Galeri Maya

One of Turkey’s first private art galleries, Galeri Maya opened in late December 1950 at 20 Kallavi Street in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu neighborhood, the city’s artistic and cultural hub. During the four years it remained active, the gallery promoted new approaches in modern art—particularly abstraction, which the country’s artists began to embrace in the late 1940s—as well as ceramics, textiles, and prints. At a time when private art collecting was incipient in the country, the gallery endeavored to cultivate new collectors among the city’s burgeoning upper class. Prioritizing the work of emerging artists, the gallery showed Istanbul-based artists, including members of the country’s indigenous non-Muslim minorities, such as painters Pindaros Platonidis and Ivi Stangali, as well as expatriates, such as Russian émigré sculptor Iraida Barry. Although it failed to sustain itself financially, Galeri Maya was a precursor for numerous private galleries and institutions that have fostered contemporary artistic practices in Turkey since the 1970s.

Adalet Cimcoz (1910–1970) led the gallery and its artistic program as founder together with her close friend and unofficial collaborator, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu (1908–1973), a literary scholar and public intellectual. When Cimcoz founded the gallery with financial support from her husband Mehmet Ali Cimcoz, she was already famous for her voiceover acting in Turkey’s film industry and her weekly columns chronicling Istanbul’s cultural and society events. She and Eyüboğlu were well connected within Turkey’s artistic and literary circles, not least through their families: the former was married to the nephew of Salâh Cimcoz, one of Turkey’s few private collectors of modern art in the first half of the century and an influential state art administrator of the 1930s. The latter, meanwhile, was the elder brother of famed modernist artist Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu. Sabahattin Eyüboğlu had been invested in art for its pedagogical potential. In the 1940s he incorporated fine arts into his teaching at the Hasanoğlan branch of Köy Enstitüleri (Village Institutes), a short-lived experimental school system in rural Turkey that offered hands-on education in both modern farming and Western humanities. Long before his involvement with Galeri Maya, Eyüboğlu had advocated for the establishment of private art galleries in Turkey, echoing similar calls increasingly being made by certain sections of the artistic community. In an article published in the monthly highbrow cultural journal İnsan in 1938, he argued that private galleries would save modern painting from state patronage by significantly increasing sales to individual collectors and allowing the public to keep abreast with recent artistic production. By opening Galeri Maya, Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu aimed to fulfil this need.

Taking its name from the Turkish word for yeast or leavening, Galeri Maya fostered modernist abstraction and works in less conventional media in Turkey by providing exhibition opportunities that such works lacked at the time. After the failure of previous attempts to establish private art galleries and the discontinuation of the annual artist-run Galatasaray Sergileri (Galatasaray Exhibitions) in 1951, the yearly Devlet Resim Heykel Sergileri (State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions) remained the most regular platform in the country for displaying recent artistic production in the early 1950s. The state exhibitions, however, were dominated by figurative painting and sculpture, leaving artists working outside these parameters to struggle to show their work publicly. With fewer exhibition opportunities, these artists also had fewer sales. Among the numerous exhibitions that Galeri Maya hosted in its two small rooms were solo presentations of work by young artists such as sculptor Kuzgun Acar, autodidact Surrealist Yüksel Arslan, ceramicists Sadi Diren and Füreya, and printmaker Aliye Berger. Galeri Maya also experimented with interdisciplinary approaches to modernism. A thematic group exhibition in 1952 featured ekphrastic pictures that drew inspiration from poems. A similar group exhibition held the following year showed works by Sadi Çalık, Eren Eyüboğlu, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and Hasan Kavruk, among others, produced in response to musical compositions. Also, in 1952 the gallery mounted the first art exhibition in Turkey dedicated to works from a single private collection, that of journalist Fikret Adil, a friend of the gallery.

Both Cimcoz and Eyüboğlu utilized their regular media columns, which appeared anonymously under pen names, to promote the gallery’s exhibitions. Published in the newspaper Akşam under the pseudonym Cim-Dal, Eyüboğlu’s expository texts offered his readers points of entry for appreciating abstract art. Signed as Fitne Fücur (mischief-maker), a pen name that gradually became an open secret, Cimcoz’s society columns sought to boost the gallery’s underwhelming sales. Writing in illustrated weekly magazines such as 20. Asır and Hafta, as well as the newspapers Akşam and Vatan, she artfully combined gossip about sales with advice about decorating tasteful modern homes to encourage elite women to collect modern art.

Despite the efforts of Cimcoz, her collaborators, and the gallery’s many champions in the Turkish press, Galeri Maya could not survive without sufficient sales. When news of the gallery’s impending closure became public in May 1954, Istanbul’s artistic community initiated a so-called “rescue exhibition” (kurtarıcı sergi) to fundraise for the gallery. Berger, the artist couple Bedri Rahmi and Eren Eyüboğlu, Füreya, Ara Güler, Nuri İyem, and Platonidis were among the forty artists who donated works. While the exhibition was a success, it could only delay the gallery’s closure until July 1955.