Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey by Sarah-Neel Smith

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

In 1973, the Municipality of Istanbul and the State Academy of Fine Arts sponsored a competition among Turkish sculptors. Fifty sculptures, each by a different artist, were to be erected in public spaces throughout the city. The purpose was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. Due to practical constraints, the number of winning sculptures was reduced to twenty, which were then commissioned and erected in the specified locations. Of these twenty, only four remain in their original sites today. Three were stolen for the value of their metal. Three more were lost due to road work. Several were removed and lost when their sites were redesigned. Another was declared “meaningless” by a district mayor and jackhammered into oblivion.

The most prominently situated of the sculptures, Beautiful Istanbul by Gürdal Duyar, survived little more than a week. Placed in Karaköy Square, the commercial hub of Istanbul’s port district, Beautiful Istanbul presented the figure of a nude woman reclining on a rock, her arms chained behind her. The plinth on which the sculpture rested was decorated with motifs of Nature’s bounty—pomegranates, figs, bees. Roughly modeled in concrete, almost five meters tall and weighing seven tons, Beautiful Istanbul suggests nothing so much as a voluptuous, windswept Prometheus, fettered to the demands of the city. 

Within days the statue was attacked, an arm broken off, the motifs on the plinth effaced: an insult to Turkish motherhood. On the night of the ninth day, after being denounced by the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition government, Beautiful Istanbul was toppled and its carcass carted off to a gravel heap by the shore of the Marmara. When artists and the secular press cried foul, the carcass was retrieved—eventually to be rehabilitated, but not restored—in a remote corner of Yıldız Park, quietly taking its place in the lore of the city.

Today, when denunciations of Western degeneracy are commonplace, the mauling of Beautiful Istanbul would hardly be surprising. Even in the 1970s, in view of city’s changing demography and rapid provincialization, one might have predicted the statue’s fate. Arguably, the Municipality, the Academy, and the artist should have seen it coming.

But what is surprising about this episode, perhaps more so in retrospect, is the free rein given to the artists. Artists entering the competition could follow their inclinations as they chose. None of the winning sculptures bore visual associations with the established iconography of the Republic or celebrations of state. Unconstrained by the conventional baggage of commemorative monuments, the Istanbul Municipality’s celebration of the Republic was a celebration of individual artistic vision (with a dose of art-awareness as Civics), producing public art that was, to quote the jackhammering district mayor, meaningless—or worse.

Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity goes a long way to showing how contemporary art in Turkey, even when celebrating the Republic’s anniversary, had so completely shaken off the once dominant iconography of nationhood. Focused on the pivotal 1950s, Metrics of Modernity examines Turkish modern art within a social/political discourse of economic development and becoming modern, a discourse increasingly tied to the strategic US development programs of the Cold War. Arguing that Turkish artists of the mid-century were aware of their role as artists in the discourse of national development and aware of the place of Turkey within emerging schemes of global development, Smith demonstrates that trends in Turkish art not only responded to economic changes but were shaped, even instituted, by them. She brings to light the close relationship between modern art and development economics, working the two in tandem to show how modern art in Turkey came to be identified with individual artistic vision, largely in the spirit of abstract expressionism, displacing the national role accorded to art by the early Turkish Republic. But if this description gives a fair indication of Smith’s project, it does not do justice to what she achieves in Metrics of Modernity as she takes us into the art world and the modernity-consciousness of the Turkish 1950s.

To appreciate what Smith achieves, we must go back to a time when there was more venture than capital, a time when the rational use of resources had political currency, a time when the figure of the nation-state was still imbued with mytho-historical elegance—a world view that would be deformed and transformed by US policies of the Cold War, policies that demanded market-dependency as the price of admission to a work-in-progress “West.” As Smith tells us, the Republic of Turkey in the mid-twentieth century encompassed seemingly contradictory attributes that complicate received narratives: “neither fully European, nor post-colonial, nor nonaligned” and possessed of a development-mindedness that had been in the making for well over a century (33). Aware of the cross-currents, Smith builds her text across multiple lines of inquiry into art, audience, and the institution of modernity.

