who relied on republican precedents. There were some three dozen participating artists, conditioned by decades of experience at the State Exhibitions to anticipate the preferences of exhibition organizers. There were Fierens, Read, and Venturi, the European jury members who insisted on the value of artistic freedom above all else. And there was a vocal community of Turkish artists and critics who went head to head as they rethought the formal paradigms and institutional practices that had shaped the Turkish art world. Developing Turkey captures the changing metrics of modernity on which the artist Füreya, the subject of the next chapter, would build as she pursued her international travels in the later 1950s. By that point, the painter Zahir Güvemli’s own evaluation of Developing Turkey seemed to have been proven right: “Things used to work [one] way; they no longer do today.” 81

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4 THE ARTIST AS AGENT OF DEVELOPMENT Füreya Koral between Turkey and the United States

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NE SUNDAY NIGHT IN OCTOBER 1958 , the artist Füreya Koral hosted a gathering of friends in her small Istanbul studio, located across the street from the fashionable new Hilton Hotel. A who’s who of the local art world showed up, including Adalet Cimcoz, the founder of Turkey’s first modern art gallery; the eminent novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar; and the artists Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Eren Eyüboğlu, and Aliye Berger. Also present was John Marshall, associate director of humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, who traveled regularly to Turkey to recruit candidates for the organization’s fellowship program and who recorded the night’s events in his diary the next day. As the night wore on, recounted Marshall, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu sang folk songs in “a really moving deep bass,” and the guests began to dance, wending their way around a large kiln and taking care not to bump into the vessels and ceramic panels lining shelves along the wall. “After the theater,” a throng of “assorted actors and actresses” appeared at the door. For Marshall, the fête, which went on until three in the morning, was “a memorable

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glimpse of Istanbul artistic society, remarkable for its cosmopolitan taste, wit, and general gaiety,” a snapshot of a community that he had come to know well on annual trips to Turkey since the late 1940s.1 But even among such extraordinary company, Füreya stood out. Citing her “remarkable range of knowledge and acute taste,” Marshall named her “one of [his] most reliable informants in Istanbul.” 2 Füreya, who used only her first name professionally, was born into the same elite family as Aliye Berger, the artist who won the Developing Turkey painting contest in 1954 (she was Berger’s cousin). The ceramist was unusual in that her engagement with the medium began with an interest in tile—and, more specifically, the Ottoman tradition of architectural wall tile (çini) with which she had grown up in Istanbul—rather than a desire to work on the wheel. Füreya began making ceramics in the late 1940s while she was recovering from tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium. After two years in Paris, including a period training in the studio of the renowned ceramist Georges Serré, she returned permanently to Istanbul in 1951.3 Announcing her desire to “perform the revolution [Turkish] ceramics had not managed to carry out,” Füreya set out to update a tile tradition whose golden age had ended in the seventeenth century.4 By the 1960s, Füreya had become well known for her collaborations with modernist architects in which she scaled up the traditional çini tiles to produce monumental wall panels for major public buildings. She realized one of her most important works, a mural for the Textile Traders’ Market in Istanbul, in 1963, just a few years after Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu produced his own mural at Expo 58 in Brussels (figure 4.1). Though Füreya’s composition of white, turquoise, and pale green on a ground of scored, heavily textured black tiles is a far cry from Eyüboğlu’s grand compendium of autochthonous iconography, both engage the fundamental question of how to reconcile traditional media, such as ceramics or mosaics, with modernist aesthetics in public space. In the 1950s, however, Füreya worked on a smaller scale and pioneered her signature format of the period: rectangular ceramic panels, some twenty to thirty inches tall, whose surface she covered with abstract patches of glaze using the gestural brushstrokes she had picked up in Paris in the late 1940s. Resembling both wall tile and abstract painting and appearing in galleries in France, Turkey, and the United States, Füreya’s distinct çini panels were the basis of her reputation as an innovator in the 1950s. One of the few surviving tile panels from this period gives some sense of Füreya’s formal investments at the time (figure 4.2). A sinuous field of dense black glaze intrudes from the lower right, threatening to overwhelm patches of yellow, orange, and white that cover the tile’s surface and seep over its edges. A flurry of blue, almondshaped forms, each with a single dot at its center, rain down from a white, cloud-like patch of glaze in the upper right. To Turkish viewers, the blue forms would have been immediately reminiscent of the boncuk, a talismanic motif for warding off the evil eye. Through her use of this form, Füreya signals her engagement with a distinctly Turkish visual culture and set of folk traditions. At the same time, she dissolves and disperses the evil eye motif according to her own needs, adding a layer of dots around the eyelike 126

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figure 4.1 Füreya in front of her wall panel at the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market, 1966. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar. Photograph by Ara Güler.

forms and moving it out of the realm of talismanic power and into the space of pattern, by multiplying it across the tile’s surface. Her use of gestural, abstract brushstrokes linked her tile panels to the principle of individual intellectual achievement associated with the fine arts, in direct opposition to craft’s association with mindless labor.5 Füreya’s panel also partakes in international debates about abstraction and the relation of pigment to support. These debates were particularly active in the Parisian art world where Füreya had gotten her start, at a moment when transatlantic battles raged about American and French artists’ varying applications of paint on canvas.6 In some places, her glaze is thin and opaque, at others unevenly applied so as to reveal the clay surface beneath. Through this uneven application, Füreya calls attention to the very act of applying pigment to a surface. Her support, however, is not the absorptive canvas that artists the world over were subjecting to stains, drips, spatters, and slashes in the 1950s but instead smooth, dense clay. And her pigment is not oils or acrylics but glaze, fired hard yet still retaining an appearance of its original liquidity. Füreya met John Marshall in Istanbul in 1955 during this first, highly productive chapter of her career. Although the artist herself described this period as “exceedingly important” for her work, scholars have tended to neglect it in favor of her more The Artist as Agent of Development

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figure 4.2 Füreya, ceramic panel, early 1950s. 30.5 × 18 cm. Sara Koral Aykar collection. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

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publicly visible work of the 1960s.7 Following her return from Paris to Istanbul in 1951, Füreya threw herself headlong into the Turkish art scene. Within the span of just three years, she set up her own studio and began training apprentices, divorced her husband, sold most of her belongings, and held three solo exhibitions—at Gallery Maya in 1951, the Helikon Association Gallery in 1953, and at the Technical Institute for Girls in Istanbul in 1954. When the artist met Marshall in 1955, she had recently abandoned her surname to become simply “Füreya,” husbandless and liberated, an autonomous professional. Initially, there was no question of whether Füreya might apply for support from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose aid programs to developing countries focused on the fields of medicine and health, not the arts. Over the following months, however, the artist and the administrator struck up a dialogue about the ways in which Füreya’s efforts to modernize the Turkish ceramics tradition connected with the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission to support modernization in the developing world. In discussions with Marshall, Füreya strategically connected her individual artistic project to the larger project of national development by emphasizing her desire to train future generations of ceramists who might one day revitalize Turkey’s craft sector. Soon, Marshall had launched an informal campaign to convince his Rockefeller Foundation colleagues to fund the Turkish ceramist. Arguing that she “undoubtedly will be the figure around whom any further development in this field . . . centers,” he contended that investing in the ceramist was a low-cost, low-risk way to catalyze longterm economic change in a strategic area of the world.8 Füreya and Marshall evidently made a compelling case; less than a year later, in June 1956, Füreya became the first candidate from the developing world to receive a fellowship in the visual arts from the Rockefeller Foundation. And in February 1957, Füreya landed in New York City for the first time, where she began a trip visiting ceramics centers throughout the United States and Mexico. The length of her trip, originally planned to last four months, soon stretched to nine. This chapter analyzes Füreya’s experiences in Turkey and the United States in order to illuminate postwar discourses about the artist as an agent of development. In the introduction to this book, I explore the ways that artists in republican Turkey took up the mission of generating a national art, following Atatürk’s nationwide mandate to “work much harder than in the past, and in less time accomplish far greater things.” 9 By accepting this mission as their own, I argue, artists such as Ömer Adil, Nurullah Berk, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Namık İsmail, and Cemall Tollu willingly became “agents of development” who endeavored to modernize the national art world in connection with ongoing development projects in the social, political, and economic spheres. As Füreya’s case reveals, such visions of the artist as an agent of development both changed and spread in the postwar period, in conjuncture with what Christina Klein has called the “ideology of integration.” While historians of the Cold War have long attended to the global effects of the American ideology of containment, the ideology The Artist as Agent of Development

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of integration was just as pervasive. Where the ideology of containment relied on constructions of difference, the ideology of integration was at once a more “optimistic” discourse and was distinctly economic in nature.10 Along with containment, argued American leadership, world peace might be achieved by integrating developing nations and those of the industrial West into a common global economy, thereby establishing relationships of interdependence that discouraged conflict. For the United States, of course, such a global capitalist order would conveniently provide increased access to raw materials and opportunities for market expansion— forms of economic exploitation that midcentury intellectuals across the developing world critiqued as a form of neocolonialism. However, it was also appealing to countries like Turkey, who had been cut off from world trade channels during World War II and for whom joining an integrated global economy promised increased foreign exchange and a higher quality of life. In the long 1930s, Turkish artists had engaged with the Soviet-inspired, state-centric ideology of national developmentalism. Now, in the 1950s, Füreya found that she had to explain her work in the increasingly pervasive terms of economic integration, a new metric of modernity for Turkish and American elites alike. Füreya is an especially useful case for exploring postwar discussions about the artist and economic integration because she had one foot in the fine arts and another in the realm of craft. Craft held a privileged place in these discussions. Handicrafts were a long-standing economic force in many developing countries, which were often labeled “craft economies” in reference to their high proportion of cottage industries as opposed to industrial modes of production. International elites concerned with the future of the developing world argued that it was logical to target the craft sector as means of integrating these developing nations into a global market. They also assigned a key role to artists and designers in catalyzing such processes. If established tastemakers like Füreya could train the ceramists, metalworkers, and rug makers who were the engines of these “craft economies” to produce work in line with American tastes, argued proponents, they would ignite processes of exchange between the United States and the developing world and propel the frictionless integration of a global economy.11 Füreya’s participation in these international conversations about art, craft, and economic integration reveals that the artist took on different roles than those previously observed by the scholarship on Cold War artistic exchanges. The extensive literature on this topic typically interprets artists, musicians, and writers as cultural diplomats who help forward international governments’ political agendas while at times bringing their own investments into the mix.12 By tracing the ways that Füreya navigated, participated in, and even promoted the idea of the artist as an agent of development, rather than as an ambassadorial figure, this chapter reveals that artists were equally as valued for their potential to act as catalysts of economic change as for their diplomatic skills—or even for the perceived quality of their artistic output. As a cosmopolitan artist who also worked in the realm of craft, Füreya fit perfectly the profile of the creative individual who could help integrate the developing world 130

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into a global economy. On the one hand, she was a worldly individual whose artistic bona fides included a spell in postwar Paris and who possessed the sophisticated tastes that international officials thought would facilitate the entry of Turkish products onto the American market. Yet because of her technical skills in ceramics, a medium that could be produced on a mass scale, Füreya also bore the potential to stimulate the Turkish national economy in a way that painters never could. She was, in Marshall’s estimation, not just a “talented” artist but also an international cosmopolite who had “traveled widely, makes her way easily everywhere and has incidentally, virtually perfect English,” an individual whose “remarkable range of knowledge and acute taste” made her a most compelling collaborator.13 An elite tastemaker and multilingual sophisticate, an eager teacher and skilled craftsperson, Füreya appeared to be an ideal agent of development for the postwar moment. FROM PARIS TO ISTANBUL

Although the Turkish art world would later embrace Füreya, the artist faced an ambivalent, even hostile, critical response when she staged her first Turkish exhibition at Gallery Maya in Istanbul in October 1951. Held just four months after her Parisian debut, Füreya’s Istanbul exhibition consisted of the same artworks she had shown in the French capital. In an effort to accommodate the growing crowds at the small, recently opened gallery, Gallery Maya’s founder Adalet Cimcoz held a three-night opening. A snapshot from one of these events shows the recently returned artist in conversation with three attentive visitors who listen closely as Füreya makes a point (figure 4.3). With her upraised hand, the ceramist seems to hold an invisible brush as she explains some important matter of technique. On a shelf behind her, at head height, stand four small whirling dervish figurines, a form with which Füreya experimented early in her career. To the far right, and cut off by the photograph’s edge, can be seen one of the ceramic panels that garnered such strong public reactions when Füreya debuted in Turkey. While it is not possible to identify which individual artworks were shown at Gallery Maya, we know that some of them emphasized her work’s connection to the architectural wall tiling of Ottoman mosques. Füreya had made a close study of the great mosques of Istanbul, including the Blue Mosque, Rüstem Paşa Mosque, Selimiye Mosque, and Aladdin Mosque. In these monuments, closely abutting tiles cover large expanses of wall space, wrapping around corners, marking niches and doorways, and expanding upward into domes. In 1951, Füreya produced a tile that announced her affiliation with Ottoman çini by including at its very center a miniature prayer niche (mihrab) into which the artist had placed a diminutive Qur’an stand (figure 4.4). Yet through this object, Füreya also rejects the foundational premise of replicability on which Ottoman çini relies. While çini is rooted in the capacity for hundreds of tiles to fit into an expanding architectural matrix, Füreya’s singular tile panel insists on the principle of uniqueness affiliated with easel painting. The graceful tree painted to the left of the mihrab, which in çini traditions would be extended to connect to another tile, draws The Artist as Agent of Development

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figure 4.3 Füreya at her exhibition opening at Gallery Maya, Istanbul, October 1951. Sara Koral Aykar collection.

up short of its frame, and its hand-painted border isolates it from its surrounds. As a final refutation of çini’s principle of repeatability, Füreya replaces the regularized field of tiles that typically line the prayer niche with a collection of irregular, hand-drawn forms in ochres, blues, burgundies, greens, and pinks. By leaving her mark as an individual artist in this way, Füreya stages a productive confrontation between the medium of çini and one of the central components of postwar painting, the autographic mark. At first glance, works like these appear to stand at a great distance from the iconographic and nationalist works of Füreya’s predecessors. In fact, they continued to engage with earlier Turkish debates about how to represent processes of national development in the arts. However, in her tile panels, locality takes material form: it is embodied in the tile, glaze, and color that together make up çini, rather than in an iconographic motif. By centering her early exhibitions on ceramic panels rather than vessels, Füreya simultaneously signaled her engagement with craft and announced her desire to transform its associations beyond the merely functional. Throughout the 1950s, Füreya continued to deploy markers of Turkish identity in works that held the question of national development at their center. However, she moved away from her predecessors’ use of iconographic schemata and instead positioned the çini tradition itself as part of a national past that she updated for the modern moment. The rectangular format of her panels, which invokes the canvas, further underscores Füreya’s movement from the realm of craft into that of art. We might compare Füreya’s 132

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figure 4.4 Füreya, Writing of Paradise (Cennet Yazması), 1951. Ceramic panel, 37.5 × 27.5 × 3.5 cm. Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Huber Mansion collection. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

rectangular tile “paintings” to a body of smaller square tiles she produced in the early 1950s. In this trio of tiles, the artist experiments with different means of channeling glaze into abstract form. In one, Füreya renders a round, white vortex at the center, layered over four quadrants of color: yellow and black on the right, and a semitransparent white and bare terra-cotta on the left (figure 4.5). In another, a collection of white dots bleed together and become subsumed into a sea of thick blue pigment that surrounds it (figure 4.6). And in a third, Füreya has swept on a thin wash of turquoise, its near transparency amplified by the three assertive red specks scattered across the surface (figure 4.7). On the one hand, the variegated patches of abstract glaze emphasize these tiles’ uniqueness as objects. Yet these carreaux remain associated with tile, not painting, by virtue of their standardized square format, which positions them as fragments of a larger wall covering rather than autonomous objects. By playing up the nonutilitarian features of her large rectangular panels, on the other hand, Füreya has made of çini an autonomous artwork and demanded that viewers evaluate her work not solely in terms of craft but also, and at the same time, as painting. Turkish critics initially rejected Füreya’s transgression of traditional distinctions between art and craft. “All they said was, ceramics is form, it is a functional object, why The Artist as Agent of Development

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figures 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 Füreya’s square tiles, 1950s. 18 × 18 cm. Sara Koral Aykar collection. Photographs by Hadiye Cangökçe.

are you making wall ceramics, why have you only made objects that are fitted to the wall,” recalled the artist later in life.14 Such responses are perhaps unsurprising given the intense process of canonization and institution building that members of the modern Turkish art world had undertaken since the establishment of the republic. In the 1950s, the most pressing question within Turkey’s art world remained how to foster the development of modern Turkish art within medium-based aesthetic categories, as part of a larger mission of advancing the reputation of Turkish art on a world stage. These cultural brokers considered Füreya’s brushy application of glaze an insult to the established standards of painterly skill and her production of ceramic wall panels, rather than vessels, a perversion of ceramics’ essential connection to labor at the wheel. To them, Füreya’s willful crossing of art-craft divides was both unproductive and unnecessary. The Artist as Agent of Development

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One of the most scathing reviews of Füreya’s 1951 exhibition at Gallery Maya came from Cemal Tollu, the academy professor who, a few years later, similarly condemned Aliye Berger’s challenge to artistic convention at the Developing Turkey painting contest of 1954. The disapproving Tollu perceived Füreya’s tile panels as a failed attempt to transform a utilitarian medium into an art form. “[Füreya’s] çini possess no more value than a clean and wholesome cloth with which one covers one’s walls,” wrote Tollu.15 “Anyone who wishes to affiliate themselves with any branch of the arts must above all else master drawing,” continued the academy instructor, adding that he found Füreya “deficient” on this front.16 Füreya, announced the critic, is like Arachne, the arrogant weaver of Greek myth whom the goddess Athena had turned into a spider for her hubris: both unskilled and oversure.17 The Turkish critics’ negative response could not have been more different than that which Füreya had received in Paris when she had held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Mai, on the rue Bonaparte, five months before. There, a community of artists and critics affiliated with the Nouvelle École de Paris had welcomed Füreya’s hybrid ceramic paintings as an injection of new life into the ailing French art scene. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prominent critic Charles Estienne argued that the growing community of foreign-born artists working in Paris constituted a new French école and that the various forms of gestural abstraction they espoused represented the future of French modernism.18 Füreya was introduced into these circles by her aunt, Fahrelnissa Zeid, who was already well on her way to becoming a prominent member of the new school. Zeid, with whom Füreya had grown up in Istanbul, kept her own studio in the Iraqi embassy in Paris, where her husband, the crown prince of Iraq, was ambassador. It was she who first encouraged Füreya to take up art in the sanatorium in the mid1940s, and it was at Zeid’s urging that Füreya moved to Paris in 1949. While Zeid found a personal promoter in Estienne, Füreya forged her own alliance with the equally influential art critic Jacques Lassaigne. Lassaigne had lived in Lebanon and Morocco in the 1940s and helped several artists of Middle Eastern origin make their way in the postwar French scene.19 In the text he wrote for Füreya’s debut, Lassaigne echoed the rhetoric of novelty and rejuvenation that had become a standard way for French critics to celebrate the contributions of foreign-born artists to the postwar French art scene, praising the artist for “expanding the dimensions of a traditional art form” and for being “unafraid . . . to imagine new forms.” 20 It took Turkish critics a few more years to fully warm to Füreya’s work, whose position on the border between art and craft they found discomforting. THE ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN, AGENT OF CHANGE

By the mid-1950s the Turkish intelligentsia began to perceive Füreya’s bridging of art and craft as an asset and to celebrate her for her potential to forward Turkey’s integration into a global economy. Füreya held her second Istanbul exhibition at the Beyoğlu Technical Institute for Girls in May 1954, where she showed an entirely new body of 136

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ceramics, lithographs, and gouaches that she had produced over the previous two years. (She had shown the same work at the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara six months before, as discussed in chapter 2.) In Istanbul, the once-scathing Tollu displayed a remarkable change in tone, excitedly describing the crowds he saw competing to purchase the ceramist’s work. The scene, he observed, appeared less like an exhibition opening and more like “lively scenes of buying and selling in a market.” 21 Declaring this extensive public response to be “the best aspect of the exhibition,” Tollu immediately connected the ceramist to the problem of Turkey’s integration into international markets. If Füreya were to transfer her skills to a corps of craftsmen working on a mass scale, he suggested, Turkey’s “once extensive substantial [domestic] market” might return to its former glory and its ceramists might “help with [foreign] exchange” by mass-producing products for export.22 Tollu’s review reflects the pervasiveness of the ideology of economic integration at this moment. Turkey was hardly the only country attempting to channel its cottage industries into export markets and attract American dollars; India, for one, was engaged in parallel efforts.23 Whereas in 1951 Tollu had focused on policing aesthetic boundaries, by 1954, the terms had changed. The Turkish intelligentsia now understood Füreya’s artistic project as connected to the larger project of Turkish national development and economic integration. Tollu’s review signals an important change in the mainstream understanding of Füreya’s work that would shape her reception and opportunities over the following years, in both Turkey and the United States.24 The Turkish critics’ new enthusiasm for Füreya’s work was also connected to a resurgence in the Turkish ceramics industry that had taken place since her return from Paris in 1951. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Turkish ceramics had been on the “verge of giving its last breath and dying.” 25 The kiln at the State Academy of Fine Arts had not been lit in decades, and the famed ceramic centers of İznik and Kütahya were barely producing anything at all. In the early 1950s, however, a number of established painters, including Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu, Refik Epikman, and Arif Kaptan, began experimenting in ceramics, often citing Picasso as an exemplary case whose forays into the realm of craft justified their own. The Eyüboğlus, for instance, sourced ceramic vessels from local ceramists located in the Göksu neighborhood of Istanbul, to which they added their modernist reinterpretations of traditional folk motifs. By showing their work at new private galleries like Gallery Maya and the Helikon Association Gallery, these artists began to reach consumers still growing accustomed to purchasing such works for their homes, an endeavor supported by enthusiastic critics like Tunç Yalman.26 In the realm of industrial production, the Eczacıbaşı Ceramics Factory, which had opened outside of Istanbul in 1944, provided a source of income and technical training for art students and others seeking to work in this field; two other ceramics factories opened by the end of the decade. Equally important was the establishment of a Bauhaus-inspired State School of Applied Fine Arts (Devlet Tatbiki The Artist as Agent of Development

