The New York Times
May 18, 2011
Turkish Magnate Puts His Passion on Display
By SUSANNE FOWLER
ISTANBUL — Art collecting is often a very private passion, but the textile magnate Oner Kocabeyoglu has taken his passion very public with the exhibition “20 Turkish Artists of the XXth Century” at Santralistanbul, an art, music and education space at the tip of the Golden Horn.
The show, through June 19, features more than 430 works by 18 painters and two sculptors, accumulated by Mr. Kocabeyoglu and selected and arranged over three floors in collaboration with the writer and art critic Ferit Edgu.
At first, visitors may think they are seeing earlier works by Picasso or Klimt, but many of the paintings are by Turks who lived in France after 1940 as part of the École de Paris wave, working, studying and carousing with the Westerners creating masterpieces.
The exhibition covers a particularly interesting period for Turkish painting, Mr. Edgu said by telephone, in that it shows how Turkish artists, from a Western point of view, “caught up” to what was being painted by the Europeans. And they did this, in many cases, by packing up and moving to Paris.
But the collection itself began in 2001 when Mr. Kocabeyoglu, just 30 years old, made his first acquisition: a small gouache by Selim Turan.
“From then on, I got more and more involved,” Mr. Kocabeyoglu, whose company, Papko, manufactures clothing for retailers like Zara, said by e-mail. “I started reading about them, went around galleries. Then it became a way of life for me. I would travel to see a painting, attend a fair, or bid at an auction.” He said he would buy only “what really touched me,” until over the course of a decade he had formed a collection that is akin to an immersion course in modern Turkish painting.
He knew very little about Mr. Turan when he bought that first painting and “knew absolutely nothing” about the Turkish artists of the École de Paris, or Paris School, whose works “drew me to them with extraordinary force,” he wrote in the preface to the exhibition’s three-volume catalog. “One painting brought another, one painter another.”
“If I can express it this way,” he wrote, “they were my teachers of painting: They educated my eyes and continue to do so. Without exaggeration, I can say that the love of painting which finally became a passion gave meaning to my life, and filled a great void.”
Mr. Edgu, in his own catalog commentary, says collecting “is a passion, and like every passion, does not listen to reason. That virus that lies dormant within the individual can sometimes be awakened by a very insignificant little object, by a painting, by a line, a sculpture, a curio, a coin. And the result is as unstoppable as the run in a stocking.”
“From what I have seen, this is what happened to Oner Kocabeyoglu.”
In curating the show, Mr. Edgu divided the works into three sections: figurative paintings by artists including Fikret Mualla and Abidin Dino; pieces from the Paris School of abstract painters like Mubin Orhon, Fahrelnissa Zeid (the lone woman in the exhibition) and her son, Nejad Melih Devrim; and works by artists including Ferruh Basaga and Burhan Dogancay, under the heading of “Geometry, Light, Music and Walls.”
The editing process was a challenge. “First I went to see the whole collection, approximately 900 pieces by 40 to 50 artists,” Mr. Edgu said. After he whittled down his choices, “the collector went out and bought some more paintings, so about 40 new pieces were then added to the show.”
Mr. Kocabeyoglu said that when he began collecting art, “I was not interested in their specific value and did not buy to invest,” adding that he “was lucky in a way as these artists were not in vogue when I started collecting them, but within this period they became quite valuable” as Western interest rose in Middle Eastern and Turkish art and houses like Sotheby’s, Bonham’s and Christie’s held auctions of Turkish modern and contemporary art.
Elif Bayoglu, head of sales for contemporary Turkish art for Sotheby’s in London, said by telephone that paintings by Turkish artists of the past century have been finding new audiences and selling for record prices.
“In our sales, the most successful result came last year from Zeid,” Ms. Bayoglu said, calling her one of the most important artists of the period not only in Turkey but on the French scene. “It has extremely good provenance in that it came from the family. One of her major works, it had been estimated at £300,000 to £500,000, and sold for £657,250 to an international collector,” the equivalent of about $1,060,000.
Sotheby’s first auction of Turkish art took place in 2009, Ms. Bayoglu said, and a fourth is planned for spring 2012.
“If I didn’t tell you the works were Turkish, you probably would assume they were French, or international,” she said. “The quality was very high and they did exhibit in Paris and around Europe with the rest of the international modern artists of the period. Most of these artists have died and the supply of good quality works is very limited, which is also why they are very valuable and very rare to come by.”
Some pieces are acquired through the artist’s relatives, she said, “but for the most part, they come from collectors who bought back in 1940, ’50, or ’60 and held on to them. But now with the values rising, are coming into the market.”
“Collectors held on to some of these for 50 years,” she said, “and it’s amazing to see works you didn’t know and learn where they’ve been hiding. It’s very exciting: You just don’t know where, or what else, has been hiding.”
But the first thing exhibit visitors will see upon entering the main gallery space is portraits of the artists themselves, taken over the years by the renowned Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler.
“I was in Paris between 1950 and 1960,” Mr. Edgu said, “and all of the painters in this exposition were my friends, so I have a deep affinity for them and their work. Ara Guler was also a friend of mine from those days. And he has always been passionate about taking pictures of artists, Turkish or foreign, even Picasso and Dalí. Knowing this, I figured he had portraits of all these people in his archives. I was right. Of the 20, only one was missing, and luckily he was still alive, so Ara was able to shoot him, too.”
Mr. Kocabeyoglu advises collectors of Turkish art “to go about it carefully. There should definitely be passion but also selective choice and a lot of self-education.” The sole purpose of the exhibition at Santralistanbul, he wrote, was “nothing more than to share it with lovers of art” and to “repay in a small way my debt to these painters who have opened the doors to a new world for me and brought me much pleasure.”
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