Although the beginnings of painting in the Western style in Turkey can be traced back to the last quarter of the 19th century, a knowing eye could still follow the slow change of pictorial idioms from the 17th to the late 19th centuries, where Western influences were effective. The Ottoman empire, which developed its most advanced artistic expressions in parallel to its political power in the 16th century, has handed down a rich collection of miniature painting in the form of chronicle books prepared by a host of artists such as leather binders, gold leaf workers, marbled paper makers, and calligraphers, not to mention a whole workshop of miniaturists. The miniature, besides requiring a most perfect technique applied to miniscule images, had its specific rules and symbolism, which also changed visibly from the early 15th century to the 18th century.  As compared to Iranian miniatures, the Turkish had more clearly orthogonal orders, accentuation of architectural images, and color schemes that emphasized primary colors.

From the 17th to the late 19th century, when painting in the European style was adopted, the miniature moved slowly towards larger images executed on free paper and concerned itself increasingly with quotidian scenes.  The influence of the Baroque can be found in interior wall decorations of villas and mosques where landscapes and still life subjects were popular.

As Ottoman political power waned in the late 19th century, the most urgent reform seemed to be needed in the realm of military education which also included engineering and technical teaching.  It was here at first that young Ottomans interested in the visual arts learned Western type of rendering and drawing, along with perspective.  This new visual analysis of the world also gave way to a new way of perceiving.  Along with this new education, photography also played an important role in altering the way the world was seen and represented.  As the Ottomans began to follow the West in many fields where they thought reform was necessary, they began to take Western art as an example to follow.  The palace and the related upper class began to collect European paintings, and several well known European painters and architects settled in Istanbul and worked for the elite.

The Turkish Republic, which was founded in 1923, had succinctly expressed an ideal of creating a modern, secular and enlightened society. In this project, art, music and literature played an elemental role. The first Turkish artists of the Republic were almost all educated in Paris or Berlin, in the workshops of well known artists.  Many of them learned their trade in an era when the Avant-Garde Cubism and the School of Paris were in their prime. When they returned to Turkey, most felt that they had a social role to fulfill as artists.  They spent time in the provinces to paint the ideal life and the efforts of the Turkish public in Anatolia at the time of modernization. Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that it took some time for Turkish art to really assume an autonomous condition.

By the 1950s, modern Turkish painting had come into its own and started to form different movements and artists’ groups. By the 1980s, we see a rich individuation especially in pictorial art and in sculpture and before the third millennium the Turkish art scene joined the international world of Biennials and fairs in the form of installations, video and performance art.

Even if it is assumed that modernism and the globalization of culture due to capitalism has created a kind of international art expression, there can be found in each separate country or culture, traces of traditional aesthetic attitudes.  These can be overt or covert. In Turkey, around the 1950s, as artists felt that they had mastered the know-how of Western art, the problem that was most deeply felt was that of cultural identity. How to create a modern painting that would at the same time be Turkish was the important question. In this relation we can find three different attitudes where historical visual traditions affect modern Turkish painting consciously or unconsciously.

The most obvious one is where Turkish painters consciously looked back at the miniature and calligraphic traditions and applied these in modern techniques or idioms.  For example Nurullah Berk, one of the leading modernists in the 1960s applied the texture and color approach found in miniatures to a kind of hard-edge painting, where the subject matter was often oriental women. He often composed his pictures in a quasi cubist manner. Sabri Berkel, who is one of the first Turkish abstract painters, used obvious Turkish subjects such as typical street vendors in a highly stylized cubist manner in the effort to relate his modern art to the Turkish scene. Ibrahim Balaban is another painter active through the 1950s and 1980s, whose work directly relates to the miniature in the way his compositions are constructed. The subject matter related to village life is also a direct relation to Turkish culture. One of the popular painters of the actual art scene is Yalcin Gokchebag who paints small canvases where village life is depicted in the minutest, detailed and technically perfect manner. The naïve style with which figures are rendered also remind one of the miniaturist’s approach. Nuri Abaç on the other hand, directly quotes miniatures. It is interesting to note that most references to the miniature style come with a distinct naïve approach, where life is as always happy and careless.  Bedri Rahmi Eyupoglu, one of the most influential teachers of the fine arts academy in the ’50s and the ’60s, not only integrated miniatures but also folk art, to create a Turkish Modernism.  However, his very colorful canvases, the obsession with color and textures that he brings together almost like a collage – giving a certain abstract feel to his work – create a direct reference to miniature painting.

Although calligraphy in traditional Turkish visual arts was a separate category that could be used in all kinds of media (not to mention works on paper), it was also very often used as part of the miniature painting’s visual imagery.  Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that painters who used the aesthetics of calligraphy in their painting were also under the influence of traditional styles.  Abidin Elderolu, is one of the most important artists who was active till the late ’70s and used the aesthetics of calligraphy in a quasi abstract painting style.  His work is full of references to Eastern painting, to Chinese and Buddhist works. In this context one could recall Sabri Berkel, the pioneer of abstract painting in Turkey, in relation to his abstract works that take their inspiration for the calligraphic script.

Another reference to the miniature is obvious in the work of Cevat Dereli, who was most active around the ’60s and ’70s, and who used the spatial understanding, or the perspectival order of the miniature to create his modern works. He can also be mentioned as an artist who painted in the naïve style. Yet, the way he places depth, planes one on top of another to suggest distance, the way he uses size, and the way his figures are ordered on the canvas in a rather spiral order, are all reminiscent of the miniature aesthetics.

While many artists of the modern era were content in following Western examples and trying to create their own individual approach, a close analysis of 20th century Turkish painting would reveal structures and sensibilities that clearly relate to deep cultural structures. These would primarily refer to a specific cultural sense of time and of space, apparent in Turkish and Ottoman music or in architectural layouts of building complexes in the Ottoman world.  Rather than a linear arrangement, the spatial orders usually follow a spiraling progression evident in the way that the figures were related in the miniature. One of the important aesthetic qualities of the miniature has been the way different colored and textured areas are placed side by side, almost creating an abstract color field. As mentioned before, several Turkish artists referred to this application of color.

Another feature that is reminiscent of miniatures is the way the eye focuses separately on each object, and the way each image is rendered with the utmost precision.  In other words, in the visual world of the miniature there is no aerial perspective. No matter how close or how far, each object has the same focus. This aspect can be seen in two artists’ works.  It is certainly not something that they were conscious of, yet their careful attention to each object, without creating a hierarchic order, seemed to follow a traditional sensitivity.  Süleyman Seyid of the late 19th and early 20th centuries paints still life, and although he could be classified as an early impressionist of the Ottoman art scene, his approach to the world carries the sensitivity of an older tradition. On the other hand, Mahmut Cuda, also a still life painter, who was active well into the ’80s, painted vases and flowers with very subtle tonal nuances reminiscent of the same sensitivity.

It is certain that references to the miniature and to traditional aesthetic structures are more numerous than those mentioned above.  No matter how fast a culture adopts certain technologies and life styles, it is without doubt that the deep cultural structures remain as guiding forces in creating forms or in relating to the world.  These basic habits of perceiving and relating change slowly. On the other hand, it can be claimed that it is only through such deep-lying cultural ways of relating that cultures can resist the normalizing forces of globalization. This is not to advocate a return to the past or a revival of tradition; rather it emphasizes cultural analyses to re-discover certain special aesthetic traits and sensibilities that lie dormant, for the use of creating new artistic forms that will be meaningful.