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Güzel Sanatlar Yüksek Okulu) in 1955, which had ceramics as one of its five departments, alongside textiles, graphic arts, interior design, and decorative arts.27 One of the most powerful indications of international elites’ growing belief that artists, designers, and craftspeople had a part to play in economic integration was the establishment, in 1956, of a joint Turkish-American Handicraft Development Office in Ankara. Run by six Turkish staff members working in collaboration with a team of industrial designers from the prestigious American design firm Peter Muller-Munk Associates, the Handicraft Development Office was part of a much larger program that, between 1955 and 1957, brought together American industrial designers and local craftsmen in twenty different developing nations. The unnamed craft program was run by the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), the US government’s primary vehicle for aid to the developing world. It was part of a broader array of programs focusing on people-to-people exchanges, through which the Eisenhower administration attempted to “give the global imaginary of integration a material, institutional foundation.” 28 In Afghanistan and Cambodia, El Salvador and India, Mexico and Turkey, American designers surveyed existing craft output, generated designs for mass production, and made recommendations for marketing strategies, all with the broader developmentalist goal of “help[ing] these nations relate to modern patterns of international trade.” 29 While the TurkishAmerican Handicraft Development Office produced over a hundred prototypes in those media that it identified as bearing the most export potential (ceramics, basketry, woodwork, hammered copper, and carved meerschaum), it did not, ultimately, attain its final goal of flooding the American market with mass-produced Turkish crafts, due to disagreements between Turkish and American officials.30 Nevertheless, the threeyear experiment reflects the significant ideological and financial resources that international elites invested in the idea of artists, designers, and craftsmen as agents of development. These ideas would shape Füreya’s own international trajectory during the 1950s. The Handicraft Development program positioned local craftsmen and American designers in a collaborative yet hierarchical relationship. This is concisely illustrated in “Design as Political Force,” a lengthy feature about the program published in the American magazine Industrial Design in 1957. In the article, magazine editor Avrom Fleishman uses text and images to articulate the distinct roles that the program assigned to craftspeople and designers in various international contexts, including Turkey. A two-page photo spread in the article centers on images of unnamed Turkish craftsmen and their wares, including two women and one man hard at work adding decorative glaze to ceramic vessels (figure 4.8). Although these craftsmen work “at a high level,” explains the journalist, they are locked in a premodern state of existence because of their inability to connect to world trade; they are “so far from their markets—geographically and culturally—that they have little knowledge of what it wants.” 31 The photograph of the Turkish ceramists underscores this perspective. It 138

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figure 4.8 Photograph of Turkish ceramists accompanying Avrom Fleishman’s article, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” Industrial Design 4, no. 4 (April 1957), 51.

anticipates an American viewer to whom the women’s headscarves and the roughwalled environment signal a premodern mode of production. At the same time, the neat row of graceful, identical vases extending into the distance suggests the organization and precision with which the Turkish craftsmen already work, signaling their latent potential to work in a streamlined manner on a mass scale. In the pages of Industrial Design, the photograph stands as an image of an underutilized labor force with potential to boost the Turkish economy, if only they will heed the (white male) industrial designers who appear on the facing page. The heroes of Fleishman’s account appear on the opposite side of the two-page spread, in the form of four suit-clad designers from Peter Muller-Munk Associates who are shown hard at work “tackl[ing] Turkish problems.” Placed to the left, where an American reader would encounter them first, and looking across the magazine’s spine as if to oversee the workers on the other side of the spread, they are positioned as catalysts of change. They cross their arms, furrow their brows, and consult gravely with one another. The designers are cast as what Fleishman had elsewhere dubbed the “economic diplomat,” a bearer of specialized knowledge who offers aid to the isolated, uninformed craftsmen in the name of international goodwill, while serving simultaneously as an “economist, marketing specialist, technical instructor and large-scale coordinator.” 32 Although these economic diplomats are “no specialist[s] in foreign affairs,” explains the writer, they can still “contribute something important by relating [their] knowledge . . . [to] craft oriented people [they know] little or nothing about.” 33 If the Turkish craftsmen would simply follow the recommendations of the men in the The Artist as Agent of Development

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Pittsburgh boardroom, suggests the editorial, they, too, could become a motor of Turkey’s economic liberalization and hasten its integration into a capitalist world system. Within the very first paragraph of his article, Fleishman acknowledges that the Handicraft Development program emerged out of an American reevaluation of its approach to foreign aid in the developing world. He notes that this collaborative and craft-focused approach to economic development was part of a “shift” in American aid programs, which involved “working in [developing] economies on their own terms.” 34 While there was wide consensus that American aid programs in Europe had been a great success, explains Fleishman, the United States had been less successful in its aid efforts for the developing world. Methods that had worked well in Europe, such as onetime injections of American dollars and sending American experts for short instructional visits, simply had not produced “lasting changes in underdeveloped economies.” 35 Aid monies had been misdirected, and local workers often discarded American techniques as soon as foreign experts departed. If the United States wished to avoid committing itself to an endless cycle of wasted handouts, suggested Fleishman alongside a growing number of assenting voices, then Washington needed to redesign its aid programs to “help people help themselves.” Only in this way might the United States be confident that developing nations would continue along a US-approved trajectory after aid monies had been disbursed and advisors had gone home, eventually achieving integration into markets and obviating the need for additional aid in the future. As the individuals who would continue to produce goods in the coming years, Turkish craftsmen were a central part of this particular vision. While the Handicraft Development Office hoped to produce a collaborative model, the Turkish intelligentsia were keen to promote a different mode of handicraft development, which hinged on a new archetype of the artist-craftsman. Whereas the ICA program had assigned designers and craftsmen separate roles based on a division of labor between design and craft, the artist-craftsman was distinguished by possessing both artistic vision (associated with the fine arts) and technical know-how (associated with craft). As art historians Jessica Gerschultz and Jenni Sorkin have explained, the figure of the artist-craftsman was, in its very definition, associated with elite members of society, like Füreya, who had access to the space of the “fine arts” and who might bring an artistic vision to bear on an industrial apparatus that relied on the labor of nonelite craftsmen.36 This archetype defined Füreya’s reception as she became better known in Turkey and began her dialogue with John Marshall and American audiences in the second half of the 1950s. The Turkish intelligentsia’s new interest in the figure of the artist-craftsman is reflected in “The Ceramics Studio,” a photo essay published in the newspaper Ulus in January 1953 that featured text by Bülent Ecevit and nine images by staff photographer Hüseyin Ezer (figure 4.9). “The Ceramics Studio” offers a rosy image of an atelier recently opened at the Gazi Education Institute in Ankara by the ceramist Hakkı İzzet, who had studied ceramics in Germany in the early 1930s. On the one hand, the 140

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figure 4.9 Bülent Ecevit, “The Ceramics Studio,” Ulus, January 8, 1953, 5, with photographs by Hüseyin Ezer. Courtesy Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation of Science, Art and Culture and Rıza Ezer.

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photographs emphasize İzzet’s skills as a craftsman by portraying him as a master at the center of a workshop full of apprentices, surrounded by kiln and wheel, vessels and clay. The technical dimensions of his vocation are further underscored by his white lab coat. At the same time, the captions emphasize İzzet’s artistic credentials, reiterating that “the head of the workshop is also closely concerned with the artistic side of ceramics,” not merely those of craft.37 The point is further underscored by a photograph showing the ceramist holding a slender vase with expert hands, inspecting it closely to make sure it meets his aesthetic standards. While the Handicraft Development Program suggested that American designers would catalyze the Turkish ceramics industry, “The Ceramics Studio” proposed that the native artist-craftsman would play this role. İzzet is shown as the head of a committed corps of workers who efficiently produce their wares in a well-ordered production line. In the upper-right photograph, three apprentices demonstrate the sequential steps leading from raw material to finished product, accompanied by the caption “In our country, ceramics will develop atop sound foundations.” 38 One of the workers is cut out of the frame, but his hands extend into it to pour liquid clay into a mold. In the center, a second worker extracts a freshly finished vessel from a mold, while a third, to his left, smooths the edges of a completed vase. In an additional frame to the left, two more apprentices use delicate brushes to add floral ornaments to the vases’ bodies. The Turkish studio’s productivity is symbolized by the many products lining its shelves, all thanks to the guidance of the supervising artist-craftsman, İzzet. By the mid-1950s, nearly every reviewer of Füreya’s exhibitions portrayed her in the guise of the artist-craftsman, emphasizing that she possessed both the technical skills of the craftsman and the individual artistic vision of the modern artist. In a review of Füreya’s Helikon exhibition that he wrote for the American publication TurkishAmerican News, Ecevit labeled “her craftsmanship . . . perfect” but also called Füreya “a born artist” and described her work as “full of poetic feeling and interpretation.” 39 Füreya’s newfound reputation as an artist-craftsman would resonate strongly with the Rockefeller Foundation official, John Marshall, who during the very same years began forming his own theory about the capacity of the creative individual to catalyze modernization in the developing world. FUNDING THE “CREATIVE MINORITY”

In the early 1950s, John Marshall came to believe that the future of the modern Middle East lay in the hands of a “creative minority,” which he defined as “that still restricted but rapidly growing group of Muslims privileged in having a secular and increasingly westernized education.” 40 Marshall drew this particular concept from the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who, in his twelve-volume Study of History (1934–1961), argues that all human civilizations have been propelled forward by a class of innovators—the creative minority—who have used inspiring, rather than coercive, tactics to guide their countrymen through the distinct challenges of their epoch. Applying this philosophy of 142

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history to his own personal experiences in the Middle East and combining it with the standard premises of American modernization theory, Marshall contended that individuals like Füreya would propel modernization in the Middle East. Further, he argued that the most effective way for the Rockefeller Foundation to drive Middle East development was to support this demographic through its fellowship program. By bringing members of the creative minority to the United States, exposing them to the most advanced examples of American scientific and creative thought, and sending them back to their homelands, argued Marshall, the American foundation could have just as substantive and enduring an impact as it would by funding public health programs. Marshall described this process as an “invigorating transfer of technical know-how” and contended that artists, too, should be considered human channels through which American foundations could advance their interests.41 Further, contended Marshall, this funding model entailed low investment but high return; he argued that extending “relatively small RF grants” to members of the creative minority might lead to a “solution of Near Eastern problems out of all proportion to the amounts involved.” 42 Once back in their native countries, proposed the administrator, fellowship recipients like Füreya would share the knowledge they had gained in the United States with the younger populations of their modernizing homelands. In so doing, he continued, they would ignite a continuous process of development that would extend well into the future. Marshall began to develop his theory of the creative minority in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he transformed himself from a generalist in the humanities to a Middle East expert. Marshall had joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 1933 as assistant director for the humanities, and he early on showed a propensity for steering the program in innovative new directions.43 In 1948, Marshall (by now the associate director for the humanities) became the first humanities staff member to visit the Middle East. Until 1958, when he took a new job with the foundation, he spent at least one month per year traveling between Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. There, he forged relationships with an extraordinary community of government officials, intellectuals, and artists.44 When he was back in the United States, Marshall became closely involved in the process of securing the place of Middle East studies in the American university, although he took a critical view of many American scholars’ historicist approach to the Islamic world.45 By the mid-1950s, Marshall’s reputation as a Middle East expert was so well established that Princeton University consulted him when seeking a successor for the renowned Arabist Philip Hitti, and the Museum of Modern Art called on him when it considered sending an exhibition to the Middle East.46 Marshall subscribed fully to the central premises of postwar development ideology outlined in this book’s introduction. He believed, for instance, that all nations progressed on a common path from tradition to modernity and that this process could be accelerated through strategically directed political and economic reforms. He also shared the mainstream American view that the Middle East was “a region of crucial The Artist as Agent of Development

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importance for the peace of the world” because of its strategic geopolitical location alongside communist Russia, and he therefore advocated US involvement in the area.47 Finally, Marshall adhered to the standard premise that “cosmopolitan Turkey” was the most advanced nation of the Middle East. This idea was most concisely expressed by sociologist Daniel Lerner in the singular table in his book The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), in which he located Turkey “HIGH” on a graph comparing levels of “tradition” and “modernity,” above Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iran (figure 0.2). In 1951, Marshall told his colleagues that Rockefeller aid to Turkey was “virtually assured” to succeed, adding that “Turkey’s creative minority now only needs a final lift.” 48 By the end of the decade, Marshall had stimulated an eightfold increase in Rockefeller aid to Turkey; almost 40 percent of all the fellowships awarded to Turkish candidates in a sixty-year period were distributed under his watch. Marshall did not just promote the financing of individuals. He also considered supporting the establishment of an American Studies program at University of Istanbul, ameliorating the national orchestra’s need for instruments, financing the restoration of the Hagia Sophia, and training Turkish archivists. Of the fifteen individuals from Turkey who would receive fellowships, nearly one-third—including the gallerist and critic Bülent Ecevit, the painter Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, the composers Bülent Arel and İlhan Mimaroğlu, and the critic Tunç Yalman—were closely involved with the intellectual circles centering on Gallery Maya and the Helikon Association Gallery.49 Turkish authorities considered Marshall’s services to their country so important that they honored him with the Medal of the City of Istanbul in 1956. While Marshall adhered to a conventional set of ideas around modernization in the Middle East, he was unusual in his conviction that artists, writers, and creative individuals had an important part to play in such processes. “In my view, the humanities have an important place in [the] process . . . of modernization which [Turkey] is attempting,” he asserted.50 Marshall believed that the American government and philanthropic organizations had vastly underestimated the power of humanities-focused funding, including the visual arts, to stimulate the socioeconomic modernization they wished to promote. As the foundation began to branch out from its traditional focus on medicine and public health, he launched a decade-long campaign to convince his colleagues to offer humanities fellowships to candidates from the Middle East.51 The Rockefeller Foundation adopted Marshall’s ideas quite quickly. As early as 1951, his colleagues agreed to direct more funding “to relatively undeveloped areas . . . and to the specifically humanistic aspects of area study work.” 52 By the time Marshall met Füreya in Istanbul in 1955, the foundation was primed to undertake its first experiment funding an artist from the developing world. AN APPEAL FROM THE ARTIST

April 1957 found Füreya in San Francisco, California, nearing the end of four months of Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored travel through the United States and Mexico. The artist had arrived in New York in early February, where she was immediately 144

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invited into the upper echelons of the art world following an itinerary that Marshall had based around her interests at the intersection of craft, modern art, and Islamic art. Her first visits were to the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Crafts, where she met with the director Thomas S. Tibbs; the Museum of Modern Art, where she met with the director René d’Harnoncourt; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she spoke with the curator of Islamic art Maurice Dimand; and the Guggenheim Museum, where she saw James Johnson Sweeney (whose acquaintance she had already made at the 1954 AICA congress in Istanbul). In mid-March, Füreya made her way to Mexico City, where the prestigious anthropologist and director of the Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares, Daniel F. Rubín de la Barbolla, directed her to a range of ceramic centers across the country. When she returned to the United States in late April, Füreya’s first stop was San Francisco, followed by a whirlwind tour of top American craft centers at the very moment when American ceramics came into its own.53 Füreya spent a week touring ceramics programs and meeting local potters in Los Angeles before making her way to Santa Fe, where she learned about indigenous ceramics techniques. After completing a ten-day enameling workshop at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the artist passed through Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, and Syracuse before finally landing in Washington, DC, in May 1957. In San Francisco, Füreya was suddenly struck by how little time remained of her American fellowship and sent Marshall an appeal requesting an extension. Though addressed only to Marshall, the letter’s extended audience was the broader community of Rockefeller Foundation officials to whom Marshall would have to make her case. Writing in her slightly Gallic English and signature blue ballpoint pen, Füreya explained to her American sponsor that she wished to “profit as much as I can of the States” while still in the country.54 She also requested three months of additional funding to attend the summer session at Alfred University, one of the top ceramics programs in the United States, to learn to make her own glazes. Füreya’s San Francisco letter is important because it reveals that, by the late 1950s, the artist herself explained her larger artistic project in terms of economics. In other words, she had learned to speak the international language of development. Füreya told Marshall that acquiring the technical skill of glaze making would be “fruitful not only for my work, but also for many young Türks who desire so much to learn in the field,” because it would free her and the ceramists she trained from their reliance on expensive glazes imported from Europe. Further, contended Füreya, learning how to make her own glazes would enable her and her assistants to produce more authentic, and therefore more marketable, products for an international market. Framing an additional period of tutelage in the United States as a means of forwarding Turkey’s integration into global markets, Füreya revealed herself utterly at ease with the set of ideas around the artist and economic integration that had, by the mid-1950s, become mainstream. The Artist as Agent of Development

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Füreya began her San Francisco letter by echoing a refrain that Marshall had heard frequently from other artists, that Turkey’s isolation from international markets was an impediment to their artistic progress. Füreya was far from the only member of the Turkish intelligentsia who told Marshall that the lack of materials available to them impeded creative work. The Istanbul Orchestra appealed to him for strings, reeds, and mutes, and teachers at the State Academy of Fine Arts, including Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Sabri Berkel, asked if the Rockefeller Foundation could provide them with canvas and paint.55 For Füreya, the central problem was the acquisition of glazes; because of Turkey’s lack of foreign exchange, it was not always possible to import the glazes she used from abroad, and she found herself unable to work to her greatest potential. One of her assistants recalled that Füreya sometimes resorted to grinding up industrially produced glass tiles to produce the colors she desired: “We had so little of everything that in order to use the sediment that accumulated in the cylinder-shaped bowl in which Ms. Füreya washed her brushes, I would take that bowl . . . dry it out, and use the leftovers.” Only later did he discover that the other assistant had been doing the same.56 Appealing to her American funders’ sense of national pride, Füreya contended that the American university was the only place in the world where she could find the solution to the creative problems caused by Turkey’s economic isolation. She told Marshall that her French instructor, Georges Serré, had discouraged her from learning to make her own glazes and that she subsequently found herself “forced to import glazes . . . from France” on her return. Tapping into postwar discourses about the United States as a superior source of technical knowledge, Füreya argued that a period of tutelage at Alfred University would provide the ceramists of Turkey with the solution to this problem. Once she had learned to make her own glazes, she claimed, she would return to Turkey to teach others this skill, thereby circumventing the material shortages that prevented them from producing their wares. By providing what Marshall had once called an “invigorating transfer of technical know-how,” suggested Füreya, she would have an impact that would resonate far beyond her own work. Füreya also reiterated the increasingly standard premise that using local materials was a key strategy for selling products to an international market. When the ceramist argued in her letter that learning to make her own glazes “would give me the knowledge of using the material that I could find in Turkey and that they used making the old Ottoman tiles,” she appealed to a marketing principle that Avrom Fleishman had succinctly summed up in the pages of Industrial Design: “The more distinct the national character, the better the sales potential is likely to be.” 57 In so doing, she suggested that glazes would function as a kind of local artistic currency facilitating her ceramics’ circulation within an international sphere. Throughout her letter, Füreya deployed a set of ideas about the creative individual and economic integration that had become common by the mid-1950s in order to explain the stakes of her work and her need for further study in terms the Rockefeller Foundation would understand. And she was successful. Marshall soon concluded that 146

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it would be “of very considerable importance for her work and for the development of work with ceramics in Turkey for her to learn more of the technique of making glazes.” 58 In June, the foundation offered to provide tuition and lodging at Alfred University and to cover an additional three months of personal expenses. Before enrolling at Alfred, however, Füreya traveled to Washington, DC, where she had her first solo exhibition in the United States. GIVING “ANCIENT ART A MODERN STYLE”

In May 1957, with the support of the Turkish embassy, Füreya opened her first US solo exhibition at the Franz Bader Gallery, a reputable showroom in the northwest area of the city. A host of powerful well-wishers turned out for the opening, including the director of one of the Smithsonian museums and officials from the German, Iraqi, Swiss, and Yugoslavian embassies and the World Bank. The famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson took several shots and left a congratulatory message in the guest book on his way out.59 A cache of photographs from the opening reveals the wide range of material with which Füreya made her American debut (figure 4.10). Dozens of ceramic tiles and platters are arrayed on tables and low shelves around the perimeter of the room, and a series of moody black-and-white lithographs hang on the wall alongside several brightly colored ceramic panels. In one shot, Füreya can be seen deep in conversation with Edwin Wilson, a former US ambassador to Turkey. The artist grasps a large bowl in her hands, tilting it outward so her companion can observe its interior. The collection of objects seen in the exhibition indicate that Füreya’s US trip was a period of wide-ranging experimentation during which she built on and rethought the approaches she had forged in France and Turkey. On the right, two pedestals have been laid on their sides and stacked atop one another to create a display surface. A half-dozen small, square tiles are scattered about like coasters, decorated with a tortoise-like form with two small legs and a central dot. (This form was derived from Füreya’s study of ancient Hittite iconography and also appeared in a series of ceramic panels she produced for the Istanbul Hilton in 1955.)60 Alongside them rest three painted stones with jagged edges, just small enough to pick up in one hand. These are somewhat anachronistic objects, of which there is no other record within Füreya’s oeuvre, though there may be a point of connection with the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, who had produced a similar set of objects in the early 1950s.61 Finally, there is the vertical ceramic panel that leans against the wall, its surface dominated by a pale ovoid form and a series of smaller such shapes. In this panel, the artist carved down into the surface of the clay, exploring questions of texture and scale that would later come to dominate her murals in public space (figure 4.1). Working in the name of cultural diplomacy, members of the local press amplified the Turkish embassy’s description of Füreya’s work as “symbolic of modern Turkey: founded on a rich heritage, but ever progressive and in search of new horizons.” 62 The Artist as Agent of Development

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figure 4.10 Füreya and Edwin C. Wilson, former American ambassador to Turkey, at the opening of her solo exhibition at the Franz Bader Gallery, Washington, DC, May 13, 1957. Franz Bader Gallery collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy Sara Koral Aykar.

