Learning Modern Art as a Foreign Language: Turkey’s Culture Revolution, the d group and André Lhote

The Turkish War of Independence resulted in the official end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and dismantled the traditional, religious culture of Islam in Turkey. The ensuing secularist and modernist Atatürk Reforms are considered a revolution that aimed at transforming the cultural fabric of Turkish society. All aspects of life were reconstructed within the span of a decade: from the 1920s to the 1930s, a new civil code and alphabet were introduced, the metric and calendar system was established, and new architectural programs were launched. Art and culture was an integral part of this process as an ancillary vehicle of propaganda. This essay aims to explore how a group of artists active in the early Republican era—and banded around an exhibition society known as the “d group”—tried to embody this cultural transformation through an adaptation of the Cubist style, distinguishing them from their Impressionist and Expressionist predecessors. Specific focus is given to why a distinct version of Cubism, based on the “modern classicism” of the French artist and teacher André Lhote (1885–1962), attracted Turkish artists, and how this new artistic language corresponded to the larger cultural transformations at stake.[1] What aspect of Lhote’s artistic identity and pedagogy appealed to their artistic and nationalist aspirations? Was he so favored because he supposedly “taught Cubism in ten lessons” to modernists in a hurry, or was there some other aspect to his interpretation of Cubism that genuinely appealed to the young Turks of the early Republic?[2] Alluding to Walter Benjamin’s idea of language as a mental entity that expresses the signs and meanings we construct, I argue that the Alphabet Revolution is implied in the search for a new artistic language and constitutes not only a broader understanding of the character of the cultural revolution in Turkey, but of how artistic modernism emanating from a European art center functioned in a context of pro-Western national worldmaking.

The Alphabet Revolution of 1928, implemented five years after the announcement of the Turkish Republic, was experienced as a “mental” break with the Ottoman past. Considered as one of the most radical steps towards cultural Westernization, the Latin alphabet was one of the overt signs of new Turkey. This shift was the culmination of an ongoing tide within an educated elite in the last decades of the Ottoman empire, with the aim to purify the Turkish language, and rid it of the dominance of Arabic and Persian words. A “white language” was envisaged, like the “white and naked beauty of Greek art”—reflecting the commending tendency towards Greco-Roman humanist tradition as opposed to Islamic religious culture.[3] The alphabet revolution also symbolized the aim to homogenize a society traditionally molded by segregation and hierarchy. Official posters propagating the achievements of the revolution give us a feel of the revolutionary zeal. In one of these, the call for all to learn “the new, easy alphabet” regardless of age, gender or social standing is represented through a juxtaposition of old and new letters. This is done in a simplified way as if to represent the simplified way of learning (fig. 1). And indeed, while the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which was based on Arabic script was harder to learn in terms of writing, it was also not so suited to the native Turkish vernacular. Arabic and Turkish did not correspond in terms of various consonants, and this discrepancy was further acknowledged when printed material in the late nineteenth century reflected the various difficulties of reading. The poster uses the complex and complicated Arabic script to show how sounds do not correspond to pure and simple Turkish, and even the colors used for the letters, black and red, can be said to symbolize forces of reactionary vs. progressive political currents. To transcend the gap between an educated, privileged minority and the uneducated masses was one of the predominant features of the Turkish Revolution, and this is reflected in the way the poster represents two images showing two doors in which one plainly says “mekteb” (school) with anonymous figures entering, while the other, which has “millet mektebi” (people’s house) written on it, has a queue of peasants waiting to enter.  The republican dictum that rural folk were the masters of society is also reflected in the poster, especially through a third image which shows an old rural couple reading a newspaper together. In a predominantly rural society where women would generally walk behind their spouse, or schooling would only be considered children’s activity, this poster not only shows a change of alphabet, but overtly addresses the public pedagogy aimed by the Turkish revolution.

