Nejad Melih Devrim, 1923-1995

Nejad Melih Devrim, son of the painter Fahrelnissa Zeid, was born on Büyükada in 1923. Studying at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts between 1941 and 1945 as a student of Léopold Levy, he went to Paris in 1946. He was an internationally acclaimed lyrical abstract painter. Carving a place for himself in the School of Paris that took shape after 1945 in the Parisian art scene, Devrim developed a style based on his research into Ottoman art and calligraphy as well as the Byzantine mosaics and symbolism at the Hagia Sophia and the Chora museum in Istanbul. Relying on a linear sense of rhythm and the use of color values, he sought solutions to the problems of plasticity in painting. His paintings in gouache on paper are from a later period. Showing no formal influence from any object, they are examples of works in which Devrim liberates the plastic elements of the painting while the colors soften and dissolve.