Date

1977

Author

Erzen, Jale

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As artists and art lovers, we cannot but rejoice at the pioneering sponsorship of the State Academy of Fine Arts in giving public and accredited place to the modernist art attitudes, which for many years have painfully fought underground in Turkey. The shows held for the first Istanbul Biennale brought to light the many questions and problems that many of us, who feel the crisis and the growth-of Western art, and who are sensitive to the cultural polarizations in Turkey,were very much aware of. Yet, knowing that only such an exposition can raise the issues and find the expressions for solving them we owe hearty thanks to the organizers of the Academy. Although formally and conceptually, artists practicing in Turkey have not yet evolved a firm solidarity, their awareness JALE ERZEN of the present paradoxes of Turkish Fine Arts, and their serious efforts to grope for a moJern Turkish expression that would be relevant both within Western and International movements, and within the Turkish cultural frame, predicts great advances for tomorrow. These artists, however, will be looked upon as a handful of cultural misfits till the Turkish public can step up to the same awareness and appreciation of modern art. As Prof. Arnold Berleant states in his essay 'The Art of the Unseen" developments in art depend on consecutive evolutions: "The first consists in extending the art object, the second in intensifying appreciative experience, and the third in enlarging art to include the total environment." As the only institution that has made the modernization efforts in Turkish art since the Nineteenth Century, the Statt Academy of Fine arts is now making the difficult effort for the third stage of the development. The Istanbul Art Festival included a symposium with criticisms and evaluations on Modern and Turkish art, exhibitions in various fields, and shows presenting newly evolving Turkish arts such as.modern dance and the light art of Teoman Madra using slides as the medium. The "New Tendencies" exhibition that took place at the Academy halls, at first glance took us back to the art of the late sixties of Europe and the United States. However, truly modern expressions, such as Pentur I, IX, III of Şükrü Aysan, were not lacking. The fact that we see works very much in the line of Photo-Realism, Surrealism, Social Realism as they were exacuted in the West should be looked upon as an indication that Turkish artists are concienciously working after evolving their own cultural expressions using the pioneering Sixties' movements of the West as springboards for new articulations. Abstract works which were in the minority, as they are today in Turkish art, indicate that this is the area where we can be most hopeful for future developments and for a future Modern Turkish art. Turkish abstract artists feel much freer in applying their own configurations and their own mixture of abstract values. This may also be due to the fact that Turkish art has such a long history of abstract art. The first prizes in painting, belonging to Şükrü Aysan, gave no reference to anything outside pure artistic concepts; thus they were alienating in the true sense of the avant-garde. Such examples have already been seen in the West, but in our own cultural environment they come more to the point. The first and second prize winners in sculpture, Hasan Safkan and Rahmi Aksungur, first and second prize winners in print, Ergün İnan and Balkan Naci Islimyeli, the second prize in photography, Mehmet Asatekin, and a few other paintings as the works of Veysel Günay, Erol Eti, and Tangül Akakmcı, prove that there are already artists using Western modernist attitudes in a culturally and aesthetically relevant frame for Turkey. Only when such examples can be seen in abundance their implications for the future will be correctly understood. After all that we have seen and heard during the Istanbul Art Festival we can say that a new cultural environment is gaining dynamic progress in Turkey. Endeavoring executions are not lacking, but to make them understood and gain influence we still need serious art criticism and many more analytical studies and publications on Turkish art.

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http://jfa.arch.metu.edu.tr/archive/0258-5316/1977/cilt03/sayi_2/297-310.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/51269

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Department of Architecture, Article