Learning modern art as a foreign language: Turkey's culture revolution, the d group and André Lhote

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The Turkish War of Independence resulted with the official end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, and dismantled the traditional, religious culture of Islam in Turkey. The ensuing secularist and modernist Atatürk Reforms are considered a cultural revolution that aimed to transform the cultural fabric of Turkish society. All aspects of life literally changed within the span of a decade from the 1920s to the 1930s, from the calendar-time-metric system to a new alphabet, from the dress code to architectural programmes. Art and culture was an integral part of this process as a typical vehicle of propaganda. A young generation of Turkish artists internalized the revolution; like nationalist missionaries, they sought to find a new visual language to express this new, nationalist spirit. I’m interested in how they set about doing this. In the late 1920s when Cubism as an artistic style was percieved as the only appropriate visual language that could signify the futurist idealism of the new Turkish nation, young artists discovered a Parisian artist and teacher who they believed could teach them that visual language. This artist was André Lhote (1885-1962), a Salon Cubist considered to be one of the leading artistic figures to represent a “return to order” in the 1930s. 1928, which was the year of the Alphabet Revolution in Turkey was the year that Académie Lhote became a popular destination for modern Turkish artists. A group of these artists later came together to form the modern art group “d” which looked very much like a monogram of Lhote’s teachings of rectangles and circles. The d group were revolutionaries in Turkey, seeking new forms to visualize their ideals, very much like the nation adapting to the Latin alphabet rather than the Arabic script to write the Turkish language. It is obvious that Turkish artists believed in a vocabulary of modernist form and colour that had universal validity, and could be translated, like language.