On Montage in Painting

Published as part of the exhibition Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times, this text examines artist, educator, and writer Özer Kabaş’s (1934–1998) concept of “montage.” Vasıf Kortun explores how this notion—which Kabaş used to address the uncritical adoption of Western art as a model—resonates across Islamicate geographies and how it manifests in Turkey’s art scene after the 1980s.

Some time ago, while working on a compilation of Özer Kabaş’s texts,⁠^[1] I was deeply impressed by his 1969 essay “Türk Resminde Montaj” [Montage in Turkish Painting], published in the journal Papirüs. Unbeknownst to me, I had made a similar argument—using the concept of “montage” in the same vein as he did. It was 1996, and Okwui Enwezor had asked me to write a text for the catalog of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. In that text, I addressed the questions Okwui was exploring: what local communities understood by the notion of “center,” how they resisted it, and how they experienced it not simply as an external force but as something that had become deeply ingrained and internalized.⁠^[2]

The concept of “montage”⁠^[3] carried a pejorative connotation in 1970s Turkey. It referred to an industrial product modeled on foreign designs—with a Western engine—assembled domestically from imported or locally produced kits. Adapting the idea of “montage” to art implied a fundamental critique. In his article, Kabaş asserted that “combining local themes with neoclassical or ‘gallery art’ forms in a superficial sense is not a synthesis unique to us; if anything, it is a montage.” In my text, I argued that “localized content” is not a criterion for assessing a work’s value and noted that it often implies a fetishized, essentialized distinction. While Kabaş addressed the modern era, I focused on the period following the neoliberal rupture of 1989.

During a conversation about the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre [Magicians of the Earth], chief curator Jean-Hubert Martin cited the Hurufiyya movement as an example of a widespread practice in certain regions where artists harmonize traditional calligraphy with the École de Paris. The curator noted that although these works demonstrated high technical mastery, they did not interest him in the context of the exhibition. He argued that such artworks were highly programmed and predictable. The Global South may find this criticism hard to accept, but the issue is not limited to calligraphic modernism alone. The real question is: When does Eastern content, dressed in Western painting materials, formats, styles, and structures, constitute a program of “montage”?

Martin was unaware that the Hurufiyya movement was part of a complex equation. This practice began with Madiha Umar,⁠^[4] who was born in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Iraq. Umar continued her education in Beirut and Istanbul, and was among the first women whom the Iraqi government sent to England on a scholarship. After moving to Washington, D.C., to study at George Washington University in 1942, the artist encountered the work of Nabia Abbott, an Iraqi-American scholar researching the early history of calligraphy. This discovery shaped Umar’s aesthetic approach to Arabic script: transforming letters from their traditional contexts into abstract forms while preserving their transcendent essence. Umar paved the way for many artists with her 1949 exhibition and her essay in the accompanying booklet;⁠^[5] countless versions have been seen since.

The fact that these paintings were made not through the bodily discipline required to paint with fine horsehair brushes while seated close to the ground, but rather in accordance with the conventions of Western canvas painting, raised different questions. What pathways could lead to a genuine, contextual practice while remaining squarely embedded in a Western artistic heritage and system? Especially in a context where schools, art spaces, and commercial outlets were strictly defined by Western modalities?

The Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander broke this cycle with her paintings in the second half of the 1990s.⁠^[6] Madiha Umar had undoubtedly opened a new path, but the endless repetition of it justified Martin’s concerns about method and predictability. When a reference—whether a form, local content, or a system—becomes a pretext for “returning to sources,” it stifles the genuine pursuit of originality and risks becoming merely decorative. It is decorative because the process remains on the surface. By investing in the value Arabic script carries through its association with the holy book, even if it is not inherently sacred, it conceals its silence and becomes a legitimate, transactional work of art.

But we must not overlook another point. Knowledge and context resided in the West; to see the finest examples of publicly available calligraphy and book art, one had to go to the Library of Congress (African and Middle Eastern Division) or the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution. This also reminded me that İpek Duben had to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to study miniature painting.

The Iraqi artist Ata Sabri reportedly shared a French magazine with his colleague Jewad Selim. The magazine featured an article by art historian Eustache de Lorey on Makâmât by al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122). Hence, Selim’s encounter with the Baghdad School of Painting—an Islamic art movement that emerged in the 13th century—occurred through a French journal, a Western source, and changed the trajectory of his artistic life.