Those words were written by the Turkish press attaché, Altemur Kılıç, whose voice dominated the Washington reception of Füreya. (Kılıç was, incidentally, Füreya’s stepson from her recently ended marriage.) For instance, American critics eagerly transmitted the embassy’s message that Füreya revived the “lost colors” that OttomanTurkish artisans had uniquely contributed to the history of art, but whose techniques of production had been forgotten, including turquoise, eggplant, tomato red, grass green, and ultramarine blue.63 They also called Füreya’s work “unusually interesting,” and celebrated her unique capacity to transform “the heritage of Byzantine mosaics and Turkish tiles” into modern artworks “reminiscent of Klee or Miro, yet not in any sense derivative.” 64 Füreya, the Washington Post announced, “Gives Ancient Art a 148

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Modern Style.” 65 With the support of this promotional press apparatus, Füreya made her first inroads into the American market. The DC press, however, strayed from the Turkish embassy’s talking points by emphasizing a particular aesthetic feature of the ceramist’s work that was standard in discussions of “advanced” painting in the United States in the late 1950s: the relation of pigment to surface. When Füreya opened her exhibition in 1957, mainstream American audiences were primed to evaluate artistic quality in terms of the relation of paint to canvas. Abstract expressionism had become the US government’s main artistic export after 1955 and began to experience mainstream market success in 1956, just prior to Füreya’s arrival. The American public had begun to embrace a second generation of abstract expressionist painters, many of them women and working in a more lyrical style, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan.66 DC audiences were also familiar with the work of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, prominent figures of the Washington Color School, who deployed Frankenthaler’s signature stain technique of soaking thinned oil paints into the canvas like fabric dye to make the pigment become one with its support. Such artistic currents gave rise to an American critical apparatus based on an opposition between artists who successfully “transcend[ed] the decorative” (an approach associated with artistic inspiration, vision, and mastery) and those who merely covered the surface (an approach associated with ornamentation and the affiliated categories of femininity and craft).67 Individuals who were perceived as having profoundly and essentially transformed the surface were considered true artists. By contrast, those who merely made cosmetic or superficial alterations were condemned. These intersecting discourses around gender, the decorative, and abstraction shaped the American reception of Füreya’s work. Although Füreya showed many types of objects, the American press focused primarily on the way this cosmopolitan “lady artist” had expanded the scope of a craft medium through gestural abstraction.68 For instance, the American critics made no mention of the difficult-to-define tiles and painted rocks seen in the photograph at the opening but made much of her abstract ceramics, such as the panel visible behind her on the wall. Rectangular in form, the panel is hung at eye level like a painting. It is dominated by a dark flood of glaze that sweeps in from the upper right, aqueous and semitransparent, making the lighter patch of pigment in the upper right appear to recede. In this panel, Füreya uses the same exploratory brushwork—with curving chains of small, arcing strokes reaching into the pale ground—that is visible in her smaller panels of the same period (figure 2.9). This early 1950s work contains on its surface a range of distinct experiments in how glaze might be applied. While the artist proceeded with caution in some portions of the tile’s field (such as the space between the white, cloud-like forms where single brushstrokes never touch), she manipulates the glaze more boldly in others, as in the lower corner, where orange, yellow, and green bleed into one another for a hazy, blurred effect. The Artist as Agent of Development

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Even in black-and-white reproduction, it is possible to discern the distinct features that American audiences would have found so appealing about such ceramic panels when they went on view at the Franz Bader Gallery. With her layered, multichromatic patches of glaze, Füreya’s panels respond nimbly to transatlantic discussions of pigment and support. They amplify a sense of liquidity, creating simultaneous effects of surface and of depth. And, they answer at the same time to a midcentury fetishization of the autographic gesture: in the upper third of the panel seen hanging behind Füreya at Bader Gallery, the inclusion of the tripping brushstrokes she has added atop the glaze signal the presence of an artist at work. In promoting Füreya’s work, the DC critics strategically described her manipulation of glaze in terms that emphasized her distance from craft, legitimating her instead as an artist. The Sunday Star, for instance, cited her “unusually free and rich . . . surface modeling” and the “textural beauty” of her tile panels, while the Post suggested that the end result of her work in this craft medium was “suggestive of modern European painting.” Further, the distinct material qualities of glaze—a material associated with craft—contributed to the effect of “richness,” “modeling,” and depth that the American critics saw as an indicator of Füreya’s artistry. Comparing her tile panels to the gouaches she produced during the same period is illuminating on this point. A 1952 gouache, for example, shares many of the same features as her glazed panels, including its limited color palette; a pronounced, if shallow, depth of field; and a sense of upward lift achieved through the density of form and chromatic progression (figure 4.11). Yet where the gouache registers the dry scrape of a brush on paper (as in the feathery brush marks on the tallest of the green leaves), Füreya’s tile panels make a theme of their own apparent liquidity. At a moment when the problem of how to master the decorative without being mastered in turn was a central point of critical discussion in the United States, works such as these lent themselves to the affirmative reception that DC critics were happy to give. RETURN TO ISTANBUL

At each stage of her travels between France, Turkey, and the United States, Füreya encountered a common set of ideas about the artist, craft, and the problem of economic integration. She launched her career in Turkey between 1951 and 1954, where she was in close dialogue with a community of intellectuals who were initially skeptical of her transgression of traditional boundaries between art and craft but soon embraced Füreya as an agent of development who might help drive Turkey’s integration into international markets. Füreya staged additional exhibits against a backdrop of Turkish-US collaborations, such as the Handicraft Development Office in Ankara. And once she arrived in the United States, the ceramist herself adopted the guise of an artistic agent of development, presenting herself as a carrier of technical know-how that would transform the Turkish ceramics industry. 150

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figure 4.11 Füreya, untitled work signed “25 May 1952, Clinique Pasteur St. Cloud Leysin, Switzerland.” Mixed media on paper, 33 × 23.8 cm. Sara Koral Aykar collection. Photograph by Hadiye Cangökçe.

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Although Füreya would continue to describe her American experience as “formative,” she never again returned to the United States, and the short, eleven-day show the artist organized at the Architectural League in New York in October 1957 was the last time American viewers encountered her work.69 Over the following decades, Füreya became a catalyzing figure for Turkish ceramics, though not in precisely the way that she, Marshall, and the Turkish intelligentsia had projected in the 1950s. In that earlier moment, preoccupied by the ideology of integration, the artist and her international supporters had connected Füreya to the vision of global markets that American leadership and their allies promoted as a means to world peace. Marshall and Cemal Tollu, among others, helped articulate this vision of an artist as an agent of development who might train others to mass-produce ceramics in line with international tastes, thereby beginning a process of distribution of Turkish ceramics onto international markets. Although she continued to train assistants in her home studio, Füreya did not collaborate with industry to transfer her designs to mass production, and the imagined international market for her work did not materialize.70 Instead, Füreya continued to explore what she called the “crossroads of art and industry” by producing large-scale work in (semi)public architectural spaces, such as hotels and markets, and by mentoring a generation of ceramists who helped drive the ceramics revival of the 1960s.71 Füreya made her first forays into architectural space with a 1953 commission for a series of small wall panels (now lost) for the newly built Istanbul Hilton and a large wall-scale commission for the Marmara Hotel in Ankara in 1959 (subsequently demolished).72 While she did not produce wall tiles for the Turkish pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels—that honor went to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, whose monumental mosaic wall formed the backbone of the pavilion—Füreya produced several hundred coffee cups for its restaurant, laying the ground for a lifetime of collaborations with one of its architects, Utarit İzgi. These early experiences foretold a burst of public work in the 1960s and early 1970s, in which Füreya worked especially closely with İzgi.73 Two projects from 1964 and 1966, the Anafartalar Market in Ankara (designed by Ferzan Baydar, Affan Kırımlı, and Tayfur Şahbaz) and the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market (designed by Metin Hepgüler, Doğan Tekeli, and Sami Sisa) respectively, represent the approach Füreya used throughout the following decade. In the Textile Traders’ Market, for example, she pursued her goal to “revolutionize” çini by compiling hundreds of rectangular tile panels to make a wall-scale whole. If, in the early 1950s, Füreya engaged with çini in freestanding panels like Writing of Paradise (1951), now each tile was significant for the part it played in the larger whole, rather than independently important. Although she continued to deploy the flowing abstract marks and many-colored glazes of her early tile panels, in these architectural commissions, they no longer served to underscore her objects’ affiliation with abstract painting as much as they served to knit together the gridded wall. In these commissions, Füreya moved away from the profile of the artist-craftsman that had pertained in the 1950s and became involved in a separate strain of discussions 152

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about the synthesis of art and architecture.74 If the Turkish intelligentsia had previously argued that Füreya’s bridging of art and craft uniquely positioned her to revitalize Turkey’s craft sector, in the 1960s the debates turned more toward the question of how to impact audiences in public spaces. Rockefeller Foundation funding for artists from the Middle East slowed after Marshall left his position as associate director of humanities in 1958, abandoning his dialogue with the “creative minority” he believed would drive modernization in the Middle East. This first distinct chapter of Füreya’s career thus also represented a first distinct chapter in the broader history of art, craft, and the ideology of economic integration, which waned as the 1960s approached.

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CONCLUSION Building Istanbul Modern: Art and Development in a Twenty-First-Century Museum

O

N DECEMBER 11, 2004, RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞAN , prime minister of Turkey, walked up to a bright-red podium tracked by a blue-white spotlight. The cameras of CNN Türk hugged close as he put down his notes and raised his head to look out at his audience. When the camera zoomed out, a large logo appeared behind the prime minister: a simple white square surrounding the phrase “ISTANBUL MODERN,” the name of the new art museum that Erdoğan was there to inaugurate. “In this city, which was a cradle of civilization, there is no shortage of the art events that we see in the developed countries of the world,” said Erdoğan, who nevertheless expressed regret at the “late arrival” of a modern art museum on the Turkish cultural scene. After sounding this critical note, the prime minister shifted to a more optimistic tenor, announcing his “personal pride and happiness” at witnessing Istanbul Modern rectify this problem. It was an unusual speech for the politician known more for his conservative Islamist politics than for his investment in modern and contemporary art; nevertheless, he ended on a poetic, even effusive,

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note, telling the audience of four thousand people that the museum would act as a “glimmer of light” illuminating future generations.1 Although Erdoğan did not mention it explicitly, everyone present was aware of the immediate political context for his comments about Turkey’s artistic and cultural riches. The museum’s opening had been accelerated, at the prime minister’s request, to coincide with an important set of talks held in Brussels regarding Turkey’s entry into the European Union, from which he had returned just the day before. Further underscoring the museum’s connection to Turkey’s EU bid, European leaders Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schroeder sent congratulatory video messages to be played at Istanbul Modern’s opening. “As we look ahead at the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union, it is increasingly important that the world learns more of what Turkey and Turkish people have to offer us,” pronounced Blair in his statement, which was later commemorated in a plaque in the museum’s foyer.2 Located in a former customs warehouse just steps from the Bosphorus strait, over the following fifteen years, Istanbul Modern welcomed some seven million visitors and became a requisite stop for foreign tourists to the city (figure 5.1). During the summer, visitors enjoyed spectacular views of the Istanbul skyline and Topkapı Palace from the terrace of the museum’s restaurant, as multistory cruise ships let off passengers nearby. Istanbul Modern soon became a staple in travel guides such as “36 Hours in Istanbul,” a New York Times feature that positioned the museum at the very center of Istanbul’s expanding art scene.3 Immediately on entering, visitors were greeted by Fahrelnissa Zeid’s monumental canvas My Hell (1951), whose surface is shattered into fields of saturated yellow, red, black, and gray (fig. 0.17). Produced in Paris by a well-traveled Turkish artist with both European and Middle Eastern affiliations, My Hell was another powerful emblem of Turkey’s essential cosmopolitanism and an integral part of the museum’s affirmative answer to the dominant political question of the day: “Is Turkey, a comparatively poor and mostly Muslim nation, European enough to join the club?” 4 Although Erdoğan’s presence at Istanbul Modern’s opening might give the impression that it was a public institution, the museum was a hybrid enterprise, driven by a coalition of public, private, and corporate interests characteristic of the late-capitalist museum.5 The US$5 million space was conceived and paid for by the Eczacıbaşıs, a wealthy local family with an established history of arts philanthropy, under the direction of their arts nonprofit, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı). However, it was housed in a state property, received funding from the beauty corporation Avea and the pharmaceutical wholesaler Hedef Alliance, and showed works from the Deutsche Bank collection on a yearly basis. In the museum’s twenty-four thousand square feet of gallery space, artworks from the Eczacıbaşı family’s private collections were interwoven with canonical artworks from the Turkish state’s collections, whose origins lay in the early years of the republic. These included paintings from the Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (the “State Museum”), inaugurated by Atatürk in 1937 and located just a half mile 156

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figure 5.1 Istanbul Modern. Courtesy of Istanbul Modern. Photograph by Muhsin Akgün.

down the road.6 Along with the State Academy of Fine Arts (to which it was adjacent) and the annual State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions (where the government made new purchases for its collection each year), the State Museum was a key cog in the republican art machine through which Turkish leadership endeavored to develop a national art world beginning in the long 1930s. Though the State Museum was frequently closed for years at a time, it was a looming local precedent for Istanbul Modern and the primary source of national developmentalist historical models with which the founders of the twenty-first-century museum had to reckon.7 Istanbul Modern came directly out of, and in some ways continued, the twentiethcentury debates about art and national development, Turkey’s place in an international order, and public versus private custodianship of the arts that this book has illuminated. In an echo of earlier debates about “popular training” (halk terbiyesi), the museum’s founder, Oya Eczacıbaşı, announced that Istanbul Modern’s primary goal was to educate unschooled audiences and encourage “the custom of visiting museums” in Turkey.8 In continuation of earlier discussions about the way modern art institutions might help Turkey assert its place an international community, she described it as “a new focal point in the globalizing art world” that would “reflect [Turkey’s] cultural development” to its worldwide peers.9 At the same time, Istanbul Modern engaged with a key question raised by Sabahattin Eyüboğlu in his 1937 essay “The Art Gallery” and later renegotiated by the founders of the first private art galleries in the 1950s, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2: What roles should public and private enterprises take in the construction of a national art world? Finally, in articulating the Conclusion

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larger social role they envisioned for the museum, the Istanbul Modern team described the Turkish art landscape as “deplorably limited,” using a rhetoric of lack that echoed the assertions of local intellectuals a half century before.10 However, Istanbul Modern was also a distinctly twenty-first-century museum, not only with regard to the configuration of public and private interests behind it but also in the ways that it rewrote the developmental narratives it inherited from the past. This rewriting took its most substantial form in the inaugural exhibition, Observation/ Interpretation/Multiplicity: Influences, Relations, Oppositions in 20th Century Turkish Painting, organized by curators Ali Akay, Levent Çalıkoğlu, and Haşım Nur Gürel as a “fresh new perspective on Turkish painting history.”11 In this exhibition, curators abandoned the progressive and chronological approach established by the State Museum, utilizing instead a thematic framework heavily inspired by the recently opened Tate Modern in London. Istanbul Modern’s location in a repurposed warehouse on the waterfront already announced its kinship with the London museum, which had opened in a former power station on the Thames four years earlier. By extracting individual artworks from the State Museum’s collection and blending them into a thematic exhibition inspired by Tate Modern, the Istanbul Modern team marked the museum as “an environment of international standard” and announced Turkey’s possession of the “universal and contemporary values” that its founders believed were the key to a prosperous national future.12 BUILDING ISTANBUL MODERN

Istanbul Modern’s roots lay in a period of socioeconomic change in the 1980s. In the 1960s and ’70s, the government had experimented with import substitution (building up local industrial sectors in order to reduce a reliance on foreign imports) and relied heavily on remittances from guest workers in Germany as part of its ongoing efforts to escape its semiperipheral status and integrate into the global economy.13 In the 1980s, Turkey shifted tacks yet again under the leadership of President Turgut Özal. Özal aggressively liberalized the economy and integrated Turkey into transnational markets, changes that roughly paralleled those in the United States and United Kingdom under Reagan and Thatcher. Turkey successfully moved from the periphery to the core of a global economy, and the resulting economic boom catalyzed a local market for contemporary art and a new community of collectors.14 Prominent among the new community of collectors were the members of three major industrial dynasties—Eczacıbaşı, Koç, and Sabancı—who spurred a wave of museum construction in the following decades.15 The Eczacıbaşı family already had an established legacy of philanthropy in the arts; in 1973, Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı had created the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı), which funded a range of cultural festivals, including the Istanbul Biennial, launched in 1987. That same year, Eczacıbaşı called in the acclaimed Italian architect Gae Aulenti, known for her 1981 conversion of a former Paris train station into the popular Musée 158

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d’Orsay, to design a museum in a nineteenth-century fez factory in Istanbul’s Eyüp neighborhood. Blocked by local authorities at a moment of political fragmentation, Eczacıbaşı’s Aulenti-designed museum never broke ground; it took another decade and the personal support of Prime Minister Erdoğan for Istanbul Modern to become a reality.16 The ease with which, in 2004, the Eczacıbaşı collection found a public home— and official sanction from the highest level of national leadership—reflected a political sea change that had taken place in the intervening years. In the early 2000s, liberal and Islamist political factions came together in an unanticipated “post-Kemalist” consensus that questioned the foundational premises of Kemalism, the national developmentalist ideology formed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk when he established the Turkish republic in 1923. This unusual collection of political groups were united in their shared belief that it was necessary to rethink the relation of Islam and the state, their emphasis on the importance of membership in the European Union, and their embrace of “democracy, multiculturalism, and a market economy in a globalizing world.”17 Istanbul Modern was a direct result of this brief moment of consensus, when the conservative Erdoğan and a pro-EU business elite converged on the idea that a museum of modern art would help promote Istanbul as a global cultural capital symbolizing these values. In the late 1980s, political fragmentation had prevented an Aulenti-designed museum from coming to fruition. Now, a decade and a half later, this propitious convergence of invested parties enabled Istanbul Modern to open. The post-Kemalist consensus that facilitated Istanbul Modern’s opening in 2004 was short-lived. By 2007, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKParti) had begun to show an authoritarian streak, and Turkey’s hopes of joining the European Union had begun to fade. Erdoğan’s cultural politics took a turn toward neo-Ottomanism, which emphasized Turkey’s Ottoman-Islamic roots and historical affiliations with the Middle East rather than its secularist, republican legacy and connections to Europe. Erdoğan, who went on to become president in 2014, was now far more likely to be photographed at the Topkapı Palace viewing a goat-hair coat said to have belonged to the prophet Muhammad than inaugurating a museum of modern art. When Queen Elizabeth II visited Istanbul Modern in 2008, it was no longer as a member of a cadre of welcoming European leaders but as one of the only remaining supporters of Turkey’s EU bid. A publicity image shows the diminutive queen flanked by two figures who represent the two sides of the short-lived post-Kemalist alliance that had produced the museum: First Lady Hayrünnisa Gül, her hair covered by a pale pink headscarf, and museum president Oya Eczacıbaşı, in a knee-length skirt and jacket (figure 5.2). The three women are gathered in front of Zeid’s My Hell (1951), which serves as a centerpiece of this public exercise of state power and international diplomacy at a moment when Turkey’s status as a member of the European “club” was Conclusion

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figure 5.2 Queen Elizabeth II views Fahrelnissa Zeid’s My Hell (1951) at Istanbul Modern, along with Oya Eczacıbaşı and First Lady Hayrünissa Gül, May 2008. Photograph by POOL—Anatolia/Getty Images.

on shaky ground. Today, Erdoğan’s image as the domineering “sultan” of Turkey is difficult to square with this political moment of the early 2000s, when the prime minister’s announcement of his “joy and happiness” about Istanbul Modern’s opening was echoed so enthusiastically by European leaders. Since 2004, the museum has become an integral part of a US$1 billion urbandevelopment project, Galataport, designed to catalyze Istanbul’s tourism sector with a state-of-the-art cruise ship terminal and a suite of luxury hotels.18 Local authorities and the museum’s founders now aim to deploy Istanbul Modern to create another Bilbao, the formerly depressed town in northern Spain whose name has become synonymous with museum-driven development following the success of starchitect Frank Gehry’s spectacular branch of the Guggenheim Museum in that city. In 2018, Istanbul Modern put the majority of its collection into storage and moved into a temporary space while it waited for construction to begin on a fifty-thousand-square-foot building designed by Renzo Piano, of Centre Pompidou and Whitney Museum fame. Plans portray the gleaming future museum, nearly double its previous size, as a gathering place for international visitors who flock toward it in droves. Maps of the larger Galataport development show Istanbul Modern as the anchor of a multiblock tourist hub linked together by a hydraulic boardwalk running its length. To the north, a nineteenth-century mosque and park will remain untouched, and to the east, just across a paved plaza, stands Istanbul Modern’s immediate predecessor, the perpetually closed State Museum. Originally due 160

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to reopen in September 2020 in its own renovated space, the troubled national art collection’s opening was delayed by the departure of its senior staff in the summer of that year.19 A STATELY PREDECESSOR

Like Istanbul Modern, the State Museum found its first home in a repurposed building on the waterfront. Rather than a customs depot, however, republican leadership decreed in 1937 that the state’s growing collection of modern art would take up residence at Dolmabahçe Palace, the former home of the Ottoman crown prince. By filling the defunct palace with modernist works of art by an emergent corps of national artists, Atatürk announced the replacement of an Ottoman cultural order with a new republican one. While the academy produced artists and the annual state exhibitions served as a means of ranking and distributing their output, the State Museum was designed to provide a historical framework through which the emergent history of modern Turkish art was given shape and made comprehensible to a national public. As one enthusiastic reviewer announced, it was “now possible to follow all the stages of development in Turkish art.” 20 In keeping with the national developmentalist logic of the republican art world, the State Museum plotted out the story of three generations’ convergence on a modern art simultaneously aligned with European modernism and informed by the Turkish past. In a series of articles published in the magazine Ar between 1937 and 1938, a young Nurullah Berk, who later became director of the museum, offered up a lengthy and detailed description of the museum’s first exhibition, Fifty Years of Modern Turkish Art.21 The exhibition began with a survey of the work of the “primitives” (primitifler), a group of nineteenth-century painters trained at the Ottoman naval academy who produced realistic paintings of palace grounds and Bosphorus landscapes. Because they were invested in signaling a break with the Ottoman order, the twentieth-century custodians of the State Museum put these artists firmly in the past by designating them as the first chapter of an unfolding history of Turkish art.22 A second sequence of galleries featured the work of a transitional generation of Ottoman artists who had studied in Paris and returned to Istanbul to deploy impressionistic strategies between 1870 and 1900. These first two sections of the exhibition were the ground for the third and final section focusing on the much-valorized artists of the new republic, a cadre with which Berk himself identified. Over the following fifty years, Berk pursued the interlinked projects of running the State Museum and writing a national art history alongside his work as a painting instructor at the academy. He served as the museum’s director between 1963 and 1969 and remained an attentive critic of the museum’s activities throughout his life. Berk’s first survey text on modern Turkish sculpture came out in 1937, and the final one just a year before his death in 1981.23 Through these publications, Berk helped to make the teleological art historical narrative first established at the State Museum into the Conclusion

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figure 5.3 Nurullah Berk, “20th-Century Turkish Painting,” 1973. Current rendering by Kevin Guyer.

