Abidin Dino, 1913-1993

Although he was born in İstanbul, Abidin Dino’s family moved to Switzerland the same year with the result that he spent his boyhood in Europe. Enrolled in Robert College, the youth was more interested in painting and drawing with the result that he eventually dropped out of school. In 1933 he was one of the founders of the D Group along with the painters Nurullah Berk, Cemal Tollu, Zeki Faik İzer, and Elif Naci and the sculptor Zühtü Müritoğlu. A largely self-taught artist, Abidin Dino became an active participant in the Parisian art scene after his return to France in 1952. His home in Paris became a favorite gathering-place for many famous authors and artists.

As in all of Dino’s work, Antibes is an example of the artist’s penchant for transforming nature into a game of abstract forms created from the interaction of daylight and darkness. Unlike most other landscapes, this painting does not represent a scene as a straightforward copy of the “real” world but rather treats it as a means whereby it may be reconstructed through the perception of the eye. In the forms in Dino’s canvas we might see islands, or the boulders in a breakwater, or perhaps a boat tied up to a dock; but the natural objects from which the objects were abstracted are essentially unimportant for what this painting shows us is the artist’s vision of brilliant sunlight countering darkness, of cool water overwhelmed by tremendous heat.