Nazan Azeri · Guest contributor
Nazan Azeri examines the first generation of women painters, their access to art education and artistic production, through social transformation, economic independence and women’s struggle to establish themselves as artists.
This essay is republished in SIR Art Journal, with the artist’s approval, from the text on Nazan Azeri’s personal website.
Studying the first generation of women painters during the process of modernisation requires us to consider women’s position within the religious context of the Ottoman Empire, transformations in society and art, and their causes. How could women painters emerge from an Islamic society that subordinated women and inherited a tradition prohibiting figural representation? Answering this question requires an understanding of the social background that shaped the process, what preceded and followed it, and the ruptures it involved. As the West accumulated colonial wealth and advanced in science and technology, modernisation, Enlightenment thought, nationalism and the transition to capitalism, societies unable to keep pace or develop new perspectives lost power. In the Ottoman Empire, the resulting military defeats and territorial losses prompted attempts at modernisation to halt this decline and bring renewal. Reform began under Sultan Ahmed III in the Tulip Era (1718–1730), continuing under Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II, first in the military and subsequently in education. These developments led to the opening of secular schools for boys and girls and to changes in cultural life.
Ottoman society, Islam and women
In the Ottoman Empire, private law was governed by religious and customary law until the Tanzimat period, and subsequently by the religiously grounded Mecelle. Alongside establishing a system of belief, the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, contains rules regulating worldly life. Within the framework of Islamic rules, human beings are servants of God. Women occupy a secondary position in matters such as male polygamy, concubinage, inheritance and testimony in court. In Ottoman society, this framework confined urban women to domestic life; women worked in the fields but were economically disadvantaged. The surah An-Nisa states: “Men are superior to women because God has made them superior in many respects, and because they support and feed women from their earnings. Good women live in harmony with their husbands and, just as God protects their rights, preserve their chastity even when their husbands are absent.” It also states: “First admonish those who are defiant; leave them alone in bed. If this is still of no use, beat them. But if they obey you, do not seek ways to torment them. Surely God is exalted and beyond reach.” In other words, in return for supporting women from their earnings, men are granted superiority and the right to use violence against women who do not conform. In patriarchal systems, the method is first to dispossess those who are to be subordinated by belittling their abilities, intelligence and economic labour—whether insecure, dependent domestic labour or low-paid employment—and then to legitimise their exploitation. In John Berger’s account, to be born a woman is to be born within a private, enclosed space owned by men. (1) This mentality extends from ancient Greece through Rome to medieval Europe. The concept of women’s rights first came to the fore during the Enlightenment.
The debate over women’s rights
Over time, developments arising from social conditions in the Ottoman Empire required women’s participation in working life. During the empire’s final period, through the wars with Russia and Greece, the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars, women in Anatolia undertook every kind of work left behind by men at war. Nursing courses were opened to train women serving at the front, and economic and social pressures gradually brought women into employment. During the First World War, they began working in industries behind the front lines. Newspapers and magazines, some produced by women, also began to appear. In their journals, women identified economic independence as the most important principle for the freedom of both the country and women, recognising that it could be achieved only through industrialisation. They criticised the outlook of sultans who had made the Ottoman state dependent on foreign powers in judicial, penal and financial matters. (2) They explained and debated information and methods drawn from women’s movements in Britain and Norway, supported those movements, and voiced their own demands for the right to vote and stand for election. (3) In 1908, Halide Edip Adıvar first discussed feminism in the journal Mehasin. Associations were established to advance women’s rights. Founded to claim rights, provide charity and offer mutual support, and led by the educated daughters and wives of wealthy families, these associations subsequently joined men in the War of Independence movement. Their women leaders organised rallies calling on the public to resist the occupation. The first resistance rally was initiated by Halide Edip on 15 May 1919.
