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Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
When artist Nazmi Ziya Güran died in 1937, his obituary read: “That painter of the...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.011
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8. Nazmi Ziya Güran and Turkish Impressionism
Ahu Antmen
When artist Nazmi Ziya Güran died in 1937, his obituary read: “That painter of the sun—the Turkish Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir—has passed away.”1 Kemal Erhan, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Halk El Sanatları ve Neşriyat, n.d.), 15. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations from Turkish are mine. The obituary’s author, Kemal Erhan, undoubtedly meant this analogy to concisely summarize Güran’s contribution to modern Turkish painting. Yet this encomium also exemplifies the residue of an internalized Eurocentric attitude toward art appreciation and art history. From his death to the present day, Güran has remained the Turkish impressionist. His fellow Turkish impressionists are all but absent from the anglophone and francophone literature on the topic. The “Beyond France” section of the Wikipedia entry on “Impressionism” names him as the artist “who brought Impressionism to Turkey”—an accolade, to be sure, but one that positions Güran as transmitting or translating impressionism without necessarily making his own contribution to that idiom.2 See “Impressionism,” Wikipedia, https://bit.ly/2CBSKaO. The discourse of bringing this or that style from the center to the periphery has become so common that it has been forgotten how this paradigm deleteriously erases individual artistic agency. Art historian Partha Mitter has rightly labeled this situation the “Picasso manqué syndrome,” a Western-centric attitude that traces influence and emphasizes derivation to the point where non-Western modern artworks are reduced to mere imitations.3 See Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007), 7. Following Mitter, is Güran’s case now one of “Monet manqué,” where all that may now be seen is a pale shadow or residue of French impressionism? Or was Güran not merely imitating, but developing a personal style that reflected his natural temperament in a more liberated sense of form and color?
In 1915, around the time when Güran and other artists of his generation returned to Istanbul from Paris and started showing their work in the first Galatasaray Exhibitions (1916–51), an annual showcase for Turkish modern art, U.S. art critic Christian Brinton pointed to the dissipation of darkness worldwide while describing the universal appeal of impressionism.4 Norma Broude, “A World in Light: France and the International Impressionist Movement 1860–1920,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1990), 9. He discussed how in Europe and the United States “countless acquisitive apostles of light” simultaneously changed the complexion of modern painting from “black and brown to blonde, mauve, and violet.”5 Christian Brinton quoted in Broude, “World in Light,” 9. Taking a cue from Brinton, Norma Broude has termed this worldwide change “the Impressionist impulse” and linked it to political and cultural transformations at the turn of the century.6 Broude, “World in Light,” 10–11. Although Broude claimed that impressionism in France influenced artists working in other countries who, in turn, imitated or transformed this art, she also admitted that “at times [it was] entirely independent of what was then happening—or still to happen—in France, taking its character, instead, from what was indigenous to the tastes, concerns and traditions of each region.”7 Broude, “World in Light,” 10–11. This “impulse” can certainly be seen in Turkish artists in the beginning of the twentieth century, where the notion of an independent artistic identity was still in formation and very much linked to aspects of cultural modernity experienced by Ottomans.
Güran belongs to a generation of Turkish artists who embodied a critical shift toward subjective expression in the genre of oil painting, itself a relatively new medium in the early twentieth-century Ottoman world. By the early twentieth century, traditional Ottoman arts such as miniature painting and calligraphy were in decline due to the extensive effect of Westernizing currents; the introduction of new visual culture due to the international circulation of printed materials; and the lack of sufficient local patronage beginning in the nineteenth century. While Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire did practice oil painting for the representation of religious themes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, Ottoman Muslims had tended to use the medium predominantly for landscapes. Oil painting was taught at military schools founded in the late eighteenth century for the purpose of modernizing the Ottoman army. The initial function of art lessons at these military schools was not so much artistic but practical. Young officers were taught technical drawing and topography for military engineering purposes or mapmaking; this instruction eventually led to their interest in art.
Hence the first Ottoman Muslims to work in oil paint and adopt what has been called a “Western mode of painting” were military officers who produced what may be best described as “postcard canvases”: dull copies of scenes commonly circulated as postcards and sometimes photographs. In fact, various images in Abdülhamid II’s rich collection of photographs reveal that many military painters used this material to produce their scenes. Images of landscapes, buildings, and interiors were copied meticulously with slight alterations. Comparing a photograph against a painting of Yıldız Park from 1890 shows the extent to which photographic images were copied. Initially, the light and shadow in the painting may seem like a reflection taken from direct observation; however, the photograph reveals even these elements to have been copied. This is unsurprising, since military schools trained engineers and topographers to make precise and detailed drawings of the land, its resources, and its challenges. Presented to the court with the signature “Your humble servant,” these anonymous paintings show that the concept of an independent artist was foreign to a cultural context rooted in the Islamic religion and its symbolic authority, the sultanate. In time, some of the more promising and artistically inclined young military officers were sent to Europe, often Paris, to continue their art education. After studying at the École des beaux-arts in Paris, they returned to Turkey to produce landscapes and still lifes that stylistically transcended their earlier postcard-like images.
