“I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became the voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.”– Miriam Makeba
Ali Atmaca, one of the most sought after contemporary Turkish artists whose work is represented in the museum in Nice, once told me that when he was living in Paris a collector who’d come to his studio had walked out on discovering he was Turkish, saying “your history is building mosques, not painting.”
Not everybody reacts that badly to Turkish painters. Yavuz Tanyeli, another highly regarded contemporary artist told me that in an exhibition abroad with other Turkish artists a visiting curator or collector had not bothered to more than glance at any work other than his – that’s original, he’d said, studying it, we don’t have that here. Yavuz’s paintings look conventional except for his subject matter and treatment, but I got the point.
Until then I couldn’t understand why a highly accomplished artist like Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu had painted a map of Istanbul with motifs from Turkish kilims, or why Erol Akyavaş had painted castle walls in his abstracts that seemed derivative of miniatures, nor Burhan Doğançay’s peeling abstract calligraphy.
About the same time I put works by Turkish painters on my FB art page, Aziz Başan Art, asking if these were not plagiaristic; they were in the Impressionist style. One person was incensed by my provocation: “I’ve seen their paintings, our Impressionists are much better!”
Hmmm…
Having already included figures from Turkish puppet theatre in my figurative work, I turned to miniature art in an attempt to resolve this issue permanently, at least for me.
I painted this oil in 2018, part of my series A History of the Republic. It refers to the coup d’etat of May 27, 1960, and uses a famous Persian miniature which depicts Ferhat and Şirin, the Anatolian version of the Persian Khosraw and Shirin. In the Anatolian version Şirin is an Armenian princess. Not only that but the miniature depicts her as her own person, which is what all nomadic pastoral women appear to have been.
I hated Ottoman poetry, which is what we were studying at the time. Even when deciphered the symbolism is cliched, rather like French poetry was before Baudelaire whom modern Turkish poets copied liberally. I could not believe the idealized love stories that clog it. And to top it all, we attended class in a separate building from the girls.
It was not surprising the coup only enhanced my sense of dislocation.
After a show trial that would have made Stalin envious the military hung the Prime Minister and two cabinet members in the name of democracy. Great, just what the republic needed, nor has it recovered.
Be that as it may, I look forward to your comments on this controversial issue of plagiarism in Western Art, a subject I will continue with in my next blog.
Is not Christendom the defining reference rather than ‘Western Art’? I find John Berger’s Ways of Seeing sheds light on this aspect, too. It is available on YouTube and still riveting to watch after all these years.
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