The core of Metrics comprises four topical chapters, flanked by an extensive introduction and a conclusion that fast forwards from the age of emergent modernity to the present age of modernity surpassed. Although each of the chapters is a whole unto itself, the introduction is substantial and has much to offer. It sketches the ideological flux of the pre- and postwar periods, elaborating on Washington’s paradigm of strategic development and the pressures that led to Turkey’s alignment with the US. It situates Smith’s project within contemporary art-historical approaches and discusses the research challenges, both theoretical and practical, that she faced. Importantly, the introduction provides a masterful look into Turkish modern art prior to the 1950s, revealing the creative energy unleashed by the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s while grounding her readers in the visual and thematic characteristics of art during the early republican era—characteristics formed during a period of intense nation-building but challenged in mid-century as Turkey moved into the American orbit and flirted with privatizing the economy.

Each of the chapters of Metrics targets specific markers of change in the postwar Turkish art world. Chapters one and two examine Turkey’s first private galleries for modern art, the Gallery Maya in Istanbul and the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara, opened in 1950 and 1953 respectively. Both were founded by notable figures committed to promoting the arts; both aimed at changing the relationship of art to public; both were regarded as venues of modernity unfolding; neither lasted more than a few years. But it is the differences between the galleries that Smith documents to reveal the competing postwar approaches to how and why modern art should be promoted.

The Gallery Maya in Istanbul was the private venture of Adalet Cimcoz, a prominent social figure, well known as a voice-over film actress, society columnist, and translator. That Turkey’s first private gallery did not appear until almost thirty years after the founding of the Turkish Republic is itself an indication of how un-commodified art was at the time. Cimcoz sought to promote modern art by bringing it into the homes of Istanbul’s aspiring middle class, effectively privatizing modern art as objects to be owned by art-conscious consumers. Revolving around Cimcoz’s dynamic personality, the gallery was more successful as a salon for the art-minded than as a commercial venture—it could hardly succeed commercially in a city with a population of scarcely over a million with little free cash for buying art. But Gallery Maya provided a celebrated alternative to the state exhibitions. The press reviews and debates that surrounded the gallery reveal how “modernness” dominated the popular culture of the day, and, in Smith’s hands, they make for a lively entry into the art discourse of the time.

Where Gallery Maya promoted modern art and art-consciousness as domestic fashion, the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara championed modern art as a vehicle of democratic change. The gallery’s co-founder was none other than Bülent Ecevit. (A noted journalist at the time and ardent supporter of Atatürk’s modernizing goals, Ecevit would later revitalize the Republican People’s Party and be elected Prime Minister four times during the bitterly conflicted decades of the 1970s–1990s.) Starting from the premise that individual expression was the opposite of authoritarianism, Ecevit argued that state control of development produced “underdeveloped” citizens (40). Creative arts were the antidote, especially abstract art, which breaks with established figural identities. But first, art and individual must encounter one another more directly, more spontaneously, freed from the heavy hand of state sponsorship.

Ecevit’s identification of art and democracy still strikes a familiar chord. There was a remarkable congruence of values between the future Prime Minister and the liberal American mindset, a congruence Smith brings to light with eye-opening selections from Ecevit’s copious writings on art. Indeed, when Turkey was admitted to NATO, Ecevit urged the nation to catch-up with “the civilizational and cultural foundations” that other NATO nations held in common (88). Educated in the American liberal arts tradition at Istanbul’s Robert College, with its underlying Protestant values of self-improvement and self-reliance, Ecevit looked to America and molded Helikon in the spirit of individual growth through the arts. On the American side of the fence, one finds this philosophy of art and individual reduced to instrumental policy: state support for artists working in individualistic modes was one of the metrics upon which US aid was contingent (89).

Where the first two chapters explore the galleries as markers of change, chapters three and four take up a watershed event and two artists whose success marked a new era. The event was a much anticipated painting competition in 1954 on the theme “Developing Turkey,” a competition judged by a jury of prominent European critics. The outcome was startling. In preference to the canvases of the Academy-schooled painters, who depicted the usual autochthonous suspects (Agriculture and Industry, allegorically hand-in-hand), the European jury chose an expressionist canvas by a woman and outsider, Aliye Berger. Berger, from a well established Istanbul family, had trained abroad as a printmaker—not even a proper painter, according to her Academy critics. While Berger’s entry dutifully depicted figures laboring towards the future, the figures are indistinct, all but consumed by the fiery torrent of sunlight that flows across the canvas. The European judges had chosen Berger’s individual expressiveness over the conformity of the established painters, suggesting that the latter, if not the national project of “developing Turkey” itself, were passé.