Male writers also voiced objections to women’s oppression. Celal Nuri İleri discussed equality between women and men and equal pay for equal work. Hamdullah Suphi and Osman Hamdi Bey deplored women’s lack of education and society’s fatalistic mentality. Ahmet Mithat Efendi criticised male polygamy in Eyvah (1872); Şemsettin Sami criticised women’s veiling in Taaşşuk-ı Talat ve Fitnat; and Sami Paşazade Sezai criticised concubinage in his novel Sergüzeşt (1889). A family-law reform in 1917 gave women the right to have their consent sought before a husband entered a polygamous marriage, but this was abolished two years later. The efforts at modernisation that had begun in the Tulip Era accelerated with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Through a series of reforms led by Atatürk, secularism was adopted as a principle of government. The separation of religion and state made religion a matter of individual conscience. The Turkish Civil Code of 1926 eliminated inequalities between women and men in family and inheritance law. Women were granted participation in municipal elections on 3 April 1930 and the right to vote and stand for parliament in the 1935 elections, when eighteen women entered parliament.
Transformations in the visual arts
Calligraphy was the predominant art in the Ottoman Empire. The God of Islam is an abstract God who has not taken bodily form on earth and cannot be depicted as in Christianity. Since creation belongs to God, the artist is forbidden to create by drawing first a likeness—a face—and then other living beings such as animals and plants. Miniatures, by contrast, are book illustrations; they were not the predominant Ottoman art and did not include the three-dimensionality that would suggest existence in this world. When book illustration, calligraphy and miniature painting were set aside following the introduction of printing and because of their expense, miniature painting moved out of books and became mural painting in palaces and private homes. Innovations such as light and shade and perspective, initially explored in fragments of nature added to miniatures, were now sought in landscape compositions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Baroque and Rococo ornament, landscapes and still lifes replaced traditional mural decoration and painted ornamental work. Figural murals joined them towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the opening of military schools and the academy made available the anatomical knowledge required to achieve three-dimensionality in the figure. The underlying factor was a change in mentality: the desire for modernisation.
A non-Muslim bourgeois class emerged in Istanbul to conduct Europe’s financial affairs in the city. Children of wealthy Ottoman families who had received a cosmopolitan education entered state service as administrators following the abolition of the confiscation system. In Istanbul, now an open market, these developments laid the groundwork for an independent market for artists. Those commissioning and supporting artists included representatives of foreign capital, Tanzimat pashas, money changers and the sultan himself. Artists arriving mainly from France—the Orientalists—painted an East imagined through Western eyes.
To modernise the army, drawing and perspective were introduced for topographical purposes at the Artillery School and the Military Academy, and teachers were brought from Europe. When artists trained in military schools turned to easel painting, their subjects were generally architecture within landscape. Architectural elements in sixteenth-century historical miniatures passed into domestic murals and, by the late nineteenth century, onto canvas through the military painters. Often working from photographs, these artists, described as the Primitives, primarily painted monumental structures in natural surroundings: religious sites, mosques, barracks, schools, commercial buildings and palaces. In my view, even if unconsciously, this expressed the sense of the sublime experienced in nature and in the monumental buildings situated within it.
The generation of 1914 graduated from the School of Fine Arts in 1908–1910 and was sent to Europe by the state, returning at the outbreak of the First World War. As they brought home an Impressionism whose moment in Europe had passed, European artists were turning their gaze towards the East and Africa. The movement from miniature painting into three-dimensional landscape murals, and from there onto canvas through the military painters, signals a transition from a faith-centred understanding to positivism and a naturalistic perception of the world grounded in sensation. The military painters’ naturalism was objective and object-based. Feelings of infinity and sublimity found expression in the monumentality of their chosen objects. In my view, the generation of 1914 was also right to find what it sought in Impressionism. Both the inherited approach shaped by the prohibition of figural representation and the landscape and still-life subjects passed down through wall and ceiling painting and the military painters paralleled Impressionism’s principal subjects. It is understandable that they found the qualities they needed in Impressionism’s sensory, subjective naturalism and in its empiricist, experimental, positivist outlook, which allowed room for individuality. Painting the sensations reflected in them by the fleeting impressions of the changing spectrum of light, they captured the sensory—the world of appearances perceived through momentary sensation. The rapid transformations and upheavals of Ottoman social life, and the pace of the period, suited a swift technique of painting. It is sometimes asked why this generation was not influenced by newer, more contemporary movements abroad. The reason lies in the fundamentally different needs underlying Western conditions and artistic searches and their own.