We could also put it this way: the West functioned as the transmission point of artistic practices specific to the East. The West does not merely plunder; it researches, produces knowledge within its own parameters, classifies, and exhibits on its own terms, as if showcasing Western art. Consequently, the West also serves as the agent through which the image returns (home). Locally, producing works influenced by miniatures on large canvases and displaying them in art galleries also results from internalizing this same logic of montage.

One might believe that a “national” style can be achieved by clothing a historical element in a modern structure. Yet this is an archaeological process in a Western sense. Even the concept of cultural heritage has Western origins. Every region has its own treasure, its own distinct inventory. For example, Egyptian artists have often drawn inspiration from the country’s Pharaonic era or depicted traditional life along the banks of the Nile as a recurring, timeless motif. Unfortunately, this is only an attempt to resurrect a millennia-old relic.

The real issue is not so much the “center” meddling with the traditions of the “other,” but rather the periphery depriving itself of its own agency. Selecting from the bundle of cultural inventory amounts to nothing more than affirming existing dominant political tendencies while suppressing others. The past does not exist to be rewritten in retrospect to lend legitimacy to the demands of the day. On the contrary, the past is a curious treasure and an open wound—multifaceted, varied, riddled with interruptions, stripped of the narratives of the defeated, and revealing not only itself but also those who speak of it.

There is also this: The West constantly advises artists from the East and the South to draw on their own indigenous sources to be authentic. Yet these sources can only be accessed through “archaeological” methods, a formalist style, and a Western-oriented approach. In reality, however, one does not need archaeology to belong to a place or to be native to it.

The issue of “indigenous sources” is also complex. A French art historian labeled Ottoman military painters “primitive” (meaning close to the source, pure, unspoiled, naive, unschooled) in 1937. The message is clear: “Return to your sources; only then will we accept you.” The center accepts you but relegates you to the margins, boxes you in, and refuses to incorporate you into its main narrative. For example, Fahrelnissa Zeid transcended these frameworks and was a central figure in the post-World War II Paris art scene alongside her son Nejad Devrim. Yet her retrospective at Tate Modern fell into the “identity trap,” despite her assertion that her work had no connection to Byzantine or Islamic art. This is because the West always needs essentialist crutches to introduce an “Eastern” artist. Conquering the citadel from within is rare. The Algerian Baya, the Moroccan Chaïbia Talal, and the Turkish-born Semiha Berksoy are presented to the market not only as excellent artists but also as “outside the norm” (self-taught, delusional, unruly female figures). Jean-Hubert Martin’s fundamental mistake in Magiciens de la Terre was to repeat this cliché. He analyzed the problem correctly but overlooked what was possible.

II.

When I returned to Turkey as a young writer in the late 1980s, the practices I encountered reminded me of what I had become familiar with in New York. I wasn’t searching for an “essence,” but many unopened doors could have led to a relationship with place, context, and time. Yet what I saw had nothing to do with these. The works were as ordinary as what I had seen in New York, and the real problem was the absence of the environment needed for them to flourish. Everyone was painting, but no one was talking about painting.

Kabaş’s essay traces this problem even further back, noting that the academic approach to painting in Turkey, beginning in the 19th century, has treated art as separate from its historical and sociological context and has been built around the belated adoption of formal changes emerging in Western painting. According to Kabaş, the focus should be on the impact of Western art movements on painting practice in Turkey and the responses developed to this influence. He argues that painting must engage with society’s own transformation and internal dynamics. By “locality,” he does not mean an archaeological excavation but rather “contextuality.” Contextuality, for Kabaş, is a matter of geography and social structures. Having avoided using the human figure as a mere template from the very beginning of his practice, Kabaş regarded the figure as the subject and bearer of existential concerns. He wrote:

“Artists, often armed with the forms of Western art—such as Cubism or Fauvism—have experimented with these movements on the Turkish peasant, severing them from their own dialectic out of a concern to be ‘local.’ Since the true relationships and interactions between essence and form were unknown, this resulted in a fiasco. The Turkish peasant and Cubism never got along, because these paintings did not engage with the human being in their pain, suffering, and strength, but instead depicted superficial, crude outlines. In attempting to create Anatolian art driven by romantic and status quo-oriented concerns such as ‘finding beauty in misery,’ not much emerged beyond the ‘Anadol.’ Only a handful of artists managed to break free of this mindset through their own strength.”⁠^[7]