Caricatures of the era by leading caricaturists Ramiz Gökçe (1900–1953) and Cemal Nadir Güler (1902–1947) also attest to the transformation, and interestingly feature anthropomorphized Arabic and Latin letters as symbols of the old and new subjects of society.[4] In one caricature, we witness an immigration of Arabic script in the form of a convoy; in another, we see a struggle between two sporty figures symbolizing the old and new alphabets in the form of a box match (fig. 2). Ramiz Gökçe, one of the leading cartoonists of the Republican era, was famous for his keen eye in providing perspective about communal situations in a society that was in constant transformation due to successive modernist reforms. In his boxing match, he delicately places the two opposing anthropomorphized alphabetic scripts as they come to a blow. It’s hard not to notice, from the downhearted look on his face, that the Arabic “script man” is having quite a hard time but has more supporters, while the other, a construct of Latin script, has only two campaigners, but looks much more willing and confident. In another caricature of an “alphabetized” figure by Cemal Nadir Güler, also an acclaimed caricaturist of the era, a figure with a hat in the form of the letter “m”—perhaps deliberately so, because the hat is another symbol of modernism in early Republican Turkey—makes a huge leap from the Arabic script to the Latin in the span of a year (fig. 3). The Arabic script is left behind in a gust of wind, and the circular ground the figure walks on is suggestive of dark territory that has been overcome. On one level, these images seem like positive interpretations of the speedy success of the revolution. On perhaps a more subconscious level, they represent the socio-psychological effects of the hurried nature of the revolution through humanized letters which look awkward and clumsy. A later caricature by Cemal Nadir Güler from the 1930s offers a clue to an awareness of the hurried nature of revolutionary social engineering in a humorous way. Here, the caricaturist fakes the signature of one of André Lhote’s most avid supporters in Turkey, the artist, teacher, and writer Nurullah Berk, in a drawing that mimics the artist’s style. The drawing shows a geometric rendering of a woman, presented as a “shape” rather than a real person, while the caption reads, “An ideal woman according to a futurist!..” (fig. 4).

A caricature by Cemal Nadir Güler

A young generation of artists, mostly educated in one of the most forward-looking institutions of the late Ottoman empire, its old imperial, but new national art academy—the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (School of Fine Arts)—internalized the republican revolution like missionaries and sought to find a new visual language to express the spirit of the modern nation-state. They were, indeed, a branch of what could rightly be called “futurist” in the local context of the Turkish revolution. A newspaper vignette depicts the group forging ahead into the future, holding tightly to a letter “d” as if it is a spray pump, attacking any counter-revolutionary force in their midst (fig. 5). The d group, which was formed in 1933 during the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Turkish Republic, reflected in their discourse the heated republican spirit of the time. The emergence of the group was announced in the daily press as a kind of new birth. Their artistic approach was propagated in the same words as the revolution itself—“art as a cultural cause; a rational cause; a cause that would lighten the horizon that had darkened.”[5] The group’s definition of itself was summarized in the formula: “Friendship; Hard Work; Patriotism; Courage.”[6] According to an account written by the group’s leading figure and spokesman, no other than Nurullah Berk, art was “no field for commerce, popularity, or deception;” instead, they wanted their art to be “useful to the country” (Çoker, Cemal Tollu, 68). Such explanations, published in daily newspapers in the 1930s, reveal the interest of the national press to lend a voice to a young generation of artists eager to find visual form to the revolutionary spirit. The Turkish art critic Sezer Tansuğ was the first to point out how a younger generation of Turkish artists were so eager to renew their artistic language and that they may owe the courage to do so in the Alphabet Revolution.[7] Many of these new artists, supported by the Turkish state, did not enroll in the Beaux-Arts in Paris like their predecessors would have done, but in alternative academies like Hans Hofmann’s and André Lhote’s. The learning they received in modern art studios as an alternative to traditional academic training enabled them to experiment with new forms in a country which was barely used to naturalist representation in oil painting. Their search for new forms was such a revolution in itself that they were occasionally called “to speak Turkish” in their visual language by artists and critics who felt that Western artistic “isms” were foreign to the Turkish public and would only create cultural distance.