In Europe, various artistic movements challenged the corrupted bourgeois mind and its values under the impact first of the First World War and then of the Second, expressing their reckoning with modernity through art. In this context, they sometimes turned towards Eastern and African art, drawing formal resources from those cultures in ways also connected with colonialism. Here, during the same years, there was a desire to catch up with a belated modernity; the founding of the Republic brought new hope and an accelerated drive to modernise. To be original is to draw sustenance from one’s own place and time—from its science, philosophy and social events—to bring these together and transform them into form. When blocked, it means stepping outside oneself to look, yet evaluating what one sees from one’s own position and translating it into form again. From this perspective, it is understandable that the generation of 1914, sent to Europe, found what it sought in Impressionism. Whether the first Impressionists and, later, the Independents, Group D and the abstractionist movements succeeded in doing this is a separate question.
Women artists in this process
The Muslim women painters who established a presence in painting—or who at least obtained an artistic education, even if marriage prevented them from sustaining that presence—were the daughters of high-ranking bureaucratic families close to the palace. They received their initial education at home or in foreign mission schools, generally Notre Dame de Sion and the American College for Girls in Üsküdar. They studied painting at the School of Fine Arts for Women, abroad, or with Western Orientalist artists visiting the country.
Even before the School of Fine Arts for Women opened, two artists refused to accept the domestic life assigned to women in Ottoman society and the expectation that they should be content with whatever livelihood their husbands provided: the first women painters Mihri Müşfik (Rasim) (1886–1954) and Müfide Kadri (1889–1911). Both made painting their principal occupation and, as educators, worked to establish it as a practice among women.
Mihri’s father, Mehmet Rasim, taught at the military medical school; her grandfather, Asaf Pasha, was an aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülhamid. The aunt of the painter Hale Asaf, she received her first art lessons from the court painter Zonaro. At seventeen, against her family’s wishes, she travelled to Rome and then Paris to study painting, using a false passport supplied by Madame Barer, the French ambassador’s wife. She supported herself by renting out rooms in her home and painting portraits. After the Balkan War, she met Cevat Bey, the finance minister, who had travelled to Paris to negotiate a loan. At his suggestion, she taught painting first at the Darülmuallimat teacher-training school for girls in 1913 and later at the School of Fine Arts for Women. It was considered more appropriate for a woman to teach the female students. She painted portraits of Tevfik Fikret, Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın and Rıza Tevfik. On her second visit to Rome, she painted the Pope at Gabriele d’Annunzio’s suggestion. However, a Catholic pope sitting for a Muslim Turkish woman was not well received, and the painting was later set aside. Following Tevfik Fikret’s death, Mihri made a cast of his face, producing the first such mask in Turkey. At the end of the War of Independence, she painted Mustafa Kemal in his marshal’s uniform and presented the portrait to him. Her close relations with former leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress, and her fear that the prosecution of some of them might extend to her, led her to leave the country in 1922. She spent her final years in New York, earning a living through private lessons, and was ultimately buried in a potter’s field there. In letters to her family, she described the hardships she had endured for painting and wrote that, if she were to begin life again, those hardships might make her refuse to paint. (4) While teaching at the academy, she insisted that her female students work from the nude. Life drawing continued with Zaro Ağa and the school attendant Ali Efendi, with models found outside the school by the students, and, after 1917, with White Russian refugees fleeing Russia.
Müfide Kadri was adopted after her mother’s death by Kadri Bey, who managed Altunizade’s accounts. She took painting lessons first from Osman Hamdi Bey and later from the Italian Professor Valeri, a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts. The first woman teacher in painting, she taught initially at the Numune schools, later teaching music and embroidery at the Numune-i İnas girls’ school and the girls’ secondary and upper schools. She also taught painting at the Darülmuallimat teacher-training school. Müfide Kadri, who helped educate Abdülhamid II’s daughter Adile Sultan, belonged to the Ottoman Painters’ Society, and one of her paintings won an award in Germany. (5) She also pursued music and composed works. Her paintings included portraits, landscapes, still lifes and subjects incorporating music in some way. She died of tuberculosis at twenty-two. Celile Hikmet Enver (1883–1956) was the daughter of Enver Pasha, an aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülhamid and son of Mustafa Celalettin (Borzęcki) Pasha, who was of Polish origin. Her mother, Leyla Hanım, was the daughter of the German-born Marshal Mehmet Ali Pasha (Magdeburg), who had taken refuge in Turkey. Alongside learning foreign languages, she studied painting with the court painter Zonaro and later continued her lessons in Rome and Paris. Her marriage to Hikmet Bey in 1900 produced her son, the poet Nâzım Hikmet. Hikmet Bey’s father, Nâzım Bey, was a governor and a poet interested in Sufi literature.
