Fikret Muallâ was born in Istanbul in 1903, the son of Mehmed Ekrem Bey, a director at the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. After his secondary education at the Galatasaray High School, he was sent to Switzerland to study engineering; his passion for painting drew him instead to Germany, first to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and then to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where he trained in the studio of Arthur Kampf. Returning to Istanbul in 1926, he spent several years teaching painting, illustrating books, and contributing drawings to magazines, yet he never found the recognition he sought in the city’s art circles. On 15 January 1939, he left for Paris and never returned.
The Paris years were at once a period of great artistic maturity and great hardship. Despite everything, Muallâ’s output never ceased; if anything, the life of the city around him grew more vivid and more freely rendered with each passing year. Gouache on cheap paper suited his temperament perfectly: it dried fast, demanded nothing, and allowed him to set down what he saw almost in the same instant as seeing it. By 1954, when a show at the Galerie Dina Vierny brought him to wider attention, the model and writerYouki Desnos had already named him ‘the painter of Paris’.
Fikret Muallâ’s art is grounded in a Fauvist sense of colour and an Expressionist line. Fauvism, as practised by Henri Matisse and André Derain at the turn of the century, freed colour from its descriptive obligations: rather than recording what the eye sees, colour becomes the carrier of feeling and atmosphere, saturated, pure, and often deliberately unnatural. Muallâ absorbed this sensibility, deepening it through his earlier exposure to German Expressionism, and made it entirely his own. In his hands, a single colour can do the work of light, air and space together; orange does not merely fill the background of a composition, it becomes the composition’s climate.
'Street - Orange' belongs, along with the other gouache works in the SSM Painting Collection, to Muallâ’s Paris years, though it is undated. Against a ground of deep, enveloping orange, five figures are arranged across the picture plane: dressed in blue, white and reddish-brown, they stand close together, yet each seems sealed within a private world, present in the same scene but quite unreachable by one another. Two figures on the left move leftward; the figure at the right edge moves in the opposite direction; the two in the centre face outward, apparently still. Faces are offered as colour alone, without feature or expression. Perspective has been set aside entirely, and the figures lie flush against the surface of the picture, almost as flat as the ground. Washes of orange, blue and white continue beyond the drawn lines, dissolving the edges of each form into the next.
The SSM Painting Collection holds two further works from this series, 'Street - Blue' and 'Street - White'. In the context of the collection, Muallâ represents the later reaches of Turkish painting's modernising trajectory; and in this work, Paris appears not as a place of exile but of hard-won freedom.
