Parallel Lives: The Eyuboglus and the Urens |
Welcome to Al-Monitor Istanbul.
This week, we take a gentle scolding from a loyal reader who thinks we have been dazzled by shiny new trends and neglecting the old masters. So we are going back to the pillars of Turkish culture: Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu and his Romanian-born wife Eren, a turbulent partnership, two fierce talents and a reminder that modern Turkish art was built as much on collaboration as on charisma. We revisit Orhan Kemal’s sharp portraits of the hard life of debt and unemployment, only to find that our final section suggests the country’s economic story has not exactly grown softer.
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Thanks for reading,
Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)
P.S. Have tips on Istanbul’s culture scene? Send them my way at nertan@al-monitor.com.
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1. Leading the week: Through Thick and Thin
The works of Bedri Rahmi Eyubo IsBank Painting and Sculpture Museum glu at IsBank Painting and Sculpture Museum (Isbank)
Located at the heart of Istiklal, IsBank has an outstanding permanent collection of Turkish paintings and a knack for quietly confident, sharp-eyed exhibitions. The present one, aptly titled “Side by Side,” holds two narratives in tension: the famous one everyone thinks they know, and the quieter one waiting to be heard. It pairs two artist couples across two floors — the storm-weathering, bohemian Eyuboglus and the understated, academic Urens — both of whom left decisive fingerprints on 20th-century Turkish painting.
Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu and Eren Eyuboglu need little introduction. Their half-century partnership folded Anatolian folklore, patterns and poetry into the vocabulary of modern Turkish art. Bedri Rahmi became, as curator Omer Faruk Serifoglu puts it, “a myth who carried Turkish art to an international scale.” At the same time, Eren — Romanian-born, Paris-trained along with Bedri Rahmi at Andre Lhote’s studio — “earned her rightful place with her own universal artistic language much later.” Their canvases mostly radiate joyful turbulence, the visual record of a marriage where passion and art constantly collided. Bedri Rahmi’s best-known love poem, “Black Mulberry (“My black mulberry,........