Celile separated from her husband after the First World War and lived in Germany for a time. Vildan Gizer (1889–1974), Emine Fuat Tugay (1887–1975), Naciye Tevfik (1878–1960) and Meliha Zafir Yenerden (1896–1979) were likewise daughters of wealthy, high-ranking bureaucratic families who had received a good general and artistic education. After marriage, they were able to continue painting only as a hobby. Harika Lifij (1890–1991), having completed the teacher-training school for girls and married the painter Avni Lifij, continued her profession by teaching art. Emine Fuat Tugay’s English-language book Three Centuries, describing the lives of prominent old Turkish and Egyptian families, was published by Oxford University. Meliha Yenerden also wrote poetry; her collection Sanguines et Fusains was published in Paris in 1952 by Éditions de la Revue Moderne.
When the School of Fine Arts for Women opened in 1914, it admitted thirty-three students in its first year, six of them non-Muslim. The first student to enrol was Müzdan Arel, born in 1897. Others included Müide Esat, Belkıs Mustafa, Nazire Osman, Fatma Nazlı Ecevit and Güzin Duran. Belkıs Mustafa was the school’s first Muslim woman graduate. Although Güzin Duran (1898–1981) won the competition for study in Europe, she continued her education in Istanbul after marrying Feyhaman Duran. Alongside teaching art at Atatürk Girls’ High School, she produced landscapes, nudes and still lifes and work relating to Karagöz shadow theatre. The school’s student number twenty-four, Nazlı Ecevit (1900–1985), was the granddaughter of Ali Pasha, one of the sultan’s aides-de-camp, and the daughter of Colonel Emin Bey. Before completing school, she joined her father in Kastamonu after he had gone to Anatolia to participate in the War of Independence, and taught there. She subsequently taught in various parts of Anatolia and, following retirement, continued painting in Salacak until the end of her life. Her marriage to Dr Fahri Ecevit produced Bülent Ecevit, who became a prime minister of the Republic of Turkey. (6)
Melek Celal Sofu (1896–1976) belonged to a family lineage that included Namık Kemal, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Grand Vizier Topal Osman Pasha and Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, who was executed on Mahmud II’s orders in the early nineteenth century. Alongside a private education in two foreign languages, she received her first painting lessons from her uncle Kâzım Bey, one of the early military painters. She attended the academy as a guest student, took private lessons from Nazmi Ziya Güran and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. She married Hacı Sofuzade Celal Bey and, after his death, the German physician Professor Lampe, settling in Munich. She worked in sculpture as well as painting. Melek Sofu (Lampe), who gave many of her paintings to friends and acquaintances, held her last solo exhibition at Galerie Schumacher in Munich. She also wrote nine books introducing illumination, calligraphy and Turkish embroidery, translated into French and German. Those published bore the titles Hattat Kemal Akdik, Türk İşlemeleri, Şeyh Hamdullah, Un Motif Ouddique dans l’arue mement Ture, le Viveut Seraildes Sultans and Turkische Kunst und Turkische Stickerein. Her books on Hakkı Altınbezer, Bahattin Tokatlıoğlu and Necmettin Okyay remained unpublished. (7)
Her painting Mecliste İlk Türk Kadını (The First Turkish Woman in Parliament, 1936) is significant as possibly the first feminist painting in Turkey. (8)
Fahrünnisa Zeyd (1901–1991) was the daughter of Şakir Pasha, a historian, teacher and diplomat, and the niece of Grand Vizier Cevat Pasha. Her family produced numerous artists in theatre, poetry, painting and ceramics. After graduating from the School of Fine Arts for Women in 1920, she continued her education at the Académie Ranson and the studios of Stalbach and Bissière in Paris, and in Namık İsmail’s studio in Istanbul. She joined Group D and became one of the artists to exhibit most extensively abroad. Alongside her portraits, she produced abstract works. (9)
Sabiha Bozcalı (1903–1998) was the daughter of Rüştü Pasha, son of the naval minister Bozcaadalı Hasan Pasha; her mother was the daughter of the interior minister Memduh Pasha. She studied with Louis Corinth and Karl Caspar in Berlin and Munich. Invited to paint members of the Egyptian dynasty, she travelled to Egypt. On her return, she worked in Paul Signac’s studio in Paris and Giorgio de Chirico’s in Rome. In addition to portraits—including one of Atatürk—still lifes and landscapes, she worked in book and magazine illustration and graphic art. Her projects included Reşat Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopaedia and work on the Zonguldak coal enterprises.