Of the so-called “military artists” whose paintings survived, Ahmed Ali Pasha’s (1841–1907) and Süleyman Seyyid Bey’s (1842–1913) paintings reflect an enthusiasm for the romantic and naturalist landscapes of the Barbizon School, thus providing a critical clue to their artistic interests while in Paris. Many of Ahmed Ali Pasha’s paintings, such as his Light of the Forest (1887), naturalistically render the landscape and intensely focus on the contrasts between light and dark. These interests were not specific to those who had studied abroad, however. The military artists Hodja Ali Rıza (1858–1930) and Hüseyin Zekai Pasha (1860–1919) were also interested in the representation of their natural surroundings. Ali Rıza, “the Hodja” (meaning “teacher”), depicted sunlit landscapes with an attention to minute detail, and Hüseyin Zekai Pasha concentrated on how the effects of light could be depicted without departing too much from solid form. By comparison, Halil Pasha (c. 1857–1939), while trained at the Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümâyûn (Military Engineering School) before leaving to study art in Paris from 1880 to 1888, sacrificed meticulous imitation in favor of direct response to nature and adopted a quasi-impressionist style in some of his landscapes.8 Halil Pasha studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Gustave Courtois (1852–1923) in Paris. During this time, the École des beaux-arts received foreign students as élèves libres. Other Ottoman students, such as Osman Hamdi Bey, Ahmed Ali Pasha, and Süleyman Seyyid, are also thought to have studied at the École under the same status. For an account of Ottoman/Turkish students studying in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Deniz Artun, Paris’ten Modernlik Tercümeleri-Académie Julian’da İmparatorluk ve Cumhuriyet Öğrencileri (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007), 52–53. While it is not possible to know which exhibitions Halil Pasha attended in Paris, in a later interview, he revealed he had no interest in the modern tendencies he observed, criticizing Édouard Manet for opening the path for paintings devoid of form and draftsmanship but consisting only of color.9 Malik Aksel, Sanat ve Folklor (Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2011), 14. The interview mentioned was originally published in Ar magazine in July 1937. Halil Pasha’s own paintings, such as Çengelköy Boat Harbor (1890), reflect a clear interest in the effect of light on the color of objects and their surroundings, yet these techniques are not synonymous with an experimental attitude or disregard for naturalism (fig. 1). Still, he is generally seen as carrying out “a revolution in light” in Turkish painting and paving the way to impressionism.10 Sezer Tansuğ, Halil Paşa (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993), 40.
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Description: Çengelköy Boat Harbour by Pasha, Halil
Fig. 1. Halil Pasha, Çengelköy Boat Harbor, 1890. Oil on canvas, 27 × 46 cm (68 9/16 × 116 13/16 in.). Sakıp Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul.
When the first art school of the Ottoman Empire, the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (School of Fine Arts), was opened in 1882 in Istanbul, it was also the first institution to offer artistic training for civilians. Some keen young military officers also attended, in a break from their anticipated military careers. Founded and headed by the Orientalist painter Osman Hamdi Bey (1840–1910) during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), the curriculum at Sanayi-i Nefise was loosely based on the École des beaux-arts in Paris. It aimed to train professional artists and architects who could contribute to a growing demand to become part of a new, modern cultural milieu in the Ottoman Empire.11 See Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (Istanbul: İş Bankası Yayınları, 1971), 447–48. Cezar provides a document that gives clues to the reason behind the founding of an art academy in Istanbul. In general, figurative imagery remained a problem due to religious sentiment, and thus not all aspects of the Beaux-arts model were emulated: artists at Sanayi-i Nefise did not work from the nude model until at least the 1910s, for instance. Still, the school represented a foray into the future in a predominantly Muslim country that remained conservative on issues of image-making.