What I witnessed in the late 1980s was a shift from this sense of being left behind to a kind of cultural synchronicity. Magazines and catalogs were being published in color; access and travel had become easier. In other words, a sense of imaginary global belonging had developed, and there were ingenious ideas regarding the “export” of artists: “The Italians exported the three Cs (Chia, Cucchi, Clemente). Why can’t we do the same?” This sense of belonging, however, was intertwined with a trauma of inferiority and belatedness that had been ingrained in people since the Tanzimat era of the late-Ottoman period.

Kabaş’s essay “Montage in Turkish Painting” and his painting Merhaba, Mrs. Grey are both from 1969. The distribution of paint on the palette in the left hand of the Western-style artist—seated before an easel with a scarf draped around his neck—matches that in the painting on the easel. In other words, the artist has little idea of what he is actually doing; he is simply following the abstract expressionist style he learned somewhere. Abstract expressionism—which took shape after World War II as a liberating practice that celebrated individual creativity—amounts, in Kabaş’s painting, to nothing more than an endorsed program. The artist’s head, replaced by a skull, suggests his mind has rotted away under the influence of an imported artistic practice. Having become depleted through the repeated production of such paintings, he has turned into the living dead, even as he claims, “we are just fine.” Kabaş’s persistent emphasis on authenticity in his writings, and his interpretation of the uncritical, literal repetition of Western models as “montage,” can be understood in this context. By saying “we,” Kabaş emphasizes a widespread shortcoming in Turkey’s art scene. With its dubious neutrality, this practice remains confined to the decorative plane and reinforces the status quo by securing a significant place in art acquisitions in the late 1980s.⁠^[8]

Four years after his diatribe, Fatma Tülin’s paintings—which Kabaş remarked no longer required her to “seek instruction”—embody a reckoning. They stubbornly set themselves distinct from their surroundings. This is not driven by a desire for uniqueness, but by a need to articulate her own quest, express herself with curiosity, and accept solitude.

In a setting squeezed between social realism that dominated the agenda in the early 1970s and the traditions of abstract painting, artists from Gazi Education Institute—such as İsmail Saray, Cengiz Çekil, and Osman Dinç—who favored a sophisticated and communicative practice were sidelined. Let’s also set aside figures like Mehmet Güleryüz and Cihat Burak, who didn’t fit into either camp. Such peripheries of the prevailing narratives are very rich, but that is a separate topic. Amid all this, where does Fatma Tülin—whom Kabaş took under his wing and who held her first exhibition at Boğaziçi University at the age of 23—fit in?

With the paintings in her first exhibition, Tülin brings her practice into the grocery store. It is about proximity, which aligns with Kabaş’s contextuality: A painting of an onion and a loaf of bread suspended in space. The country’s simplest nourishment, rooted in the vernacular. The title of the painting is no more than what meets the eye: “bread and onion.” Artists were considered more “of this land” when their paintings of villagers featured large hands and patched vests in anonymous rural settings. They gave collectors greater reassurance when the paintings, contrary to the artists’ intentions, conveyed resignation to fate, meekness, and obedience.

On one hand, Tülin was concerned with nothing but looking closely at the thing itself: swollen, cracked, and fissured; plants with and without bark. Some erotic, bold, and carefree. Carefree because they express nothing other than what they are. She settles on a white sheet of paper (the canvas itself) and turns her back on the history of European still life. Her work does not stem from a tradition woven with compositions of exotic plants from the colonies, nor with the implications of wealth, property, and ownership—or their critique. On the contrary, starting with “bread and onion” brings it as close as a greengrocer’s shop or a neighborhood market; it is everyday and full of stories.

Turkey’s 20th-century painting possesses a unique structure—one so immense in its diversity, relative to the vast geography it spans, that it cannot be analyzed through a modernist framework of stylistic lineages. In this regard, it is also valuable to read writers such as Özer Kabaş and, except in his later years, Sezer Tansuğ. Not so that we might agree with them, but because their work broadens our horizons.