Domesticating the avant-garde in a nationalist era: Aesthetic modernism in 1930s Turkey

This paper investigates the rise of aesthetic modernism in Turkey’s early republican era (i.e., the late 1920s and the 1930s), with an emphasis on the influence of international cultural currents on Turkey’s intelligentsia. The paper concentrates on the modernist ideas and works of the D Group, who advocated a high modernism in the plastic arts, and the literary modernism of the socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet (Ran). Firstly, it addresses the historiographical argument that aesthetic modernism in Turkey was a derivative enterprise, a low-grade replica of European modernism. Secondly, it argues that the early republican intelligentsia found itself in a dilemma with regard to modernist currents. For them, aesthetic modernism was a sign of the modern epoch, but it also carried a radical potential for a critique of bourgeois modernity. Aesthetic modernism not only promised change, functionality, and renewal, but also manifested such disturbing symptoms of modernity as individualism, melancholy, degeneration, and restlessness. The paper reaches the conclusion that figures such as the D Group artists and Nâzım Hikmet translated the avant-garde international currents of aesthetic modernism into the early republican context, opting for positive and optimistic versions of modernism rather than adopting its more alienating, pessimistic, and despairing features. Through their works, an intellectual debate on aesthetic modernism was initiated in early republican Turkey.