An often-cited book by Ismail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, compiled from his lectures at the School of Fine Arts, and published in 1931 under the title Demokrasi ve San’at (Democracy and Art) reflects the cultural temperament to search for new forms. Popular with its notion of the “new man,” the book spread the idea that Turkey had entered a new phase of its culture and civilization, and needed a new “container” or “envelope,” for its new ideals.[8] An educator who believed that art was part of social reform, Baltacıoğlu defended Cubism as the indispensable artistic style of modern democratic nations, and illustrated his book with modern architecture and Cubist paintings.[9] The Cubists he referred to were all associated with the Section d’Or—a collective of artists and writers whose approach to Cubism was grounded in the universal ideals of the Western classical tradition. Section d’Or artists, André Lhote among them, were idealists who believed that “the ultimate end of painting is to reach the masses.”[10] However, it was “not in the language of the masses that painting should address the masses, but in its own” language, like religion and philosophy, “not in order to be understood,” but “in order to move, to dominate, to direct” (Gleizes and Metzinger, “Cubism,” 18). Baltacıoğlu shared these ideals, and he even envisaged a republic of fine arts in which artists, as social beings, would spread the new morality.[11] 

Taking into consideration the search for a new artistic language that would express the revolutionary spirit, the attitude of young Republican Turkish artists echoed this line of thinking. Their attitude was one of communicating in language in the sense that Walter Benjamin, in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” claimed that language itself, beyond what is spoken through it, is itself  “‘the medium’ of the communication.”[12] Benjamin’s idea was based on the premise that all kind of human expression was to be classed as a language in so far as it communicates a mental meaning. There was, according to Benjamin, a communicable “language of things” (Benjamin, “On Language,” 318). It is in this sense that I correlate linguistic and artistic signs as mental entities communicating not only through, but in language. The new mentality in Turkey was based on a sense of becoming “civilized” in a process of modernist cultivation based on “universal” ideals, and this mentality “spoke,” as it were, in languages of things, like a new civil code, a new alphabet, new types of clothing, and new art.

The “universal” language of artistic modernism and Lhote’s global studio

It is evident that Turkish artists of the Republican era believed that a new vocabulary of modernist form and color had “universal” validity and that it could communicate the new, modernist ideals of the nation-state to the masses. In this sense, they were reflecting the attitude of the modern Turkish nation-state which was obviously in a process of construction based on systems associated with a Western way of life, such as the Latin alphabet, the Gregorian calendar, or the Swiss civil code. In light of this, perhaps it was not a coincidence that the year of the Alphabet Revolution coincided with the moment in which the Académie Lhote became a conscious destination for Turkish artists. This was certainly a time in which the modernist ideology of style exerted an influence over artists globally, and various modern artists teaching in Western centers posed as alternative “modern academies” of new artistic pedagogies. Paris was still an attractive center for artists from all over the world, and Turkish artists were among those mingling in its cultural environment on state scholarships or their own personal finances. It seems like a deliberate choice that a group of these modernist missionaries called themselves the “d” group and designed an exhibition poster as a monogram that looked very much like Lhote’s teaching—as can be seen in Traité du Paysage (1939)—of curvilinear forms. Indeed, deconstructing the “d” may be a good starting point; it is hard not to notice that the letter these artists turn into a kind of logo consists of an abstracted circle and rectangle, and obviously the geometric stylization is deliberate (fig. 6). The terms “geometry” and “construction” were concepts laden with connotations in the context of Republican Turkey, tying in with the modernist sense of shaping, forming, building, developing, inventing, and erecting a new order.

