Visions of aesthetics and culture in Yeni Adam: republic of fine arts (1934-1950)

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the construction of art and aesthetic as objects of national identitiy construction in both Kemalist and Yeni Adam’s cultural conservative perspective in the early Republican Turkey covers a period between the mid 1930s and the 1940s. Following the state’s building process, discussion on culture, tradition, and ideology were questioned by different groups of intellectuals and state authorities. On the one hand, the single party regime monopolized artistic production and contributed state directed national art.On the other hand, smayıl Hakkı Baltacıoglu was a follower of cultural nationalist ideology in the early era attempt to deal with the main problematics of national art in more liberal way. This thesis presents discussions on a broad scale of visual arts in the period of nation-building.Art critiques of early Republican intellectuals show the ongoing efforts to change the society’s perception of art.Among the dominant discourse of the 1930s, Yeni Adam’s critical perspective on art and aethetic in the concept of nation-state and Westernism went hand in hand with nationalism and modernism. Yeni Adam’s reshaping the Western cultural formation in the Turkish culture opened up a new path for art and aesthetics in which nationalism, social realism, and modernism co-existed.