Most of the artists grouped under the contested label of “Turkish impressionists”—Sami Yetik (1878–1945), Ruhi Arel (1880–1931), Nazmi Ziya Güran (1881–1937), Ibrahim Çallı (1882–1960), Hikmet Onat (1882–1977), Avni Lifij (1886–1927), Feyhaman Duran (1886–1970), and Namık Ismail (1890–1935)—were trained at the Sanayi-i Nefise in the beginning of the 1900s and then in Paris in the early 1910s. Those who attended the academy in Istanbul worked from antique sculpture and clothed male models and under the direction of Polish artist Joseph Warnia-Zarzecki (1850–?). They also learned painting from Italian artist Salvatore Valeri (1856–1946), who instructed his students to copy nature with an attention to minute detail. Those who attended the École des beaux-arts in Paris worked with Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), an academician who also ran a private and more liberal atelier libre.12 John Milner, The Studios of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 23. Most members of the 1914 Generation also studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens before moving on to the École des beaux-arts. The Académie Julian served as an important educational center for artists coming to Paris from across Europe and, indeed, all parts of the world, including, as discussed in Chapter 13, South Africa. Turkish artists were not interested in employing classical styles and subjects that, while an integral part of academic training in the West, were foreign to their cultural background. While they introduced audiences in Turkey to new genres such as portraiture, depictions of young women, and, more radically, the nude, they overwhelmingly produced still lifes and landscapes, many of the latter painted en plein air in the environs of Istanbul. What distinguished them from an older generation of mostly military painters was their deliberate departure from mimesis, revealing a more confident approach to surface, color, and form and so a subjective response to their surroundings. Many of their paintings were also thematically close to the French impressionists. As the art historian Semra Germaner has commented, “While French artists sought to represent the riversides at Seine, the sailboats at Argenteuil, poppy fields, young women in nature with their umbrellas in the wind, spring blossoms at Montmartre and Paris boulevards, Turkish artists painted the Bosphorus, sailboats at the Princes’ Islands, barges at the shores, spring trees at Kadıköy, napping women in garden scenes and Taksim Square.”13 Semra Germaner, “Bir Karşılaştırma: Claude Monet-Nazmi Ziya,” P Dergisi, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 46.
Each of the so-called Turkish impressionists had a personal approach to painting. Güran’s work has tended to be seen as the most impressionist in style, because he applied complementary colors, building up the scenes with broken brushstrokes and so sacrificing accurate appearance. The same applies to Avni Lifij, who used a palette of yellow, pink, orange, and violet to capture the atmospheric dawns and dusks of Istanbul. Other artists, such as Yetik, Çallı, Onat, Duran, and Arel, remained within the boundaries of a more stable sense of form, and were not as experimental when it came to using complementary colors. Due to these differences in approach, art historians tend to refer to these artists as “the 1914 Generation,” an appellation tied to the date of their arrival on the Turkish art scene.
Labeling these artists “impressionists” came much later, when a younger generation of artists started to scrutinize the approaches of their precursors. Writing in the 1930s, when the influence and popularity of the 1914 Generation had started to decline, the Turkish artist Elif Naci (1898–1987) declared them to be “a group that had seized the whitened beard of aged Impressionism and dragged it into Turkey.”14 Elif Naci, “Güzel sanatların son 15 senedeki tekamülü,” Cumhuriyet (October 30, 1938): 2. Naci’s rather disdainful statement was echoed by others, such as the art historian Burhan Toprak (1906–1967), who had been appointed to rejuvenate and modernize the Sanayi-i Nefise, where the 1914 Generation by that time worked as instructors. Toprak criticized the 1914 Generation for their lack of ability to grasp “the new reality” unfolding around them when they were in Paris, noting that these artists had not attended to the rise of expressionism and cubism.15 Burhan Toprak’s full statement is quite revealing: “When they went to Paris for art education, they were unable to see the new reality unfolding around them. . . . Matisse had accepted Cézanne as a master and was convinced the leader of the Fauves. Then came Cubism, Expressionism and what not. These painters lived in Paris between 1910 and 1914 but brought us no news from this boiling pot.” Burhan Toprak, Sanat Tarihi (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yayını, 1963), 3:257. Similarly, the influential artist and writer Nurullah Berk (1906–1982) recounted his childhood memories of the 1914 Generation: “Çallı Ibrahim, Feyhaman, Nazmi Ziya, Namık Ismail, Hüseyin Avni Lifij, Sami and Hikmet had just returned from Europe and expressed themselves in their paintings through bold brushstrokes and bright, alluring colors. This new approach in Turkish painting must have been startling, it was more like heaps of paint stacked on top of each other compared to paintings the spectators were used to. In reality, what Çallı Ibrahim and his friends were practicing was a formulaic form of the French Impressionist school.”16 Nurullah Berk, Sanat Konuşmaları (Istanbul: AB Neşriyatı, 1943), 63.
The 1914 Generation sought to represent the everyday reality of objects, places, and people in an unidealized, naturalistic manner. This naturalistic representation of mundane reality was what led to the label “Turkish impressionists.” Compared to artists before them who have valued accurate representation, their approach to form and color focused on how painting could express artistic subjectivity. Clearly, however, many of these artists continued to value a true-to-life attitude, leading their paintings to hover between naturalism and impressionism.
A distinctive feature of the 1914 Generation is their production of work speaking to the sociopsychological aspects of the historical changes they experienced. They were the first group of Turkish artists to produce images of war. The state-run Şişli Studio, organized before the Ottoman defeat in 1917, mobilized these artists to create paintings celebrating the Gallipoli campaign. Most of the works produced in the Şişli Studio, named after a district in Istanbul, were naturalistic scenes of war and soldiers. Still, certain works, such as Ali Cemal Ben’im’s Wounded Soldier (1917), evidence an independence and interest in stylistic experimentation. Painterly effect and formal concerns seem to have prevailed over propagandistic purposes.