Hale Asaf (1905–1938) was the daughter of Salih Bey, head of the court of appeal under Abdülhamid II. Her grandfather, Asaf Pasha, one of the sultan’s aides-de-camp, was poisoned in 1901. She learned English and Greek from English and Greek governesses as a child, French at Notre Dame de Sion, and Italian during her long years in Rome. She took painting lessons from her aunt Mihri Müşfik and from Namık İsmail. At sixteen, her family sent her to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Following victory in the War of Independence, her father and uncle, supporters of the sultanate, fled to Egypt, leaving her without money. She went with her family to join her aunt Mihri in Rome. After a period in Paris, she returned to Turkey and taught painting at Bursa Girls’ Teacher Training School. Her paintings Yeşil Türbe (The Green Tomb), Cem Sultan Türbesi (The Tomb of Cem Sultan) and Eski Bursa Evleri (Old Bursa Houses),
and Çorapçılar Çarşısı (The Stocking Sellers’ Market) date from this period. She joined the Association of Independent Painters and Sculptors, which emerged in opposition to Impressionism. Returning to Paris, she met Antonio Aniante, who had been expelled from Italy for opposing Mussolini, and shared her life with him. Aniante’s book about Atatürk, Mustapha Kemal, le Loup gris d’Angora, was published in Paris in 1934. She underwent three liver operations because of a cyst contracted from a dog in childhood. On 31 May 1938, she died of liver cancer in Paris, a week before the opening of an exhibition of thirty-seven paintings scheduled for 6 June. The whereabouts of these paintings are unknown. Aliye Berger (1903–1974) was Fahrünnisa Zeyd’s younger sister. She fell in love with Carl Berger, who had fled to Turkey after taking part in a popular uprising in Hungary and came to their home to give music lessons. They married after twenty-three years together; six months later, he died of a heart attack. Fahrünnisa took her to London to help her recover from the depression that followed. There she began making prints and introduced materials not previously used in the medium. To exploit the texture of the support, she printed on materials such as muslin, sandpaper and butcher’s paper. Seeking to convey her immediate excitement and feelings through an indefinite, continually moving flow of lines, she might be described as a psychological Impressionist—an Impressionist of her own emotions. As she recalled: “One day my sister showed me metal plates and some needle-like points, engraving tools. I picked them up. Whether with anger or love, I cannot say, I began cutting into those metal plates. I was digging into my memories on those hard plates. In this way I was bringing them—my memories—back into being. Making them live, in my own way.” (10) The things she drew—interiors, household objects, cupboards, brooms, teapots, her beloved, landscapes, boats and trees—seem as though they might disperse and disappear at any moment, leaving only a patch of tone on the surface.
In 1954, Aliye Berger’s Güneşin Doğuşu (Sunrise) won first prize for painting in the competitions organised for Yapı Kredi Bank’s tenth anniversary. The jury included three foreign art historians who had come for the International Congress of Art Critics. With the transition to a multi-party system, this was a period of movement from a statist, protectionist approach towards a liberal market economy based on private enterprise. In this context, the bank’s competition theme was “Paintings Depicting Various Productive Activities in Turkey’s Economic Life”. In the art world, on one side stood the Cubist-oriented Group D painters led by academy teachers; on the other were the abstractionist painters known as the Attic Painters, who challenged them on the grounds that Cubism had become outdated in Europe. The award to Aliye Berger’s abstractionist painting provoked a major controversy in academic circles.
