Hale Asaf, 1905-1938

In 1919 Hale Asaf began her art education in Rome under her aunt Mihri Müşfik, before moving to Paris in 1920. In 1921 she gaining admission to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under Professor Arthur Kampf. On her return to Turkey, she briefly attended the School of Fine Arts for Girls and İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts, and passed the Europe examination, whereupon she was sent by the Ministry of Education to Munich where she became the student of Lovis Corinth. She later attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére and studied under André Lhote. When she returned to İstanbul in 1928, Asaf played a role in the founding of the Union of Independent Painters and Sculptors. In 1931 she moved to Paris for health reasons, and died there in 1938.

The “Still-life” is an explicit example of Cubist space analysis. The problem of representing three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces has been an issue that artists everywhere have always had to address and it has lost none of its importance even today. Although the geometrical perspective solution arrived at by European artists in the 15th century came to be the dominant one, Cubists in particular questioned it on the grounds that it was more concerned with creating an illusion of three-dimensionality than it was with depicting reality. Cubist artists depict their subjects from a multitude of viewpoints to represent them in a greater context. In this Asaf painting, the space containing the artist’s subject (a bottle) is depicted by means of unnatural-looking, sharply-angled blocks of color. This creates the impression that the bottle is being seen from the side while the table on which its stands is being viewed from above. The planes making up the bottle are executed with aggressive brushstrokes using the same chunks of color from which the ground is constructed.