As part of its call for contributions on art and ethnicity, the SEN web team is delighted to present a selection of articles related to the topic from SEN’s print issues.

We are pleased to present a preview of Cemren Altan’s “Visual Narration of a Nation: Painting and National Identity in Turkey” published in volume 4 issue 2 of SEN. If you would like to read the entire article, please visit our publisher’s website here.

Article Abstract

The aim of this article is to review the relationship between Turkish nationalist discourse and early republican paintings through the examination of cultural politics and the production of certain types of works of art and the content analyses of those paintings. In other words, it aims to develop a critical reading of the history of Turkey in conjunction with the development of the history of art. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923 and this date also symbolically defines the change in both the political system and society. A largely Muslim population was, for the first time, invited by the state into the Arts. This, on one hand, represented rupture with Islamic principles — that did not allow images that give the illusion of reality — and on the other hand, declared an alliance with the European ‘modes of representation’, the European civilization. The invention of ‘visual citizenship’ through early paintings exemplifies what Hobsbawm referred to as the ‘invention of traditions’ (Hobsbawm 1983), the process of creation of the nation. The examples of figurative paintings that converged to form a strong discourse, structured as a narrative and their messages are organized around certain significant components, convey a particular depiction of ‘Turkishness’. We discuss those arguments through the study of the metaphors and analogies applied in some examples of 1930s paintings in Turkey.

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