Eren Eyüboğlu (1907–1988), born in Iași, Romania, was originally named Ernestine Letoni. She studied at the Iași Academy of Fine Arts and, after travelling to Paris in 1926, in André Lhote’s studio. That same year, she met and fell in love with Bedri Rahmi; in 1936, she came to Turkey to marry him. The birth of her son Mehmet Eyüboğlu in 1939 and his illnesses occupied ten years of her life, during which she turned to portraits and still lifes that she could paint at home. After 1950, Anatolian motifs and themes entered her paintings. The movement known as Anatolian Cubism influenced artists’ turn towards Anatolia. In 1946, Nurullah Berk spent a year in Paris examining contemporary developments. Seeking to combine the flourishing socially realist, traditionalist Mexican painting with their own Cubist approach and Anatolian local culture, he encouraged Group D to work in this direction. (11) At a group exhibition at the French Consulate in 1951, alongside Hakkı Anlı, Sabri Berkel, Zühtü Müridoğlu and Fahrünnisa Zeyd, we find Eren Eyüboğlu producing non-figurative abstract works. (12) She would subsequently return to figurative painting. In my interview with her son Mehmet Eyüboğlu, we learn that “she could get no news of her family in Romania, which remained under Nazi occupation for eleven years during the Second World War; when she went there after the borders reopened, she felt like a stranger”. We also learn that “she endured her husband’s affairs because of her love, her child and having nowhere to go; through painting she maintained her existence and was able to overcome her emotional suffering”. (13) Born in 1907, Maide Arel graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and married the painter Şemsi Arel. In Paris with her husband, she worked in the studios of André Lhote, Fernand Léger and Metzinger. While there, she received a bronze medal for Türk Hamamı (Turkish Bath) in the annual Club International Féminin exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Füreya Koral (1910–1997), Şakir Pasha’s granddaughter and a member of the same family as Fahrünnisa Zeyd, graduated from Notre Dame de Sion Girls’ High School and the philosophy department of Istanbul Darülfünun. Her amateur ceramic work, begun while receiving treatment in Switzerland, continued after training in Lausanne and then in Sèvres, Paris. She received a silver medal in an international ceramics competition in Cannes in 1955 and a gold medal in Prague in 1962. In 1986, she shared the Sedat Simavi Foundation’s Visual Arts Award with Neşe Erdok. Her works include the wall panels at Ankara’s Ulus Çarşısı (1962), the panel at Istanbul’s Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (1969), and panels at Istanbul’s Divan Patisserie, Hilton and Sheraton, and Ankara’s Marmara Hotel. Two other women artists of this transitional period who worked in sculpture and ceramics as well as painting were Sabiha Bengütaş (1904–1992) and Nermin Faruki (1904–1991). In 1938, Sabiha Bengütaş won first prize in the competition for sculptures of Atatürk and İnönü. Her Atatürk statue stands in the garden of Çankaya Mansion; the İnönü statue is in Mudanya. Nermin Faruki’s busts include those of Hadi Bara and Ahmet Faruki. Furumet Tektaş (1912–1961) was the daughter of Suat Davaz, the first undersecretary for foreign affairs in the government of the national struggle and the Republic’s first ambassador to Rome. She pursued her artistic education at the Villa Medici Academy and the English Academy on Via Margutta in Rome. During her father’s appointment as ambassador to Paris, she worked for five years at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and André Lhote’s studio. She founded Turkey’s first Philharmonic Society and married Afif Tektaş. Apart from an exhibition in the Philharmonic Society’s rooms in 1945, she never exhibited her paintings during her lifetime. Two exhibitions, at the Painting and Sculpture Museum in 1962, a year after her death, and at the Women’s Library in 1996, helped preserve her from oblivion. Bedia Güleryüz (1903–1991) came from a family of provincial notables who had moved to Istanbul in the 1870s. Her father, Mehmet Halit Bey, was a calligrapher alongside his work at the Court of Accounts. She was the aunt of the painter Mehmet Güleryüz. She studied at the School of Fine Arts for Women, where Feyhaman Duran and Ahmet Haşim taught her painting and art history.