Many of the 1914 Generation or the Turkish impressionists also experimented with painting nudes in the early stages of their careers, not as a preference, since so few were made, but as a reflection of their ability to competently paint across genres. Namık Ismail and Ibrahim Çallı created a sensation when they exhibited the very first female nudes in the Galatasaray Exhibition of 1922. This could only have been possible at this moment when the country operated in a tumultuous state between occupation (1918–22) and independence (1923).17 See Ahu Antmen, Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernity in Turkish Painting (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi Yayınları, 2015). Even so, many of the early nudes by the Turkish impressionists reflect a timidity in approach. The nude women depicted do not cast their gaze confrontationally out of the picture plane, but instead demurely turn their faces away from presumed viewers.
The theme of young women on outings in natural surroundings was also deliberately employed as a sign of Ottoman cultural modernity by the 1914 Generation. Compared to the formal distortion and tonal approach shown in their landscapes, their figurative depictions, including those of cultural elites who played a pivotal role in the modernization process, were more naturalistic. These artists painted the first portraits of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, and other national war heroes such as the soldier and statesman Ismet Inönü—images that became ingrained in public memory. Güran’s portrait of Atatürk remains one of the most circulated, as it plays into the popular imagination of the Turkish War of Independence, with Atatürk shown in military gear and wearing a calpac. With its visible brushstrokes and surface play of green, blue, and reddish-brown, this portrait reflects a spontaneity when compared to more rigid official portraits of Atatürk.18 In Atatürk portraits by other members of the 1914 Generation, such as those by Namık Ismail (dated 1935), Ibrahim Çallı (dated 1937), and Feyhaman Duran (dated 1937), photographic likeness and a serious air of officiality come across as the most important aspects of the works, whereas in the Güran portrait the color scheme and brushwork add a painterly quality to the painting.
These exceptions aside, Güran and his generation focused almost exclusively on painting landscapes, often around Istanbul. The shores of the Bosphorus were their preferred spots: Üsküdar, Küçüksu, Anadoluhisarı, and Kandilli on the Anatolian side; Rumelihisarı, Aşiyan, Emirgan, and Tarabya on the European side. In a way, Güran and his generation were the most recent participants in establishing an image of the city as picturesque. Representations of Istanbul had been popular among Orientalist painters and their collectors, and at least 120 such Western painters are known to have visited the city in the nineteenth century.19 A list of these artists can be seen here: Semra Germaner and Zeynep Inankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, 2002), 312–15. On a more popular level, the photographic and illustrated postcards of Istanbul that were produced for touristic purposes also contributed to a romanticized image of the city.
Nurullah Berk, who studied with the Turkish impressionists, believed that it was difficult for Istanbulian artists not to use an “impressionist technique,” especially those who genuinely sought to express their surroundings through direct observation. He pointed to the qualities of light intrinsic to the city: “In the summer, Istanbul’s light is yellow, orange and red. This light almost kills all the light values. Shadows are blue and purple. When the sun sets, those blues and purples become a dim and mellow mist surrounding the atmosphere. Foregrounds, backgrounds, the earth, houses and the sky seem to be under a purple spell. Come the winter, those purples and blues are cooler, and fainter, a symphony of low-pitched gray.”20 Nurullah Berk. Sanat Konuşmaları, 63.
Understanding the importance of light in late nineteenth-century painting requires thinking about its local context and interpretation, such as this distinctive “Istanbul light” that Berk mentions. Here, “light” refers to the colors observed by an artist in all their physicality, but “light” may also be taken metaphorically, as a reflection of the spiritual and social aspects of a local time and place. Pertinent to this discussion would be the ideas of Stéphane Mallarmé, who compared the artistic and the social in late nineteenth-century France through the metaphor of “the natural light of day penetrating into all things,” and linked the idea of an all-encompassing light with participatory democracy.21 Stéphane Mallarmé quoted in Brendan Prendeville, Realism in 20th Century Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 33. Güran’s generation experienced new political freedoms in the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18), which began with the Young Turk Revolution and brought with it ideas of nationhood, republicanism, and public participation, as opposed to imperial rule by a sultan. The founding of the Turkish Republic (1923) came with the promise of democracy and transformed Ottoman subjects to Turkish citizens. Such modern ideals were drawn from Enlightenment and positivist thinking. In turn, these ideals had ramifications for artists keen on reflecting their individual observations of the world around them. A more subjective and thus modern approach to paintings was a way of transcending the old cultural order.
