Hale Asaf

Biography

In the spring of 1938 a Turkish woman painter died in Paris, aged thirty-three. Her paintings stayed with a man close to her, the Italian writer Antonio Aniante, and afterwards were scattered: some were lost during the Second World War.

Hale was born in 1905 in Istanbul, in the Kadıköy district, into a judge’s family: her father was president of the Ottoman Court of Appeals. As a child her surname was Salih. At five she underwent an operation for a serious illness, and she felt its consequences all her life. She had her first schooling at home, then finished at Notre Dame de Sion, a private French school, where she learned French and English.

In 1919 she was sent to Rome to her aunt, the painter Mihri Müşfik Hanım, and there she had her first painting lessons. The following year she was already in Paris, where Namık İsmail, a friend of the family, taught her drawing. Then her relatives sent her to Berlin. Her illness flared up there and she needed an operation on her lungs, but Hale passed the entrance examinations of the Prussian Academy of Arts and entered the class of Arthur Kampf. Her family was going through a break-up in those years: her father had left for Egypt. In 1924 her portraits were printed in Berlin art magazines, and people began to talk about her for the first time.

Back in Istanbul she studied briefly at the girls’ school of fine arts under Feyhaman Duran and İbrahim Çallı. Her mother died of tuberculosis in Switzerland, and Hale began to sign herself Asaf, after her grandfather; some authors also point to her mother’s side of the family. In 1925 she won a Ministry of National Education competition for study in Europe, and reportedly she was the first woman to do so. From 1926 she studied in Munich under Lovis Corinth. That summer she showed portraits at the Galatasaray Exhibition in Istanbul, the main venue for young artists, held from 1916 to 1951.

In 1927–1928 Hale Asaf was in Paris again: she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under André Lhote and took private lessons from the ceramic artist İsmail Hakkı Oygar, to whom she became engaged. In 1928 she took part in the National Society exhibition in Paris.

In the autumn of 1928 she was appointed drawing teacher at the girls’ teacher-training school in Bursa, and later she also taught French there, at the girls’ art institute. In April 1929 six of her works were shown at the first exhibition of young painters in Ankara. In July 1929 she was among the founders of the Independent Painters and Sculptors Association, the first woman among its founders. In the autumn, at the association’s exhibition in Istanbul, she showed portraits and views of Bursa.

After her cosmopolitan childhood, provincial Bursa was hard to get used to. When she was painting at the bazaar, a crowd that disliked the sight of a woman with an easel (by another account, was offended by a painting) set upon her, and she fainted. By the end of 1929 she had swapped posts with the painter Mahmut Cûda: he took her place in Bursa, and she became an assistant to Namık İsmail at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. Her low spirits did not lift, and at the end of 1931 Asaf left the academy and went to Paris alone.

In Paris she needed another operation. About then she met Antonio Aniante, an Italian writer who ran the Galerie-Librairie Jeune Europe. He invited her to stay, and she began working in the gallery. Later they set up home together. Her paintings were shown at the Jeune Europe exhibitions of 1932 and 1933, at the Salon des Tuileries and, in the autumn of 1935, at the Salon des Indépendants. In 1934 the gallery closed, and the books of Aniante, an opponent of Mussolini, were banned in a number of countries. What saved them from want, so the story goes, was that King Zog I of Albania paid five thousand francs for a portrait.

Hale Asaf died on 31 May 1938 and was buried in a Paris cemetery. A survey of 2001–2002 counted twenty-one portraits by her, of which ten survive, and thirteen views of Bursa, of which ten are known. Of five Paris landscapes, one survives. Some of the paintings are with Turkish collectors; the fate of the rest is unknown.