454 Cultural Life
 
Cultural Life 455  
 
   
 
 
  
  
 

Fine Arts

 
 
The Directorate General of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism coordinates most of the activities related to fine arts in Turkey. Besides direct or indirect involvement in domestic and international activities related to fine arts, particularly phonetic and plastic arts, this Directorate General has a total of 28 institutions, 24 professional and four amateur, attached to itself, including state museums of painting and sculpture as well as state fine arts galleries.
 

Painting: Artists such as İbrahim Çallı, Hikmet Onat, Namık İsmail, Avni Lifij and Feyhaman Duran, who went to Europe to further their studies in art in the 1910s, acquired the techniques of impressionism as well as symbolist interpretations albeit being educated at the Corman Atelier. These artists, known as the “1914 Generation”,  became  the  first   academicians to  train  the

 

Zeibeks at the War of Independence / İbrahim Çallı
 
 
  
  painters of the Republic era in the Fine Arts Academy. Ali Avni Çelebi and Zeki Kocamemi, who were the first painters to introduce modern interpretations in Turkish painting, shared the influences of the Hoffman School and also the leadership of the expressionist view, with Şeref Akdik, Mahmut Cûda, Hale Asaf, Muhittin Sebati, Refik Epikman, Cevat Dereli besides the sculptor Ratip Aşir Acudoğlu. These painters, who formed a group called “Müstakiller” (Independents), pioneered the dissemination of modern Turkish painting by staging Anatolia Exhibitions in various cities such as Zonguldak, Samsun, Bursa and İzmit. Moreover, Zeki Faik İzer, Nurullah Berk, Elif Naci, Cemal Tollu, Abidin Dino, Sabri Berkel and the sculptor Zühtü Müridoğlu, who opened new horizons to this movement, came together within a group called the “D Group” and headed towards analytical decompositions and abstractions rooted in cubism.  
     
 

Together with the Universities Reform in 1928, the “Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi” (School of Fine Arts) remaining from Ottoman times was turned into the Academy of Fine Arts, and the French painter and engraver Léopold Levy was appointed chairman of the Advanced Painting Department in 1937.

  
     
 

Levy, together with the D Group artists, transformed the academic staff into a new formation. From among the “Yeniler Grubu” (The Neo Group) founded by Levy’s pupils, Turgut Atalay and Mümtaz Yener headed towards social realities while Nuri İyem, starting from the abstract, eventually became the painter of Anatolian women, squatters, strikes and migrations.

 
     
 

The non-figurative painting created by the Neo Group was developed by artists such as Mübin Orhon, Fahrünnisa Zeyd, Nejat Devrim, Adnan Çoker, Lütfü Günay, Devrim Erbil, Özdemir Altan, Adnan Turani, Güngör Taner, Mustafa Ata and others in the 1950s, while social realistic painting spread in the Çukurova panoramas of Duran Karaca, on Cihat Aral’s canvasses and among artists trained in the Neşet Günal-Neşe Erdok atelier.

  
     
 

As for the “Onlar Grubu” (The Group of Them), comprising Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and the artists trained in his atelier in