Nurullah Berk, 1906-1982

Nurullah Berk was a student in the studios of Hikmet Onat and İbrahim Çallı at the School of Fine Arts from 1920 to 1924. He then went to Paris for four years, where he worked in the studio of Ernest Laurent. He was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts as an instructor in 1939.

One of the first artists of the Republican generation, Nurullah Berk was also one of the founders of the D Group, whose members adhered to a Cubist Contructivist approach to painting that opposed Impressionism, which still enjoyed mainstream status in the 1920s. In the 1930s, influenced by the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, Berk produced works in the same genre using objects like tables, bottles, and playing cards as his subjects. By the 1950s, the influences of Fernand Léger and André Lhote weighed heavily in his work, which focused on local themes: a woman doing the ironing, a man smoking a nargileh, a potter shaping a jug on a wheel. In such paintings, the contoured figures are placed in the centre of unvarnished surroundings. Berk also favored a decorative style and, in later years particularly, he brought a fresh perspective to the genre of “oriental odalisque” art that had existed at least since the time of Ingres. In his works that show nude, sleeping women, with all of the erotic associations that they inspire, Berk also included decorative elements (arabesques) that bear the imprint of the oriental miniature tradition. With his paintings of solid-color arrangements on a geometrical substructure, he sought to create yet another synthesis between Eastern and Western art.