A Salon Cubist considered to be one of the leading artistic figures to represent a “return to order” (rappel à l’ordre) in the 1930s, the French artist André Lhote was an influential teacher of semi-figurative abstraction which he taught in a rather formulaic fashion at the Académie Lhote in Paris. This modern school functioned as a kind of global studio; it was an accessible venue open to cultural difference (as a long list of international students proves), operating under relatively affordable prices and offering impressive teaching methods. Eşref Üren (who was at Lhote’s in 1929 and then later in the 1930s), remembers the place as a “tower of Babel.”[13] Artist Cemal Tollu points to the universality of the Académie Lhote, “raising people not only for France, but the whole world,” bringing together people of “all genders, all nationalities, all ages.”[14]

According to accounts by students over the years, Lhote’s power as a teacher lay in his extensive knowledge of the formal aspects of painting, based on aesthetic principles of the Renaissance and its Classicist ideals.[15] Admirer of Cézanne, as well as David and Ingres, the general inclination towards Classicism colored all his endeavors—i.e. painting, writing, and teaching.[16] Nurullah Berk, who came to Lhote’s after successively graduating from the Istanbul Academy and Paris Beaux-Arts, described Lhote’s teaching as the opposite of the system at the formal academies, however, despite its stress on the modern, it taught “real classicism.”[17] He was, according to Berk, a “modern classic” (Berk, Ustalarla Konusmalar, 53). Waldemar George, who was an influential art critic in those years, defined Lhote’s modern classicism as “the humanization of an industrial subject through a modernization of Old Master technique.”[18] He praised Lhote for “daring to undertake the unprofitable but heroic task of restoring to modern painters the taste for composition and order.”[19]According to Paul Wood, this sense of revived Classicism was welcomed in certain circles as a reaction “to [a] sense of the anarchy that had prevailed in culture in the years before the war.”[20] Some art historians, such as Kenneth Silver (in Esprit de Corps), have linked this revival to the conservative atmosphere of the postwar period, and to the influence of nationalist right-wing politics.[21] Others, such as David Batchelor, have cautioned against making generalizations, asking if we can really connect “the entire range of Classically oriented work from this period” as “evidence of artists’ having internalized reactionary political ideas” (Batchelor, “‘This Liberty and this Order,’” 17). The reasons for it can surely be argued, but one thing is clear, in the 1920s, even the most avant-garde artists, among them Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carra, had “turned to classical themes enacted in a more or less stable pictorial space,” and in general terms a more “accessible art . . . capable of speaking to the people in a language” (they believed) “everyone could understand” (Wood, “Introduction,” 5). According to Jean-Roch Bouiller, Lhote “remains” an “ambivalent” figure “between academicism and the avant-garde.”[22] It is undoubtedly in the context of a more mellowed down version of avant-gardism that André Lhote, as both an artist and teacher, appealed to Turkish artists. According to Michele Greet, Cubism for Lhote was an experiment of the 1910s and he himself did not consider himself a cubist, and distanced himself from it by his attitude towards it as a passé historical moment, but aligned with it as a useful “formal exercise.”[23] Hence Lhote’s formalistic “return to order,” also displayed in the way that he “advanced the idea of a great French tradition,” greatly appealed to modern Turkish artists who had no historical tradition in painting to fall back on, but came from an academic background steeped in Francophile admiration and national conservatism (Greet, “Latin American Artists,” 52). A significant aspect of this cultural milieu is that working from the nude model as the basic tenet of academic artistic training only truly started in the School of Fine Arts about thirty years after its founding due to conservative Muslim culture and remained a sensitive subject even after the revolution which tried to free society of such cultural restrictions. Lhote’s teaching, based on working from the model, provided both an array into a tradition, and also the possibility to address that tradition (the nude female body, as it were) through a filter of geometric rationalization rather than naturalistic sensuality, which would enable a de-sexualization of the nude body and confine it in a space of cultivated propriety for the “civilized” modern new men of the nation.  Hence the visual language sought was one of moderation in various artistic and cultural aspects.