Individual impressions of the Istanbul landscape, with its historical, romantic, picturesque associations for the young Turkish artists returning from Paris with the outbreak of World War I, reflected an inner psychology new to Turkish painting. Initially the artistic landscape may have served as an escape from tensions of the shifting political landscape and the yet unforeseeable future. Güran recalled the occupation as an era during which painting became a tool to express his psychological introversion.22 According to Elif Naci, who interviewed the artist, Güran was removed from his office as director of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi during the occupation of Istanbul for propaganda related to the national cause. As a result, Güran retreated to his inherited family house at Çamlıca and tried to earn his living through various means: “I spent my time in my garden. I was trying to live with the 18 lira salary they were still paying me. First I grew cabbage and celery to feed my children. But then I was forced to enter the tobacco trade.” See Elif Naci, Anılardan Damlalar (Istanbul: Karacan Yayınları, 1981), 33. Turkish sociologist Hilmi Ziya Ülken has persuasively underscored the “uninhabitedness” of landscapes painted by Güran’s generation. These barren landscapes record neither the historical nor the contemporary aspects of the city.23 See Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Resim ve Cemiyet (Istanbul: Üniversite Kitabevi, 1942), 56. Even when a historical site did enter the composition, it seemingly existed in an atmosphere of isolated timelessness. Indeed, Istanbul appeared as a desolate city (fig. 2). Lifij represented the city shrouded in a hazy atmosphere of yellows, pinks, and purples. Çallı painted young women dressed in modern attire, integrated into the landscape but distant from the hustle and bustle of city life. Feyhaman Duran executed a vast number of small seascapes that border on abstraction. Hikmet Onat painted the shores of Istanbul, capturing impressions of small boat harbors populated by only a few figures. Thus, while this generation of artists shared an interest in Istanbul landscapes, each captured the city’s scenes and sites in ways reflecting their individual interests and temperaments.
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Description: A View of Küçüksu from Hisar by Güran, Nazmi Ziya
Fig. 2. Nazmi Ziya Güran, A View of Küçüksu from Hisar, n.d. Oil on canvas, 43 × 61 cm (109 1/4 × 154 15/16 in.). Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.
These Istanbul landscapes took pride of place in the new capital, Ankara, where people were encouraged to visit exhibitions and buy artworks as part of modern nation-building. A desolate, rural spot in the middle of Anatolia, Ankara scarcely constituted a picturesque city. As such, it was rarely depicted by the Turkish impressionists, who nonetheless actively supported the transition to the new, republican nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Istanbul landscapes by the Turkish impressionists were hung in the homes of the modern cultural elite in Ankara. In this way, perhaps these Istanbul landscapes were also functioning, on a subconscious level, as emblems of nostalgia. After hundreds of years serving as the center of the Ottoman world, Istanbul had been rendered obsolete with the choice of Ankara as the new Turkish capital. Republicans supported the view that Istanbul represented the old order. This was the reason why a younger generation of modernist artists, many of whom studied under Güran and his cohort, regarded their elders as “belated impressionists” trafficking in a sentimental image of that city, as opposed to what was perceived as the new. Younger Turkish artists had already started to embrace cubism.
Güran and his generation never parted with impressionist techniques and concerns, and continued to paint landscapes all their life. Güran made a point of repeatedly visiting the same spot to capture subtle changes in light throughout the day or returning to those places once the seasons had changed, thus rendering his work especially impressionist in terms of the passage of time and changing light. According to artist and writer Eşref Üren (1897–1984), who worked alongside many of these artists and thus witnessed their artistic approaches, Güran and also Lifij were especially focused on capturing the effects of light on objects: Üren remembered Güran repeatedly painting the same tomb in Üsküdar at different times of day and under different atmospheric conditions, and he recalled Lifij obsessively working to represent the melancholy of evening colors.24 Eşref Üren, “Yanlış anlaşlan bir kavram: Resimde Safyüreklilik,” Cumhuriyet (August 5, 1973), 4.
Güran, describing his work, said that he had “delved into Impressionism, Romanticism and even Symbolism.”25 Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 26. While his work reveals that he took inspiration from aspects of impressionism in France, his explanations provide clues about his inclination toward an impressionist approach: “My mihrab (i.e., the niche in a mosque indicating direction of prayer),” he said, “has always been the sun. And my book nature.”26 Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 26. He thus characterized his pursuit of natural light in both physical and spiritual terms, and he considered himself a disciple of Hodja Ali Rıza, the local landscape artist and devout military school art teacher who associated nature with a divine essence while also spearheading a plein-air method. Güran trained with Hodja Ali Rıza as a private student even before entering the Sanayi-i Nefise and while studying at the Mekteb-i Mülkiyye (School of Political Science).27 Güran studied political science to please his father, a high-ranking state bureaucrat who wanted his son to have a profession as a civil servant (a common parental preference of the time). He entered the Sanayi-i Nefise to receive academic art education the year his father passed away. Hodja Ali Rıza was known for taking his students on excursions in rural Istanbul, where he painted many of his own works. He converted Güran into a committed plein-air artist. A drawing by the Hodja citing Güran’s name records their continued collaboration after Güran entered the Sanayi-i Nefise in 1902 (fig. 3).28 See Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu, ed., Istanbul’un Ressamı Hoca Ali Rıza-Ev ve Şehir (Istanbul: T. C. Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı Kültür Yayınları, 2018), 2:612. An occasional visitor to Güran’s börek parties at his house in the historical Süleymaniye neighborhood, the Hodja there interacted with a circle of younger landscape painters including Ibrahim Çallı, Feyhaman Duran, Sami Yetik, and Namık Ismail.29 Börek is a kind of pastry.
