Fikret Adil (also Fikret Adil Kamertan)

Fikret Adil is known in Turkey primarily as a journalist and author, notably of the iconic novella Asmalımescit 74 (1933), which presents a semi-autobiographical account of his bohemian life among painters, poets, and fellow authors in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Beyoğlu district in the 1920s. Less well-known is Adil’s unwavering advocacy of modern art in Turkey as a critic and a collector beginning in the 1930s, when there was little public or market interest in it there.

The son of a military surgeon, Adil came from an educated, middle-class family and attended Istanbul’s prestigious French-language Galatasaray High School, where he became fluent in French. In the early 1920s he began his career as a journalist, authoring hundreds of articles for national newspapers including Vakit, Tan, and Yeni Istanbul as well as columns for arts and culture magazines such as Artist, which he also edited, and Holivut. While he largely published in Turkish, he also produced articles in French for publications that catered to international readers. Later in the 1920s he befriended modern painters including Hale Asaf, Nurullah Berk, İbrahim Çallı, and Elif Naci, all of whom figure in Asmalımescit 74. As Berk recounted decades later, Adil’s storied attic apartment, the address of which gave the novella its title, became a customary meeting place for artists to discuss their ideas and aspirations. Adil must have met some of these painters at Beyoğlu’s famed cafés, such as Baylan, Nisuaz, and Petrograd, which were frequented by the city’s artistic and literary milieus. He knew other artists, including Berk and Abidin Dino, from the newspaper industry, where they worked to support themselves in the early 1930s when, in the absence of art galleries, a private art market struggled to emerge in Turkey. It was around this time that Adil introduced modern art into his coverage of Istanbul’s cultural life. In an effort to challenge the mockery of modern art in the press and counteract public indifference, he published exhibition reviews and profiles of young artists who were experimenting with new forms and subject matter. As Berk, Dino, and Nuri İyem later recalled, Adil became a crucial early champion of their work.

Adil’s advocacy for modern art in Turkey gained an international dimension in 1933, when he introduced some of his artist friends to Sergei Iutkevich, a Soviet film director with a background in painting. Iutkevich was visiting Istanbul on an official assignment to shoot a film about the country’s ongoing transformation into a modern secular nation after its proclamation as a republic in 1923. The immediate impact of this informal meeting was an unofficial exhibition of Turkish artists in Leningrad and Moscow in 1934, which showcased works on paper that Iutkevich had brought back from Istanbul. The Soviet director also established contacts between these artists and the Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), the Soviet state organization responsible for international exchanges in culture and science. When the Turkish state eventually took over the correspondence with Soviet officials, the plan to exchange art exhibitions transformed into an official affair. A Soviet art exhibition traveled to Ankara and Istanbul in 1934–35, and a Turkish painting exhibition that featured works by Asaf, Berk, Çallı, and others toured Moscow, Kyiv, and Bucharest in 1936. This newfound connection between the Turkish and Soviet art worlds, just as it became possible during a period of an alliance between the two nations, came to an end when their relationship soured with the onset of World War II.

Adil’s involvement with Istanbul’s art scene continued in the following decades. He was a founding member of Sanat Dostları Cemiyeti (Friends of Art Society), an arts appreciation group established in 1948, and helped to organize exhibitions in its dedicated space in Beyoğlu. In 1952 he loaned a selection of artworks from his collection to Gallery Maya, one of the first private art galleries in Turkey, founded by his friend Adalet Cimcoz in order to popularize art collecting among the country’s burgeoning upper classes.

Through gifts from artists in recognition of his public advocacy of their work and through purchases, Adil gradually built a collection of modern art that by the end of his life totaled over three hundred paintings and drawings, according to İyem’s estimate in 1969. An important early private collection of modern art in Turkey, it included Ahmet Ali’s Çiçekli natürmort (StillLife with Flowers, 1903; Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul); Asaf’s Paris’ten peyzaj (Paris Landscape, undated; private collection); Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s Kır kahvesi (Countryside Café, undated; private collection); Léopold-Lévy’s Peyzaj (Landscape, undated, circa 1937–49; private collection); and early works on paper by Muallâ from the 1930s, including Moda (undated; Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul). Adil sold a portion of his collection toward the end of his life, and the remainder was dispersed after his death.