The cultural shift towards a “return to order” was echoed in Turkey in certain art journals in the 1930s, in articles that carry an opposing attitude to what is called modern art’s “extreme” examples. For instance, in an article titled “Passé Art,” the artist Nurullah Berk states that all the -isms of the pre- and post-war artistic avant-garde seem like “expressions of an arrogant charlatanism” and are doomed to be forgotten, because of their general lack of humanism.[24] The artworks used to illustrate Berk’s article are by Henri Laurens, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall; added are cynical captions like, “this is how a nude woman is represented in stone”/”this is how Laurens imagines a nude woman.” The sculptor, and d group member Zühtü Müritoğlu’s recollection of how even into the late 1920s, Picasso and Matisse whose work, at the time, could only be seen in low quality reproductions were ridiculed by students at the Istanbul Art Academy.[25] Although artistic modernism was internalized by many Turkish artists not long after, there was a continuing dispute as to the limits of new artistic forms, and it is obvious that although modern art was understood as the medium of a new mentality, it had to be able to communicate. In this sense, there is an evident need for what Wood has defined as a “modern academy,” a transformed institution taking the place of its classical predecessor: the academies.[26]

Lhote’s intellectual stance towards classical art and its principles, and his ensuing artistic pedagogy founded on established ideas of form, harmony and craftsmanship, were some of the underlying reasons of why he appealed to young Turkish artists both on a personal and cultural basis, during an especially “constructive” and pro-Western phase of early Turkish nation-building. Lhote’s work and teaching encapsulated the modern and the classical; he was a modernist, but one who didn’t deny tradition. In this sense, his work was contemporary, but comprehensible. Based on a sense of order and set of principles that had its antecedents in visual culture linked to the idea of “civilization,” Lhote’s art and teaching must have constituted a firm anchor, an alphabet that could be learnt, for a group of artists who were (1) already cut off from their own image-making traditions (2) still newcomers to the visual cultural traditions of Western art forms, and, therefore (3) searching for a new, up-to-date, yet firmly grounded visual language that would embody the ideals of modernist culture in Turkey. 

“Universal” or derivative?

In an interview published in 1933 in the popular Turkish daily Akşam, Ali Sami Boyar (1880–1967), a Turkish artist from an older generation, complained that

all the young artists educated in Paris these days become followers of modern art, and André Lhote is among their prophets. Whoever returns from Europe seems to have visited his studio. André Lhote, André Lhote, André Lhote . . . As if Paris never had a greater artist.[27]

Owing to his popularity among Turkish artists, Burhan Toprak (1906–1967)—the newly appointed, young and avid director of Istanbul’s art academy—invited the much-acclaimed Lhote in 1936 to become a long-term instructor. When Lhote was made this offer, which he declined, fourteen Turkish artists had already studied with him, and around thirty more would do so over the next two decades.[28] Lhote did not become a long-term instructor in Turkey, but he was the most influential teacher whose impact exceeded any other local or foreign teacher in the country’s art education in the first half of the twentieth century.

The constructive/geometric type of naturalism propagated by André Lhote did not serve to unite artists in a rigidly coherent style, but it did give the new painting—reaching the public through d group exhibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s—a new air of modernism as opposed to naturalist and impressionist tendencies still quite popular at the time. This sense of modernism tied in with the desire to propagate a national culture that was both universal and local at the same time: In the belief that a visual lexicon of form and color had a kind of universal validity, various d group members embarked on a process to synthesize local themes with this “universal” language. Structured forms were obviously equated with a rational, and scientific tendency that was conceived to be the essential ground for all art if it needed universal validation. The subject matter, on the other hand, remained largely within the premise of traditional themes and cultural symbols. According to art historian Nilüfer Öndin, the fact that subject matter retained its significance for Turkish artists was proof enough of how revolutionary ideals surpassed Cubism.[29]

