Lot 206: * Fikret Moualla Saygi (Turkey, 1903-67) Card Players

gouache on paper, signed lower left
515 x 635 mm.

Footnotes

• Provenance
  Swiss private collection; acquired by the seller and her father in Paris in the 1960s, from Mrs Fernande Anglès, a close friend of the artist.
  
  Born into a wealthy family in 1903 in Kadiköy, Istanbul, Fikret Moualla is recognised alongside Abidin Dino as one of Turkey's most important 20th Century artists. As a child, injury prevented him from realising his sporting career, resulting in a permanent limp, thus rendering him an easy object of abuse. His difficult childhood was the root of a lifetime's mental torment, anxiety and illness later necessitating numerous periods in psychiatric hospitals and institutions.
  Although he struggled academically, his period of study in Germany was paramount in laying the foundations for his artistic career. German expressionism strongly influenced his work, encouraging his already evident detachment from a classical approach to painting. The violence, lack of harmony, and clashes in form and colour of expressionism, resonated in Moualla's increasingly unstable character, and aroused a desire to produce work of a similar nature. His mental volatility, accompanied by a growing dependency on alcohol, developed even more so upon his move to Paris in 1939.
  
  The Parisian social scene proved to be a subject worthy of gouache, his preferred medium. He would work quickly, frequenting the taverns, bars and cafes which would prove to be places detrimental to his addiction.
  In the present and following lots, Moualla depicts social gatherings in the familiar spaces of a cafe and a bar. He uses vivid, bold blocks of colour, suggestive of Fauvism, to translate the busy scenes onto paper and applies the paint in an urgent manner, quickly and fluently. See Abidin Dino and Ara Guler, Fikret Mualla, Istanbul, 1980.