avignon by way of istanbul

Avignon, by way of Istanbul

Avignon, by way of Istanbul By Jackie Wullschlager

He is the Minotaur at the gates of the Istanbul mosque, the modernist

beside the minarets, the cubist outside ancient Constantinople's

churches. And bathed in bright winter light, seven decades of

Picasso's iconic sexy women now strut their stuff in a panoramic,

glassy gallery, Turkey's new window on the west, high above the

Bosporus.

A glowing bronze head from 1906 is his early mistress, languorous

Fernande Olivier. A severe classical face in oil, charcoal and sand is

his first wife, Olga, in Juan-les-Pins in 1924, and the sensual,

voluminous purple nude of "Siesta" is her rival Marie-Therese, curled

up on a beach in 1932. Painted metal bent into the contours of a head

was modelled in 1961 on Jacqueline Roque, who metamorphoses into the

angry, blotchy, mock-primitive "Woman" of 1971. From the serene to the

tempestuous, this parade of famous muses arrives almost a century

after the prostitutes of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" changed the face

of modern art, in a country whose prime minister called in 2003 for

the criminalisation of adultery, and which has, as a Muslim country,

no broad tradition of figurative painting.

Can paintings and sculptures really build bridges between continents?

Is Picasso a golden key to Turkey's acceptance of, and in, Europe? Is

a western artist transformed into something rich and strange by an

eastern setting, or does he remain more insistently himself than ever?

Picasso in Istanbul, which opens at the city's Sakip Sabanci Museum on

Thursday, is not only the first Picasso show in Turkey, but its first

major monographic display devoted to any western artist. It is also

among the most politically loaded international art exhibitions

anywhere in the world.

Last year for MoMA in Berlin a beleaguered US attempted to bolster

solidarity by triumphally lending to post-cold war Europe the

masterpieces it had whipped away several generations earlier. Yet

Picasso in Istanbul also celebrates modernism, representing by

contrast a dramatic clash of cultures, in a far more inflammatory

setting. Straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul lies on the cusp between

Christianity, which dominated the city until its fall as

Constantinople in 1453, and Islam, whose decorative, non-figurative

aesthetics stand in stark opposition to the western iconographic

tradition. This background, and the timing of the exhibition - it

coincides with the start of Turkey's European Union accession talks -

make it a landmark show in which both east and west have intellectual

stakes.

For Turkey, playing host to Picasso demonstrates its European

credentials. "We want to be among the world's most significant

museums," says Guler Sabanci, chair of the trustees. Just before his

death in 2004, her uncle, the millionaire entrepreneur Sakip Sabanci,

built the gallery as a western parallel to his exquisitely preserved

Ottoman villa, the former family home - his father bought it in 1951

from the nephews of Princess Iffet - which now houses, among other

things, his rich calligraphy collection.

Some of these sparkling pieces toured New York's Metropolitan museum,

the Louvre and Berlin's Guggenheim in 1998-2001; together with this

spring's Turks at London's Royal Academy, these shows were Turkey's

bid for cultural gravitas in the west. Reciprocal visits were by no

means assured. Sabanci insisted on state-of-the-art lighting and

temperature controls at his new gallery because, he dreamed, "I want

it to be so good that one day we can have a Picasso exhibition here."

Now Picasso and Ottoman calligraphy look at one another across

Sabanci's hilly garden, dotted with sculptures above a turquoise sea:

a model of enlightenment dovetailing with tradition in 21st-century

Turkey.

But this show is also about western cultural imperialism and crisis.

The scope is vast. Its credentials are impeccable - the lead curator

is the art historian and Picasso expert Marilyn McCully, and its chief

lender is Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist's grandson, who offered

scores of important pieces from family collections. How did Turkey

pull off this coup? "We deserve it!" says the museum's director Nazan

Olcer. Lenders were generous because "we impressed them with our

dedication." Turkey, she believes, has a large young population that

cannot afford to travel, but which has a huge, pent-up interest in

western art; the museum is also inundated with "calls from the

countryside, from very simple people planning to visit Istanbul just

to see this exhibition". This fresh audience is a fabulous chance for

everyone to see western art anew: "an opportunity", according to

McCully, "to present an artist without baggage, no preconceived

ideas".

Talk to Olcer for 60 seconds and you perceive immediately what the

decadent west, with its instant art, its fawning to mass taste and

collusion of art'n'celebrity, is on the verge of losing: a thirst for

knowledge through culture. "We will not leave visitors alone, no!"

Olcer says. "The more you know, the more you understand. This will be

a very nice learning process." Explanatory material includes maps of

Europe, and a catalogue that doubles as the first book on Picasso to

be published in Turkey. This includes a revelatory diary, new even to

experts, by the late Turkish artist Abidin Dino of the days he spent

with Picasso in Vallauris in 1953.