It is also through synthesis of the local and the “universal” which enabled Turkish artists to retain the belief that they had escaped from the problem of mere copying.  National themes in the constructive-naturalist style, such as Nurullah Berk’s Pilots (1933), were not so common to come across; a composition of five figures with an airplane and Turkish flag in the background, this painting—reminiscent of late Futurist aeropittura images—is the only known painting to combine the geometric language of artistic modernism with subject matter that includes industrial, national, and militaristic symbols (fig. 7). The new national identity ideal was envisaged predominantly by rural symbols and the elevation of the figure of the peasant. Hence geometrically stylized renderings of rural landscapes (with mosques or traditional housing in the background), rural figures (like veiled women, weaving women) and objects (like earthenware pots and traditional musical instruments) were predominant, which reveals that the modern mentality is actually expressed in visual language, i.e. modern art, but not necessarily through the depicted symbols. Paintings like Nurullah Berk’s Man Smoking Narghile (1958), Cemal Tollu’s Shepherd and Goats (1955), Halil Dikmen’s Anatolian Women (1948), Sabri Berkel’s Yoghurt Seller (1952), Maide Arel’s Whirling Dervishes (1951) all reflect an attitude in which Lhote’s visual language is used, as it were, to “speak” Turkish folkloric subjects (fig. 8, fig. 9). This attitude is reminiscent of other modernities around the world in which the formation of new nation-states aspired to create a national identity, and art served to function as a kind of pillar to remind of culture and heritage, making the work more approachable to the public. Other modern art histories—in countries like Mexico or Brazil for example—echo this pattern, and there is no doubt many artists from those other countries were at Lhote’s studio, as past rosters of his school indicate. For example, Michele Greet states that apart from his early friendship with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Lhote instructed “at least twenty-seven Latin American artists . . . between the wars, many of whom took his teachings as the basis for modernist art production in the Americas” (“Latin American Artists,” 54). Alejandra Ortiz Castanares’s account of how the Mexican “Purist” Manuel Rodriguez Lozano saw André Lhote as his master but believed that that he “had to reject any isms, including cubism,” because it was “alien to local reality.” [30] In this pursuit, Lozano used Lhote’s approach as a path he could use to reach a pure Mexican painting.

Conclusion

A report written in 1933 by the artist Namık İsmail (1890–1935) and presented to the Ministry of Education states that the most significant of all the revolutions carried out by the Turkish Republic would surely be the cultural revolution, and that an order needed to be imposed on the field of art just as in the field of health and agriculture. In the ensuing years, state-funded exhibitions and competitions were organized, a national museum of modern art was established, ample importance was given to the reorganization of the country’s national art academy, but artists were left to their own accord when it came to the style or content of their work. A missionary attitude by Turkish artists who not only aligned themselves with but were part of an educated elite sought new teachers from whom they could learn a new language of artistic modernism in Europe. This is what led them to André Lhote. The d group was the first exhibition society in the Turkish Republic to openly identity with the national republican cause and discuss the ways in which modern art, conceived of as a symbolic element in the formation of a modern nation-state, could be instrumentalized to not only construct a national art, but serve to fuel a nationalist spirit in the public. However, it must be said that although such endeavor found favorable response in the national press, modern art exhibitions remained an elite activity far from reaching a wider public.

On a final note, I must say that the initial spark for this article was an exhibition at the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde Museum in Stockholm, organized around a group of Swedish artists who had been students of André Lhote, and displayed very clearly the dissemination of modernism à la Lhote in the Swedish context. It was a startling experience since the exhibition actually looked like a journey through Turkish modern art. The mutual point was the learning experience at the Académie Lhote, where artistic modernism—initially a radical, subjective reaction towards academicism—was academicized itself, and taught like a kind of lingua franca of modern art. Taken literally, almost all artists who worked in Lhote’s studio were translating a language into their local contexts. What is fascinating is how the artistic language of modern art functioned in different societies, serving not only in the signification of individualistic artistic identity, but as a medium that communicated a nationalist discourse through art.