Best-selling artist Burhan Dogancay dies

 

 

Istanbul (Dunya) – Funeral services will be held in Istanbul today for Burhan Dogancay, 83, a celebrated contemporary artist whose works on urban walls are on display at hundreds of museums and business headquarters worldwide, his museum curator said.

 

He died on Wednesday at the Istanbul American Hospital, where he was undergoing treatment. He will be interred on Saturday at Turgutreis, Bodrum, on the Aegean Coast, where he lived during the last few years.

 

Mr. Dogancay was born in Istanbul in 1928, the son of Adil Dogancay, an army officer, cartographer and artist. He began painting at the age of four under the tutelage of his father and Arif Kaptan, a noted artist.

 

He studied law at Ankara University and received an MA and Ph.D.  from the University of Paris. In France, he took arts courses at La Grande Chaumiere. He worked for the Trade and Turkish Tourism Ministries and served as an attaché in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

 

In 1961, he left the Turkish diplomatic service and settled in the U.S. to devote his life to the arts.

 

While living in New York City, he became the only photographer to shoot pictures of the 1986 repair work being done at the Brooklyn Bridge, from scaffolding and the top of the bridge for which he was cited. He captured spectacular frames of the city.

 

"Those photos also have historic value because the Twin Towers can be seen in the background. Those buildings no longer exist,"  Bergin Azer, his assistant and curator of the Dogancay Museum in Istanbul said in an interview earlier this year..

 

Mr. Dogancay was perhaps the greatest artist in the world to study urban walls and doors.

 

"He travelled all over the world to study urban walls," Ms. Azer said. "He saw things in walls that we don’t see. Urban walls serve as a testament to the passage of time and reflect the social and economic conditions of people."

 

Examples of his collages of urban walls and doors adorn the five-story museum, an old, renovated street corner building facing Tarlabasi Avenue, on a side street running from Tarlabasi  to Istiklal Caddesi near Galatasaray.

 

The Dogancay Museum opened its doors in 2004 as Turkey’s first museum of modern art, but the Istanbul Modern and several private museums have now surpassed it both in volume and collection.

 

The ‘Blue Liberty,’ one of his most famous urban wall collages, includes newspaper clippings, snippets of magazines, photographs and ribbons, on a blue gouache picture of the Statue of Liberty, can be seen at the museum, as well as his paintings and drawings on population explosion.

 

Mr. Dogancay  had scores exhibitions dealing with urban walls, using a combination of collage and fumage.

 

Blue Symphony

 

He soared to fame in Turkey when his ‘Blue Symphony’ painting garnered $1.5 million in an Istanbul auction in 2007.  The ‘Blue Symphony’ became the third most expensive painting in Turkey after two works of Osman Hamdi Bey, a 19th century artist and archaeologist. The painting has since also been surpassed by works of the late contemporary artist Erol Akyavas in terms of revenues generated at auctions.

 

He became the first Turkish artist ever to have his works displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

 

Mr. Dogancay’s works are displayed at more than 114 museums, universities, institutions and corporate collections in 21 countries, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgium, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and the George Pompidou Center and Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He has more than 5,000 paintings, collages, sculptures and thousands of published photos to his credit.

 

The Library of Congress in Washington, American Airlines in Boston, the Sears Building and the First National Bank of Chicago, Citibank, J. Walter Thompson Company, JP Morgan Chase, and RCA Corp. in New York City also have his works in their collections. 

 

Competition for young artists

 

To encourage the arts, the Dogancay Museum organizes annual painting contests among Istanbul’s 1,500 primary schools, receiving works from 7,000 students.

 

It takes the top young artists to tours of major museums and art centers in European city’s, such as Paris, London and Rome.

 

The museum, which also sells usable art – t-shirts, books, handbags and other paraphernalia with prints of Mr. Dogancay’s works -- is open every day from 10 a.m. to six p.m