Rasih Nuri İleri

The Communist author, translator, and activist Rasih Nuri İleri amassed one of the most important private collections of modern art in Turkey. Comprising over three thousand oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, İleri’s collection included rare early works by Turkey’s prominent modern artists, such as Aliye Berger, Abidin Dino, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and Fikret Muallâ. In the early 1960s, İleri creatively harnessed modern art to fundraise for the country’s new socialist party through exhibitions.

İleri hailed from a prominent family of politicians, authors, Communists, and artists. His father was the author Suphi Nuri İleri, who, among other things, was an early translator of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Turkish. Rasih’s paternal uncle was the author, journalist, and statesman Celal Nuri İleri, who published the eponymous political journal İleri (1919–24) and served as a member of the Ottoman Parliament and, later, of the Grand National Assembly of the Turkish Republic. Communist modernist artists Abidin and Arif Dino were his maternal uncles. The painter Namık İsmail, who cofounded the Worker and Peasant Socialist Party of Turkey in 1919, was a family friend whose paintings decorated the walls of the İleri family home in Istanbul.

Growing up among modern artists and Communists, İleri developed an interest in both subjects early in life. He started collecting art in the 1930s, acquiring one of his first paintings from Eyüboğlu. Unable to meet Eyüboğlu’s asking price on his meager salary as a primary school teacher, İleri acquired the work on a payment plan in monthly installments. Other early acquisitions included paintings by Selim Turan and Avni Arbaş, which he purchased from Liman Sergisi (Harbor Exhibition), organized in May 1941 by Abidin Dino and a group of young, mostly left-leaning painters from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts who called themselves Yeniler Grubu (Newcomers’ Group). Following in the footsteps of his father and uncles, İleri embraced Communism in the late 1930s and joined the Turkish Communist Party in 1942, beginning a lifelong involvement with Turkey’s socialist movement.

İleri’s fledgling collection of modern Turkish art grew significantly through gifts and inheritance. Abidin Dino gave him more than seven hundred of his own pictures, including rare early works. Upon Arif Dino’s death in 1957, İleri inherited nearly three hundred of his pictures along with two paintings each by İbrahim Çallı and Ali Avni Çelebi, and about thirty pictures by Eyüboğlu.

In the early 1960s, İleri mobilized his extensive contacts in the art world in the service of the Workers’ Party of Turkey, founded in 1962, by organizing two group exhibitions to support the party’s operational budget. Titled Dayanışma ve Yardım Resim Sergisi (Solidarity and Aid Painting Exhibition), the exhibitions opened in October 1962 and March 1965, and brought together the work of prominent modernist painters from Turkey and France. Artists such as Kuzgun Acar, Arbaş, Abidin Dino, Bedri Rahmi and Eren Eyüboğlu, Rasih Güran, Nuri İyem, Füreya Koral, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Édouard Pignon donated works for both exhibitions. The resulting sales generated significant sums for the party.

Among the highlights of İleri’s collection were Muallâ’s Beş Kadın (Five Women, ca. 1930s) and Boğaziçi’nde Kırmızı Yalı (Red Mansion on the Bosphorus, 1932); numerous prints by Berger; İyem’s Küçük Denizci (Young Sailor, 1941); a painted female nude by Çallı; and Askerler (Soldiers, 1951) by İbrahim Balaban. These works were among hundreds included in a 2010 exhibition at Galeri Nev in Ankara, the most comprehensive public display of İleri’s art collection to date. After the collector’s death in 2014, his holdings were bequeathed to his family.