Mavi Boncuk |
February 2022 First Edition
In this vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey, Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development.
After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art scene in Istanbul and Ankara. The entrepreneurial female gallerist Adalet Cimcoz, the art critic (and future prime minister) Bülent Ecevit, and artists like Aliye Berger, Füreya Koral, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu were not only focused on aesthetics. On the canvas, in criticism, and in the gallery, these cultural pioneers also grappled with economic questions—attempting to transform their country from a “developing nation” into a major player in the global markets of the postwar period.
Smith’s book publishes landmark works of Turkish modernism for the first time, along with an innovative array of sources—from gossip columns to economic theory—to reveal the art world as a key site for the articulation of Turkish nationhood at midcentury.
Based on: Art, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey (2015)
Author : Smith, Sarah-Neel ; Advisor : Mathur, Saloni
ABSTRACT
Art, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey tracks the emergence of a modern Turkish art world of unprecedented size and dynamism between 1950 and 1960, a period during which Turkey first experimented with multi-party democracy. The scholarship on modern visual culture in the Middle East has often focused on the moment of nation-formation, emphasizing the determining role played by nationalist ideologies in shaping modern lifestyles in the new states that formed across the region in the twentieth century. In contrast, this dissertation analyzes what postcolonial scholarship has called the “moment of maneuver”: the transitional time when a young nation-state begins to rethink its nationalist past, while articulating a new vision of an international future through subscription to Western forms of liberal democracy. Cold War ideologies of democracy were a key reference for the members of the Turkish art world who inaugurated novel forms of institution-building, exhibition-making, and written critique. Drawing on Turkish, French, and English-language archives and interviews, the dissertation examines how artists and writers used exhibitions, painting, and art criticism to promote the democratic principles of popular participation, freedom of expression, and dissent. Throughout, it demonstrates that art was shaped by transnational intellectual currents, global organizations like UNESCO, and international exhibitions. This research troubles existing accounts’ portrayal of the West as a generative center from which modernist artistic currents and democratic political ideals radiated outwards, as if transmitted to a series of passive, “peripheral” receivers after World War II. Instead, it demonstrates that Western artistic and political ideologies were simply one component within a complex constellation of forces that shaped the development of modern art worlds across the globe. Furthermore, it argues that it is only by engaging with art worlds like Turkey’s—simultaneously in dialogue with the West and forged through processes of decolonization and nationalization—that we can fully understand the fundamental transformation that ideologies of modernism underwent in the post-war period.
[1] Sarah-Neel Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where her work focuses on art of the modern Middle East, modernism in a global and comparative perspective, the history of museums, and post-9/11 visual culture. Her current book project, How to Build an Art World: Art & Politics in 1950s Turkey focuses on the intersection of art and international discourses about democracy after WWII.
Reviews
"Metrics of Modernity is the first book in any language to illuminate postwar art in Turkey in all its complexity, using the varied lenses of a new economy, rapid internationalization, and state support and intervention. Blending the historian’s rigor with the storyteller’s command of narrative, Sarah-Neel Smith reveals how an artistic community molded during the liberalization of the 1950s—and pulled geopolitically between the Soviets, a nonaligned South and East, the NATO countries, and Iran—built the foundations of today’s global contemporary art scene."—Vasıf Kortun, Research and Curatorial Advisor, Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
"Metrics of Modernity charts a much-needed history of a precise period and presents a remarkable narrative based on a web of interactions between objects, people, and institutions. Sarah-Neel Smith employs a new methodology based on an alternative body of evidence that moves away from mainstream institutional history. She rigorously mines a noninstitutional structure that is equally a narrative of state opposition and a history of an elite class. She meticulously plugs Turkey into the wider postwar discourse and debates about art and democracy across different geopolitical contexts, particularly through abstraction.—Nada Shabout, Regents Professor of Art History, University of North Texas
"Metrics of Modernity expertly weaves together the artistic, political, and economic threads that shape Turkey's relation to international politics and the broader framework of developmental modernity. Sarah-Neel Smith’s work is a landmark intervention into our understanding of art and modernity in the Cold War era, offering us productive new avenues for the study of postwar art around the world."—Rebecca M. Brown, Professor of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University
"Smith successfully grants agency to the artists and cultural workers who negotiated the terrain of Turkey’s economic liberalization during the 1950s. Her book draws thought-provoking parallels between the development of Turkey’s arts industry during the 1950s and its neoliberal economic transformation today."—Berin Golonu, Assistant Professor of Art History, University at Buffalo, SUNY
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