Nurullah Berk (also Nurullah Cemal)

Nurullah Berk led a multi-faceted artistic life. Throughout his long career as a painter, he published numerous articles and books about modern art, acted as an unofficial spokesperson for two artists’groups of which he was a member, taught at the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (Academy of Fine Arts) in Istanbul, directed the Devlet Resim Heykel Müzesi (State Museum of Painting and Sculpture) in the same city, and served as commissioner for official exhibitions of Turkish art abroad. His prolific output as an author made him an influential voice in shaping the ways in which modern Turkish art was understood by its local and international publics.

Berk’s artistic training began during high school in Istanbul, where he studied with the painter Hikmet Onat. In 1920 he enrolled at Istanbul’s Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi, as the Academy of Fine Arts was then called, attending the workshops of Onat and İbrahim Çallı, both Paris-trained painters who embraced Impressionist techniques. Like many of his peers, Berk continued his training in Paris, where he studied from 1924 to 1928 with Ernest Laurent at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and from 1932 to 1933 with Fernand Léger and André Lhote at their respective private ateliers. Unlike most of his peers in Turkey, Berk had a strong command of the French language, which gave him greater access to modern art discourses circulating in the city. He owed this fluency to his pedigree as member of an elite Francophile family that produced several high-ranking Ottoman statesmen; his grandfather was a minister, and his great-grandfather had served as the grand vizier to Sultan Abdülhamid II.

While launching his artistic career during the first decade of the Turkish republic, proclaimed in 1923, Berk became involved in the founding of two artists’groups—Müstakil Ressamlar ve Heykeltıraşlar Derneği (the Society of Independent Painters and Sculptors) and d Grubu (Group d)—of which he remained an active member throughout his terms of affiliation. Formed by emerging artists, most of whom were recent graduates of ateliers in Paris or Munich, these groups advocated for a different vision of modern art, rejecting the Impressionist brushstrokes espoused by the older generation of artists in favor of a style inspired by Paul Cézanne and Cubist fragmentation. On a pragmatic level, these groups provided exhibition opportunities for their young members, who often struggled to find places to display their work publicly.

In the late 1920s Berk began to write on art, responding to a perceived sense among artists in Turkey that there were not enough critics to cover local exhibitions. Addressing topics ranging from Montparnasse—the Parisian neighborhood popular among artists—to art exhibitions in Istanbul and Ankara, his articles appeared in national newspapers including Vakit and Akşam, popular magazines like Yedigün, and the high-brow literary journal Varlık. Berk’s writing sought to provide information about modern art movements in Western Europe, such as Cubism and Purism, on which there was little expository writing in Turkish at the time. These essays were published together in 1934 as Modern san’at: Empresyonizm, neo empresyonizm, kübizm, pürizm, fütürizm, sürrealizm (Modern Art: Impressionism, Neo-impressionism, Cubism, Purism, Futurism, Surrealism). While the book reproduced a Paris-centered narrative of modern art, it was nonetheless a major resource on the topic for Turkish readers. Through his book and other articles on Western European art movements, Berk emerged as a critical voice in the 1930s among those contributing to the transmission of French-language art discourses in Istanbul.

Berk’s position as an outsider to Istanbul’s art establishment began to change with his appointment to the Academy’s painting department in 1939, first as a teaching assistant and later as a studio instructor. He continued to write about modern art, shifting his focus in the mid-1940s to book-length accounts of its Turkish history. His book Türkiye’deresim (Painting in Turkey, 1943)—the first monograph on the topic—offered a preliminary historical survey of easel painting in Turkey at a time when art history was still a fledgling discipline there. Revised editions were translated into French in 1950 and English in 1954. Berk continued his historiographic efforts on the subject in the following decades, co-authoring 50 yılın Türk resim ve heykeli (Turkish Painting and Sculpture of the Last Fifty Years, 1973) with the sculptor Hüseyin Gezer, and Türk resmi (Turkish Painting, 1983) with the critic Kaya Özsezgin. With these foundational books, Berk shaped the early historical accounts of modern art in Turkey.