The career of Füreya Koral (chapter four) brings the confluence of American metrics and Turkish modern art to a peak. Principally a ceramicist who had trained in France, Füreya developed a unique style of glazed tiles in the manner of expressionist painting, revitalizing the moribund tradition of decorative wall tiles. In a fascinating exploration of US cultural diplomacy, Smith documents how Füreya bridged the all-important craftsman/artist divide (hence checking two boxes for the US support programs). A mutual courtship between Füreya and the Rockefeller Foundation culminated in Füreya’s becoming the first non-Western artist to receive Foundation support. Her cross-over success encouraged further patronage of Turkish artists by the Rockefeller Foundation, for whom the modernist resurrection of ancient crafts had a special resonance in the paradigm of “transition.” But if the humanist bent of the Rockefeller Foundation found redemption in Füreya’s dual identity as artisan/artist, it was not Füreya’s craftsmanship but her artistry, her painterly mastery of the surface, that carried the day in America. American critics lauded her 1957 exhibition in Washington D.C. as true art.  

In her conclusion to Metrics, Smith brings us into to the present century with a provocative look at the founding of Istanbul Modern, the vastly successful institution that has taken on the apparent mantle of a national museum—but with telling differences. Smith terms the museum a “hybrid enterprise, driven by a coalition of public, private, and corporate interests characteristic of the late-capitalist museum” (156). Istanbul Modern was born in a rare moment when the EU aspirations of Turkish industrialists (themselves the beneficiaries of a liberalized economy) coalesced with the aims of the newly elected Islamist-populist government, which had promised it could deliver prosperity for all. Cheering from the sidelines was a swath of cosmopolitan intellectuals, sure of their place in the vanguard. All concerned were confident that the path forward lay in abandoning the crusty biases of the latter-day Kemalist state in favor of market-blessed multiculturalism—the very stuff of the EU.

Opened in 2004 in a waterfront customs warehouse only a few hundred meters from where Beautiful Istanbul once stood, Istanbul Modern was an instant hit. With its spacious exhibition halls and breath-taking Bosphorus views, the new museum provided a defining moment: We’ve arrived. To make the point that the old Turkey, the rigidly ethno-secular Turkey, was a thing of the past, Istanbul Modern showcased its ability to showcase. Worldly and post-national, the new museum abandoned chronologic presentation and received genres in favor of thematic oppositions pumped up with fresh labels like “Enchanted Landscape / Counter-City.” Smith tells us that the curators intended to demonstrate “synchronicity with the most recent museological trends in the Western metropole” and display “European partnership rather than national identity”—thus sidestepping the formative relationship between Turkish art and national development (165). Viewed from this perspective, Istanbul Modern (now housed in a bespoke building by Renzo Piano) constitutes a fitting moment in the unfolding of the twenty-first century when even corporate carbon-credit programs are “curated” and when nation-states are touted as “brands”—seemingly profitable solutions to sticky problems of art and identity.

To my eyes the great achievement of Metrics is Smith’s reconstruction of the Turkish art world. It is here where Smith shows an extraordinary talent. Her purposeful “reimagining of the archive”—reimagined from diverse sources that are typically isolated categorically—is accomplished with such coherence and so smoothly rendered as to bring her reader into the picture with disarming ease. To reconstruct the Turkish art world of 1950s not only convincingly but with an uncanny feel for the era is a remarkable accomplishment. In Smith’s hands, the Turkish 1950s take on an almost sensible ambiance. Her account, even at its most distant, exhibits a familiarity with the subject, a familiarity, sometimes wry and ironic, that comes only from immersive research and long reflection. In achieving this quality she may have been helped by the immediacy of conversations with those close to the participants. Perhaps she has been aided as well by the passage of time, freeing her from the interpretive investments to which an earlier generation might have been inclined. However that may be, Smith’s ability to engage and to present the era has produced in Metrics an exemplary and compelling work.