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accepted account of Turkish modernism. This account still pertained in the 1980s, when the Eczacıbaşı family began building the art collection that became a cornerstone of Istanbul Modern. A diagram that Berk produced in 1973, plotting the historical trajectory of some two dozen Turkish art movements through time, provides important information about the shape of these standard art historical narratives (figure 5.3).24 Berk’s diagram seeks to register the impact of competing art historical forces on the development of Turkish modernism between 1908, the year of the Young Turk Revolution, and 1973, the year of the diagram’s making. There are, on the one hand, the forces emanating from a Turkish tradition, catalogued in an unlabeled column on the far left, and, on the other hand, those emanating from Europe and the United States. The latter are registered in a second column, prominently labeled “Western Influences,” on the far right. The impact of these contrapuntal forces on the history of Turkish art is indicated by lines converging from each column onto the diagram’s central field. There, Berk has designated a collection of individual artists (İbrahim Çallı, Zeki Kocamemi, Ahmet Çelebi), artists’ groups (Turkish Painters Association), institutions (State Exhibitions, Gallery Maya), and events (the AICA Congress of 1954) that he sees as constituting Turkish art history. Thus, the group of artists who called themselves Group D, of which Berk had been a member, is shown on the receiving end of both “folk traditions” (originating in the Turkish column on the left) and of “cubism, construction, and expressionism” (coming from the “Western influences” column on the right). Berk adds an additional layer of specificity to his schema by using two separate marks at the end of these lines. Filled-in circular endpoints indicate “indirect influences,” while those that remain hollow signal “direct influences.” While building on, extending, and nuancing the three-generation narrative of modern Turkish art established at the State Museum, Berk’s diagram also reveals the persistence of developmental approaches to art history in the Turkish cultural sphere. Despite its ambitious beginnings, the State Museum was closed to the public as much as it was open. After opening in 1937, it closed in 1939 and remained so for over a decade. Though it reopened its doors in 1951, it closed again in 1959. Publications like Berk’s, rather than the museum, became the primary vehicle of transmission for the history of modern Turkish art.25 In 1964, on a visit to the recently reopened museum, the American art collector Abby Weed Grey described the deplorable conditions in the “freezing galleries,” where the artworks were barely visible due to “an early system of lighting chandeliers [which hung] from the ceiling, graced with a few low wattage bulbs.” 26 Grey’s account echoed Berk’s own increasingly plaintive set of public complaints in which he expressed concern about the risk of fire, the structural unsoundness of the building, and the humid environment.27 In its troubled history and in the national developmentalist historical models it articulated, the State Museum was an important precedent for Istanbul Modern’s search to become the “first [Turkish] museum of contemporary art worthy of the name.” 28 Conclusion

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REWRITING DEVELOPMENTALIST NARRATIVES

In building Istanbul Modern, the museum’s founding team looked to a highly successful recent precedent: Tate Modern, a new London museum that had garnered acclaim for using the “alchemy of culture” to transform a former industrial space into a dynamic cultural hub, revitalizing the neighborhood of Southwark in the process.29 The parallels between the two institutions, starting, even, with their names, were undeniable. Like Tate Modern, which had opened in 2000 in a former power station on the Thames, Istanbul Modern made its home in a repurposed customs depot on the Bosphorus. While the Tate faced off with the storied landmark of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Istanbul Modern looked across the water to the Ottoman Topkapı Palace. The resemblance was even more noticeable once a tall, rectangular column appeared outside Istanbul Modern, a visual echo of Tate Modern’s signature smokestack, once a utilitarian feature of the former powerplant that now served to enhance the London museum’s visibility. Tate Modern’s major innovation had been to abandon chronology in favor of thematic categories intended to register art historical dynamics not captured by teleological schemata, an organizational strategy the museum labeled Collection 2000. Although the Tate curators did away with chronology, the exhibition nevertheless retained a tight connection to the history of Western art. Each of the four categories was a reinterpretation of one of the painting genres first codified at the French salon: history painting, the nude, landscape, and still life. At Tate Modern, each genre was reinterpreted through a triad of associated concepts. History painting became “History, Memory, Society”; the nude was translated into “Nude, Action, Body”; landscape was recoded as “Landscape, Matter, Environment”; and still life was expanded into “Still Life, Object, Real Life.” 30 Taking Tate’s Collection 2000 strategy as their model, the Istanbul Modern team similarly sought to rewrite the history of Turkish modernism “by entirely detaching it from the course of chronology.” 31 As at Tate Modern, Istanbul Modern’s inaugural exhibition, Observation / Interpretation / Multiplicity, distributed some 160 paintings into thematic sections that loosely mapped over the hierarchy of genres: “Faerie Form / Deviant Body” (nude), “Enchanted Landscape / Counter-City” (landscape), “Touching Time” (still life), and “If Walls Could Speak” (history painting). In Istanbul, curators added a fifth category, “Mystery of Mind / Beyond Intuition,” which encompassed a range of approaches to abstraction. The inclusion of this section on abstract painting helped bolster the museum’s claims about Turkish artists’ sophistication, in much the same way that members of the Turkish art world had pointed toward abstraction as an indicator of Turkish modernity in the postwar period. However, the Istanbul Modern team made a few key changes to Tate Modern’s model. First, they utilized dyadic rather than triadic themes, a seemingly minor change that nevertheless highlighted the role of competing and even antagonistic approaches in the history of Turkish art. For instance, the section “Enchanted 164

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Landscape / Counter-City” juxtaposed late-nineteenth-century artists who engaged with the picturesque with those who offered up darker portrayals of urban life in Istanbul’s spreading shantytowns. This curatorial approach can be compared to Berk’s 1973 diagram, in which he presented the history of Turkish art as the direct product of competing forces. Though the Istanbul Modern curators abandoned Berk’s chronological schema, they nevertheless retained his attention to contrapuntal art historical forces. In so doing, they also loosened their exhibition’s relationship to the hierarchy of genres. This functioned as a tacit acknowledgment of these hierarchies’ lesser historical relevance to histories of (Ottoman) Turkish art and a productive means to avoid positioning the Turkish works as belated or secondary imitations of a Western precedent. In the long 1930s, Turkish artistic elites had considered the construction of a state museum of modern art to be a requisite component of the national art world they sought to build. Although the resulting State Museum was closed for much of the postwar period, in the 1950s, the same community of intellectuals continued to explore questions of art, development, and history in galleries like Gallery Maya, the Helikon Association Gallery, and in publications like Berk’s art historical accounts. By the early 2000s, of course, these “children of the republic” had long since passed away, and such national developmentalist models had come up for revision, impacted by the new practices of collecting that had emerged since the 1980s, by Turkey’s continuing efforts to join the EU, and by Istanbul’s accession to the status of a “global city.” Inheriting these multilayered legacies, the founders of Istanbul Modern endeavored to place republican models of art and development in the past. Instead, they sought to emphasize the museum’s synchronicity with the most recent museological trends of the Western metropole. They spoke in twenty-first-century terms, emphasizing cosmopolitanism and European partnership rather than national identity, and thematic rather than teleological approaches to mapping art history. But the museum could never fully escape the exhibition practices and historical paradigms it had inherited from the twentieth century. As the case of Istanbul Modern reveals, the questions that so preoccupied the Turkish cultural community in the postwar period are as live today as they have ever been. What is the role of modern art within a national developmentalist project? What does individual expression have to do with the status of nations? And, finally: how can we integrate the paired histories of artistic and economic development into a history of modernism writ large?

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Edouard Roditi, “Introduction à la peinture turque de notre temps,” Colóquio: revista de artes e letras 28 (April 1964): 40. 2. Roditi, “Introduction à la peinture turque,” 35. 3. UNESCO, Art in Non-industrialized Countries, report, late 1940s, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG4, NAR Personal Projects III4L, box 135, folder 1323 “MoMA-René D’Harnoncourt.” 4. George F. Kennan, International Exchange in the Arts (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956), 2. 5. David C. Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (January 2004): 23–54; Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 6. See Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Fatma Müge Göçek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Şevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 7. Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), “Ankaradaki Amerikan Heyetinin Tetkikleri,” June 1, 1947, 3. Because the third person singular (he, she, him, her) is gender neutral in Turkish, I use either he/she, him/her, or the singular plural they/theirs in the translations throughout this book. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 167

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8. Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu, “Şahsî Teşebbüs Felsefesi,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), October 13, 1947, 2. 9. Thornburg’s report came out in English less than a year after he first set foot in Turkey, and in February 1948, it was reprinted in English in the Turkish magazine Bütün Dünya. He also summarized many of his findings in a 1947 article in Fortune magazine titled “Turkey: Aid for What?” (October 1947), 106–7, 171–72. His report was subsequently published in Turkish as a book titled Türkiyenin Bugünkü Ekonomik Durumunun Tenkidi (publisher unknown, 1950). In 1957, Thornburg wrote a follow-up report, which appeared under the Turkish title Türkiye Nasıl Yükselir?. 10. Fındıkoğlu, “Şahsî Teşebbüs Felsefesi,” 2. 11. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Amy L. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006). 12. While development historians often describe Truman’s 1949 speech as inaugurating what Gilbert Rist calls the “age of development,” it is more accurately understood as a high-profile manifestation of an emergent discourse that already had international traction. Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997). For a comprehensive overview of the historiography of development, see Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity 6, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 429–63; and Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 125–74. 13. Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 14. Bülent Ecevit, “Ekonomik Bölünme,” Son Havadis (Ankara), January 7, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 15. See, for example, Bernard Lewis, “Recent Developments in Turkey,” International Affairs 27, no. 3 (1951), 320–31; Howard A. Reed, “A New Force at Work in Democratic Turkey,” Middle East Journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 1953): 33–44; Richard D. Robinson, “The Lesson of Turkey,” Middle East Journal 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1951): 424–38; Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States in Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); and Walter Livingston Wright, Jr., “Truths about Turkey,” Foreign Affairs (January 1948): 349–59. 16. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (London: CollierMacMillan, 1958), 105; Robinson, “Lesson of Turkey,” 433; Thomas and Frye, United States in Turkey and Iran, 138; Reed, “New Force at Work,” 33. 17. Robinson, “Lesson of Turkey,” 437. 18. Cited in Wendy M. K. Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 114. 19. For a detailed account of the ways progressive discourses of modernization shaped the writing of Turkish art history, see Zeynep Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” in Suretin Sireti: Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası Koleksiyonun’dan Bir Seçki, ed. Yasa Yaman (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2011), 11–178. On the pervasiveness of progress narratives in Turkish art history during this later period, see Ceren Özpınar, Türkiye’de Sanat Tarihi Yazımı (1970–2010): Sanat Tarihi Anlatıları Üzerine Eleştirel Bir İnceleme (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2016); and Özpınar, “Periods in the Art History of Turkey,” Art in Translation 10, no. 3 (2018): 249–276. 20. Berk Esen, “Nation-Building, Party-Strength, and Regime Consolidation: Kemalism in Comparative Perspective,” Turkish Studies 15, no. 4 (2014): 600–20. 21. See Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950–1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977); Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London: 168

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

Verso, 1987); Şevket Pamuk and Roger Owen, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Pamuk, Uneven Centuries. Sibel Bozdoğan coined the concept of the “long 1930s.” See Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). On the many dimensions of the Kemalist reforms, see Alev Çinar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Zeynep Kezer, Building Modern Turkey: State, Space, and Ideology in the Early Republic (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2015); and Hale Yılmaz, Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923–1945 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). On the concept of tutelary democracy, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: British Academic Press, 1995), 176–206. See Bilge Criss, ed., American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1930–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); Nicholas Danforth, The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Cangül Örnek and Çağdaş Üngör, eds., Turkey in the Cold War: Ideology and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Lewis, “Recent Developments in Turkey,” 328. Çağlar Keyder, “The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy,” New Left Review 1, no. 115 (June 1979): 19. On the Turkish pavilion at Expo 58, see Sibel Bozdoğan, “A Lost Icon of Turkish Modernism: Expo 58 Pavilion in Brussels,” Docomomo 35 (2006): 62–70; Duygu Demir, “Another Kind of Muralnomad: Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s Mosaic Wall from the Turkish Pavilion at the Brussels Expo 58,” Thresholds 46 (2018): 120–43; and Johann Pillai, The Lost Mosaic Wall: From Expo 58 to Cyprus (Nicosia: Sidestreets, 2010). For Eyüboğlu’s firsthand accounts of Expo 58, see Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Cam Pazarı,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), March 24, 1958, 3; Eyüboğlu, “Bir Eksiklik Var Ama . . . ,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), March 31, 1958, 3; and Eyüboğlu, “Üçgen Salgını,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), April 16, 1958, 3. Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), “50 Milletin Katıldığı Milletlerarası Brüksel Sergisi,” April 20, 1958, 5. Celâl Bayar, “C. Bayar’ın Endüstri Planımız Üzerinde Söylevi,” Ülkü 7, no. 37 (1936): 9–11. Ela Kaçel, “Information or Culture: The Intellectual Dissemination of Americanism as Common Sense,” New Perspectives on Turkey 50 (2014): 171–88. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, speech at the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, Ankara, October 29, 1933, http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~sadi/dizeler/onuncu-yil1 .html. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, speech to Adana Crafts Guilds, March 16, 1923, quoted in A’dan Z’ye Atatürk, ed. İbrahim Sarı (Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords Edition, 2016), 114. On Kemalist discourses of progress and development in architecture, see Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 106–52. Since its founding, the art school has had seven different names. For a detailed account of its founding and evolution, see Zeynep İnankur, “Introduction,” in Hoca Ressamlar/Ressam Hocalar: Sanayi-i Nefise’den MSGSÜ’ye Akademi Resim Hocaları Sergisi, ed. Burcu Pelvanoğlu and Neslihan Uçar (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2010), 9–87. These reforms laid the groundwork for a second round of changes in the late 1930s, when the state hired several European instructors to further align the State Academy of Fine Arts with international standards. See Nilüfer Öndin, Cumhuriyet’in Kültür Politikası ve Sanat 1923–1950 (Istanbul: İnsancıl Yayınları, 2003), 146–59. Namık İsmail, “Akademi ve Ressamlık Münakaşası,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), February 23, 1932, 4. NOTES

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37. Students who received a high score on their culminating exams at the academy were automatically sent to Europe, but in 1931 Eyüboğlu went to Europe by sharing the state scholarship of his brother Sabahattin Eyüboğlu. On republican scholarship programs, see Deniz Artun, Paris’ten Modernlik Tercümeleri: Académie Julian’da İmparatorluk ve Cumhuriyet Öğrencileri (Istanbul: İletişım Yayınları, 2007); and Kansu Şarman, Türk Promethe’ler: Cumhuriyet’in Öğrencileri Avrupa’da, 1925–1945 (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2005). 38. The annual State Exhibition was one of the only places for Turkish artists to show their work at the time. First titled the Exhibitions of the Revolution (İnkilap Sergileri, 1933–1937), from 1939 onward, these became the State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions (Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergileri). 39. On the centrality of the peasant to the republican imaginary, see Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 251; and Zeynep Yasa Yaman, “Modernizmin Siyasal / İdeolojik Söylemi Olarak Resimde Köylü / Çiftçi İzleği,” Türkiye’de Sanat, no. 22 (February 1996): 29–37. 40. Nurullah Berk, “Güzel Sanatlar Meselesi,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), February 9, 1937, 5. 41. Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 168. 42. Until the establishment of this art school, only male students could receive artistic education. The Women’s Academy of Fine Arts operated independently until 1926, when it merged with the preexisting academy. See İnankur, “Introduction,” 27–33. 43. In 1938, for example, Eyüboğlu condemned surrealism, Dadaism, and futurism as “a range of caprices” (bir sürü kaprisler), complaining that these movements “disown those who have come before them simply for the sake of novelty.” Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Yeniler ve Yeni Resim,” Ar (1938), 7–8. For more on the Turkish art scene’s rejection of avant-garde strategies affiliated with Dada and surrealism, see Duygu Köksal, “Domesticating the Avant-Garde in a Nationalist Era: Aesthetic Modernism in 1930s Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey 50 (2015): 29–53. 44. Tollu likely produced Seated Woman in the studio of André Lhote, Fernand Léger, Marcel Gromaire, or Hans Hoffman, in whose Paris and Munich studios he trained for several months in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For a detailed account of Tollu’s career, see Adnan Çoker, Cemal Tollu (Istanbul: Galeri B, 1996). 45. See Zeynep Yasa Yaman, D Grubu: 1933–1951 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2000). 46. Nurullah Berk, “D Grubu,” originally appeared in Vatan or Vakit on October 5, 1933. It is reproduced in Öndin, Cumhuriyet’in Kültür, 190; and Çoker, Cemal Tollu, 68. 47. Modern sanat, or modern art, was used as an all-encompassing term to describe forms of painting that moved away from mimetic representation. In the long 1930s, the dominant term was mücerret sanat. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, soyut sanat was typically used to describe more dramatic forms of nonrepresentational abstraction. However, these terms were quite new, and many people used them interchangeably. See Ali Artun, “Hakkı Anlı ve Bir Yerel Modernizm Zamanı,” Sanat Dünyamız 102 (2007), 63–71; Zeynep Yasa Yaman, “1950’li Yılların Sanatsal Ortamı ve ‘Temsil’ Sorunu,” Toplum ve Bilim 79 (Winter 1998): 94–137; and Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti.” 48. See Ranjit Hoskote, “The Disordered Origins of Things: The Art Collection as Pre-Canonical Space,” in Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2019), 209–15. 49. Berk’s earliest art historical text was Modern San’at (Istanbul: Semih Lütfi Bitik ve Basım Evi, 1934). He continued to publish art historical surveys into the 1970s, including Nurullah Berk and Hüseyin Gezer, 50 Yılın Türk Resim ve Heykeli (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1973). 50. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Yeniler ve Yeni Resim.” 51. For a comprehensive overview of Berkel’s work, see Jale Erzen, Sabri Berkel (Istanbul: Arçelik, 1988). 170

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52. Iftikhar Dadi, “Ibrahim El Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism in a Comparative Perspective,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (2010): 555–76. 53. Şemsettin Arel was the son of Mehmet Ruhi Arel, an important Ottoman painter who had studied at the Naval Academy. On painting instruction at Turkish military schools, see Shaw, Ottoman Painting; and Duygu Demir, “A Military Legacy and a Tactical Destruction,” in Altan Gürman, ed. Başak Doğa Temür and Süreyyya Evren (Istanbul: Arter, 2019), 168–173. 54. See Valérie Gonzalez, “Aesthetic Phenomenology of a Late Ottoman Calligraphy from the Museum of Raqqada (Tunisia),” in M. Uğur Derman, 65th Birthday Festschrift, ed. İrvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi, 2000), 313–40; and İrvin Cemil Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 53/54 (Spring–Autumn 2008): 211–24. 55. See Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 47–51; and Cemal Tollu, “Şemsi ve Maide Arel Sergisi,” Yeni Sabah, October 31, 1951, clipping, SALT Research archives, Istanbul, https://archives.saltresearch .org/handle/123456789/40550. 56. Yılmaz, Becoming Turkish, 198–205. 57. Necmi Sönmez, Paris Tecrübeleri: École de Paris–Çağdaş Türk Sanatı 1945–1965 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2019); Metin Toker, “Pariste Türk Sanatkârlar,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), July 9, 1951, 9. 58. In 1952, for instance, Estienne featured work by both Zeid and her cousin, the ceramist Füreya Koral, in the 1952 Salon d’Octobre. Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 (London: Ashgate, 2009). 59. See Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Fahrelnissa Zeid: Painter of Inner Worlds (London: Art/Books, 2017). 60. Sarah Wilson, “Extravagant Reinventions: Fahrelnissa Zeid in Paris,” in Fahrelnissa Zeid, ed. Kerryn Greenberg (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 97. 61. Sarah-Neel Smith, “Fahrelnissa Zeid in the Mega-Museum,” Ibraaz, July 14, 2016, https://www .ibraaz.org/usr/library/documents/main/fahrelnissa-zeid-in-the-mega-museum.pdf. 62. This narrative originated in the period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, revealing itself with particular strength in the writings of Clement Greenberg, and was cemented in the 1980s by Serge Guilbault’s now-canonical text, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 63. Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Jaleh Mansoor’s book Marshall Plan Modernism, in which she bridges the artistic and the economic with appeal to the work of political economist Giovanni Arrighi, is methodologically closest to the present study. However, unlike the present book, which seeks to break away from the European canon, Mansoor aims to further integrate these Italian artistic practices into a European canon by labeling them “the century’s last gasp of interesting, indeed formally original painting” and a “proper ism.” Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 64. See, for example, Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes, eds., Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2016); Pedro Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); and Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 65. See, for example, the scholarship of Atreyee Gupta, including “After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World,” in Postwar, ed. Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes, 632–37; and Gupta’s forthcoming book Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernization, and the Third World Project, India, ca. 1930–1960. See also the special issue of Critical Asian Studies, “Bandung Humanism: Towards a New Understanding of the Global South,” vol. 51, no. 2 (June 2019). NOTES

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66. John M. VanderLippe, “A Cautious Balance: The Question of Turkey in World War II,” The Historian 64, no. 1 (fall 2001): 63–80. See also Selim Deringil, Turkish Foreign Policy during the Second World War: An “Active” Neutrality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 67. On the role of the United States as “the new ‘West’ in Turkish culture” that supplanted Europe, see Perin E. Gürel, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 68. On Turkey’s foreign policy during the early Cold War, see Şaban Halis Çalış, Turkey’s Cold War: Foreign Policy and Western Alignment in the Modern Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 69. Roby Carol Barrett, The Greater Middle East and the Cold War: US Foreign Policy under Eisenhower and Kennedy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 70. Cemal Tollu, “Emir Kulu San’at,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), July 3, 1952, 2. See also Cemal Tollu, “Zamanın İçinde Bulunmak,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), August 1, 1956, 2. 71. Peyami Safa, “Bizdeki Komünistlerin En Tehlikelileri,” Milliyet (Istanbul), 1954, clipping, reprinted in Çağrışımlar Tanıklıklar Dostluklar, by Şakir Eczacıbaşı (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2010), 195. 72. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 73. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Gender, Power, and Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the AvantGarde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 74. I borrow this phrase from historian Omnia El Shakry, who has addressed the obfuscation of state archives that came with processes of decolonization in the Arab world. Omnia El Shakry, “ ‘History without Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East,” American Historical Review (June 2015): 920–934. For a relevant discussion of gossip as a scholarly source, see Karin Zitzewitz, “The Archive in Real Time: Gossip and Speculation in the World of South Asian Art,” Art Journal 77, no. 4 (2018): 97–107. 75. Roditi, “Introduction à la peinture turque,” 40. 1. THE SEMIPERIPHERAL ART GALLERY

1. This chapter is derived, in part, from Sarah-Neel Smith, “The Semiperipheral Art Gallery: A Case Study in 1950s Istanbul,” Third Text 34, no. 2, 271–290 (May 13, 2020), https://doi.org/10 .1080/09528822.2020.1757239. 2. On other attempts to open galleries in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, see Begüm Akkoyunlu Ersöz and Tania Bahar, eds., İhsan Cemal Karaburçak (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2011), 154–57; Emin Nedret İşli, “Eser Dergisi ve Selçuk Milar,” Sanat Dünyamız 74 (1999): 243–45; Mehmet Üstünipek, “Türkiye’de Özel Galericiliğin Tarihsel Örnekleri: Galeri İsmail Oygar,” Türkiye’de Sanat 50 (2001): 46–52; and Yasa Yaman, “1950’li Yılların Sanatsal Ortamı ve ‘Temsil’ Sorunu.” 3. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Sergiler Dolusu,” in Sabir ile Koruk: Toplu Eserleri, Yazılar, 1952–1953 (Istanbul: İşbankası Kültür Yayınları, 2002), 130. On Eyüboğlu’s exhibition, see Cemal Tollu, “Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu Sergisi,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), April 26, 1950. 4. Bülent Ecevit, “Maya Yaşamalıdır!,” Ulus (Ankara), May 25, 1954, 3.

