1 Introduction
The n ewspap ers of 28 July 1938 announced a decision made by the Republican People’s Party (RPP), the political party ruling the one-party regime in Turkey at the time, to initiate the “Painters’ Homeland Tours” programme. As part of this project, carried out in coordination with the People’s Houses1 and the Academy of Fine Arts ,2 some 54 painters went to 63 provinces and painted more than 800 paint ings (BCA-CHP 490.1.0.0.2016.20 490.1.0.0.2016.21) over a period of eight years (1938–1946).3 The RPP covered all the costs of the tours, which lasted between one and three months each year. A jury, composed of different people every time, selected paintings produced during the project and handed out awards, and some of the paintings were bought by the RPP to adorn state institutions. It was said that the project aimed “to protect the artists of the country” and “to reflect on the natural and historical beauties and local characteristics of the homeland” (Erol 1998). Moreover, the artists were to contribute to increasing the “consciousness of national art ” (Anonim 2002a: 306).
In essence, the project undertook to send artists to Turkish provinces and towns—and not big cities—in order to paint. The paintings made there were first exhibited in the capital, Ankara , then in the People’s Houses of various provinces in Anat olia (Aydın Dikmen 2016). Given the economic conditions of the time, the programme was both ambitious and comprehensive. Given also the state of artistic patronage at this time, it is clear that this sort of scheme, in which the party-state covered all the artists’ costs,4 could contribute to artistic production. However, the people living in the receiving towns may have shown minimal interest in the project and even have felt totally alienated. So what did the RRP intend by sending artists to these regions? If the purpose was solely arts patronage , why wasn’t it enough for the artists to pai nt where they lived? The answers to these questions are not one dimensional, and the Painters’ Homeland Tours shed interesting light on the state’s approach to the instrumentalization of an element of high culture—namely pai nting—in the early republican era.
According to Sibel Bozdoğan, the modernization of art in Turkey can be examined in two periods: while in the first period (1908–1930) one can differentiate the “first moderns” or the emergence of a modern culture of art and architecture, the years between 1931 and 1950 correspond to an era when art and architecture were subjected to a nation-building project and state ideology (Bozdoğan 2008). Even though we benefit from her periodization that situates the artistic field vis-à-vis the course of artistic modernism in Turkey, our analysis here will be structured by another periodization that focuses on the discourses and ideologies that shaped the cultural p olicies in the early republic. This latter periodization, offered by art critic Orhan Koçak, classifies the era between the foundation of the republic and 1950 into two periods, the first being “the Ziya Gökalp moment” (1923–1938), and the second “humanist culture” (1938–1950) (Koçak 2010: 306). Therefore this chapter will elaborate on the Painters’ Homeland Tours (1938–1946) as a moment in Turkish cultural policy according to this latter periodization. The subject will be dealt with in the following order.
First, we will present the general framework of cultural policies in the Ziya Gö kalp’s formulation and explore how they were related to the artistic field. This will enable us to contextualize the “humanist culture” debate and policies as alternative readings both to the cultural crisis that Turkish modernization had struggled with and its Gökalpist resolution. The humanist turn in Turkish cultural policy will be discussed with its concomitant movement in art—that is, classicism—which became favoured in Western countries as well, although, we will see that the acceptance of classicism had close relations with rising nationalism . Next, we will evaluate the objectives and repercussions of Painters’ Homeland Tours. Finally, we will see that the tours took place at an interesting moment in terms of both Turkish and European history.
This chapter draws largely on my unpublished dissertation (Aydın Dikmen 2016), which refers to a wide range of source material. In addition to extensive and systematic use of the secondary literature available, certain official documents were examined for the first time, bringing new insights. The documents found in the Republican Era catalogues of the State Archives of the Prime Ministry shed light on many aspects of the tours about which the public had hitherto received little or erroneous information. For example, it has been generally accepted (Giray 1995a, b; Yasa Yaman 1996; Edgü 1998; Öndin 2003) that the last of the homeland tours was organized in 1943 (thanks to reference to the 1944 Party Catalogue (CHP 1944)),5, until my recent work (Aydın Dikmen 2016) proved that the tours continued until 1946. Other important assets found in the archives were the petitions of teachers working in Anatoli a, addressed to the general secretariat of the RRP in order to benefit from the state’s patronage programmes, the most important of which was the Homeland Tours. Thanks to these, we are now aware of the existence of a group of art teachers who urgently called for arts patronage. Their voices, which we can now hear, tell us that the award mechanism of state patronage was far from an exclusive artistic evaluation; rather, social and political affinities influenced the distribution of patronage. Moreover, the petitions shed light on these painters’ view of the state, notwithstanding the state’s view of the society and the local branch of People’s Hous es of those towns they lived in. Overall, this chapter aims to demonstrate a sequence in the history of Turkish cultural life that underlines how culture is always shaped by politics.
2 The Colour of the Cultural Policies in the Early Republic
The Turkish Republic strived to build a modern and secular nation state, and founded itself as a clear breaking point from its Islamic and Ottoman past. As a country of “delayed development ” (Matossian 1994), Turkey had two kinds of concern underlying its modernization efforts. First, the founding cadres thought that Turkey had a backward society in terms of Western civilization. Second, and contrarily, it was believed that a Western-style civilization should be achieved by keeping the national identity which would construct the new-born republic as a nation state.
In the 1930s, almost all discussions in the public sphere regarding art engaged with the theme of belatedness. While the general view was that painti ng in Turkey needed to catch up with modernism in the West, it was also widely held that we had to create an authentic art interchangeably defined as milli sanat (“national art ”) or yeni sanat (“the new art”) (Bozdoğan 2001; Duben 2007; Shaw 2011). The primary reason for this was the culture–civilization binary which was put together by Ziya Gökalp, the leading ideologue of the founding Kemalist regime. According to the Gökalpist formula, while the national hars (“culture”) had to be supported and protected with the national consciousness as the requirement of being a nation state, the “civilization” which was perceived as international and inherent in the West was something to be achieved urgently because Turkey lagged behind its Western counterparts.
Although nationalist sentiments started to influence the practice of art from the 1910s onwards, the state became involved in the artistic field more actively in the 1930s when the one-party regime consolidated itself through a number of measures, including censors, closing the old cultural institutions and opening up the new ones that the state could easily control.
In the 1930s, modernization in harmony with the national identity was a desired feature for artists and intellectuals, and this was a common situation in a great number of nation states emerging in the early twentieth century. It was argued that, owing to the populism inherent in authoritarian governments, there were two related expectations from painting which modernist movements in art could not meet (Hobsbawm 1995). While the first was that art should pay attention to the needs and necessities of the regime in terms of its subject/content, the second was that it should be easi...