AN OVERVIEW TO LANDSCAPE IN TURKISH PAINTING AND LITERATURE

Abstract

Landscape paintings are seen in indoors in Turkey. Most of the perspective landscapes where sea and sky meet in these paintings of unknown artists can be seen on the walls of Topkapi Palace Women's Quarters. Wall paintings in Istanbul and Anatolia indicate that perspective painting reached indoors. Training of perspective painting start in military schools at the institutional level. There are nine different painting offices established within the body of Mühendishane-i Bahri-i Hümayun which was Imperial School of Naval Engineering. It seems like time has stopped under the indirect spring light in the landscapes which was painted based on a photograph. In military schools, the main subject of the painting courses implemented for ?resm-i hattî? (technical drawing) and ?menâz?r? (perspective) was land plots and view of nature. Academic figure training was not given in these courses. The progress of our art of painting in two forms as landscape and figure results from two different viewpoints. The landscapes that can be defined as a reflection of the sufi spirit in the Tanzimât period are transformed into an expression form of positivism as of the years of the Constitutional Period. Impressionism, which started with the return of the painters of 1914 Generation to the homeland, pushed the artists to work outdoors, and every corner of Istanbul turned into a picturesque painting. For certain, these landscapes will vary according to the perspectives of the artists on places from popular venues of the public to remote cemeteries, and their subjectivity. Within this process, description in literature corresponds to landscape in painting, painters and literary artists sometimes express the same landscape in their own languages without the knowledge of each other. During the first years of the Republic, Pera was reflected on paintings and writings accomplished by the artists together. After 1950s, abstract works has become the indicator of artist's autonomy and sometimes the starting point of abstractions could be landscapes.