Behind it all, as at MoMA in Berlin, is the message of the

self-doubting, fearful west to the world: that 20th-century modernism

remains our most compellingly attractive, meaningful and relevant

cultural product because it is a symbol of democratic and personal

freedom. And no painter embodies this better than Picasso. A

self-willed individualist who created out of his own life the radical

face of 20th-century art, Picasso plundered artists from El Greco to

Cezanne, only to smash forever models of representation that had held

since the Renaissance. "His belief in his creative powers was

enormous, and he set about from an early age to revolutionise his

artistic practice, exploring how a painter in the 20th century might

discover new means to represent the world," says McCully. "Picasso had

a voracious appetite for innovation and experimentation... He was able

to transform his sources of inspiration into an art that was truly

original, and the hand of its maker was its defining characteristic."

With 135 top-quality works, this show boldly and clearly tells the

story not only of Picasso but of a century of modern figurative art:

the two here are one and the same thing. Unravelled through rarely

seen, privately owned pieces, from early works on paper - including an

1899 self-portrait and rose period saltimbanques in Indian ink - and

cubist oils such as "Still Life with a Bottle of Vittel" (1915), to a

roomful of late works chosen by Picasso himself for an important

exhibition in Avignon, months before his death in 1973, the story here

will stir even seasoned Picasso lovers. But its true inventiveness is

to appeal to an audience unfamiliar with easel painting, by its use of

mixed media and special emphasis on tapestries and ceramics, forms

that are common in Turkey.

Thus "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", the gateway to modernism that never

leaves its home in MoMA, is dramatically presented by a large woollen

tapestry of it, made in 1958 to hang in Picasso's home in Cannes; it

offers novice audiences a way into cubism. A second giant wool and

silk tapestry, "Woman at Their Toilette", is modelled on an enormous

1938 papier colle, and is an entrance point to Picasso's angular,

dissociative wartime style, with the double-faced, weeping Dora Maar

an expression of the existential agony and physical terrors of the

age.

Later work, ironic, violent, tender, is brilliantly represented not

just through paintings but by a crowd of ceramic bulls, goats, owls,

and a comic white earthenware, azure-glazed "Woman in a Blue Dress".

Her bulbous breasts, stick-thin neck and handle-like arms make her a

close cousin of the abstracted blue figures in the great Antibes

painting "La Joie de Vivre (Pastorale)", also from the late 1940s; the

ceramic figure emphasises what a sculptural painter Picasso always

was.

Setting and installation is everything in global 21st-century shows.

In works such as this ceramic, and in paintings such as the sensuous,

shimmering blue "Two Fauns and a Naiad", another highlight, we see in

Istanbul's Picasso a quintessentially Mediterranean artist, formed by

a Barcelona childhood and life on the Cote d'Azur. "Picasso was very

interested in the Museum of Mankind in Paris and in the art of north

Africa," says Olcer. "I very much believe that if he had had the

chance to encounter more to the east of the Mediterranean, he would

have found many common points. We are also from around the same

Mediterranean, we are sharing so many things, influences,

impressions."

The museum lenders to this show are all French and Spanish, and

another geopolitical dimension is surely France's repositioning of its

Mediterranean role. As Europe shifts eastwards to Berlin's cultural

advantage, France plays on its historic Mediterranean links with north

Africa and Asia. Significantly, France's most exciting museum-building

project is not in Paris but in Marseilles, the centre of north African

culture in France, where a grandiose Musee des Civilisations de

l'Europe et de la Mediterranee is planned to open in the port in 2008.

When Jacques Chirac said recently that Turkey needed a "major cultural

revolution" to realise its hope of joining the EU, political

commentator Cengiz Aktar replied that "the most difficult issue will

be for old Europe to mentally digest Turkey." Five centuries of

history that saw Turkey as the infidel at the gates of Vienna, bent on

destroying a unified Christian heritage, die hard, especially when

layered with the contemporary terror of radical Islam and Turkey's

abysmal human rights and censorship record. The novelist Orhan Pamuk

is due to stand trial for "denigrating Turkish identity", which

carries a possible three-year prison sentence, weeks after Picasso in

Istanbul opens.

Last month in Frankfurt, Pamuk received the German book industry's

peace prize, in recognition of his ability to pinpoint the "historical

traces left by the west in the east, and the east in the west".

Culture, says Olcer, "brings people together, avoids prejudices,

breaks down borders". Art that celebrates freedom of expression

matters most of all to those who don't have it; which is why,

paradoxically, western modernism can assert itself so spectacularly on

the shores of the Bosporus, and Europe can begin to digest Turkey as

we watch Turkey digesting us.

"Picasso in Istanbul", Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul, 00 90 212 277

2200, muze.sabanciuniv.edu; November 24 to March 25.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005 "FT" and the "Financial