172

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5. Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu also exhibited work by a number of other artists about whom biographic information is scant. These included Ali Bütün, Nevin Demiryol, Vaalko J. Digemans, Azra İnal, Nazan İpşiroğlu, Piet Kraus, Güngör Gören, Öktay Günday, Atıfet Hancerlioğlu, Dimitro Manoyudis, Rosette Matalon, Max Meinecke, Haluk Muradoğlu, Rafik Sabuncuoğlu, Nuri Özgiray, Yüksel Özgür, Öz Sömer, Pindaros Platonidis, Marta Kaya Tözge, and Eli Yağıçoğlu. 6. Ecevit, “Maya Yaşamalıdır!” 7. “Adalet Cimcoz, Maya’nın Durumunu İzah Ediyor: Eğer Sanatçılar Yardıma Koşarsa Galeri Bugünkü Buhranlı Devreyi Atlatabilecek,” unattributed newspaper clipping, 1954, reprinted in Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, ed. Melda Kaptana (Istanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1972), 71. 8. Zahir Güvemli, “Kurtarıcı Sergi,” Vatan (Istanbul), June 21, 1954, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 76–77. 9. Adalet Cimcoz, “Maya Dostlarına Açık Mektup,” Vatan (Istanbul), July 16, 1954, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 78. 10. Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White’s foundational study Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) situated the origins of this institutional form in a French “dealer-critic system,” while others have chronicled the evolution of the Euro-American art gallery in the postwar period. See, for example, Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (London: Ashgate, 2015); Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and A. Deirdre Robson, Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 1950s (London: Garland Publications in the Fine Arts, 1995). 11. Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism; Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia; Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow; Khullar, Worldly Affiliations; and Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École. 12. A notable exception is Karen Zitzewitz, who has used the concept of cosmopolitanism to capture the complex dynamics of a contemporaneous institution, the Chemould Gallery in Mumbai. Zitzewitz reiterates one of my own core claims: that economic operations, as much as vaguer ideological currents of nationalism, played a determining role in the art worlds of young nation-states like India and Turkey. Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst and Company, 2014), 67–97. 13. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Relevance of the Concept of Semiperiphery to Southern Europe,” in Semiperipheral Development: The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century, ed. Giovanni Arrighi (London: SAGE Publications, 1982), 34. 14. For important early critiques of center-periphery models, see Nelly Richards, “Postmodern Disalignments and Realignments of the Center/Periphery,” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992): 57–59; and Richards, “The Cultural Periphery and Postmodern Decentring: Latin America’s Reconversion of Borders,” in Rethinking Borders, ed. John C. Welchman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 71–84. For a more recent critique, see Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 15. Jacob Stewart-Halevy, Slant Steps: On the Art World’s Semi-Periphery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 3. For an in-depth exploration of the usefulness of world-systems approaches for the humanities, see David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds., Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). On semiperipheral cultural production in Greece and

NOTES

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

174

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Turkey in the 1960s, see Kenan Sharpe, “A Mediterranean Sixties: Cultural Politics in Turkey, Greece, and Beyond,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, ed. Martin Klimke and Mary Nolan (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 168–189. Cimcoz, “Maya Dostlarına Açık Mektup.” Cimcoz quoted in “Maya Sanat Galerisi Kapanmak Tehlikesinde,” by Şahap Balcıoğlu, reprinted in Adalet Cimcoz: Bir Yaşamaöyküsü Denemesi, by Mine Söğüt (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2000), 98. Nahire Yamaç, “İstanbul’un En Enteresen Kadını,” unattributed press clipping, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 67. Cim-Dal, “Maya’da Üç Ressam, Bir Heykelci,” Akşam (Istanbul), December 3, 1952, reprinted in Sanat Üzerine Denemeler ve Eleştiriler (Bütün Yazıları Cilt 2: Görsel Sanatlar), ed. Azra Erhat (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1982), 77. Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 59; Yılmaz, Becoming Turkish. Çağlar Keyder, “Whither the Project of Modernity?,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 42. On children of the republic, see Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Leyla Neyzi, “Object or Subject? The Paradox of ‘Youth’ in Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 3 (2001): 411–32. Hamit Zubeyr, “Halk Terbiyesi Vasıtaları,” Ülkü 1, no. 2 (1933): 152, quoted in Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic, by Sibel Bozdoğan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 94. Adalet Cimcoz, İğneler, Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), June 29, 1962, untitled column clipping, reprinted in Söğüt, Adalet Cimcoz, 174. For a concise overview of the history of the Turkish left in the twentieth century, see Kemal H. Karpat, “The Turkish Left,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 2 (1966): 169–186; and James Ryan, “The Republic of Others: Opponents of Kemalism in Turkey’s Single Party Era, 1919– 1950,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017). Hikmet, who looked to the Soviet revolutionary poet Mayakovsky as one of his inspirations and was a close friend of Cimcoz, was imprisoned for his communist sympathies between 1938 and 1950. Cimcoz would mail Hikmet’s poems to Eyüboğlu in Paris. Eyüboğlu would, in turn, translate them into French and distribute them to local journals while an original Turkish copy remained locked in Cimcoz’s bank box. On Cimcoz and Hikmet’s relationship, see Şükran Kurdakul, ed., Nazımın Bilinmeyen Mektupları: Adalet Cimcoz’a Mektuplar 1945–1950 (Istanbul: Broy Yayınları, 1986). Cimcoz and her husband, Mehmet Ali Cimcoz, were also close friends with the leftist writer Sabahattin Ali (1907–1948), who was assassinated by a member of the state security service in 1948 while attempting to flee the country. The night before his death, Ali stayed at the Cimcoz’s house. See Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 57; and Clifford Endres, “Edouard Roditi and the Istanbul Avant-Garde.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 471–93. On German émigré scholars and architects, see Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 253–81. On the Village Institutes, see M. Asim Karaömerlioğlu, “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 4 (October 1, 1998): 67–91; Karaömerlioğlu, “The Village Institutes Experience in Turkey,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 1

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30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

(1998): 47–73; and Ekrem Işın, ed., Mindful Seed Speaking Soil: Village Institutes of the Republic 1940–1954, bk. 2 (Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2012). Sabahattin Eyüboğlu to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, ca. 1940–41, in Kardeş Mektupları, ed. Mehmet Eyüboğlu (Istanbul: İşbankası Kültür Yayınları, 2003), 173. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, February 9, 1945, in Sabahattin Eyüboğlu ve Köy Enstitüleri: Tonguç’a ve Yakınlara Mektuplarıyla, ed. Mehmet Başaran (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1990), 50. Adalet Cimcoz, “Adalet Cimcoz’un Gönderdiği Mektup,” Dünya, November 24, 1952, 5. On this episode, see also Dünya (Istanbul), “Her Yerde Partizanlık! Semih Balcıoğlu Sergiyi Açamıyor,” November 21, 1952, 3. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu to İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, in Başaran, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu ve Köy Enstitüleri, 81. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, September, 29, 1950, in M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 306. See Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 111, 117. See M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 264; and Laïdi-Hanieh, Fahrelnissa Zeid, 89–90. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu, Resim Tarihimizden: Galatasaray Sergileri, 1916–1951 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003); Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 144–55. On women’s art education in the Ottoman Empire, see Özlem Gülin Dağoğlu, “Mihri Rasim and the Founding of the Women’s Fine Arts Academy, İnas Sanayi-i Mektebi: Double-Edged New Social Reality,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 33–54. On the nude as an indicator of modernity, see Octavian Esanu, ed., Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude (London: Routledge, 2018). Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–21. On Ottoman museums, see Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Celâl Esad Arseven, cited in Ar, “Plastik Sanatlar ve Türkiye,” no. 2 (April 1937): 3. For more on this debate, see Öndin, Cumhuriyet’in Kültür Politikası ve Sanat. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, “Resim Galerisi,” İnsan 1, no. 4 (July 15, 1938), in Erhat, Sanat Üzerine Denemeler ve Eleştiriler, 60. S. S., “Mütevazi Bir Sanat Köşesi: Şark Sediri ve Orijinal Perdeler, Galerinin En Muvaffak Olmuş Dekorlarını Teşkil Ediyor,” Son Saat (Istanbul), December 30, 1950, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 21–22. See, for example, Tollu, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi.” 2. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, February 25, 1948, in M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 260. Tollu, “Yeni Bir San’at Galerisi ‘Maya,’ ” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), January 31, 1951, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 31. Bülent Ecevit, “Eyüboğlu’lar,” Ulus (Ankara), May 3, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. Zahir Güvemli, “Yeni Türk Resmi,” Varlık 437, no. 9 (September 1, 1956): 14–15, quoted in Yasa Yaman, “1950’li Yılların Sanatsal Ortamı ve ‘Temsil’ Sorunu,” 100. Cimcoz quoted in Nizamettin Nazif, “Dublaj Kraliçesi Adalet Cimcoz,” Radyo 23 (April 24, year unknown): 18–20, clipping, courtesy Mine Söğüt. The Gallery Maya cadre’s taste-making efforts aligned with those taking place elsewhere. On an Egyptian intelligentsia’s attempts to disseminate “proper taste” (al-dhawq al-salim), see Dina A. Ramadan, “Cultivating Taste, Creating the Modern Subject: Sawt el-Fannan and Art Criticism in 1950s Egypt,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 42, no. 1/2 (2008): 26–31. On Life magazine’s efforts to acclimate “ ‘bewildered,’ ‘irritated’ NOTES

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48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

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readers to the new art,” see Bradford R. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): 283–308. Azra Erhat, “Maya ve Cim-Dal, Ölümünün 10. Yılında Adalet Cimcoz’u Anıyor,” Milliyet Sanat Dergisi 3 (1980): 15–16. Cim-Dal, “Yeni Resim Sergileri,” Akşam (Istanbul), November 30, 1953, reprinted in Erhat, Sanat Üzerine Denemeler ve Eleştiriler, 98; Cim-Dal, “Ferruh Başağa’nın Sergisi,” Akşam (Istanbul), October 24, 1952, reprinted in Erhat, Sanat Üzerine Denemeler ve Eleştiriler, 75. Cim-Dal, “Paralel Plastik-Müzik,” Akşam (Istanbul), April 11, 1953, reprinted in Erhat, Sanat Üzerine Denemeler ve Eleştiriler, 90. Cim-Dal, “Paralel Plastik-Müzik,” 90. Sarah-Neel Smith, “The Newcomers Group,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, https:// www.rem.routledge.com/articles/the-newcomers-group. Cim-Dal, “Ferruh Başağa’nın Sergisi.” Vatan (Istanbul), “Maya Galerisi Sanat Mevsimini Açtı,” September 6, 1952, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 55. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 98; Keyder, State and Class, 119. Keyder, State and Class, 119. Adalet Cimcoz to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, August 25, 1950, Eyüboğlu family archive, Istanbul. For later forms of apartment art, see Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); and Margarita Tupitsyn et al., Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84 (London: Afterall Books, 2017). S. Eyüboğlu to B. R. Eyüboğlu, October 1950, in M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 309. Tunç Yalman, “Maya’daki Yeni Resimler,” reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 33. Between 1950 and 1953, for example, an average Turkish household’s costs for food, clothing, and other household expenditures ranged between roughly 360 and 400 lira per year, while Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s household of three subsisted on 500 lira per month. At the 1953 exhibition Paralel: Plastik–Müzik, artwork prices ranged from 100 to 300 lira. The monthly operating costs of the gallery were approximately 500 lira. See Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu to Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, 1948, in M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 252. For national averages of household spending, see Turkish Statistical Institute, İstatik Göstergeleri, 1923–2009 (Ankara: Turkish Statistical Institute, 2009), 544. Şevket Rado, “Sanat Eserleri Arayanlar İçin,” Akşam (Istanbul), December 31, 1950, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 25. Other examples of such consumer how-tos include S. Eyüboğlu, “Resim Galerisi” and Cemal Tollu, “Yeni Bir San’at Galerisi ‘Maya.’ ” Rado, “Sanat Eserleri Arayanlar İçin.” Cimcoz’s writings for weekly magazines and daily papers during this twenty-year period totaled at least three hundred articles, and her columns included Sosyete Dedikoduları (Society Gossip) in Tasvir, 1945; Şehir Dedikoduları (City Gossip) in 20. Asır, 1953–55; Siz de Orada Miydiniz? (Were You There Too?) in Hafta (Istanbul), 1954–55; Sosyete (Society) in Tef, 1954–55; İstanbul’dan (From Istanbul) in Ulus, 1957–58; and İgneler (Needlings) in Cumhuriyet, 1962, as well as occasional columns for Salon and Aydede, 1948; Yeni İstanbul, 1950; Vatan, 1952; Akşam, 1953; Dünya, 1954; and Yeni Ufuklar, 1959–60. Fitne Fücur, Siz de Orada Miydiniz?, Hafta (Istanbul), January 21, 1955, untitled column clipping, courtesy Mine Söğüt; Fitne Fücur, Siz de Orada Miydiniz?, Hafta (Istanbul), March 11, 1955, untitled column clipping, courtesy Mine Söğüt.

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66. Nurettin Nur, “Maya Sanat Galerisinde Bir Saat,” Hafta (Istanbul), April 4, 1952, clipping, courtesy Mine Söğüt. 67. Nazif, “Dublaj Kraliçesi Adalet Cimcoz,” 18, clipping, courtesy Mine Söğüt. 68. Fitne Fücur, Zibidi’ye Mektuplar, Hafta (Istanbul), December 4, 1954, untitled column clipping, reprinted in Söğüt, Adalet Cimcoz, 204–205. 69. These features of Cimcoz’s activities paralleled women’s art collecting in the postwar United States. Dianne Macloed, for instance, has analyzed art collecting as a practice that enabled women “to intervene in the male discourse of possessive individualism,” while Mary Caroline Simpson has argued that it allowed women to “push back, albeit gently, against the prevailing idealization of domestic bliss and class specific standards of ladylike propriety.” Dianne Macloed, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2008), 11; Mary Caroline Simpson, “Modern Art Collecting and Married Women in 1950s Chicago—Shopping, Sublimation, and the Pursuit of Possessive Individualism: Mary Lasker Block & Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman,” Women’s Studies 39, no. 6 (2010): 607. 70. Bir İstanbul’lu, “Şehir Köşesi: ‘Maya,’ ” Yeni İstanbul, June 29, 1955, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 80. 71. Cimcoz quoted in Balcıoğlu, “Maya Sanat Galerisi Kapanmak Tehlikesinde,” 98. 72. Cimcoz, “Maya Dostlarına Açık Mektup.” 2. DEMOCRATIC ABSTRACTIONS

1. Roy Thompson, “He Was a Newsman Here; Now He’s Turkish Premier,” Winston-Salem Journal, January 28, 1974, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 2. Marjorie Hunter, “Ottoman Empire’s End Freed Turkish Artists,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 1, 1954, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 3. The collection of Ecevit’s writings I discovered during my research is now publicly available at ecevityazilari.org, thanks to the support of the Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation for Science, Culture and Art (Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Bilim Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı) and the Istanbul research center SALT. In 1954, Ecevit also cofounded Forum, a trailblazing political journal that, during its six-year tenure between 1954 and 1960, sought to embody the spirit of multiparty democracy by accommodating differing political views rather than adhering to the partisan model then dominating the Turkish press. For a comprehensive account of Forum’s activities, see Diren Çakmak, Forum Dergisi: 1954–1960 (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010). 4. Bülent Ecevit, “Autobiography,” August 1956, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.1, series 805E, box 5, folder “Ecevit, Bülent (Turkey).” 5. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 176. 6. Bülent Ecevit, “Hürriyet,” Ulus (Ankara), July 26, 1951, 4. 7. Bülent Ecevit, “Aydının Derdi,” Ulus (Ankara), October 10, 1956, 3. 8. Bülent Ecevit, “Sanat ve Devrimlerimiz,” Dünya (Istanbul), June 21, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 9. Bülent Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika,” Ulus (Ankara), January 11, 1954, 3. In 1931, the conservative modernist İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu published Demokrasi ve San’at (Democracy and Art), an investigation of the connections between modern art and Turkish democracy that can be seen as a republican-era precursor to Ecevit’s reinterpretations of these themes. For a concise overview of Baltacıoğlu’s text, see Yasa Yaman, “Siretin Sireti,” 17–19. 10. Turkey’s official date of membership was February 18, 1952. See Şaban Halis Çalış, Turkey’s Cold War: Foreign Policy and Western Alignment in the Modern Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 87–101; and Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy. NOTES

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11. Bülent Ecevit, “NATO ve Sosyal Hayatımız,” Ulus (Ankara), June 23, 1953, 4. 12. On Ecevit’s biography, see Frank Tachau, “Bülent Ecevit: From Idealist to Pragmatist,” in Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, edited by Metin Heper and Sabri Sayari (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002): 107–125. 13. Times, “Two Parties in Turkey,” December 31, 1946, 3. 14. Lewis, “Recent Developments in Turkey.” 15. Ecevit, “Autobiography.” 16. On the history of Ankara and Istanbul as competing urban centers, see Akcan, Architecture in Translation. 17. Ekrem Işın, ed., Osmanlı Donanmasının Seyir Defteri (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009), 221. 18. Bülent Ecevit, “Devlet Resim Heykel Sergisinde,” Ulus (Ankara), May 5, 1953, 1, 4. 19. Ecevit, “Devlet Resim Heykel Sergisinde,” 1, 4. 20. Bülent Ecevit, “Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergisi,” Pazar Postası (Ankara), April 29, 1951, 4, 9. 21. Bülent Ecevit, “D Grubu ve Devlet Sergileri,” Ulus (Ankara), May 2, 1952, 4, 5. See also Bülent Ecevit, “Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergisi Bugün Açılıyor,” Ulus (Ankara), April 15, 1952, 4; and Ecevit, “Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergisi,” Ulus (Ankara), April 24, 1952, 4. 22. Life, “Young Man of Modern Art,” May 12, 1952, 85, 87. 23. While the collaborative nature of Helikon’s activities makes it difficult to assign specific roles, another key leader in the gallery’s activities was Bülent Arel, a pioneering musician and later a central figure at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Many of Helikon’s most active members were affiliated with Ankara University’s School of Political Science, Faculty of Law, and Conservatory of Music, including Zerrin and Rasin Arsebük, Orhan Burian, Reha Kalgan, İlhan Usmanbaş, and Aydın Yalçın. For fragmentary lists of Helikon’s members, see Cemal Tollu, “Helikon’da Bir Sergi,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), April 7, 1954, 2; and John Marshall, diary, April 4, 1953, March 10, 1955, and March 12, 1955, Rockefeller Archive Center, dimes .rockarch.org. 24. On the long-standing understandings of script-as-body and body-as-script in Ottoman and Turkish art, see Schick, “Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” 211–24; and Sarah-Neel Smith, “Sufism/Surrealism,” in Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Mathew Gale (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021): 128–31. 25. Unattributed caption, Ulus (Ankara), December 11, 1953, 1. 26. An additional important instance of Helikon’s support for abstract art occurred in 1954. After seeing Preface to an Exhibition (Sergi Öncesi), a show of abstract paintings and collages staged by the young artists Adnan Çoker and Lütfü Günay at Ankara University in February 1953, Ecevit invited them to show at Helikon. The resulting exhibition took place in February 1954, titled Non-Objective and Abstract Painting (Non-Objektif ve Abstre Resimler), and subsequently traveled to Istanbul, where it also appeared at Gallery Maya. 27. Ecevit, “Ankara’da Sanat Uyanışı,” Dünya (Istanbul), April 2, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. The parenthetical phrase “advanced (avant-garde)” is Ecevit’s own. 28. On Turkish claims of ownership over classical heritage in the 1950s, se S. M. Can Bilsel “ ‘Our Anatolia’: Organicism and the Making of Humanist Culture in Turkey,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 223–41. 29. On Helikon’s music program, see Filiz Ali, Elektronik Müziğin Öncüsü Bülent Arel (Istanbul: İşbankası Kültür Yayınları, 2002). 30. Bülent Ecevit, “Kültüre Sadaka,” Halkçı (Yeni Ulus) (Ankara), June 12, 1954, 3. 31. Bülent Ecevit, “On Dördüncü Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergisi,” Dünya (Istanbul), April 29, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit; Ecevit, “Kültüre Sadaka.” 32. Turner, Democratic Surround, 171. 178

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33. Turner, Democratic Surround, 185. 34. Turner, Democratic Surround, 179. On the extension of discourses of democratic viewership to world’s fairs in an international context, see 213–58. 35. Turner, Democratic Surround, 179, 113. 36. Daniel Lerner and David Riesman, “Self and Society: Reflections on Some Turks in Transition,” Explorations (1955): 79. 37. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 69. 38. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 76. 39. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 77. 40. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 77. 41. Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika.” 42. In 1955, Ecevit also participated in an eighteen-day trip to Canada organized by NATO for journalists from all the member countries. 43. Bülent Ecevit, “NATO Ruhu,” Ulus (Ankara), June 17, 1953, 4. 44. Ecevit, “NATO ve Sosyal Hayatımız.” 45. Ecevit, “NATO ve Sosyal Hayatımız.” 46. On the “manufacturing” of Turkish citizens, see Kezer, Building Modern Turkey. 47. Ecevit, “D Grubu ve Devlet Sergileri.” 48. Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika.” 49. Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika.” 50. Thornburg, Turkey: An Economic Appraisal, 36. 51. Ecevit, “NATO ve Sosyal Hayatımız.” 52. Turner, Democratic Surround, 202. 53. Ecevit, “Sanat ve Devrimlerimiz.” 54. Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika.” 55. Ecevit, “Sanatçı ve Politika.” 56. Bülent Ecevit, “American Handcrafts,” Turkish-American News (Ankara), February 15, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 57. Ecevit, “American Handcrafts.” 58. Ulus (Ankara), untitled announcement of Cemal Bingöl’s exhibition at Helikon, December 11, 1953, 1. 59. See Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). 60. Ecevit, “Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergisinde.” 61. Bülent Ecevit, “Füreya Kılıçın Şiir-Resimleri,” Dünya (Istanbul), November 24, 1953, clipping, courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. 62. İsmail Altınok recounts in Bir Ressamın Notları that the artist Abidin Elderoğlu had aspirations, inspired by Malraux, to create a similar “museum without walls” devoted specifically to Turkish art. 63. Anonymous, “İşte Forum Budur,” February 15, 1956, quoted in Çakmak, Forum Dergisi: 1954–1960, 158. 64. Ecevit, “Autobiography.” 65. Fitne Fücur [Adalet Cimcoz], İstanbul Dedikoduları, Halkçı (Ankara), September 19, 1954, untitled column clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 66. Ecevit, “Autobiography.” 67. “Most of the lectures I was interested in happened to be in the Social Relations Department . . . Now I am taking ‘Social Psychology’ (Prof. Brown), ‘Sociological Factors in Political Power’ (Dr. Moore), and ‘Personality and the Social System’ (Dr. Inkeles) . . . [and] Dr. Ziadeh’s NOTES

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68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

seminar on the Politics of the Middle East.’ ” Bülent Ecevit to John Marshall, February 9, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.2, series 805E, box 5, folder “Ecevit, Bülent (Turkey).” The seminar was headed by Henry Kissinger, who declared Ecevit an “extremely valuable” participant. Henry Kissinger to John Marshall, November 7, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.1, series 805E, box 5, folder “Ecevit, Bülent (Turkey).” Bülent Ecevit to Louise Gerald, September 7, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.1, series 805E, box 5, folder “Ecevit, Bülent (Turkey).” Ecevit to Louise Gerald. Fellowship Recorder Card, “Ecevit, Bülent,” Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.1, series 805. Bülent Ecevit, “Helikon,” Gergedan, July 1988: 150–153.