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Description: Working in nature by Rıza, Hodja Ali
Fig. 3. Hodja Ali Rıza, Working in Nature, August 28, 1909. Charcoal on paper, 27 × 20 cm (68 9/16 × 50 13/16 in.). Süleymaniye Library Süheyl Ünver Collection, Istanbul.
Even before his personally financed studies in Paris in 1909, Güran could be defined as an impressionist in terms of his practice. He graduated a year later than his contemporaries because he failed to fulfill the standards of his painting instructor, Salvatore Valeri, an artist keen on a quasi-photographic rendition in painting. Valeri curtly dismissed Güran’s artistic inclinations, announcing: “The little sir has become an Impressionist!”30 Valeri quoted in Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Neşriyatı, 1937), 8. According to historian Taha Toros, the younger artist may have felt more confident defying Valeri’s teaching after he allegedly met the neo-impressionist Paul Signac, who visited Istanbul in 1905.31 According to Taha Toros, Signac’s visit is confirmed by a sultan’s decree that granted him the permission to work in Istanbul. See Taha Toros, “Nazmi Ziya Güran,” Antik-Dekor 60 (2000): 66–72. But there is no evidence to support this deduction. Güran’s early work reveals his nascent impressionist attitude.
His arrival in Paris led him to adopt an even less restrained style—despite taking class at the Académie Julian with Marcel Baschet (1862–1941) and Henri Royer (1869–1938), and then with Cormon at the École des beaux-arts. His previous naturalistic tendencies were abandoned for painting dabs of color that resulted in loosely defined scenes. Though archival materials do not record which works of art Güran encountered in the French capital, his time there coincided with Monet’s 1909 exhibition of the Nymphéas at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery and with Monet’s 1912 exhibition of his Venice series at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery.32 Semra Germaner, “Bir Karşılaştırma,” 46. Based on the historical data provided in Yvon Taillandier, Monet (New York: Crown Art Library, 1993), 93. Güran may have also seen exhibitions of Matisse’s work (1910) and the first futurist exhibition in Paris (1912) at Bernheim-Jeune. In tandem with these gallery shows, the Caillebotte Bequest and other subsequent purchased and donated impressionist works were displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg while he was in Paris. Despite this, Güran actually claimed that he avoided museums out of a fear that other artists would exert too much influence on his own work: “I learnt from Rıza Bey [Hodja Ali Rıza] not to be influenced by other artists. It is owing to his advice that whenever I saw a painting that I liked I would refrain from looking at it attentively.”33 Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya, 6–7. However, his interest in coloristic effects and approach to form can be linked to the modern art that he presumably saw in Paris, or at least it must have given him confidence to fulfill and express his own temperament. Moreover, he was surely encouraged in this new direction by Cormon, who advised him to always use nature as a guide.34 Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu relates an anecdote where Cormon encouraged his student to work in nature, but Güran still wanted to receive Cormon’s academic training, despite his personal leanings. See Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya, 9.
As a Turkish artist striving for an authentic identity, Güran must have faced particular challenges in Paris. In an article published in a Turkish daily newspaper on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition in the summer of 1937, he opined that while art may be a universal phenomenon, the artist must invent locally and so carry the trace of his immediate environment. Everything except “artistic creation,” he argued, “can be copied, borrowed or imitated from a more developed country.”35 Nazmi Ziya Güran, “Resim Sergisi Hakkında,” Cumhuriyet (September 12, 1937): 5. Güran believed that local character was intrinsic to a place and thus to its natural surroundings, and asserted that “the nationality of landscape painting was nature itself.”36 Erhan, Nazmi Ziya. 26. He must have felt he was imprinting his own artistic signature on modern painting through a genuine engagement with his local environment.
Although he typically departed from his house very early in the morning almost every day “to capture the awakening of nature,” Güran also demonstrated an interest in observing how a city was enlivened by its inhabitants.37 Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 9. Erhan quotes Nazmi Ziya Güran as saying: “Those who haven’t witnessed the transformation of night becoming day haven’t seen anything of the universe.” Güran’s cityscapes thus presented subjective memories and objective observations of specific places. For example, he was interested in showing certain characteristic sites. In Paris, his paintings record such tourist sites as Notre Dame, the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, or a Parisian café. In Istanbul, he painted the Hagia Sophia and other churches. He documented the once popular Koç Café numerous times at different times of day. Mosques recurred throughout his work. One example of the latter includes Landscape with Mosque (n.d.), showing the imposing Fatih mosque, which the artist painted numerous times in different seasons in order to capture the effects of changing light (fig. 4). To a casual observer, the scene might appear to be an image of a mosque in a Monet-esque style, devoid of any local character except for its theme. Seeing how the mosque is formed, by brushstrokes of light tones, the viewer can sense that it is not the architectural physicality of the structure that is depicted but how the sun transforms its imposing presence. Güran’s painting is an impression of the mosque as he tries to capture his “mihrab,” the sun, on its surface. This is not a mere imitation of Monet but a reflection of an “impressionist impulse” that a modern Turkish artist must surely have felt in the light of Istanbul.
