Burhan Doğançay

Biography

One day, walking along 86th Street in New York, Doğançay stopped in front of a wall. The remains of a poster, shadows in the unevenness of the plaster, orange mixed with blue, green and brown, marks left by rain and mud. He later recalled that it was the most beautiful abstract painting he had ever seen. This happened in the early 1960s, and from then on walls were his main subject.

He was born on 11 September 1929 in Constantinople. His first painting lessons came from his father, the artist Adil Doğançay, and from Arif Kaptan, also a Turkish painter. In 1950 he graduated from the law faculty of Ankara University. He then studied at the University of Paris (by some accounts he received his doctorate in economics in 1953, by others his studies continued until 1955) and at the same time attended courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He did not give up painting and took part in several group exhibitions. After returning to Turkey he exhibited in Ankara, including with his father, at the Ankara Art Lovers Club.

In 1962 a brief spell in government service, connected with diplomatic work, brought him to New York. In 1964 he decided to devote himself to art alone and to settle in the city for good. He looked for material for his collages and assemblages on the streets themselves. Making a living from art seemed to him almost impossible, and, by his own account, it was Thomas Messer, for many years director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, who urged him to stay and not to retreat from the city’s difficulties.

In 1969 Henry Geldzahler, then head of the department of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, secured him a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. It had been founded by June Wayne, and between 1960 and 1970 about seventy artists passed through it, among them Ed Ruscha, Jim Dine, Josef Albers and Louise Nevelson. Doğançay made sixteen lithographs there, including a suite of eleven sheets titled “Walls V”. The medium forced him to give up his earlier casual manner and to organise his compositions graphically: the flat areas became more sharply defined and the colours brighter. It seems to me that it was after Tamarind that his work acquired the concentration by which it is recognised.

In the mid-1970s he took up what he regarded as a secondary project: photographing urban walls all over the world. He called the series “Walls of the World”. He was interested only in the traces left by people: inscriptions, signs, pasted and torn-off images, without distinction of culture, country or style. “Walls are the mirror of society,” he said. His photographs are not chance snapshots: they are carefully framed pieces of surface, studies of material, colour and light, at times resembling monochrome paintings. Over time the archive grew to thirty thousand images from more than a hundred countries on five continents. In 1982 it was shown in a solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, then in Brussels, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal.

In painting he worked mainly in collage and, to some extent, fumage (a technique of making marks with the smoke of a flame). Posters and objects taken from walls served as his basic material. He recreated billboards, graffiti-covered walls, broken windows and doors. He compared himself only with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, but, unlike Rauschenberg, he preferred to reproduce fragments of walls in the relations in which he had found them, hardly altering colour or position. In the 1970s and 1980s his fame came from the Ribbons series: clean paper strips and their calligraphy-like shadows. The bright curving forms seem to burst out of a flat, single-coloured background. Later they gave rise to shadow sculptures made of aluminium composite and to tapestries.

The tapestries began with a meeting in Paris with Jean-François Picaud, owner of the Atelier Raymond Picaud in Aubusson. He thought the Ribbons an ideal subject for weaving and invited the artist to submit several cartoons. The first three tapestries were woven in 1984.

For the first Istanbul Biennial, in 1987, Doğançay made a large collage, “Symphony in Blue”, from the Cones series. In it, as in its companion works “Magnificent Era” (in the collection of Istanbul Modern) and “Mimar Sinan”, he enters into a dialogue with the history of Turkey. In 2012 the composer Kamran Ince wrote a piano piece based on this collage. Doğançay’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Albertina in Vienna, Istanbul Modern and the State Russian Museum. In 1992 the Russian Museum held his solo exhibition “Walls and Doors”.

In 2004 the Doğançay Museum opened in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, regarded as Turkey’s first museum of contemporary art. In the same year he received an honorary doctorate from Hacettepe University in Ankara, and in 1995 the president of Turkey awarded him the National Medal for the Arts.

For the last eight years of his life he worked in turn in studios in New York and in Turgutreis. He died in Istanbul on 16 January 2013. He was buried on 19 January in Turgutreis, in the Karabağ cemetery, in accordance with his own will.