I was in
Fethiye when the Monet exhibition “Monet’s Garden” opened at the SSM Sakip
Sabanci Museum in Istanbul. I saw the
exhibition twelve days later on a sunny and relatively warm Wednesday
morning. And I was not sure if this
exhibition was about Monet’s paintings.
It seemed to be more about a man wanting to be known better.
I had seen
Monet’s paintings in different parts of the world before. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York. In Paris. Even in Japan, at the
Ohare Museum of Art. I had various books
on Monet, including a huge one by Sandro Sproccati as well. Yet, on the day that
I visited this exhibition, seven days after this French painter was born in
Paris in 1840, I was realizing that when I am faced the energy of his
paintings, he was becoming alive.
I have been
to different museums around the world. I
had encounters with paintings that did take my breath away. Pictures that moved me even days after I
visited them. I saw paintings that
touched me beyond description when I saw them with my bare eyes even if I knew
them so very well through books and the media.
J.M.W. Turner is one painter that I fell in love with after seeing his
paintings in an exhibition in Zurich.
When standing in front of one of his paintings, it is impossible to
resist the charm of the effect of the light. He is surely “the painter of
light.” Seeing a Turner with your own eyes cannot compare in any way with
seeing a Turner painting in a book or on paper or on screen. There is something is his paintings that no
camera seems to be able to capture.
With Monet,
I had always loved his paintings, since I was a kid. They were everywhere. The water lilies especially. Who would not love Monet? With the pastel
colours, with the pinks and the greens, the purples with dashes of white and
the shades of the sun?
Well, as I
was looking at the paintings at the exhibition, which were brought to Turkey
from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, I was
being faced with the fact that the Claude Monet that I thought I knew. Here was a man infatuated with nature, with
his garden. A man who wanted to capture
what he loved to be near and what he loved to see, but seems to be losing
himself in what he was looking at when he is painting.
I cannot
say the the paintings at the “Monet’s Garden” exhibition are even the best of
Monet that I had seen. For me, it was
not one of those exhibitions where a painting really captures my heart and
soul. There were very few paintings that
had a special light, a special energy for me.
It was more like feeling Monet’s heart, and may be more if his sad days
than the happier ones. Seeing his paintings
as a part of big exhibitions in different museum, Monet had reflected feelings
of serene joy and peaceful happiness for me. Until the day I visited the
exhibition in Istanbul.
As I was
looking at the painting one after the other, I felt the heart of a man who
wanted to be remembered. It was as if we
were faced not with the energy of his paintings, but the energy of his own
soul. I looked and looked again to be
impressed, and I was faced with the same message. It was him not his paintings that wanted to
be known.
So that
evening, I found myself collecting all of the books that I have on Monet as
well as the “Monet’s Garden” exhibition book, as well as book on Japanese
Gardens, to understand this man as well as trying to understand what he might have
wanted to bring into his wife with “The Japanese Bridge” which he depicted in
so many of his painting in the ever growing fabulous garden of his.
...
As I was
driving back from the exhibition to my apartment in Arnavutkoy, I passed
by Japanese Garden in Baltalimani. I remembered how frequently I think of Japan,
how I love Kyoto and the gardens of the temples in that beautiful city. I found myself wondering if Monet had ever
made it to Japan and what was behind his admiration with the Far Eastern Culture.
...
I love
Japan. There is no doubt about it. My soul finds a hard to define peacefulness
there. Yet, I love Fethiye as well. I feel strangely complete in this small
city. I cannot not come back.
And then
there is Istanbul. A city full of people
struggling. People fighting with themselves as well those that they love. A city that makes us forget what we are made
of. I was born in Istanbul. I was raised there. I lived there. It was all that I had before Fethiye. I did not have a home town, another home city
that I could go to or go back to . Neither did my mother or my late father have. Istanbul was all that we had. And maybe it is
still all that we have in this beautiful and complicated country of ours where
our heart, mind and soul face its demons, joys, questions and triumphs. It will continue to be a city that many of us
run away from but also cannot help from coming back to.
The
“Monet’s Garden” Exhibition will be on display until January 6th,
2013 at the Sakip Sabanci Museum in.