3. “THE FIRST COUP IN THE TURKISH ART WORLD”

1. See Yapı Kredi Bank, “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası 10. Yıl Sanat ve Kültur Mükâfatları,” exhibition brochure, 1954, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. The bank was originally founded as “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası,” but it is now referred to as simply “Yapıkredi.” In this text, I’ll refer to it as “Yapı Kredi Bank.” 2. The official description of the exhibition’s contents was “Turkiye’inin iktisadi hayatında çeşitli faaliyetlerini gösteren tablolar” (paintings that show the diverse activities in Turkey’s economic life). See Yapı Kredi Bank, “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası 10. Yıl Sanat ve Kültur Mükâfatları.” 3. It is not clear whether the artist designated the title Composition with Goats, or whether this was attached to the painting subsequently by the bank, which has held the painting in its collection since 1954. 4. For a detailed account of Tollu’s career, see Adnan Çoker, Cemal Tollu (Istanbul: Galeri B, 1996). 5. As with Tollu’s Composition with Goats, it is not clear when, or by whom, this title was attached to the painting. 6. Bülent Ecevit, “Bir Jüri’nin Kopardığı Fırtına, I,” Halkçı (Yeni Ulus) (Ankara), September 16, 1954, 3. 7. Cemal Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), September 15, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 8. On Füreya Koral and Fahrelnissa Zeid, see chapter 4. For additional biographical details on Aliye Berger and the Şakir Paşa family, see Emel Koç, Alyoşa: Aliye Berger Biyografisi (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 2004); and Shirin Devrim, A Turkish Tapestry: The Shakirs of Istanbul (New York: Quartet Books, 1994). 9. The most extensive catalogues of Berger’s work are Veysel Uğurlu, ed., Aliye Berger (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1998) and Aydın Erkmen, ed. Aliye Berger: Yaşamı, Sanatı, Yapıtları (Istanbul: Ada Yayınları, 1980). 10. On the urban development of Istanbul in the 1950s, see Nur Altınyıldız, “The Architectural Heritage of Istanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 281–303; and Murat Gül, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernization of a City (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 11. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), September 20, 1954, 2. 12. Muzaffer Ramazanoğlu, “İtirazlara İtiraz,” Vatan (Istanbul), October 24, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 13. Important previous studies of this event include Nihal Elvan and Veysel Uğurlu, eds., Resim Tarihimizden: “İş ve İstihsal” 1954 Yapı Kredi Resim Yarışması Sergisi Kataloğu (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005) and a special issue of Sanat Dünyamız, vol. 16, no. 46 (Winter 1992). 180

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14. Anonymous, “Resim: Spor ve Sergi Sarayında Patlayan Bomba,” Akis (Ankara), September 18, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 15. Anonymous, “Resim.” 16. It seems likely that Tör found out about the AICA Congress and decided to invite Fierens, Read, and Venturi to adjudicate Developing Turkey after he had already begun organizing the painting competition and spreading the word regarding his preference for figural submissions. 17. Paul Fierens, Herbert Read, and Lionello Venturi, quoted in Ayşe Nur [Azra Erhat], “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü,” Yeni İstanbul (Istanbul), September 16, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 18. Fierens, Read, and Venturi, quoted in Nur, “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü.” 19. Yasa Yaman, “1950’li Yılların Sanatsal Ortamı ve ‘Temsil’ Sorunu.” 20. Ecevit, “Bir Jüri’nin Kopardığı Fırtına, I,” 3. 21. Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 135; Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, 132. 22. Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, 133. 23. Ahmad, Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 135. 24. Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism, 5, 6. 25. Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism, 16. 26. On the Turkish art world’s rejection of surrealism and Dadaism, see D. Köksal, “Domesticating the Avant-Garde in a Nationalist Era,” 29–53. 27. Irene Small, for instance, has noted that “a new set of coordinates for painting in Brazil emerged from within developmentalism’s discursive and material field” in 1954. Irene Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 135. 28. All biographical information is drawn from Vedat Nedim Tör, Yıllar Böyle Geçti (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1976). 29. On Yapı Kredi Bank’s cultural programs, see Hasan Ersel, Kâzım Taşkent, Yapı Kredi ve Kültür Sanat (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2014). For a detailed account of another major collecting institution, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, see Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 12–15. For a parallel example of a competitive, privately sponsored exhibition series in Japan, see Alexandra Munroe, “Morphology of Revenge: The Yomiuri Indépendent Artists and Social Protest Tendencies in the 1960s,” in Munroe, ed. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994). 30. Though numbered 1–11, rule number 8 was mistakenly omitted. See Yapı Kredi Bank, “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası 10. Yıl Sanat ve Kültur Mükâfatları,” 3–4. 31. Amélie Edgü, ed., Yurt Gezileri ve Yurt Resimleri (1939–1943) (Istanbul: Milli Reasürans Sanat Galerisi, 1998). Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, for one, returned to the village of Çorum and its local art forms throughout his life and consistently testified to the impact of his Homeland Tours on his work. See M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 181–84, 218–19. 32. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, “Gün Işığında Hasret Çeken Tablolar,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), August 31, 1953, 2. 33. In 1951, for example, the four most important painting instructors at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul petitioned municipal authorities to advocate for a 1 percent law. Nurullah Berk, Sabri Berkel, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and Cemal Tollu, “Petition to the Municipal Authorities,” March 3, 1951, Eyüboğlu family archive, Istanbul. On the synthesis of art and architecture at this juncture, see Sibel Bozdoğan and Esra Akcan, Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2013), 130–135; and Ela Kaçel, “Integration of Arts and Architecture in Postwar Turkish Modernism,” Journal of Propaganda Arts: Turkey 28 (2016): 214–37. 34. Fatay, “Gidişat,” Dünya (Istanbul), September 24, 1954, 3. NOTES

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35. Anonymous, “Sanat Aleminde,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), September 3, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 36. The specific rules about the role of the jury and the distribution of prizes were as follows: “A three-person international jury will distribute the prizes” (rule seven), “painters may not submit multiple paintings or receive multiple prizes” (rule three), and that a prize would only be awarded “on the condition that there is a work worthy of a prize” (rule nine). Yapı Kredi Bank, “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası 10. Yıl Sanat ve Kültur Mükâfatları,” 3–4. 37. Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç.” 38. Turan Erol, ed., Günümüz Türk Resminin Oluşum Sürecinde Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu: Yetişme Koşulları, Sanatçı Kişiliği (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1984), 41. 39. Altınok, Bir Ressamın Notları, 40. Letters exchanged between Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu in the 1930s and 1940s are another valuable source for information about artists’ efforts to anticipate juries’ preferences. See M. Eyüboğlu, Kardeş Mektupları, 126, 128, 138, 149. 40. Burçak Keskin-Kozat, “Reinterpreting Turkey’s Marshall Plan: Of Machines, Experts, and Technical Knowledge,” in Criss, ed., American Turkish Encounters, 215n34. 41. Va-Nu, “Münekkidlerin Tenkidi,” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), September 16, 1954, 2, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 42. Simone Gille-Delafon, Report on Inaugural Meeting, Wednesday, September 8, Fonds AICA Internationale, Les Archives de la Critique d’Art, Rennes, France, folio I, “5ème Congrès, 6ème Assemblée Générale, Istamboule, 1954.” 43. Herbert Read, “The Faith of a Critic,” in The Tenth Muse: Essays in Criticism by Sir Herbert Edward Read (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1957), 322. 44. Giovanna Avella, “Lionello Venturi: Viaggio in India,” Storia dell’arte 101, no. 1 (2002): 100–107. 45. Lionello Venturi, “Danze a Istanbul.” La Nuova Stampa, September 28, 1954, 3. 46. Fitne Fücur [Adalet Cimcoz], Siz de Orada Miydiniz?, Hafta (Istanbul), September 17, 1954, untitled column clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. AICA’s national member sections were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia; individual members attended from Argentina, Estonia, Israel, Sweden, Poland, and Portugal. 47. Fücur, İstanbul Dedikoduları. 48. Simone Gille-Delafon to Nurullah Berk, August 20, 1954. Fonds AICA internationale, Les Archives de la Critique d’Art, Rennes, France, folio I, “5ème Congrès, 6ème Assemblée Générale, Istamboule, 1954.” 49. Paul Fierens, opening speech, September 8, 1954, Fonds AICA Internationale, Les Archives de la Critique d’Art, Rennes, France, folio I, “5ème Congrès, 6ème Assemblée Générale, Istamboule, 1954,” folder “Assemblée Generale: Rapports Moral, Financier, Discours.” 50. Gille-Delafon, Report on Inaugural Meeting. 51. Nurullah Berk to Simone Gille-Delafon, November 16, 1954, Fonds AICA Internationale, Les Archives de la Critique d’Art, Rennes, France, folio I, “5ème Congrès, 6ème Assemblée Générale, Istamboule, 1954,” folder “Assemblée Generale: Rapports Moral, Financier, Discours.” 52. Zahir Güvemli, “Kalkınan Türkiye,” Vatan (Istanbul), September 16, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 53. Read quoted in Nur, “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü”; Güvemli, “Kalkınan Türkiye.” 54. Fierens quoted in Nur, “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü.” 55. Venturi quoted in Nur, “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü.” 182

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56. Venturi quoted in Nur, “Üç Sanat Tenkitçisinin Türk Sanatına Dair Görüşü.” 57. Tollu, “Emir Kulu San’at,” 2. 58. Adnan Benk, “Cemal Tollu’nun Tenkitçiliği,” Dünya (Istanbul), October 1, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 59. Benk, “Cemal Tollu’nun Tenkitçiliği.” 60. On tensions between academy instructors and students in the 1950s, see Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 45–50. 61. Bülent Ecevit, “Bir Jüri’nin Kopardığı Fırtına, II,” Halkçı (Yeni Ulus) (Ankara), September 17, 1954, 3. 62. See Keskin-Kozat, “Reinterpreting Turkey’s Marshall Plan,” 182–218. 63. Ecevit, “Bir Jüri’nin Kopardığı Fırtına, II.” 64. Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç.” 65. Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç.” 66. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” 67. Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç.” 68. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” 69. Eyüboğlu, “Bir, İki, Üç.” 70. For a longer history of the gender dynamics of the Turkish art world, see Ahu Antmen, “Why Do the Pioneers of Contemporary Art Have Pink IDs?” in Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, ed. Fatmagül Berktay, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Zeynep İnankur, and Burcu Pelvanoğlu (Istanbul: Istanbul Modern, 2012), 66–89. 71. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” 72. Va-Nu, “Münekkidlerin Tenkidi.” 73. M. Asım Karaömerlioğlu has called this the “cult of the peasant.” See Karaömerlioğlu, “People’s Houses,” 67–91; and Yasa Yaman, “Modernizmin Siyasal,” 29–37. 74. Va-Nu, “Münekkidlerin Tenkidi.” 75. Other relevant examples include Third Class Passengers (Üçüncü Mevki Yolcuları) and Last Ferry to Büyükada (Büyükada’ya Son Vapur), reproduced in Erkmen, Aliye Berger, 53, 62, and Building the Bosphorus Bridge (Boğaz Köprüsü Yapımı), reproduced in Uğurlu, Aliye Berger, 36. These works are likely from the early 1950s. 76. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” Tollu’s thoroughly academic theory of painting was based on his understanding of a European canon. Tollu mentioned Lhote, Rodin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso as his points of reference, although he did not specify additional details. From these artists, Tollu derived a straightforward definition of what constituted a legitimate work of art, citing the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). 77. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” 78. Tollu, “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” 79. Aliye Berger quoted in Tunç Yalman, “Aliye Berger Anlatıyor,” Vatan (Istanbul), September 19, 1954, clipping, Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. 80. Aliye Berger quoted in Tunç Yalman, “Aliye Berger Anlatıyor.” 81. Güvemli, “Kalkınan Türkiye.” 4. THE ARTIST AS AGENT OF DEVELOPMENT

1. John Marshall, diary, October 13, 1958. 2. John Marshall, diary, October 18, 1958. 3. While her maternal aunts Aliye Berger and Fahrelnissa Zeid, with whom she grew up, took painting lessons as children, Füreya’s creative training focused on the violin; later in life, Füreya NOTES

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

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would suggest that she chose ceramics in part because her aunts were already highly engaged in the field of painting. See Karoly Aliotti, Nilüfer Şaşmazlar, and Farah Aksoy, eds., Füreya (Istanbul: MASA, 2017), 217. All biographical details on Füreya are drawn from this publication. For additional scholarship on the artist, see Füreya (Istanbul: Sayılı Matbaa, 1981); Fatma Türe, ed. Bir Usta, Bir Dünya: Füreya Koral (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1997); and Ayşe Kulin, Füreya (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1999). Candeğer Furtun, “A Conversation with Füreya Koral,” in Aliotti, Şaşmazlar, and Aksoy, Füreya, 107. Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 347. Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. John Marshall, diary, March 31, 1956. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, speech at the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, Ankara, October 29, 1933, http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~sadi/dizeler/onuncu-yil1 .html. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 25, 59. For a detailed analysis of how these ideas about craft as a vehicle for economic integration played out in Vietnam, see Jennifer Way, The Politics of Vietnamese Craft: American Diplomacy and Domestication (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Many countries that actively rejected American ideas about economic integration during this period still engaged artists, designers, and craftsmen in state-driven development programs. See, for example, Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism; Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École; and Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow. Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25. See also Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Nancy Jachec, “Transatlantic Cultural Politics in the 1950s: The Leaders and Specialists Grant Program,” Art History 26, no. 4 (September 2003): 533–55; Michael Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Sarah A. Rogers, “The Artist as Cultural Diplomat: John Ferren in Beirut, 1963–64,” American Art 25, no. 1 (March 2011): 112–23; and Andrew Wulf, US International Exhibitions during the Cold War: Winning Hearts and Minds through Cultural Diplomacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). This recent body of scholarship nuances what Barnhisal has described as the sometimes “conspiratorial” tone of earlier accounts of art’s use as a “weapon” of the Cold War, as embodied by the work of Eva Cockcroft, Serge Guilbault, and Frances Stonor Saunders. John Marshall, interview with Tunç Yalman, January 23, 1956, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 1.2, series 805R, box 7, folder 69 “Fureya H. Koral, 1956– 1957”; and John Marshall to Fred H. Gertz, May 28, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 1.2, series 805R, box 7, folder 69 “Fureya H. Koral, 1956–1957”; John Marshall diary, October 18, 1958. Furtun, “A Conversation with Füreya Koral,” 114–15. Cemal Tollu, “Bir Seramik Sergisi,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), November 14, 1951, 2. Tollu, “Bir Seramik Sergisi.” For other reviews of Füreya’s first exhibition, see Halikarnas Balıkçısı, Vatan (Istanbul), November 3, 1951, reprinted in Füreya (1981); Albert Gabriel, Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), November 13, 1951, untitled clipping, reprinted in Füreya (1981); and Fikret Hayri, “Füreya Kılıç’ın Çini ve Litografi Sergisi,” October 31, 1951, clipping, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 44.

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17. Tollu, “Bir Seramik Sergisi.” 18. On the Nouvelle École de Paris, see Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris; and Sarah Wilson, “New Images of Man: Postwar Humanism and Its Challenges in the West,” in Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes, Postwar, 344–349. 19. On Lassaigne as a “conduit” for artists from the Middle East, see Anneka Lenssen, “Adham Isma’il’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria.” Muqarnas 34 (2017): 237–38, 255n97. 20. Jacques Lassaigne, “Fureya Kılıç,” brochure, Galeri Mai, Paris, 1951. See also Kirsten Scheid, “Distinctions That Could Be Drawn: Choucair’s Paris and Beirut,” in Saloua Raouda Choucair, ed. Jessica Morgan (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), 41–55. 21. Cemal Tollu, “Füreyya Kılıç’ın Seramikleri,” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), May 19, 1954, 2. For additional examples of the press coverage, see Yaşar Kemal, Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), 1954, untitled clipping, reprinted in Füreya (1981). 22. Tollu, “Füreyya Kılıç’ın Seramikleri.” 23. See, for example, Rebecca Brown, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); and Claire Wintle, “Diplomacy and the Design School: The Ford Foundation and India’s National Institute of Design,” Design and Culture 9, no. 2 (2017): 207–224. 24. When asked by Edouard Roditi in 1966 about how she felt about having “revived, almost singlehandedly, the great tradition of the artisans of Iznik and Kutahya,” the artist noted, “It was only . . . on my return to Turkey, that I began to think of my work in these terms.” Edouard Roditi, “Istanbul: Turkish Ceramist Fureyya Koral,” Art Voices (Spring 1966): 106. 25. Bülent Ecevit, “Seramik Atölyesi,” Ulus (Ankara), January 8, 1953, 5. 26. In 1951, Yalman announced that, thanks to the Eyüboğlus, “The ceramists of Göksu have benefited hundreds of citizens, who brightened their homes and their rooms with a spiritual and material means of expression, through these unusual artworks and the gallery itself.” Tunç Yalman, “Bedri Rahmi’nin Yazma Sergisi,” Vatan (Istanbul), 1951, clipping, reprinted in Kaptana, Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, 37. 27. Seçil Şatir, “German ‘Werkkunstschules’ and the Establishment of Industrial Design Education in Turkey,” Design Issues 22, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 18–28. 28. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 49. 29. Avrom Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” Industrial Design 4, no. 4 (April 1957): 45. Other participating countries were Costa Rica, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Korea, Surinam, Taiwan, and Thailand. 30. On the history of the Turkish–American Handicraft Development Office, see Bahar Emgin, “Traces of Peter Muller-Munk Associates in the History of Industrial Design in Turkey,” AIS/ Design: Storia e Ricerce 10 (2017): 1–25; and H. Alpay Er, Fatma Korkut, and Özlem Er, “U.S. Involvement in the Development of Design at the Periphery: The Case History of Industrial Design Education in Turkey, 1950s–1970s,” Design Issues 19, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 17–34. 31. Avrom Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 47. 32. Avrom Fleishman, “The Designer as Economic Diplomat,” Industrial Design 3, no. 4 (August 1956): 44–47; Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 47. 33. Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 45. 34. Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 45. 35. Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 45. 36. For a discussion of constructions of the artist-artisan in Tunisia and the centrality of this figure to state-run programs of handicraft development, see Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École, especially chapter 1; for contemporaneous American debates about the artist-craftsman NOTES

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37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 186

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and “whether or not pottery had a role to play in American industrial society,” see Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2016), especially the introduction and chapter 1. Ecevit, “Seramik Atölyesi.” Ecevit, “Seramik Atölyesi.” Bülent Ecevit, “Füreyya Kılıç,” Turkish-American News (Ankara), November 21, 1953, 4. In his own review of the same show, the Ankara-based painter and critic İhsan Cemal Karaburçak noted approvingly that “Ms. Füreya uses her own hands from the first moment of making to the final stages of firing,” while adding that her objects were filled with “personal details . . . the power of whose ‘Art’ aspects cannot be ignored.” İhsan Cemal Karaburçak, untitled, Zafer (Ankara), November 24, 1953, reprinted in Füreya (1981). John Marshall, “The Near East 1951,” November 13, 1951, 6. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 3, series 911, box 15, folder 2. Marshall, “Near East 1951,” 6. Marshall, “Near East 1951,” 16. In the 1930s, for instance, Marshall pressed for the foundation’s engagement in the emergent field of communications. William J. Buxton, “John Marshall and the Humanities in Europe: Shifting Patterns of Rockefeller Foundation Support,” Minerva 41 (2003): 133–53. On Marshall’s extensive interpersonal networks, see Ali Erken, “The Rockefeller Foundation, John Marshall, and the Development of the Humanities in Modern Turkey,” Divân: Disiplinlerarası Çalışmalar Dergisi 20, no. 38 (2015): 114–45. For example, he expressed “skepticism” at those people who believed “that the Near East represents survivals from ancient times” and once noted that the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies “seems to lack clear definition of purpose.” John Marshall, diary, December 14, 1955, and May 31, 1955. On the establishment of Middle East Studies programs in the American academy, see Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 74–118. John Marshall interview with Lewis Thomas, John Marshall, diary, September 9–10, 1953; John Marshall interview with René D’Harnoncourt, Julian Fleishman, Joseph Reed, and Porter McCray, John Marshall, diary, October 21, 1952. Marshall, “Near East 1951,” 25. Marshall, “Near East 1951,” 20. See Kenneth Rose, “The Rockefeller Foundation’s Fellowship Program in Turkey, 1925–1983,” https://www.issuelab.org/resources/27981/27981.pdf. John Marshall, “Humanities: Visual Arts (Expanded Program),” 1, December 30, 1958, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 1.2, series 805R, box 7, folder 67. Erken suggests that this shift in Rockefeller Foundation policy toward the humanities after World War II was motivated by the desire to mitigate the perceived failure of the foundation’s science-focused programs to forestall conflict on a world scale. See Ali Erken, America and the Making of Modern Turkey: Science, Culture and Political Alliances (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); and Kenneth Rose and Murat Erdem, “American Philanthropy in Republican Turkey: The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations,” in The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations 31, no. 2 (February 2000): 131–57. Charles Burton Fahs, “The Program in the Humanities,” excerpt from Trustees’ report, February 1951, 22, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 10.1, series 805R, box 7, folder 67. On the American ceramics scene in the postwar period, see Sorkin, Live Form.

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54. Füreya Koral to John Marshall, April 24, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 1.2, series 805R, box 7, folder 69 “Fureya H. Koral, 1956–1957.” 55. In 1955, Marshall compared Turkey to “Western Europe in the [immediate] post-war years,” telling his Rockefeller Foundation colleagues that “so long as Turkey is in her present general economic difficulties, research in every field, and progress in the arts, are seriously handicapped by the lack of foreign exchange.” John Marshall, “Opportunities for the RF in Turkey,” March 30, 1955, 3, interoffice memo enclosed in John Marshall, diary, March 30, 1955. On artists confronting material shortages, see John Marshall, diary, March 27, 1952, January 23, 1956, March 13, 1957, and March 15, 1957. 56. Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye and Mehmet Tüzüm Kızılcan, quoted in “Studio Life with Füreya,” in Aliotti, Şaşmazlar, and Aksoy, Füreya, 135. 57. Fleishman, “Design as Political Force (Part 2),” 60. 58. John Marshall to Grace L. McCann Morley, April 29, 1957, Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG 1.2, series 805R, box 7, folder 69 “Fureya H. Koral, 1956–1957.” 59. Katherine Elson, “Artist Fureya: Her Exhibit Drew Dual Compliments,” Washington Post and Times–Herald, May 14, 1957, B4. While it is possible to view Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Füreya’s exhibitions on site at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Archive (Paris), it is not possible to reproduce them, as the photographer did not authorize their publication before his death. 60. On the revival of Hittite iconography in the twentieth century, see Bilsel, “Our Anatolia,” 223–41. 61. Fahrelnissa Zeid had shown a group of similarly painted rocks at Galerie Diana Vierny in Paris in 1953. For images of Zeid’s rock works, see André Breton, ed., Le surréalisme, même 3, no. 1 (1956), 23. 62. Smithsonian Institution. 500 Years of Turkish Tiles, exhibition brochure, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, April 14–28, 1957; Franz Bader Gallery Scrapbooks and Guestbooks, 1952–1992, Scrapbook 1955–1959, Archives of American Art. 63. Sunday Star (Washington, DC), “Bader Shows Decorated Tiles by Turkey’s Fureya,” May 19, 1957, E7. 64. Sunday Star (Washington, DC), “Bader Shows Decorated Tiles by Turkey’s Fureya.” 65. Muriel Bowen, “Turkey’s Leading Ceramicist: She Gives Ancient Art a Modern Style,” Washington Post and Times-Herald, May 12, 1957, F13. See also Washington Post, “Turkish Tile Paintings Go on View Here,” April 14, 1957, A14. 66. Katy Siegel, “Contextually Boundless,” in The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, ed. Katy Siegel (New York: Gagosian/Rizzoli, 2015), 10. For details on the shifting American reception of abstract expressionism and the Washington Color School between 1955 and 1958, see David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 1 (January 1, 1991): 46; and Jachec, “Transatlantic Cultural Politics,” 537. In the early 1960s, there would emerge discussion of “abstract expressionist ceramics,” particularly in the work of Peter Voulkos, one of the individuals Füreya planned to visit on her trip to California. John Coplans, “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics,” Artforum (November 1966): 34–41. 67. Auther, “Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft,” 350. 68. Coincidentally, Life magazine’s famous feature on a second generation of “lady artist” abstract expressionists was published the same day that Füreya opened her exhibition. See Dorothy Sieberling, “Laurels for Lady Artists: Women Artists in Ascendance, Young Group Reflects Lively Virtues of US Painting,” Life 42, no. 19 (May 13, 1957): 74–77. 69. Füreya quoted in John Marshall, diary, October 12, 1958. What scant information exists on Füreya’s show at the Architectural League can be found in the Bader Gallery files on the artist at Archives of American Art. NOTES

