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Istanbul modern launched
Art in America, March, 2005
Turkey's first modern art museum opened its doors to the public on Dec. 12. With some 4,000 works of 20th-century and contemporary Turkish art in its collection, the Istanbul Modern is being touted as a showcase of cross-cultural influences, though with a strong occidental emphasis. Oya Eczacibasi, the museum's director, told the Art Newspaper that "the museum will show how much we belong in the West in a way the world doesn't realize." The permanent collection was donated in part by the Eczacibasi family and is supplemented by long-term loans from various private and state collections. The most beneficent of these institutions, lending some 2,500 works, is the Turkish bank Turkiye Is Bankasi, whose own initial acquisitions were spurred by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the republic's Western-leaning founder.
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The museum has appointed as its chief curator the Spanish-born Rosa Martinez, one of the visual arts directors of this year's Venice Biennale and a veteran of the Turkish art world. She organized the 1997 Istanbul Biennial and is responsible for the museum's first exhibition, "Observation-Interpretation-Multiplicity," a selection of 100 paintings dating from 1900 onward by resident and expatriate Turkish artists. A space in the Istanbul Modern will rotate temporary shows by international artists, and the museum can also draw once a year on the collections of Deutsche Bank, which recently designated the institution as one of a number of "associated museums" invited to borrow from the bank's 50,000 works.
Situated in an 86,000-square-foot former customs warehouse overlooking the sea, a venue for Istanbul Biennials since 1992, the Istanbul Modern is a privately funded institution supported mainly by the Eczacibasi Holding Group, a pharmaceuticals firm that managed to rush the launch to coincide with a European Union announcement of summit talks next fall on Turkish membership in the EU. The timing of the opening was encouraged by the Turkish prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan. However, apart from acting as landlord and making some improvements in accessibility, the government is not at all involved in funding the institution, and contributed nothing to its $5-million renovation.
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