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Description: Landscape with Mosque by Güran, Nazmi Ziya
Fig. 4. Nazmi Ziya Güran, Landscape with Mosque, n.d. Oil on canvas, 77 × 61 cm (195 9/16 × 154 15/16 in.). Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.
Güran’s paintings also provide a glimpse of cultural life in transition, with the figures of men and women as his subtle clues. He rarely produced figurative paintings where a single figure dominated the scene, and, even in those limited instances, such as Woman in Pink on a Chaise Longue (1917), the sleeping figure blends into the natural surroundings (fig. 5). Asleep, the woman remains oblivious to Güran’s almost intrusive gaze. Bright strokes of color represent the play of light and shadow across her dress, creating a chromatic effect dominated by pinks and greens, with black for the woman’s shoes used as a color in itself and not a shading element, as would be expected from an impressionist. The viewer can almost feel the warmth of the sun and the scent of what seem like roses encircling the woman’s body. With its hazy and peaceful atmosphere, the painting reflects an intimacy rarely seen in Turkish painting. Despite this example, Güran’s paintings generally depict figures so faintly that one fails to notice that he has represented an unveiled woman or man wearing a hat—sartorial decisions and depictions that speak to cultural and political issues of the era. Changes in fashion constituted some of the more radical changes in social life from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic: clothing laws were implemented in the 1920s, banning the religious headgear kavuk or the fez in favor of hats for men, and the wearing of full-length black çarşaf by women. As a Westernized outlook became the norm, Western-style fashions were represented in many paintings of the era. How Güran perceived the cultural transformations around him can be seen in a triptych of paintings shown in 1935, depicting one modern and two traditional neighborhoods. Placed as the central image among three works depicting traditional scenes of “old Istanbul,” Taksim Square (1935) is an example of his more naturalist works; here, content prevailed over style as he related the story of Turkish cultural modernization, specifically through women seen in the foreground in sleek, modern dress. Like the Pietro Canonica sculpture of 1928—one of the first national monuments to be erected in modern Turkey, visible in the background of the painting—the women serve as symbols of modernism. Distant apartment blocks also represent modern life in the Pera district, where Europeans and the more Westernized population of Istanbul generally resided. Compared to his depiction of modern Istanbul in Taksim Square, his paintings Süleymaniye Kemeraltı (n.d.) and Old Istanbul Street (n.d.) represent the comparative conservatism and traditionalism of these neighborhoods through veiled women and street vendors. Via the different sartorial choices of these figures, he documented his impressions of different neighborhoods with their distinct physical surroundings and local populations.
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Description: Woman in Pink on a Chaise Longue by Güran, Nazmi Ziya
Fig. 5. Nazmi Ziya Güran, Woman in Pink on a Chaise Longue, 1917. Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm (137 3/16 × 185 7/16 in.). Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul.
Güran died in 1937, only a month after the opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Sanayi-i Nefise and coincident with preparations for his monograph to be written by his student, the famed Turkish artist Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (1911–1975). Solo exhibitions were then a novelty in Turkey. That more than three hundred paintings by one single artist were shown caused a sensation. The exhibition consisted mainly of the landscapes Güran had avidly produced, including fourteen paintings of the same scene in Üsküdar on an autumn day. He chased the seasons, days, hours, and minutes, declaring in his last interview that “the art of impressionism” had forced him to work in rapid action, while the latest trends in art freed him of nature’s overwhelming pressure.38 Naci Sadullah, “Dün Beş Sanat Sergisi Birden Açıldı,” Son Posta, August 18, 1937. The full text of the newspaper interview can also be found in a later monograph on Nazmi Ziya Güran by Turan Erol, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), 34. While such a statement reveals that Güran was aware that impressionism had been surpassed by more recent currents, he nonetheless identified with it. For him, impressionism was not only a technique but a natural disposition.
