Thursday, November 22, 2012

Monet, Japanese Gardens and a City Called Istanbul


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.

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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.

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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.

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