"Nature Morte"
Still Life:
For most part of Fikret Mualla’s adut life, he practically had trouble finding food on a daily basis. He was born into a wealthy family and with the effect of the rich life he remembers from his youth, everytime he had some money, he would spend it all on the most expensive food he could find in a single day. His soul does not hide a bohemian, but a high spending consumer in it. For this reason he doesn’t like to choose ordinary food he likes food with specialties. This love, which reflects onto his paintings, verified by his letters and what he has told his friends is that he tends to have a “gourmet” side to him. Especially in the final years of Reillanne, from the letters he wrote we know that he was after special tastes in his kitchen, playing “chef” rarely cooking for his guests. Most subjects about Mualla’s Still Life, are food that he will eat or drink later. That is why he has many Stll Life paintings, besides flower paintings, with wine bottles and food. This can be interpreted as his final gastronomic diary of his final period in Reillanne. According to some researchers, Still Life (naturemort) is the least favorable subject for Fikret Mualla’s artistic personality.
Yalın Alpay & Prof Dr.Emre Alkin, “Moualla’nın Sanatı”, Sosyal Yayınları, 2016, Page: 104, 10
Gouache on cardboard
18 x 20,5 cm
1952, signed
This work will be included in the second volume of the Fikret Mualla Catalogue Raisonnée prepared by Kerem Topuz and Marc Ottavi.
This work has a certificate prepared by Marc Ottavi.
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FİKRET MUALLA (1903 - 1967)
He was born in Istanbul in 1903. He studied at Galatasaray High School. He spent a while in Switzerland, Germany and France to study engineering. In 1930, he changed his mind and returned to Turkey. He organized his first personal exhibition in Istanbul in 1934 and worked as an art teacher for a while. He settled in Paris in 1938. Instead of a regular education, Mualla left himself to the free formation of his instincts. Fikret Mualla, who lived a difficult but productive life in Paris, where he came as a result of a search, managed to attract attention by systematizing a new and original approach to painting in a very modest way - in the context of observations about daily life. Mualla, who breathes the bohemian atmosphere of bars and cafes, especially in the troubled atmosphere of the Second World War, is an important attitude that stands out with its level of expression, composition and color sensitivity within the figure tradition. The series he created with the gouache technique on paper, which is a suitable basis for rapid production, was quick to produce a solution that found its counterpart in the synthesis of Fauvism and Expressionism, integrating with the colorist sensitivity based on the Post-Impressionist heritage and partly on Henri Matisse. At this stage it is official; While determining according to the result of a spontaneous sensitivity's desire to observe and transform; He also tied the pursuit of painting to a problem of existence.
This Paris adventure, which essentially lies in exclusion and inability to hold on to one's own country, seems to have turned into a sad story that lasts until the end of one's life, in pursuit of a closed-circuit relationship that finds meaning only in producing paintings. Contrary to the extravagance and disorder in his life, his paintings reflect an artist's attitude that dominates the subject and style. Paris' entertainment venues, drinking halls, people walking on the streets, and cafes are displayed with colorful expressions in Fikret Mualla's large and small paintings. Fikret Mualla is the first Turkish artist who managed to open the doors of our contemporary art of painting to the Western world with his tragic life and depression and the original-personality structure of his painting and was able to make a name for himself in Western sources. Mualla, whose works are in various international museums and private collections, died in Paris in 1967.