Turkey Opens Its First Museum of Modern Art: Istanbul Modern

Bulent Eczacibasi, Turkey's sixth- richest man according to Forbes magazine, was at a dinner party in October at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined his group.

Eczacibasi, chairman of Eczacibasi Holding AS, said he asked Erdogan, who seemed awed by the museum he was seeing for the first time, why Turkey shouldn't have ``one-tenth" of the French museum. Two days later, he got a call from the prime minister, inquiring about an Eczacibasi-funded museum project.

That's how the opening of Turkey's first museum of modern art -- whose seeds were first sown by Eczacibasi in 1987 yet had gotten nowhere due to a lack of official support -- took place Oct. 11, five months ahead of the originally scheduled date.

Erdogan, who's lobbying the European Union to start membership negotiations with Turkey, came to visit the museum site in October, brought Istanbul's mayor along and gave orders to facilitate the opening before Dec. 17, when the EU is set to make its decision. Erdogan attended the opening ceremony and was presented with a plaque for his support.

``The prime minister immediately saw the symbolic significance of the museum," said Eczacibasi, 55, in an interview. ``While we're trying to show the EU that we're western as well as eastern culturally, this is a great example."

The location of the museum -- a gray, rectangular concrete building -- is a case in point: it sits across the Golden Horn, facing the Hagia Sofia church, built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537 A.D., and the Topkapi Palace, built by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1472. Its western facade looks toward the modern part of the city, dotted with skyscrapers housing international hotel chains, such as the Ritz-Carlton, and office buildings.

Warehouse Space

A former warehouse used by the Istanbul Port Authority, the building was first used as an art space during the Istanbul Biennial, an international festival bringing modern art from around the world and exhibiting it in historic sites.

The warehouse, built at the end of the 19th century, was turned into a museum by Tabanlioglu, a local architecture firm which has designed numerous sites in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. Its best-known project is the Ataturk Cultural Center, a mammoth rectangular building in downtown Istanbul housing the State Opera and Ballet and the State Symphony Orchestra.

The original venue planned for the Istanbul Modern was Feshane, a 19th-century clothing factory that made the fez hats worn by Ottoman soldiers. The fez plant was refurbished by Gae Aulenti, the architect of Paris's Musee d'Orsay, in 1991. Turning the space into a modern-art museum was dropped when the city wouldn't allow an independent museum. Nurettin Sozen, the mayor at the time, lost his re-election bid in 1994 to Erdogan, whose first public office was running Istanbul.

Bank Collection

Warehouse No. 4 was turned into a museum by frantic construction work, which went on until the last moment and cost about $5 million. The building features two stories of 4,000 square meters (1-acre) each. On the upper floor, the permanent collection consisting of about 4,000 pieces -- all by Turkish artists -- will be exhibited on a rotational basis.

Turkiye Is Bankasi AS, Turkey's largest non-government-owned bank, donated most of the collection. The Eczacibasi family, which has funded the museum project, is the second-largest donor.

The first permanent exhibit contains works by such artists as Fahrelnissa Zeid, a pioneering Turkish woman painter who died as a princess in 1991 after having married Prince Zeid of Jordan. Her abstract painting ``My Hell" (1951) -- a two-by-five- meter (6.5-by-16-foot) oil on canvas of colorful triangles -- adorns the wall in the main rotunda at the entrance.

The first permanent exhibition, titled ``Observation- Interpretation-Multiplicity: 20th Century Turkish Paintings," also includes works by contemporary Turkish artists such as Ozdemir Altan and Omer Uluc. Not included in this showing yet part of the museum's permanent collection are also paintings and sculptures by Abidin Dino and Fikret Mualla, considered to be the fathers of modern Turkish art.

Islamic Ban

``Among all the peoples of the region, we've had the strongest cultural exposure to the West over the centuries," said Oya Eczacibasi, the museum's director and Bulent's wife. ``That's why we have a much stronger tradition of modern art."

Turkey, like its neighbors to the east, is predominantly Muslim. The Islamic ban on representing living beings, which stems from the belief that only God can create living forms, held back the development of many art forms in Muslim cultures including the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey's political and cultural ancestor. Ottoman miniature painters ignored perspective on purpose not to make their pictures depicting palace life, war scenes and their leaders too real.

Painting in the western sense didn't start among Ottoman Turks until the mid-19th century, and it only flourished after the Turkish republic was founded on the empire's ashes in 1923. Oya Eczacibasi, 45, says Turks have always straddled Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

``This museum will show how much we belong in the West in a way the world doesn't realize," she said in an interview.

Deutsche Bank

The ground floor of the Istanbul Modern, which has a library, an educational center, a 100-person auditorium and the museum store, will host temporary exhibits. Rosa Martinez, who regularly curates the Venice and Moscow biennials, is the chief curator of the museum, with special emphasis on the international exhibitions that will be shown on this floor.

The first such show, titled ``This Is Just the Beginning," will start in April. While the permanent collection will highlight Turkish art, the temporary exhibits will complement it with art from around the world, Oya Eczacibasi says.

Deutsche Bank AG, the third-largest European bank, has agreed to include the Istanbul Modern among its associated museums. The bank shares its 50,000-piece collection, one of the biggest corporate art collections in the world, with the associated museums. The selection from Deutsche Bank's collection will arrive at the Istanbul Modern in December.

``It's a fantastic opportunity for the city, for Turkish artists, for Turkish people," said Markus Slevogt, the lender's representative in Turkey. ``Turkey has to be everything at the same time: classic and modern. That's why it's an asset to Europe."

EU Membership

Not everyone understands Turkey's dual identity as well as Slevogt, whose wife is an ethnic Turk raised in Germany. Only 30 percent of the people in EU countries support Turkey's EU membership, a September poll by the German Marshall Fund found. With a predominantly Muslim population of 70 million, Turkey is larger than the combined population of the 10 countries that joined the EU this year.

The delayed start of western-style art due to the Islamic heritage has shortchanged Istanbul when it comes to art museums. There are dozens of small galleries showcasing paintings and sculpture for sale. The Sakip Sabanci Museum, which opened in 2002 to house one of the best calligraphy collections in the world, has a Turkish-Ottoman painting gallery as well. Besides those examples, there have been no venues for the public to see Turkish or Western paintings.

So unlike Paris, New York or London, art museums don't top visitors' lists of places to see in Istanbul. Centuries-old mosques with elaborate tiles, such as the Blue Mosque, palaces and underground cisterns do.

Tourism

Oya Eczacibasi aims to put the Istanbul Modern on tourists' agenda and in Turks' minds. She targets 1 million visitors in 2005, though concedes it won't be easy when only 16 million people visited the 400 or so museums in Turkey last year, compared with 300 million in the U.S. and 70 million in the U.K. She's planning an aggressive publicity campaign, and has arranged for the city to bus 20,000 school children to the museum during the year for educational programs. Those will be the future art lovers of Turkey, she hopes.

``We have to show the people that this is a public space where they can be comfortable," Eczacibasi said. ``It'll take time, but our museum will become a popular Istanbul spot."

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