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70. Roditi, “Istanbul,” 104. 71. Roditi, “Istanbul,” 106. 72. The Hilton archives do not appear to contain information about this commission. On the Istanbul Hilton and its interior decoration, see Meltem Ö. Gürel, “Consumption of Modern Furniture as a Strategy of Distinction in Turkey,” Journal of Design History 22, no.1 (March 2009): 47–67; and Annabel J. Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 73. Other architectural commissions from this period included a two-part commission for Ziraat Bank and the Başak Insurance Agency in Istanbul (1966), the pâtisserie at the Divan Hotel in Istanbul (1968), the Istanbul Sheraton (1975), and the Manajans advertising agency (1976). See Necmi Sönmez, “Loneliness Follows the Path You Take: On Füreya’s Ceramic Panels in Public Spaces,” in Aliotti, Şaşmazlar, and Aksoy, Füreya, 308–22; and Büke Uras, “Beyond the Walls: On the Interaction between Füreya’s Art and Architecture,” in Aliotti, Şaşmazlar, and Aksoy, Füreya, 414–23. 74. See Kaçel, “Integration of Arts and Architecture in Postwar Turkish Modernism,” 214–37. CONCLUSION

1. Haber 7, “İstanbul’un Geciken Randevusu,” December 11, 2004, http://www.haber7.com/kultur /haber/66997-istanbulun-geciken-randevusu. 2. Arden Reed, “Art and Politics at the Crossroads,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2005, https:// www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-ca-istanbul11-story.html. 3. Jennifer Conlin, “36 Hours: Istanbul,” New York Times, February 7, 2010, TR10. 4. Reed, “Art and Politics at the Crossroads.” 5. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17; Saloni Mathur, “Museums and Globalization,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 697–708; Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2003). 6. The private collections were the Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı Foundation collection, Oya–Bülent Eczacıbaşı collection, the Istanbul Modern collection, and the collection of İş Bankası, a private bank that nevertheless had close ties to the republican state; the public collections were those of the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture and Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture. 7. On the State Museum and its inaugural exhibition, see Tomur Atagök and Semra Germaner, eds. Serginin Sergisi: İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesı 1937 Açılış Koleksiyonu (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, 2009). 8. Oya Eczacıbaşı, “Foreword,” in Gözlem/Yorum/Çeşitlik: 20. Yüzyıl Türk Resminde Etkileşimler, İlişkiler, Karşıtlıklar, ed. Haşim Nur Gürel, Ali Akay, and Levent Çalıkoğlu (Istanbul: Istanbul Modern, 2004), 11. 9. Eczacıbaşı, “Foreword,” 11. On Istanbul Modern’s “occidentalist imaginary,” see Ayşe H. Köksal, “The Occidentalist Imaginary of Istanbul Modern: The Case for Social Imaginaries in the Age of Global Contemporary,” Visual Resources 36, no. 1, 2020: 70–96. 10. Levent Çalıkoğlu, “Istanbul Modern: A New Turning-Point for a New Beginning,” in Gürel, Akay, and Çalıkoğlu, Gözlem/Yorum/Çeşitlik, 32. 11. “Gözlem/Yorum/Çeşitlik,” in Gürel, Akay, and Çalıkoğlu, Gözlem/Yorum/Çeşitlik, 16. 12. Eczacıbaşı, “Foreword,” 9. 13. See Keyder, “Political Economy of Turkish Democracy,” 27, 41. 14. On the impact of the economic changes of the 1980s on the Turkish art world, see Beral Madra, Post-Peripheral Flux: A Decade of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (Istanbul: Literatür, 1996) and Gülsen Bal, ed., “Turkey: The Space of the Min(d)field,” special issue, Third Text 22, no. 1 (January 2008). 188

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15. See Nora Şeni, “Istanbul à l’heure des musées privés,” Méditerranée 114 (2010): 121–30. 16. For an analysis of the place of the arts in Istanbul’s emergence as a “global city,” see Ayşe N. Erek and Ayşe H. Köksal, “Relocating the Arts in the New Istanbul: Urban Imaginary as a Contested Zone,” Visual Resources 30, no. 4 (2014): 301–318; Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and İpek Türeli, Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Çağlar Keyder, Istanbul between the Global and the Local (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 17. İlker Aytürk, “Post-Post-Kemalizm: Yeni Bir Paradigmayı Beklerken,” Birikim 319 (November 2016): 37. Aytürk’s article provides an incisive analysis of this moment of post-Kemalist consensus and the subsequent emergence of a “post-post-Kemalist” paradigm in Turkish politics. 18. Jean-François Polo, “The Istanbul Modern Art Museum: An Urban Regeneration Project?” European Planning Studies 23, no. 8 (2015): 1511–28. 19. Ayla Jean Yackley, “Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture Plagued by Delays after Top Curators Quit,” Art Newspaper, June 11, 2020. 20. Anonymous, “Türk Resim ve Heykel Müzesi,” Ar 10 (October 1937): 4–6, quoted in Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 29. 21. Nurullah Berk, “Güzel Sanatlar Müzesi,” Ar 1, no. 8–9 (July–August 1937): 1–2; “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi I,” Ar 2, no. 4 (April 1938): 10–13; “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi II,” Ar 2, no. 5 (May 1938): 12–13; and “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi III,”Ar 2, no. 6 (June 1938): 12–15. On the early history of the museum, see also Nurullah Berk, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi,” special issue, Türkiyemiz 11, no. 4 (October 1973): 51–54. 22. Shaw, Ottoman Painting. 23. For an in-depth discussion of Berk’s changing historical frameworks, see Yasa Yaman, “Suretin Sireti,” 37–42. Nurullah Berk, Türk Heykeltraşlar (Istanbul: Ahmed İhsan Basımevi, 1937); Berk, Türkiye’de Resim (Istanbul: Cumhuriyet Matbaası, 1943); Berk, Sanat Konuşmaları (Istanbul: A. B. Neşriyatı, 1943); Berk, Modern Painting and Sculpture in Turkey (Ankara: Basın ve Turizm Müdürlüğü Yayını, 1954); and Berk and Adnan Turani, Başlangıcından Bugüne Türk Resim Sanatı Tarihi (Istanbul: Tiglat Basımevi, 1981). 24. The diagram appears in Berk and Gezer, 50 Yılın Türk Resim ve Heykeli. 25. On the historiography of Turkish art since the 1970s, see Özpınar, Türkiye’de Sanat Tarihi Yazımı. 26. Abby Weed Grey Papers, New York University Library, series III, box 9, folder 7. 27. Nurullah Berk, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesini Gezerken,” Varlık 551 (June 1961): 5; Berk, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi,” Türk Yurdu 9, no. 327 (September 1966): 10–11; Berk, “Müzede Türk Sanatı,” Akademi 7 (November 1967): 39; Berk, “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi,” Varlık 760 (January 1971): 10; Berk, “Müzenin Yeniden Dirilişi ve Bir Kaç Öneri,” Sanat Çevresi 12 (October 1979): 10. 28. Şeni, “Istanbul à l’heure des musées privés,” 134. 29. Alan Riding, “A Symbol of Renewal in South London,” New York Times, May 1, 2000. 30. Tate Gallery, “Tate Modern: Collection 2000,” May 12, 2000, https://www.tate.org.uk/press /press-releases/tate-modern-collection-2000. 31. Çalıkoğlu, “Istanbul Modern,” 36. For an in-depth analysis of another important exhibition at Istanbul Modern, see Ceren Özpınar, “Claims to Fame: An Exhibition of Women Artists from Turkey,” in Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today, ed. Ceren Özpınar and Mary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 159–172.

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Sunday Star (Washington, DC). “Bader Shows Decorated Tiles by Turkey’s Fureya.” May 19, 1957. Şarman, Kansu. Türk Promethe’ler: Cumhuriyet’in Öğrencileri Avrupa’da, 1925–1945. Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2005. Şatir, Seçil. “German ‘Werkkunstschules’ and the Establishment of Industrial Design Education in Turkey.” Design Issues 22, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 18–28. Şeni, Nora. “Istanbul à l’heure des musées privés.” Méditerranée 114 (2010): 121–30. Şerifoğlu, Ömer Faruk. Resim Tarihimizden: Galatasaray Sergileri, 1916–1951. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003. Tachau, Frank. “Bülent Ecevit: From Idealist to Pragmatist.” In Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, edited by Metin Heper and Sabri Sayari, 107–25. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002. Tate Gallery. “Tate Modern: Collection 2000.” May 12, 2000. https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases /tate-modern-collection-2000. Thomas, Lewis V., and Richard N. Frye. The United States and Turkey and Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Thompson, Roy. “He Was a Newsman Here; Now He’s Turkish Premier.” Winston-Salem Journal, January 28, 1974, clipping. Courtesy Rahşan Ecevit. Thornburg, Max Weston. “Turkey: Aid for What?” Fortune, October 1947, 106–7, 171–72. . Turkey: An Economic Appraisal. New York, Greenwood Press, 1968. Originally published 1949, Twentieth Century Fund. . Türkiye Nasıl Yükselir?. Istanbul: Nebioğlu Yayınevı, 1957. . Türkiyenin Bugünkü Ekonomik Durumunun Tenkidi. Publisher unknown, 1950. Times. “Two Parties in Turkey.” December 31, 1946. Toker, Metin. “Pariste Türk Sanatkârlar.” Cumhuriyet (Istanbul), July 9, 1951. Tollu, Cemal. “Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu Sergisi.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), April 26, 1950. . “Bir Seramik Sergisi.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), November 14, 1951. . “Emir Kulu San’at.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), July 3, 1952. . “Füreyya Kılıç’ın Seramikleri.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), May 19, 1954. . “Helikon’da Bir Sergi.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), April 7, 1954. . “Resim ve Heykel Müzesi.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), September 5, 1951. . “Sanat Tenkitçileri ve Bir Netice.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), September 15, 1954, clipping. Yapı Kredi Bank Archive, Istanbul. . “Şemsi ve Maide Arel Sergisi.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), October 31, 1951, clipping. SALT Research archives, Istanbul. https://archives.saltresearch.org/handle/123456789/40550. . “Yeni Bir San’at Galerisi ‘Maya.’ ” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), January 31, 1951. Reprinted in Maya ve Adalet Cimcoz, edited by Melda Kaptana, 31. Istanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1972. . “Zamanın İçinde Bulunmak.” Yeni Sabah (Istanbul), August 1, 1956. Tör, Vedat Nedim. Yıllar Böyle Geçti. Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1976. Tupitsyn, Margarita, et al. Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84. London: Afterall Books, 2017. Türe, Fatma, ed. Bir Usta, Bir Dünya: Füreya Koral. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1997. Turkish Statistical Institute. İstatik Göstergeleri, 1923–2009. Ankara: Turkish Statistical Institute, 2009. Turner, Fred. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Uğurlu, Veysel, ed. Aliye Berger. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1998. Ulus (Ankara). Untitled announcement of Cemal Bingöl’s exhibition at Helikon. December 11, 1953. UNESCO. Art in Non-industrialized Countries. Report, late 1940s. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Archive, RG4, NAR Personal Projects III4L, box 135, folder 1323. “MoMA–René D’Harnoncourt.” Uras, Büke. “Beyond the Walls: On the Interaction between Füreya’s Art and Architecture.” In Füreya, edited by Karoly Aliotti, Nilüfer Şaşmazlar, and Farah Aksoy, 414–23. Istanbul: MASA, 2017.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s mosaic wall at Expo 58 in Brussels, 1958.  /  2 0.2. Daniel Lerner’s diagram of the different levels of modernity of Middle Eastern nations.  /  8 0.3. Avni Lifij, Development—The Work of the Municipality (Kalkınma— Belediye Faaliyeti), 1916.  /  9 0.4. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Villagers Watching the First Train (İlk Geçen Treni İzleyen Köylüler), 1935.  /  11 0.5. Sculpture atelier at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul.  /  15 0.6. André Lhote studio, early 1930s.  /  16 0.7. İbrahim Çallı, Harvest (Harman), 1928.  /  17 0.8. Ömer Adil, Call to Duty (Göreve Koş), 1924.  /  19 0.9. Cemal Tollu, Seated Woman (Oturan Kadın), 1933.  /  21 0.10. Nurullah Berk, Still Life with Playing Cards (İskambil Kağıtlı Natürmort), 1933.  /  22 0.11. Nurullah Berk, Woman Ironing (Ütü Yapan Kadın), 1950.  /  24 0.12. Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster (Kırmızı Bacaklı İğdeli Gelin), 1954.  /  25 0.13. Sabri Berkel, Calligraphy (Yazı), 1958.  /  27 0.14. Şemsettin Arel, Composition (Komposizyon), 1951.  /  28 0.15. Cemal Bingöl, Painting (Pentür), early 1950s.  /  29 0.16. Selim Turan, Untitled, 1950.  /  31 0.17. Fahrelnissa Zeid, My Hell (Cehennemim), 1951.  /  32 0.18. “Nation’s Commitments All around the Earth,” from Life, 1957.  /  34

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0.19. Guiseppe Groce, Scarf Made Up of the Flags of European Nations, 1950.  /  36 1.1. Sadi Diren’s exhibition opening at Gallery Maya, Istanbul, 1953.  /  44 1.2. Gallery Maya logo.  /  45 1.3. Publicity photograph of the 1953 State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Ankara.  /  53 1.4. Ferruh Başağa’s abstract painting, Helikon Association Gallery, Ankara, fall of 1953.  /  58 1.5. Exhibition at Gallery Maya, February 1952.  /  60 1.6. Exhibition at Gallery Maya, early 1950s.  /  61 1.7. Exhibition at Gallery Maya, early 1950s.  /  62 1.8. Nurettin Nur, “One Hour at Maya Art Gallery,” Hafta, 1952.  /  65 2.1. Bülent Ecevit departs from Ankara for the United States, 1957.  /  71 2.2. Ayetullah Sümer, Still-Life with Grapes, date unknown.  /  76 2.3. Opening of the Helikon Association Gallery, 1953.  /  77 2.4. Painting prodigy Hasan Kaptan featured in Life magazine, May 12, 1952.  /  79 2.5. Cemal Bingöl, Composition (Komposizyon), ca. 1950s.  /  80 2.6. Füreya’s exhibition at the Helikon Association Gallery, 1953.  /  82 2.7. Füreya, ceramic plate, 1951.  /  83 2.8. Füreya, ceramic teacup, 1950s.  /  84 2.9. Füreya, ceramic panel, early 1950s.  /  85 2.10. Hasan Kaptan’s exhibition at the Helikon Association Gallery, 1953.  /  90 2.11. Sabri Berkel From a Corner of Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye Bir Köşesinden), 1981 version of painting originally produced ca. 1952–53.  /  92 2.12. Sabri Berkel, Skopje, Hamamönü (Üsküp, Hamamönü), 1934.  /  93 3.1. Cemal Tollu, Composition with Goats (Keçili Komposizyon), 1954.  /  100 3.2. Zeki Faik İzer, Production (İstihsal), 1954.  /  102 3.3. Salih Acar, Production (İstihsal), 1954.  /  103 3.4. Aliye Berger, Production (İstihsal), 1954.  /  104 3.5. Aliye Berger, Bedroom (Yatak Odası), late 1940s.  /  105 3.6. Aliye Berger, Construction, early 1950s.  /  107 3.7. Özden Ergökçen, Production (İstihsal), 1954.  /  116 3.8. Aliye Berger, Passengers (Yolcular), early 1950s.  /  121 3.9. Aliye Berger, untitled engraving, early 1950s.  /  123 4.1. Füreya in front of her wall panel at the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market, 1966.  /  127 4.2. Füreya, ceramic panel, early 1950s.  /  128 4.3. Füreya at her exhibition opening at Gallery Maya, Istanbul, October 1951.  /  132 4.4. Füreya, Writing of Paradise (Cennet Yazması), 1951.  /  133 4.5, 4.6, 4.7.  Füreya’s square tiles, 1950s.  /  134–135 4.8. Photograph of Turkish ceramists accompanying “Design as Political Force,” 1957.  /  139 4.9. Bülent Ecevit, “The Ceramics Studio,” Ulus, 1953, with photographs by Hüseyin Ezer.  /  141 4.10. Füreya and Edwin Wilson at her solo exhibition in Washington, DC, 1957.  /  148 4.11. Füreya, untitled work, 1952.  /  151 5.1. Istanbul Modern.  /  157 5.2. Queen Elizabeth II views Fahrelnissa Zeid’s My Hell at Istanbul Modern, 2008.  /  160 5.3. Nurullah Berk, “20th-Century Turkish Painting,” 1973.  /  162

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INDEX

Abasıyanık, Sait Faik, 43–44 abstract art: abstract art (soyut sanat, modern sanat), 22–32, 56–57; abstract expressionist ceramics, 187n66; democracy, relationship to, 72–73; Ecevit on, 90–91; Gallery Maya and, 57–59; gestural abstraction, Füreya’s, 149–50; at Istanbul Modern, 164 Abstract Composition (Bingöl), 29–30 Acar, Kuzgun, 46 Acar, Salih, 102, 103fig. Adil, Fikret, 55 Adil, Ömer, 18–19, 19fig., 23, 129 Advanced School of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi), 14 Afro-Asia Conference (1955), 33, 37 agents of the state (devlet temsilcileri), 51 AICA (International Association of Art Critics), 70, 99, 108, 114–15, 182n46 Akay, Ali, 158 AKParti (Justice and Development Party), 159

Alfred University, 145, 146, 147 al-Hussein, Zeid, 104 allegorical figuration, 109 Aloş (Ali Teoman Germaner), 46 Altınok, İsmail, 46, 113, 179n62 Anafartalar Market (Ankara), 152 Anatolia, as artistic focus, 101 Angora goats, symbolism of, 100–101 Ankara, Turkey: abstract art in, 23, 26–30; arts groups in, 55; Atatürk and, 75 Ankara Painting and Sculpture Museum, 38 Arbaş, Avni, 46 Architectural League (New York City), 151 architectural wall tiles (çini), 126, 131–33, 152. See also Füreya Arel, Bülent, 81–82, 144, 178n23 Arel, Şemsettin and Maide, 23, 26–28, 28fig., 78, 171n53 Arsebük, Zerrin and Rasin, 178n23 Arseven, Celâl Esad, 54 Arslan, Yüksel, 1, 46

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art galleries, 45, 47–48. See also Gallery Maya; Helikon Association Gallery “The Artist and Politics” (Ecevit), 88–89 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal: Ankara and, 75; artists, mandate for, 14; arts and culture, attitude toward, 49; cultural reforms by, 10; ideological system of, 10, 159; modern art and, 161; portraits of, 9 Attic Painters (Tavanarası Ressamlar), 57–58 Auerbach, Eric, 50 Aulenti, Gae, 158 Aytürk, İlker, 189n17 Balcıoğlu, Semih, 46 Baltacıoğlu, İsmail Hakkı, 177n9 banks, role in Turkish art world, 111 Barnhisel, Greg, 184n12 Basın-Yayın ve Enformasyon Genel Müdürlüğü (General Directorate of Press and Publication), 73 Başağa, Ferruh, 57–59, 58fig., 94–95 Baydar, Ferzan, 152 Bazaine, Jean Réne, 23 Becker, Howard, 38 Bedroom (Yatak Odası, Berger), 105–6, 105fig. Benk, Adnan, 109, 117–18 Bérengier, Théophile, 75 Berger, Aliye: artistic themes of, 120, 121fig., 122; criticisms of, 118–20, 123–24, 136; as Developing Turkey competition winner, 40, 102–8, 104fig., 105fig., 107fig., 109, 116; Füreya and, 125, 126; Gallery Maya and, 43, 44fig., 46; mentioned, 1 Berger, Karl, 104 Berk, Nurullah: abstract art and, 23, 91; aesthetic synthesis, theory of, 25; as agent of development, 129; art historical texts of, 170n49; artistic styles of, 23; on artists as agents of development, 18; on canonical artists, 23; as group D member, 20; on modern art, 41; one-percent law, support for, 181n33; as State Museum director, 161; Still Life with Cards, 20, 22fig.; Turkish art, diagram of, 162fig., 163, 165; Woman Ironing, 23, 24fig. Berkel, Sabri: abstract art and, 25–26, 78, 91–93, 92fig.; Calligraphy, 26, 27fig.; one-percent law, support for, 181n33; Rockefeller Foundation, requests to, 146 Berkes, Niyazi, 7 Beyoğlu Technical Institute for Girls (Istanbul), 136–37 Bigalı, Şeref, 46 Bingöl, Cemal, 23, 28–30, 29fig., 78, 80fig., 81, 95

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Blair, Tony, 156 body-as-script, 81 Bosphorus strait, in paintings, 19, 19fig. Bourdieu, Pierre, 38 Bozdoğan, Sibel, 49 Bretton Woods system, 7 Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster (Kırmızı Bacaklı İğdeli Gelin, Eyüboğlu), 24, 25fig. Britain, relations with Turkey, 33 Burian, Orhan, 178n23 Burri, Alberto, 33 calligraphic modernism, 26, 27fig., 28fig., 81 Calligraphy (Yazı, Berkel), 26, 27fig. Call to Duty (Göreve Koş, Adil), 18–19, 19fig., 23 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 147 Cehennemim (My Hell, Zeid), 30, 32, 32fig., 156, 160fig. Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Harvard University), 186n45 ceramics, abstract expressionist ceramics, 187n66. See also Füreya “The Ceramics Studio” (Ecevit), 140, 141fig., 142 “children of the Republic,” 49 Chirac, Jacques, 156 Cimcoz, Adalet: on AICA congress, 114–15; as business owner, 53; capitalist models, engagement with, 48; career of, 48–49; consumer how-to texts, 64; customers, relationship to, 62; on Ecevit, 96; on Friends of Art Society, 55; as Fücur, Fitne, 64; Füreya and, 125, 131; Gallery Maya and, 39; on Gallery Maya’s closure, 66–67; Hikmet and, 174n25; personas of, 64; photographs of, 43–44, 44fig., 52–53, 64, 65fig.; on urbanites, 60 Cim-Dal (Sabahattin Eyüboğlu), 56–57 classic (klasik) painting, 75 Cleveland Institute of Art, 145 Cockcroft, Eva, 184n12 Cold War, 3, 37 collage, Bingöl’s use of, 81 commercial spaces, art in, 113 Composition (Komposizyon, Arel), 26–27, 28fig. Composition with Goats (Keçili Kompozisyon, Tollu), 100–101, 100fig. Construction (Berger), 106, 107fig., 120 consumer how-to texts, 63–68 containment, ideology of, 129–30 Council for European Economic Cooperation, 34, 73 Council of Europe, 34–35, 73 craft. See handicrafts

INDEX

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creative minority, 142–44 cubism, 20 culture: of consumption, 59–63; cultural democratization, 87–89; cultural modernization, 48 Cumhuriyet dönemi (republican period), 12 Çalıkoğlu, Levent, 158 Çallı, İbrahim, 17, 18 çini. See architectural wall tiles Çoker, Adnan, 46, 178n26 democracy: democratic looking, 89–97, 90fig.; Ecevit’s theory of, 71–73; person-centered understanding of, 70; Turkish, abstract painting and, 91 Democrat Party (Demokrat Partisi), 11–12, 50, 74, 110 “Design as Political Force” (Fleishman), 138–40, 139fig. Developing Turkey (Kalkınan Türkiye) competition, 99–124; Berger’s painting of, 120, 122–24; conclusions on, 124; crisis surrounding, 110–11; critiquing of, 117–20; foreign jury for, 40, 99–100, 102, 106, 109, 113–17, 124; organizing of, 111–14; participants in, 100–103; Tollu and, 100–101; Tör and, 108–9, 111–13; winning entry for, 103–4, 104fig., 106, 108 development: changing visions of (1920s–1950s), 6–13; discourse of, 6–7, 86–87 Development—The Work of the Municipality (Kalkınma–Belediye Faaliyeti, Lifij), 9, 9fig. devletçilik (étatism, statism), 6, 10 Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi. See State Academy of Fine Arts Devlet Tatbiki Güzel Sanatlar Yüksek Okulu (State School of Applied Fine Arts), 137–38 devlet temsilcileri (agents of the state), 51 Devrim, Nejad, 23, 30, 104 d’Harnoncourt, René, 145 Dimand, Maurice, 145 Diren, Sadi, 46 Doğan Güneş (Sun Rising, Berger), 102–3, 104fig., 109, 116, 122–23, 123fig. Dolmabahçe Palace, 161 Ecevit, Bülent, 69–97; on abstract art, 30; on Ankara’s new arts initiatives, 55–56; art criticism by, 75–76; on artistic freedom, 117–18; career, 70, 73–75; on Cimcoz, 45–46; on democracy, 70–73; democratic looking and, 89–95; Democrat Party’s political success, response to, 74; on Developing Turkey competition winner, 103, 109–10; on economic Cold

