An Inside Look at Yüksel Arslan's Outsider Practice, 1955–64

Abstract

This essay provides new evidence for a historiographical re-contextualization of the early artistic practice of Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan (1933–2017). Within this scholarship, Arslan is generally portrayed as an outsider figure who resisted traditional artistic categorizations; consequently, the historical conditions leading to his artistic posture in 1950s Istanbul, where his career began, remain underexplored. Arslan's fascination for prehistoric methods of image making, his erudite subject matters, and his contributions to the legacies of surrealism and of art brut have been mostly regarded by critics and art historians as idiosyncratic elements of his artistic identity. Focusing on Arslan's early production in 1950s Istanbul and its reception in art criticism and art historiography, the essay argues that Arslan's outsider status was informed by and contributed to widespread debates about artistic heritage and what its role should be in Turkey's fraught political scenario of the 1950s, torn between liberalism and centralized governance, and in the context of Turkey's contemporary artistic production.