Brilliance on the Bosporus

NO nation is more torn between the culture of East and West than modern Turkey. Most of its artists take their stand on the western shore of the Bosporus, doing second-rate imitations of European art. Others occupy the eastern bank, and turn out miniature paintings, inlays and rugs of the sort traditionally associated with Persia. One of Turkey's best contemporary painters is an artist named Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu, who has one foot firmly planted on either side of the Bosporus, paints pictures that could never have been done farther east of Paris or west of Bagdad.

Now 40, Painter Eyuboglu spent three student years in Paris, came home to paint pale echoes of Raoul Dufy. In the last decade, he has spent more and more time in the villages of Anatolia, found much inspiration in Turkish folk art. The delicate brushwork and preference for pastel colors that marked his European apprenticeship have given way to strongly accentuated designs, contrasting glittery masses against vivid backgrounds (see opposite page).

Eyuboglu works best between midnight and 3 a.m.--"almost painting in my sleep." Lately he has busied himself with a variety of mediums: temperas, mosaics, and wood blocks for printing curtains and handkerchiefs. "The possibilities are limitless," he murmurs, absently dabbling a design in his coffee saucer. Business people are beginning to see the possibilities in Eyuboglu himself; negotiations are under way for a show of his art in Philadelphia, and the new Hilton Hotel being built in Istanbul will be decorated with Eyuboglu curtains.

Best of all, the Turkish government has just invited Eyuboglu and his wife, who is also a painter, to design basma--printed cloth often worn as a headdress by Moslem women--for production by the Turkish textile industry. This project, says Eyuboglu, "will make art available to thousands of the people; it is multiple art."

When he is not at the state-controlled textile factory at Nazilli, Eyuboglu still labors long and cheerfully in his dank ground-floor studio down an alley from the city's main street. He sells most of his pictures for under $50, and according to a friend, "if you express a special interest in something he has done, he'll insist on giving it to you." Eyuboglu's ambitions far outsoar commercial success. Says he: "My goal is to evolve an art as unique as Persian miniatures and Matisse, and as Turkish as our coffee and tobacco and figs."

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