Although she won a scholarship to Europe in two successive years, her family’s refusal prevented her from going abroad. Her uncle’s subsequent move to Berlin for doctoral study eventually provided an opportunity. Between 1936 and 1939, she studied painting with Arthur Kampf in Berlin. (14) Guided by the conviction that “my love is my art”, she never married and organised her life around painting. (15) She produced Impressionist-influenced outdoor landscapes, Cézanne-influenced still lifes and self-portraits.
Other women artists whose names appeared in the Galatasaray exhibitions between 1916 and 1923, which included students and graduates of the School of Fine Arts for Women, but who subsequently had little sustained visibility, include Ruşen Zamir, Melek Fevzi, Zahide Özar, Emine Naciye, Efraz Hanım, İhsan Hanım, Hatice Hanım, Emine Nusret Hanım, Nevzat Hanım and Melek Ahmet Hanım. Nazlı Ecevit’s sister Melek Savut (1902–1973), a graduate of the American College for Girls and the teacher-training school for girls, was also known for painting and sculpture alongside her work as an English teacher.
Conclusion
This study has considered the first generation of women artists during the process of modernisation. These artists lived in a society where the view of woman as a second-class domestic being was deeply entrenched and where religious beliefs prohibited likenesses and figures. At the same time, they lived through upheaval, occupation, the War of Independence led by Atatürk, the foundation of the Republic and rapid modernisation: a period in which ways of living and thinking were swiftly transformed. Well-educated daughters of high-ranking bureaucratic families with connections to foreign missions, most married and were unable to pursue their profession; those who insisted on continuing had to endure considerable suffering or forgo marriage. During this revolution in mentality, they generally gravitated towards Impressionist painting grounded in visual sensation and towards personal expression. Often, as if resisting the prohibition of figural representation, they gave particular weight to portraiture, even painting their own portraits as though to declare: I exist.
References
(1) John Berger, Görme Biçimleri [Ways of Seeing], Metis Yayınları, translated into Turkish by Yurdanur Salman, p. 46.
(2) Serpil Çakır, “Osmanlı’da Kadın Hareketi”.
(3) Ulviye Mevlan, “Düşünüyorum”.
(4) Taha Toros, İlk Kadın Ressamlarımız, Ak Yayınları Sanat Kitapları Serisi, 1988, p. 84.
(5) See p. 20.
(6) See pp. 45–52.
(7) See p. 62.
(8) Tomur Atagök, Cumhuriyetten Günümüze Kadın Sanatçılar, Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture, General Directorate of Monuments and Museums, Istanbul, 1993, p. 18.
(9) Taha Toros, pp. 53–56.
(10) Aliye Berger: Yaşamı, Sanatı, Yapıtları, Ada Yayınları, 1980, p. 7.
(11) Necmi Sönmez, “Güneşi Doğuşu – Aliye Berger”, Maçka Sanat Galerisi exhibition catalogue. The date appears in the source as “20 Aralık 10 Aralık 1994 – 7 Ocak 95”.
(12) Eren Eyüboğlu, Ada Yayınları, Istanbul, 1994, p. 43.
(13) My interview with Mehmet Eyüboğlu, Eren Eyüboğlu’s son.
(14) Mehmet Güleryüz, Bedia Güleryüz Retrospektif Sergi Kataloğu, 21 November–2 December 1995, Çit Pavilion, Yıldız Palace, pp. 4–6.
(15) Hayrettin Güleryüz: private notes by Bedia Güleryüz’s younger brother, conveyed to me by Mehmet Güleryüz. For further information, see my master’s thesis, Batılılaşma Hareketleri İçinde Kadın Ressamlar (1996).
Note: This essay was previously published in German in the Istanbul Next Wave Berlin exhibition catalogue and in Turkish in Genç Sanat magazine. This English version is translated from the Turkish text on the artist’s website; quotations are translated as they appear there.
About the author
Nazan Azeri is a graduate of Istanbul University’s Faculty of Law and the Painting Department of Marmara University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Her master’s research focused on the first generation of women painters.