Matthew Thomas
Senior Specialist
Lot 147
Fikret Mualla Saygi (Turkish, 1903-67) Beach Cafe
26 October 2020, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £7,562.50 inc. premium
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Fikret Mualla Saygi (Turkish, 1903-67)
Beach Cafe
Beach Cafe
gouache on paper, signed and dated '59 lower right
38 x 46 cm.
38 x 46 cm.
Footnotes
Born into a wealthy family in 1903 in Kadiköy, Istanbul, Turkey, Fikret Mualla was an avant-garde painter of Turkish descent. Recognised alongside Abidin Dino as one of Turkey's most important 20th Century artists, Mualla depicted familiar scenes with vigour and life.
As a child, injury prevented him from realising his sporting career, resulting in a permanent limp, thus rendering him an easy object of abuse. His difficult childhood was the root of a lifetime's mental torment, anxiety and illness later necessitating numerous periods in psychiatric hospitals and institutions.
Although struggling academically, his period of study in Germany was paramount in laying the foundations for his artistic career. German expressionism strongly influenced his work, encouraging his already evident detachment from a classical approach to painting. The violence, lack of harmony, and clashes in form and colour of expressionism, resonated in Mualla's increasingly unstable character, and aroused a desire to produce work of a similar nature. His mental volatility, accompanied by a growing dependency on alcohol, developed even more so upon his move to Paris in 1939.
The Parisian social scene proved to be a subject worthy of gouache, his preferred medium. He would work quickly, frequenting the taverns, bars and cafes which would prove to be places detrimental to his addiction. In the present and following lots, Mualla depicts social gatherings in the familiar spaces of a cafe and a bar. Suggestive of Fauvism, he uses vivid, bold blocks of colour to translate the busy scenes onto paper. His creates equilibrium between space and subject, and as a result destroys any hierarchy between figure and location. Mualla applies the paint in an urgent manner, quickly and fluently.
See Abidin Dino and Ara Guler, Fikret Mualla, Istanbul, 1980.