Filled with the grand monuments and evocative ruins of three empires — Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman — the city once known as Constantinople is practically an open-air museum. Over the last few years, Istanbul has been adding numerous indoor museums as well. Spread across the city’s seven hills, these new and newly reopened institutions feature an array of impressive buildings — renovated Ottoman-era baths, converted old factories, bold new experimental structures — and collections of everything from centuries-old Islamic artifacts to cutting-edge contemporary art. Traveling between them is both a plunge into the city’s rich history and an exploration of its dynamic 21st-century creative scene — a scene that will be further highlighted this year at the 20th edition of Contemporary Istanbul, the nation’s top art fair, in September.
Istanbul Modern
Big things are springing up along the Bosporus, the strait that separates the European and Asian continents and divides Istanbul in two. Fans of the architect Renzo Piano, who designed the splashy new home of the Istanbul Modern museum, will recognize signature stylistic elements like the silver-gray exterior, boxy geometric forms and cantilevered base on slim columns, which make the museum a structural cousin of other Piano projects, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the additions to the Harvard Art Museums.
Inside, two galleries for temporary exhibitions are complemented by an entire floor of Turkish art since 1945. Earthy, paint-encrusted canvases by Albert Bitran (a Frenchman who lived in Istanbul) and gritty street photography by Ara Guler (whose works can also be seen in the Ara Guler Museum) help represent the 1950s, while Halil Altindere’s 2022 digital NFT — a spooky computer-animated rendition of a barren, post-apocalyptic Earth — carries the collection into the current moment.
Women are strongly represented, including postwar pioneers like Fahrelnissa Zeid, whose large canvases burst with colorful interlocking geometric forms, and Semiha Berksoy, an opera star who painted cartoonlike female nudes, simultaneously comical and haunting, in shaky, childlike strokes. But the museum’s real star might be Istanbul itself. Thanks to vast glass panels in the walls and a roof deck with a reflecting pool, the city’s mosques, towers and choppy Bosporus waters are on permanent display.
Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture
From the influence of the Barbizon school on Ottoman landscapes to the key figures in rural Anatolian Cubism, the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, just next door, is a thorough education and immersion in 19th- and 20th-century Turkish art.
Established in the 1930s, the museum also has a new attention-grabbing building on the waterfront. The Istanbul-based Emre Arolat Architecture drew up the plans for the converted warehouse, whose gridlike facades of interlocking beams are punctuated with red boxes that poke out at various lengths. Inside, the color scheme goes gray and the vibe turns industrial-futuristic, courtesy of hallways lined with metal sheets and catwalk-like passages.
Starting with Ottoman-era landscapes, the collection offers a multifloor chronological survey of artistic movements, trends and themes. Seemingly every imaginable style — socialist realism, political portraits, Art Deco, Cubism and many others — gets its own gallery.
The most potent works emerge between World War I and II. Look out for Namik Ismail, who depicted Jazz Age women in thick, textured brushwork, and Belkis Mustafa, a female artist who dared to paint nudes (and died tragically young, at 29). More flamboyant still, Ali Avni Celebi’s stunning “Masquerade Ball,” painted in 1928, is an orgiastic, carnivalesque spread of grasping, groping bodies that swells with Roaring Twenties decadence.
ArtIstanbul Feshane
No organization upped the city’s cultural offerings like the Istanbul municipal government under Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. (A political rival of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr. Imamoglu has been detained since March on allegations of corruption and other charges that many political observers say are baseless.) In a few short years, it converted multiple old industrial structures — including a cluster of disused gas silos and a 1902 water-pumping station — into modern, multipurpose exhibition spaces.
The most impressive transformation sits along the Golden Horn waterway, where a nearly 200-year-old former textile factory — at one point it manufactured men’s fezzes — reopened last year as a sprawling exhibition facility named ArtIstanbul Feshane.
Books are an essential component. A large bookshop sells cultural, historical, biographical and fictional works in Turkish and English — from “Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453” to the novels of Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk — along with tomes devoted to Turkish and international artists. For an even larger multilingual selection, an on-site library provides armchairs, couches and tables where you can peruse the “Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art” or thousands of other titles.
The programming is equally international — and sometimes literary as well. Last year the space exhibited works lent from London’s Tate museum. This year, through Sept. 20, the institution is showing creations by Ahmet Gunestekin, a Turkish artist fascinated by language. Among his large-scale, sculptural installations are multiple massive white stone shards resting atop plinths made of — yes — books.
Zeyrek Cinili Hamam
The great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan — who erected many of the empire’s most famous 16th-century mosques and palaces — designed this 1530s bathhouse, Zeyrek Cinili Hamam, and well-known Ottoman ceramic workshops in Iznik manufactured the thousands of hand-painted polychrome tiles that once lined the steamy chambers. (The Louvre museum in Paris and the V&A Museum in London possess some of the original hamam’s rare remaining whole tiles.)
After a long period of disrepair and neglect, the hamam was luxuriously reborn in 2023, thanks to an opulent 13-year renovation. The baths and massages are back, along with some new innovations: multiple exhibition areas devoted to the structure’s history and the hamam tradition.
One, in the courtyard, displays Byzantine-era artifacts — fine glassware, terra-cotta oil lamps, glazed pottery — unearthed during the restoration. Another, a new museum annex, showcases fragments of the baths’ original Iznik tiles along with traditional platform shoes worn by hamam-goers in past centuries. Crafted from rare woods, precious metals, embroidered fabric and inlaid mother-of-pearl, each pair is unique. Rounding out the offerings, an underground Byzantine-era cistern (drained of water and outfitted with modern lighting) hosts rotating contemporary art exhibitions. Composed of site-specific paintings and sculptural forms in multiple materials, “Murmurations,” by the London-based artist Anousha Payne, runs until Aug. 15.
Museum of Islamic Civilizations
The most remarkable objects in the Museum of Islamic Civilizations — a sleek, dimly lit annex to Turkey’s largest mosque, the Grand Camlica Mosque — are also the hardest to see. Soft and fine as thread and maybe an inch long, they reside in a thin glass tube, barely visible to the naked eye: hairs purported to come from the beard of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in the year 632.
Spread over two levels, the collection’s several hundred exquisite antique objects — carpets, coins, books, maps, metalwork and more — help recount the history and traditions of the Muslim faith. A fine 19th-century calligraphic work traces Mohammed’s family tree back to Adam and Eve, while an area devoted to the Kaaba, the holy black cube in the Grand Mosque of Mecca, showcases a sumptuous 19th-century carpet that once served as its door.
Aesthetes and design-lovers will particularly appreciate the stunning artisanal skills that glow like quicksilver from the many illuminated manuscripts, elaborately patterned shimmery caftans, and wooden boxes inlaid with complex marquetry and gleaming mother-of-pearl stands. And if the Zeyrek Cinili Hamam whetted your taste for more Turkish tiles, dozens of 16th-century, hand-painted Iznik masterworks fill several glass cases.
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