 
1      Kemal Erhan, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Halk El Sanatları ve Neşriyat, n.d.), 15. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations from Turkish are mine. »
2      See “Impressionism,” Wikipedia, https://bit.ly/2CBSKaO»
3      See Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007), 7. »
4      Norma Broude, “A World in Light: France and the International Impressionist Movement 1860–1920,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1990), 9. »
5      Christian Brinton quoted in Broude, “World in Light,” 9. »
6      Broude, “World in Light,” 10–11. »
7      Broude, “World in Light,” 10–11. »
8      Halil Pasha studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Gustave Courtois (1852–1923) in Paris. During this time, the École des beaux-arts received foreign students as élèves libres. Other Ottoman students, such as Osman Hamdi Bey, Ahmed Ali Pasha, and Süleyman Seyyid, are also thought to have studied at the École under the same status. For an account of Ottoman/Turkish students studying in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Deniz Artun, Paris’ten Modernlik Tercümeleri-Académie Julian’da İmparatorluk ve Cumhuriyet Öğrencileri (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007), 52–53. »
9      Malik Aksel, Sanat ve Folklor (Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2011), 14. The interview mentioned was originally published in Ar magazine in July 1937. »
10      Sezer Tansuğ, Halil Paşa (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993), 40. »
11      See Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (Istanbul: İş Bankası Yayınları, 1971), 447–48. Cezar provides a document that gives clues to the reason behind the founding of an art academy in Istanbul. »
12      John Milner, The Studios of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 23. »
13      Semra Germaner, “Bir Karşılaştırma: Claude Monet-Nazmi Ziya,” P Dergisi, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 46. »
14      Elif Naci, “Güzel sanatların son 15 senedeki tekamülü,” Cumhuriyet (October 30, 1938): 2. »
15      Burhan Toprak’s full statement is quite revealing: “When they went to Paris for art education, they were unable to see the new reality unfolding around them. . . . Matisse had accepted Cézanne as a master and was convinced the leader of the Fauves. Then came Cubism, Expressionism and what not. These painters lived in Paris between 1910 and 1914 but brought us no news from this boiling pot.” Burhan Toprak, Sanat Tarihi (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yayını, 1963), 3:257. »
16      Nurullah Berk, Sanat Konuşmaları (Istanbul: AB Neşriyatı, 1943), 63. »
17      See Ahu Antmen, Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernity in Turkish Painting (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi Yayınları, 2015). »
18      In Atatürk portraits by other members of the 1914 Generation, such as those by Namık Ismail (dated 1935), Ibrahim Çallı (dated 1937), and Feyhaman Duran (dated 1937), photographic likeness and a serious air of officiality come across as the most important aspects of the works, whereas in the Güran portrait the color scheme and brushwork add a painterly quality to the painting. »
19      A list of these artists can be seen here: Semra Germaner and Zeynep Inankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, 2002), 312–15. »
20      Nurullah Berk. Sanat Konuşmaları, 63. »
21      Stéphane Mallarmé quoted in Brendan Prendeville, Realism in 20th Century Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 33. »
22      According to Elif Naci, who interviewed the artist, Güran was removed from his office as director of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi during the occupation of Istanbul for propaganda related to the national cause. As a result, Güran retreated to his inherited family house at Çamlıca and tried to earn his living through various means: “I spent my time in my garden. I was trying to live with the 18 lira salary they were still paying me. First I grew cabbage and celery to feed my children. But then I was forced to enter the tobacco trade.” See Elif Naci, Anılardan Damlalar (Istanbul: Karacan Yayınları, 1981), 33. »
23      See Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Resim ve Cemiyet (Istanbul: Üniversite Kitabevi, 1942), 56. »
24      Eşref Üren, “Yanlış anlaşlan bir kavram: Resimde Safyüreklilik,” Cumhuriyet (August 5, 1973), 4. »
25      Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 26. »
26      Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 26. »
27      Güran studied political science to please his father, a high-ranking state bureaucrat who wanted his son to have a profession as a civil servant (a common parental preference of the time). He entered the Sanayi-i Nefise to receive academic art education the year his father passed away. »
28      See Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu, ed., Istanbul’un Ressamı Hoca Ali Rıza-Ev ve Şehir (Istanbul: T. C. Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı Kültür Yayınları, 2018), 2:612. »
29      Börek is a kind of pastry. »
30      Valeri quoted in Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Neşriyatı, 1937), 8. »
31      According to Taha Toros, Signac’s visit is confirmed by a sultan’s decree that granted him the permission to work in Istanbul. See Taha Toros, “Nazmi Ziya Güran,” Antik-Dekor 60 (2000): 66–72. »
32      Semra Germaner, “Bir Karşılaştırma,” 46. Based on the historical data provided in Yvon Taillandier, Monet (New York: Crown Art Library, 1993), 93. »
33      Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya, 6–7. »
34      Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu relates an anecdote where Cormon encouraged his student to work in nature, but Güran still wanted to receive Cormon’s academic training, despite his personal leanings. See Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Nazmi Ziya, 9. »
35      Nazmi Ziya Güran, “Resim Sergisi Hakkında,” Cumhuriyet (September 12, 1937): 5. »
36      Erhan, Nazmi Ziya. 26. »
37      Erhan, Nazmi Ziya, 9. Erhan quotes Nazmi Ziya Güran as saying: “Those who haven’t witnessed the transformation of night becoming day haven’t seen anything of the universe.” »
38      Naci Sadullah, “Dün Beş Sanat Sergisi Birden Açıldı,” Son Posta, August 18, 1937. The full text of the newspaper interview can also be found in a later monograph on Nazmi Ziya Güran by Turan Erol, Nazmi Ziya (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), 34. »
8. Nazmi Ziya Güran and Turkish Impressionism
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