Salâh Cimcoz (also Salâhattin Cimcoz)

Salâh Cimcoz was a politician, magazine publisher, and playwright whose public life straddled Turkey’s late Ottoman (late eighteenth century–1922) and early Republican periods (1923–1950). His individual and institutional efforts to support modern art in Turkey were as important as his literary, publishing, and political ventures. Not only was Cimcoz one of the few private collectors and patrons of modern art in the country during his lifetime, but he also became an influential state art administrator for the young Turkish republic in the 1930s, serving as the commissioner of numerous state-organized art exhibitions at home and abroad.

Cimcoz came from an elite family of high-ranking Ottoman administrators. Although trained as a lawyer, he began his career in magazine publishing, producing the weekly political satire Kalem (1908–1911) together with his close friend Celal Esad Arseven, an author, painter, and politician. From publishing, Cimcoz moved to politics, serving as a deputy in the last Ottoman parliament from 1914 until its dissolution in 1918. Resuming his political career during the first decade of the republic, Cimcoz rose from a city council seat in his native Istanbul to deputy in the parliament and, finally, executive member of the Republican People’s Party by 1933.

Parallel to his rise in the party ranks, Cimcoz emerged as one of the few individual collectors of modern painting in Turkey, where a private art market struggled to emerge in the absence of galleries. In the 1930s sales of artworks—to various state institutions and individuals alike—mostly took place at annual or group exhibitions, and usually in Istanbul, the country’s artistic center. Cimcoz built a collection that combined oil paintings, European porcelains, Ottoman calligraphic panels, and locally produced glassware and silverware. With the adoption of easel painting in the early nineteenth century, Turkey’s traditional Islamic-Ottoman art forms such as miniature painting and calligraphy had been increasingly relegated to the past. Yet Cimcoz’s approach to collecting recognized the value of both Turkey’s Islamic-Ottoman artistic traditions and new directions in visual art. Although he had no formal education in art history, he also distinguished himself through the expert connoisseurial knowledge he acquired in fields ranging from French Impressionism to Byzantine icon painting.

Cimcoz’s first known patronage of modern art dates to the mid-1910s, when he helped finance a large-scale public mural for Istanbul’s Kadıköy Municipality building: Avni Lifij’s Kalkınma—belediye faaliyeti (Development—The Work of Municipality, 1916), now in the collection of the İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi (Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture). In the decades that followed, Cimcoz became deeply involved in Istanbul’s art world, attending exhibition openings and commissioning works from painters. Between 1932 and 1934 he commissioned İbrahim Çallı, a well-established painter who also taught at the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (Academy of Fine Arts) in Istanbul, to produce portraits of himself and numerous family members, some of which are now in the collections of state museums. In the mid-1930s Cimcoz opened his family home to the young painter Fikret Muallâ, giving him respite from continuous economic hardship and a comfortable place to live and work.

Cimcoz’s position within the party and his interest in art overlapped in May 1933 with his appointment as the party’s head of cultural affairs. During his tenure, Cimcoz made decisions on behalf of the state on artistic matters such as opportunities to show Turkish painting abroad. He chaired the organizing committees for Bugünkü Türk Resim Sergisi (Exhibition of Turkish Painting Today), which traveled to Moscow, Kyiv, and Bucharest in 1936, and Türk Resim ve Neşriyat Sergisi (Exhibition of Turkish Painting and Publishing), shown in Athens and Belgrade in 1937. Beyond securing works of art for these exhibitions from the fledgling collections of Turkey’s various state institutions, Cimcoz traveled to the venues with his fellow committee members to oversee their installation and inform foreign viewers about the history of easel painting in Turkey. Initiated by state or civic institutions in host countries with which Turkey enjoyed positive diplomatic relationships, these exhibitions at prominent cultural spaces were among the first major displays of modern Turkish art abroad and often drew large audiences. Cimcoz also contributed to efforts to show modern Turkish art at home, serving in 1936 on the organizing committee of an exhibition that surveyed modern painting and in 1940 and 1942 on selection juries for Devlet Resim ve Heykel Sergileri (State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions), annual displays of recently produced art.

In addition to the Naturalist and Impressionist pictures by established painters often preferred by collectors in Turkey, Cimcoz also collected the work of emerging Istanbul-based artists who produced stylized depictions of figures and landscapes. His collection included Çallı’s Mevleviler (Whirling Dervishes, ca. early 1920s; private collection), Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s Tophane Kabataş mahallesi (Tophane Kabataş Neighborhood, ca. 1930s; private collection), Léopold Lévy’s Çağla badem (Green Almonds, ca. 1937–49; private collection), Namık İsmail’s Çıplak (Nude, 1935, private collection), Alexis Gritchenko’s Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia, 1920, private collection), and works on paper by Muallâ. After the death of Cimcoz and his wife Hasene, the latter in 1961, portions of his collection were distributed between his five children and auctioned in the late 1970s. His descendants continue to safeguard the paintings, works on paper, and other objects from the collection passed on to them.