David and I went upstairs after lunch thinking if the admission wasn’t too steep we’d have a cursory look around the museum; turned out, we being Old, it wasn’t very much at all, so we went exploring, finding a large exhibition of the Collection, which seemed to hit all the usual twentieth century modernist tropes but from a slightly different planet, which I found curious and interesting…turns out, as V. told us later, this was partially because for the greater part of the twentieth century most Turkish artists were expats, mainly working in Paris, where of course exposure to said tropes was de rigeur…Nedim Gunsur, Erol Akyavas, Adnan Coker, Burhan Dogancay, Fahhrelnissa Zeid [this last a woman who, at fifty years old, in 1951, was making immense groundbreaking hard-edged abstractions – see below, the red black and yellow one, more than twenty feet across] – not exactly household names to me, but often doing major and even, given some of the dates, pioneering work.  There was some pretty horrendous stuff as well and a lot that was blatantly derivative but still, given the youth of the institution, pretty impressive.  Not to mention stimulatingly weird to my unschooled eyes…

 

Any significant local support for contemporary art is quite recent, though in the 21st century that has changed dramatically and there is a growing collector base with the appetite and the means to display current art’s many iterations.  Istanbul is very much swimming in the mainstream, or clinging to it, with its very own Biennial and this, its very own eight year old Istanbul Modern.  As the works in the collection approach the present day they merged much more seamlessly with the prevailing [post-post-] modernist style[s] of the wider world…good examples and not always the usual suspects but, as everything now, less regionally distinct.

Downstairs was a big current show on the intersection between music and visual art in Turkey which could have held its own anywhere, and a poignant, idiosyncratically installed exhibition on Istanbul Cinema focusing on memorabilia, ephemera and the audience that couldn’t have happened anywhere else; very cool stuff.

We made it out to the street and, eventually, the rooftop and afternoon’s coffee, wherein the ladies trickled in, reduced to noodles from the baths…but all sufficiently recovered for a dinner out in the neighborhood, after which the lads went off on their own to the nearby Arasta Bazaar to hear music and experience the non-alcoholic nightlife…

Morning, another vast breakfast, another moody view, and then L. and I took off with John to the Blue Mosque, which was jammed with lines of tourboat tourists snaking out the back but accompanied by a “guide”, who got us in on the condition we visit his family’s rug shop, passed us through in just the right amount of time…

… duly following our friend to the shop I realized, though nothing was transacted, that the traveling rug merchant from whom we’d bought all those carpets a year ago was, as I’d somewhat suspected then and since, not giving us such a great deal.  More, on his part, a great dealer; the ones here were of a quality far superior to anything he’d hauled out of his van or that we’d bought at his highly inflated prices.  Far and away…and alas…as had that not happened I would have happily spent less for better more beautiful carpets, shipping included, in Istanbul.

Making our escape we consoled ourselves by visiting the Archeological Museum for a quiet hour of antiquities and potteries…

…until it was time for L. and I to make a last trip over the Galata Bridge for brunch with V.; more talk, good food, and tea…finding out a bit of the museum backstory in the process.

[ Orhan Pamuk insists his native city is best portrayed in black and white and as I look at this I have to agree, but, well…onwards]

Feeling somewhat smoked out despite eating outdoors [among the smokers and the diesel trucks] we met up with our somewhat diminished group for a final energetic tour, the Aya Sofya Seminar, which took us across the Hippodrome [me feeling I was getting a bit too much sun] past the German Fountain and into the Cistern [not shown] before…

…an exhaustive investigation of all the available parts of the vast Aya Sofya, culturally multilayered of course and intriguingly under restoration as well, exiting just as the light was fading, and I along with it…

Turned out I didn’t even make dinner that night; foraged for food but abandoned the thought to return to the hotel, pack and lie about stuporously until morning, taking only tea for breakfast…Thursday managed the “transfer” along the misty Sea of Marmara to the airport, where after several security checks the group dissolved, four towards L.A, another two awaiting a slightly later flight to Albuquerque…

The safety instructions, unlike the revolution, WERE televised, which I realized, given the insularity of our group travels, was the most Turkish I’d heard spoken in the entire two weeks…

…and so we settled in to a long long day of flights, waits, and airports…

 

mas anon

 

M