War, 7; on Füreya’s Helikon exhibition, 142; on Gazi Education Institute ceramics studio, 140, 141fig., 142; at Harvard University, 70, 71fig., 95–96; Helikon Gallery and, 75–86, 76fig., 77fig., 79fig., 80fig., 82fig., 83fig., 84fig., 85fig.; introduction to, 40; photograph of, 71fig.; political activities of, 96–97; as Rockefeller Foundation fellowship recipient, 144; and self-improvement, narratives of, 86–89; talk on art and democracy in Turkey, 69–70. See also Helikon Association Gallery Ecevit, Rahşan, 73, 74–75, 96 economy and economics: art and economics, 2–3, 4, 5, 13–22; economic Cold War, 3, 6, 7; economic diplomats, 139–40; economic integration, problem of, 137–38; economic semiperiphery, 47–48, 66; import substitution policies, 5, 48, 158; individual consumption, rise of, 59–63; modernity, economic metrics of, 4 Eczacıbaşı Ceramics Factory, 137 Eczacıbaşı family, 156, 158, 163 Eczacıbaşı, Nejat F., 158 Eczacıbaşı, Oya, 157, 159, 160fig. Eisenhower administration, 138 Elderoğlu, Abidin, 179n62 Elizabeth II, Queen, 159, 160fig. El Shakry, Omnia, 172n74 Engerman, David, 3 Epikman, Refik, 137 Erbulak, Altan, 46 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 155–56, 158, 159, 160 Ergöçken, Özden Akbaşoğlu, 116–17, 116fig. Erhat, Azra, 115, 118 Erol, Turan, 113 Estienne, Charles, 30, 136 étatism (statism, devletçilik), 6, 10 Etibank, 111 European Recovery Program. See Marshall Plan European Union, Turkey’s attempt to join, 32, 41, 156, 159, 165 evil eye, talisman against (boncuk), 126, 128fig. Expo 58 (Brussels), 1, 2fig., 12–13, 83, 84fig., 152 Eyüboğlu, Bedri Rahmi: abstract art and, 23; as agent of development, 129; art exhibition by, 53; art reproductions and, 63; Berger, criticisms of, 119–20, 122; Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster, 24, 25fig.; career of, 16–17; ceramics, experiments with, 137; development as artist, 14, 15–16, 170n37; on exhibition announcements, 106, 108; Expo 58 and, 152; Füreya and, 125; at Gallery Maya, 43; as Group D member, 20, 22; on Homeland Tours paintings, 112; household

INDEX

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Eyüboğlu, Bedri Rahmi (continued) expenditures, 176n61; mentioned, 46; on modern art movements, 170n43; mosaic by, 1, 2fig., 12–13; one-percent law, support for, 181n33; Rockefeller Foundation and, 144, 146; at state arts academy, 15; textiles by, 60–61, 61fig.; textile techniques, interest in, 24; Tollu, defense of, 118; Villagers Watching the First Train, 10–11, 11fig., 13, 17, 18–20 Eyüboğlu, Eren: art exhibition by, 53; art reproductions and, 63; ceramics, experiments with, 137; Füreya and, 125; at Gallery Maya, 43; household textiles by, 24; husband’s mosaic, work on, 12; textiles by, 60–61, 61fig. Eyüboğlu, Sabahattin: art reviews by, 56–59; as Cim-Dal, 56–57; customers, relationship to, 62; Europe, study in, 170n37; on Gallery Maya’s areas of activity, 62–63; life and career of, 48–52; on private art galleries, 54–55, 157 Feldman, Hannah, 33 Fındıkoğlu, Ziyaeddin Fahri, 6 Fierens, Paul, 40, 99–100, 102, 106, 109, 113–19, 124 Fifty Years of Modern Turkish Art (State Museum exhibition), 161 Fleishman, Avrom, 138–40, 139fig., 146 Fontana, Lucio, 33 Forum (political journal), 177n3 Frankenthaler, Helen, 149 Franz Bader Gallery, 147–50 Friends of Art Society (Sanat Dostlar Cemiyeti), 55 From a Corner of Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye’den Bir Köşe, Berkel), 91, 92fig., 93–94 Fücur, Fitne. See Cimcoz, Adalet Füreya (Füreya Koral), 125–53; as agent of development, 131, 132, 136–40, 142, 150; architectural commissions, 188n73; as artist-craftsman, 142; ceramic panels by, 84, 85fig., 126–27, 128fig., 131–32, 133fig., 148fig., 149–50; ceramic plate by, 82, 83fig.; ceramic teacup, 82–83, 84fig.; criticisms of, 119; exhibitions of works by, 82fig., 129, 131–32, 132fig., 136, 147–50, 148fig.; gouaches by, 150, 151fig.; introduction to, 40–41; Istanbul, return to, 150, 152–53; mentioned, 82, 104; mural by, 126, 127fig., 147; reception of, 131, 133, 135–36, 137, 140, 142, 147–49, 186n39; as Rockefeller Foundation fellowship recipient, 144–47; square tiles by, 133, 134–35fig.; wall panels by, 152 Galataport, Istanbul, 160 Galatasaray Exhibitions (Galatasaray Sergileri), 53–54

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Galerie Mai, 136 Galeri Milar, 55 Gallery Maya, 43–68; abstract art and, 57–59; archival evidence of activities, 39; artists exhibited by, 173n5; Cim-Dal and, 56–57; consumer how-to texts and, 63–68; culture of consumption and, 59–63; economic semiperiphery and, 47–48; founders of, 48–52; Füreya’s work at, 131m84; Helikon Association Gallery, differences from, 68, 78; history of, 43–47; introduction to, 39–40; logo of, 44, 45fig.; mentioned, 4; photographs of, 59–62, 60fig., 61fig., 62fig.; popular training (halk terbiyesi), 59; and privatization, 52–56 Gazi Education Institute (Gazi Eğitim Enstitüsü), 28, 78, 140, 141fig., 142 Gehry, Frank, 160 gender stereotypes, 119 General Directorate of Press and Publication (Basın-Yayın ve Enformasyon Genel Müdürlüğü), 73 Germaner, Ali Teoman (Aloş), 46 Gerschultz, Jessica, 140 Göksu (Istanbul), 137, 185n26 Göreve Koş (Call to Duty, Adil), 18–19, 19fig., 23 The Great Last Judgment (Rubens), 30 Greenberg, Clement, 171n62 Grey, Abby Weed, 163 Gromaire, Marcel, 101 Group D (artists group), 20, 22, 163 Guggenheim Museum, 145 Guilbault, Serge, 171n62, 184n12 Gül, Hayrünnisa, 159, 160fig. Günsür, Nedim, 46 Günay, Lütfü, 46, 178n26 Güratif, Nafi (non-figüratif ), 81 Gürel, Haşım Nur, 158 Güvemli, Zahir, 46, 56, 115, 124 Halkevleri (People’s Houses), 51 halk terbiyesi (popular training), 49–51, 157 Hamamönü (Berkel), 92–93, 93fig. Handicraft Development program (US-Turkey), 138–42, 150 handicrafts, 130–31, 133, 135 Harbor Painters (Newcomers Group, New Group), 57 Harman (Harvest, Çallı), 17 Hartigan, Grace, 149 Harvard University: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 186n45; Ecevit at, 70, 71fig., 95–96 Harvest (Harman, Çallı), 17

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Hasanoğlan Village Institute of Higher Learning, 51 Haydarpaşa train station, 9, 9fig. Helikon Association Gallery (Helikon Derneği Galerisi), 75–86; artwork from, 76fig., 77fig., 79fig., 80fig., 82fig., 83fig., 84fig., 85fig.; Başağa’s works at, 58, 58fig.; Bingöl and, 28; closing of, 95; establishment of, 70; Gallery Maya, differences from, 68, 78; mentioned, 4, 44; opening of, 55, 76, 77fig., 89, 90fig.; as site of democratic development, 89–90 Helikon String Orchestra, 81–82 Hepgüler, Metin, 152 Hikmet, Nazım, 50, 174n25 Hoffman, Hans, 101 Homeland Tours (Yurt Gezileri), 57, 111–12 homes, art in, 39, 59, 63–64, 137, 185n26. See also Gallery Maya Hoskote, Ranjit, 23 humanities, role in modernization, 144 hürriyet ölçüleri (measures of freedom), 109 ICA (International Cooperation Administration), 138 import substitution policies, 5, 48, 158 India, economic integration of, 137 Industrial Design, on handicraft development program, 138–40, 139fig. Industrial Development Bank of Turkey (Türkiye Sınai Kalkınma Bankası), 12 Institute of Contemporary Art (London), 30 integration, ideology of, 129–30 International Association of Art Critics (AICA), 70, 99, 108, 114–15, 182n46 International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 138 Istanbul Biennial, 158 Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı), 156, 158 Istanbul Modern (art museum), 155–65; building of, 158–61; image of, 157fig.; introduction to, 155–58; mentioned, 41; My Hell at, 32, 156, 159, 160fig.; Queen Elizabeth II at, 160fig.; State Museum as predecessor to, 157, 160–61, 163; Tate Modern as model for, 158, 164–65 Istanbul Orchestra, 146 Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (İstanbul Devlet Resim Heykel Müzesi, State Museum): closings of, 38, 55, 165; Eyüboğlu’s paintings at, 17; Istanbul Modern and, 156–57, 161, 163 Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market, 152

İnalcık, Halil, 7 İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (Women’s Academy of Fine Arts), 14, 18, 170n42 İnönü, İsmet, 50 İş Bankası, 111 İskambil Kağıtlı Natürmort (Still Life with Cards, Berk), 20, 22fig. İsmail, Namık, 14–15, 41, 109, 129 İstanbul Devlet Resim Heykel Müzesi. See Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts), 156, 158 İyem, Nuri, 46, 57–58 İzer, Zeki Faik, 101–2, 102fig. İzgi, Utarit, 12, 152 İznik, Turkey, 137 İzzet, Hakkı, 140, 141fig., 142 Justice and Development Party (AKParti), 159 Kabaağaçlı, Cevat Şakir, 104 Kabakçıoğlu, Güngör, 46 Kadıköy (Istanbul), 9, 9fig. Kalgan, Reha, 178n23 Kalkınan Türkiye Competition. See Developing Turkey Competition Kalkınma–Belediye Faaliyeti (Development-The Work of the Municipality, Lifij), 9, 9fig. Kaptan, Arif, 82, 137 Kaptan, Hasan, 76, 77fig., 78, 79fig., 89, 90fig. Karaburçak, İhsan Cemal, 46, 82, 109, 186n39 Karakaş, Fethi, 46, 58 Karaömerlioğlu, M. Asım, 183n73 Karpat, Kemal, 7 Keçili Kompozisyon (Composition with Goats, Tollu), 100–101, 100fig. Kemal, Yaşar, 44 Kemalism (national developmentalism), 10, 159 Kennan, George F., 3 Keyder, Çağlar, 49, 110 Kılıç, Altemur, 148 Kırımlı, Affan, 152 Kırmızı Bacaklı İğdeli Gelin (Bride with Red Legs and Oleaster, Eyüboğlu), 24, 25fig. kilims, symbolism of, 23, 24fig. Kissinger, Henry, 180n68 klasik (classic) painting, 75 Klein, Christina, 129 Koç family, 158 Komposizyon (Composition, Arel), 26–27, 28fig. Koral, Füreya. See Füreya

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language, modernization and, 50 Lassaigne, Jacques, 136 Law to Encourage Foreign Capital Investment (1950), 12 Léger, Fernand, 20, 101 Lerner, Daniel, 7, 8fig., 87, 89, 144 Lewis, Bernard, 7, 74 Lhote, André, 16, 16fig., 28, 78, 101 Life magazine: on Kaptan, 78, 79fig.; US aid distribution, map of, 33–34, 34–35fig. Lifij, Avni, 9, 9fig. Louis, Morris, 149 Malraux, André, 95 Mansoor, Jaleh, 33, 110, 171n63 Manzoni, Piero, 33 Marshall, John: on creative minority, 142–44; Füreya and, 125–26, 127, 129, 131, 152; on Turkey, 187n55 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program): artists’ responses to, 110; importance of, 7; mentioned, 34; propaganda poster for, 35, 36fig., 37, 110; purpose of, 3; Turkey and, 33, 73, 110 Matisse, Henri, 16, 61–62 McGhee, George, 89, 90fig. measures of freedom (hürriyet ölçüleri), 109 Menderes, Adnan, 4, 12, 75 mentality (zihniyet), 75 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 145 Middle East: Marshall as expert on, 143–44; modernity of nations of, 7, 8fig., 142–43, 144 mihrab (prayer niche), 131, 133fig. Milar, Selçuk, 55 Milli İktisat ve Tasarruf Cemiyeti (National Economy and Savings Society), 110 milli inkişafı. See national development Milli Kalkınma Partisi (National Development Party), 11 milli sanat (national art), 14 Mimaroğlu, İlhan, 144 modern art (modern sanat), 75, 78, 90, 117, 170n47 modernity, metrics of, 4–6 modernization, 7–8, 8fig., 144 modern sanat (modern art), 75, 78, 90, 170n47 Moderns (demographic category), 87 mosques: From a Corner of Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye’den Bir Köşe, Berkel), 91, 92fig., 93–94; Füreya’s study of, 131; prayer niches (mihrab), 131, 133fig.; wall tiles in, 131 Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 145 Museum of Modern Art, 86, 143, 145

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The Museum without Walls (Les Voix du Silence, Malraux), 95 Müridoğlu, Zühtü, 46 My Hell (Cehennemim, Zeid), 30, 32, 32fig., 156, 160fig. Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 33 national art (milli sanat), 14 national developmentalism (Kemalism), 10, 159 national development (milli inkişafı), 10, 56. See also Developing Turkey (Kalkınan Türkiye) Competition National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi), 11 National Economy and Savings Society (Milli İktisat ve Tasarruf Cemiyeti), 110 NATO, 7, 35, 72, 73, 87–88 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 33, 114 neo-Ottomanism, 159 Newcomers Group (New Group, Harbor Painters), 57 Nieman Foundation for Journalism, 70 1914 Generation (artists group), 9, 54 Noland, Kenneth, 149 nonalignment, political project of, 33 Nouvelle École de Paris, 30 Observation/Interpretation/Multiplicity (Istanbul Modern exhibition), 158, 164 one-percent law, 113, 181n33 Organization for European Economic Cooperation, 34 Ottoman visual culture, 19, 19fig., 27–28, 28fig. Oturan Kadın (Seated Woman, Tollu), 20, 21fig., 170n44 Otyam, Fikret, 46, 60 Özal, Turgut, 158 Öztoprak, Abdurrahman, 46 Painting (Pentür, Bingöl), 29, 29fig. Parallel: Art-Music (Paralel: Sanat-Müzik, art exhibit), 57 Paris, abstract art in, 23, 30–32 Passengers (Berger), 120, 121fig., 122 The Passing of Traditional Society (Lerner), 7, 8fig., 144 Paza, Nail, 95 peasants, as subjects of republican imaginary, 18 Pentür (Painting, Bingöl), 29, 29fig. People’s Houses (Halkevleri), 51 Peter Muller-Munk Associates (design firm), 138, 139

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Piano, Renzo, 160 popular training (halk terbiyesi), 49–51, 56, 59, 157 postwar art, 32–39 prayer niche (mihrab), 131, 133fig. precanonical art scene, 22–32 Princeton University, Marshall and, 143 private enterprise (şahsi tesebbüs), 45, 52–56 privatization, 67 Production (İstihsal, Acar), 103fig. Production (İstihsal, Ergökçen), 116–17, 116fig. Production (İstihsal, İzer), 101–2, 102fig. public spaces, art in, 113, 152–53 Rado, Şevket, 63–64 Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Bilim Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı (Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation for Science, Culture and Art), 177n3 Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Foundation for Science, Culture and Art (Rahşan-Bülent Ecevit Bilim Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı), 177n3 Rasim, Mihri, 18 Read, Herbert, 40, 99–100, 102, 106, 109, 113–19, 124 Republican People’s Party (RPP), 11, 74, 97 republican period (Cumhuriyet dönemi), 12 Rist, Gilbert, 168n12 Robert College, Ecevit at, 73 Rockefeller Foundation, 129, 143, 144, 186n51 Roditi, Edouard, 1–2, 41, 185n24 The Romanian Blouse (Matisse), 61, 61fig. RPP (Republican People’s Party), 11, 74, 97 Rubens, Peter Paul, 30 Rubín de la Barbolla, Daniel F., 145 Rufer, Magdi, 49 Sabancı family, 158 Safa, Peyami, 37 salons, 54 SALT (Istanbul research center), 177n3 Sanat Dostlar Cemiyeti (Friends of Art Society), 55 Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi (Advanced School of Fine Arts), 14 Sarç, Ömer Celâl, 7 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 184n12 School of Oriental and African Studies (London), 73 Schroeder, Gerhard, 156 script-as-body, 81 semiperipheral art galleries. See Gallery Maya semiperiphery, concept of, 47 Serré, Georges, 82, 126, 146 Simpson, Mary Caroline, 177n69 Sinan, Mimar Koca, 91 Sisa, Sami, 152

Small, Irene, 181n27 Sönmezler, Kemal, 46 Sorkin, Jenni, 140 Soviet Union, Turkey’s relations with, 37 Spitzer, Leo, 50 State Academy of Fine Arts (Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi): European instructors for, 169n35; fresco studio at, 75; Gallery Maya and, 46; instructors at, Marshall and, 146; reform of, 14; sculpture atelier at, 15, 15fig. State Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture: 1953, 52–53, 53fig.; Ecevit and, 75; Ecevit on, 86; history of, 170n38; mentioned, 157; Tör and, 111–12 State Museum. See Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture State School of Applied Fine Arts (Devlet Tatbiki Güzel Sanatlar Yüksek Okulu), 137–38 statism (étatism, devletçilik), 6, 10 Stewart-Halevy, Jacob, 47 Still Life with Cards (İskambil Kağıtlı Natürmort, Berk), 20, 22fig. Sukarno, 33 Sun Rising (Doğan Güneş, Berger), 102–3, 104fig., 109, 116, 122–23, 123fig. Süleymaniye Camii (mosque), 91, 92fig. Süleymaniye’den Bir Köşe (From a Corner of Süleymaniye, Berkel), 91, 92fig., 93–94 Sümer, Ayetullah (Mehmet Nüzhet), 75, 76fig. Sümerbank, 111 Sweeney, James Johnson, 145 Swiss Civil Code, 84 Şahbaz, Tayfur, 152 şahsi tesebbüs (private enterprise), 45, 52–56 Şakir Paşa family, 104 Şensoy, Hamdi, 12 Tagore, Rabindranath, 73 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi, 43, 52, 125 Tanzimat (modernization reforms), 5, 8 Tate Modern, 32, 158, 164–65 Taut, Bruno, 53 Tavanarası Ressamlar (Attic Painters), 57–58 Tekeli, Doğan, 152 Textile Traders’ Market (Istanbul), 126, 127fig. Thomas, Lewis V., 7 Thornburg, Max Weston, 6–7, 12, 53, 72, 89, 168n9 Tibbs, Thomas S., 145 Tollu, Cemal: as agent of development, 129; on artistic freedom, 117; on artists as agents of development, 152; on arts and politics, 37; Berger, criticisms of, 119–20, 122, 136; Developing Turkey competition and, 100–101, 100fig., 103,

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Tollu, Cemal (continued) 118; Füreya, critiques of, 136, 137; at Gallery Maya, 43; as group D member, 20; on Istanbul’s gallery scene, 55; mentioned, 82; one-percent law, support for, 181n33; painting, theory of, 183n76; Seated Woman, 20, 20fig. Toynbee, Arnold, 142 Tör, Vedat Nedim, 108–9, 111–13, 124 Traditionals (demographic category), 87 Transitionals (demographic category), 87 Truman, Harry S., 7 Turan, Selim, 23, 30, 31fig. Turkish-American Handicraft Development Office, 138–39 Turner, Fred, 70, 86 La Turquie Kemaliste (magazine), 110 Türegün, İlhan, 12 Türkiye Sınai Kalkınma Bankası (Industrial Development Bank of Turkey), 12 Türkmen, Muhlis, 12 Twentieth Century Fund (Century Foundation), 6 Uluç, Ömer, 46 Ulus (newspaper): abstract art in, 94–95; on art exhibitions, 76, 77fig.; on Bingöl’s Helikon exhibition, 81; Ecevit and, 70, 72, 74, 82; on Gazi Education Institute ceramics studio, 140, 141fig., 142; on Kaptan’s exhibition, 89, 90fig. UNESCO, on art’s relationship to economic development, 3 United Nations, founding of, 7 United States: diplomatic views on art’s relationship to economic development, 3; economic aid, 7, 33–34, 34–35fig., 140; global capitalist order and, 130; International Cooperation Administration, 138; Turkey’s relations with, 3, 37 Untitled (Turan), 30, 31fig. Usmanbaş, İlhan, 178n23 Ütü Yapan Kadın (Woman Ironing, Berk), 23, 24fig.

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Va-Nu (art critic), 119, 120 Veli, Orhan, 60 Venturi, Lionello, 40, 99–100, 102, 106, 109, 113–19, 124 Village Institutes, 51, 110 Villagers Watching the First Train (İlk Geçen Treni İzleyen Köylüler, Eyüboğlu), 10–11, 11fig., 13, 17, 18–20 Les Voix du Silence (The Museum without Walls, Malraux), 95 Voulkos, Peter, 187n66 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 47 wall tiles. See architectural wall tiles Washington Color School, 149 White, Cynthia A., 173n10 White, Harrison C., 173n10 Wilson, Edwin C., 147, 148fig. Woman Ironing (Ütü Yapan Kadın, Berk), 23, 24fig. Women’s Academy of Fine Arts (İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), 14, 18, 170n42 World Bank, creation of, 7 Wright, John Buckland, 104, 118 Writing of Paradise (Füreya), 152 Yalçın, Aydın, 178n23 Yalman, Tunç, 122, 137, 144, 185n26 Yapı Kredi Bank, 100, 111 Yazı (Calligraphy, Berkel), 26, 27fig. Yılmaz, Hale, 49 Zeid, Fahrelnissa: Arab modernism and, 32; Berger and, 104; career, 30; exhibition of works by, 53; family wealth, influence of, 119; Füreya and, 136, 147; gestural abstraction and, 23; My Hell, 30, 32, 32fig., 156, 160fig. zihniyet (mentality), 75 Ziraat Bankası, 111 Zitzewitz, Karen, 173n12

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