İbrahim Balaban

Biography

In 1953 the first solo exhibition of İbrahim Balaban opened at the French Cultural Centre in Istanbul. He was thirty-two, his schooling had lasted three grades, and years in prison lay behind him. According to some accounts, about fifty paintings were sold at the show; the public and the press took an interest, while professional artists and critics greeted a peasant without a diploma with mockery.

He was born in the village of Seçköy, in the Osmangazi district of Bursa Province. The date is given differently: some sources say 1 January 1921, others give only the year.

His parents did not allow him to study further: the village school had three grades. In protest Balaban refused to work, and until the age of fifteen he taught himself, writing and drawing. He drew his father and grandfather at work, peasants at weddings and festivals, children, oxen, fields and orchards.

At the end of 1937, aged sixteen, he was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine for growing cannabis. He could not pay, and the term was extended to three years. In prison he earned money as a barber, and he drew, according to his biographers, with coloured pencils dipped in olive oil, because there was no money for oil paints. After his release he was tried again, this time for the murder of a man regarded as his accomplice in the first case and his rival in love for his first wife, Fadime. By some accounts he himself considered the first charge unjust. He served part of his term on the island of İmralı, until 1947; he was then transferred back to the prison in Bursa. The sources give the years of imprisonment differently, and I would not fix them more precisely than “from the late 1930s to 1950”. He was released under the amnesty of 1950.

In the Bursa prison he met Nâzım Hikmet, who had been convicted for his political poetry. Hikmet painted himself, saw talent in the young prisoner and gave him his paints and brushes. He became Balaban’s mentor, helping him shape his views on philosophy, sociology, economics and politics. Balaban called him the “Poet Father” (Şair Baba), and Hikmet, in a letter to the novelist Kemal Tahir, called him “my peasant painter”. They kept in touch after their release.

Once free, Balaban lived in Istanbul for two years, by some accounts in the house of Hikmet’s mother. He then served in the army, returned to his village and married; they had two sons and a daughter. His elder son, Hasan Nazım Balaban, also became a painter.

In 1959, with several colleagues, he founded the group Yeni Dal (“New Branch”). Its members were arrested over paintings in an exhibition in 1961 and acquitted after fifty days; the group dissolved in 1963. Separately, after the military coup of 1960, Balaban spent six months in custody for drawings on political themes. The sources relate this episode to the group’s case in different ways, and it may be a single event.

His themes changed. At first he painted the poverty of village life and peasants’ tools, then turned to epic, folk beliefs, folk heroes and mythology, and later to migration to the city, urban life and the struggle for democracy. His series include “Those Walking on the Pavements”, “Migration”, “Faces of the Producers”, “The Joy of Children” and “Women of Anatolia”. In his paintings on folk subjects appear Aşık Garip, Kerem and Aslı, Ferhat and Şirin, Karagöz and Hacivat, and Nasreddin Hodja. Critics described him as a maker of socially realist works drawn from Anatolian life. He himself said that he painted scenes from the everyday life of people in Turkey, because he had always observed them and kept what he saw in his memory. Hikmet wrote poems inspired by his paintings “Spring”, “The Prison Gate” and “Threshing”.

His exhibitions took place in Turkey and, in 1979–1980, in Germany and the Netherlands, more than fifty in all, showing over two thousand works. He showed drawings in Istanbul in 2005, and they were collected in the book “Balaban: Lines of Life”. In 2008 he played Bülbül Hoca in Reis Çelik’s film “The Refugee” (“Mülteci”), and in 2012 his exhibition “Our Balaban” was held in Istanbul.

From the 1960s he also wrote books, eleven in all. His memoir of seven years beside Hikmet appeared under the title “The Poet Father and Those on the Roof” (1968) and again in 2003 as “Seven Years with Nâzım Hikmet”; a stage adaptation of the book was produced in Ankara in 2011. There are also the novels “Trial in the Mountains” and “Those Who Do Not Fit the Mould”, collections of stories and travel notes.

Balaban died on 9 June 2019 in Istanbul, aged ninety-eight. He is buried in his native village of Seçköy.