Biography
Abidin Dino was the fifth and last of extraordinarily talented siblings. His father worked as a writer, translator, and senior bureaucrat — his sophisticated intellectual presence influenced his children. Abidin learned drawing and caricature from two brothers, especially the eldest, Arif. He lived in Geneva with his family during his childhood. They moved to Paris in 1920, and in 1923, they returned to Turkey. At ten years old, he was enrolled in Istanbul’s Robert College, an American high school, but dropped out only two years later. By 1930, his drawings had already been published in magazines; his writings would follow shortly after.
His brother Arif Dino, who was close to Abidin throughout his life, was a philosopher and poet. Building friendships with other painters, writers, thinkers, and poets, Arif and Abidin grew together in every sense. Among these friends, their neighbour, a calligrapher, substantially impacted the brothers' work. They became friends shortly after moving to Istanbul. The calligraphy expert showed Abidin the finesse of his practice. Dino utilised not only the fluent linearity of calligraphy but also the stacking in his tile designs, which he made in one go, without hestiation, as if by magic. From then on, everything Dino did would fall somewhere between writing and drawing.
Although he had not signed any of his works before, calligraphy enabled his name to become a drawing; his drawings were his signature, yet his signature was a drawing itself. Dino had exceptionally delicate hands with long nails at the tips of his long fingers — his grandfather Abidin, whom he was named after, had been nicknamed ‘beautiful hands’. The various hands he drew almost daily over the years embody Dino's signature. When he mentioned how, at times, the hand drawings were getting out of his control and were starting almost to draw themselves, it is merely impossible not to invoke the ‘automatic drawings’ in which the Surrealists left the lines to sway freely on paper, breaking off the relationship with consciousness. Abidin Dino belonged to the same generation as the Surrealists, and after moving to Paris in the late 1930s, he would spend a lot of time with the founders of this movement; however, he noted that he was never one of them.
Before Paris, Abidin mainly exhibited with his friends in Istanbul with D Grubu (Group D), a movement that significantly influenced art in Turkey from the 1930s to the 1950s. Although he is mentioned as one of the founders, his relationship with D Grubu was like the tangential association he established with the Surrealists. Thinking and working with others was essential to Dino; D Grubu appealed to him as a social movement, but he was not one of them. Abidin's pictorial language did not belong to groups, schools, or movements. Indeed, he would teach himself how to draw but also lend a careful ear to jazz, dance the tango, direct a movie about football, and sculpt on both small and large scales. He would knead crow-mouthed pitchers from clay and spontaneously assemble words for a stage play or a unique, critical review.
Growing up in a crowded, intellectual, and creative family and environment, Abidin Dino gathered people around him who shared similar traits. This charisma or aura, noted by many people who knew Dino, but especially by his wife Güzin, is likely due to his ability to realise whatever he wants quickly. He was an artist of his time but remained deeply idiosyncratic. The writer Yaşar Kemal refers to him as "the tone-setter." He never drifted with others; he instead stayed to collect memories and experiences within his circles.
When invited to the Soviet Union after drawing the attention of Russian director Sergei Yutkevich for the sense of movement in his drawings, Dino was very impressed by how Russian artists, with whom he spent some time in Moscow, Leningrad, and Odesa, managed to exist together. He named them "artist-ocracy." After spending time in Ankara, Istanbul, and Adana, he returned to settle in Paris in 1952. Considering Dino's interest in drawing hands until the mid-1950s, it is interesting that while he was blossoming in his own "artist-tocracy," he tackled another motif he would repeat until the end of his life: flowers. Among artists like Kuzgun Acar, Hakkı Anlı, Kemal Bastuji, Albert Bitran, Nejad Devrim, Tiraje Dikmen, İlhan Koman, Fikret Mualla, and Mübin Orhon, Abidin became the cement ring. He introduced his friends to each other and Turkey's art history not only at his dinner table but also in his countless letters, news articles, and catalogue texts.
Dino's writings reinforced his artist friends' existence, and he generously offered his art to his writer friends. The most influential novels, short stories, and poetry books of his time — including those by Nâzım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal, Melih Cevdet Anday, Sait Faik, and Gülten Akın— were accompanied by his drawings. For many readers, Dino's illustrations became an integral part of the texts, so much so that the books would be almost unrecognisable had they not been published with his cover illustrations. The most suitable epithet to define Dino may be ‘the narrator’. He narrated virtually everything: the dervishes of Anatolia, the monasteries, drug addicts, immigrants, and even the nightlife in Istanbul. He narrated the War of Independence, but also the Cambodian Civil War, the demonstrations, the coal mines, the cruelty, all the flowers, and the slums where flowers grow. The faces, one by one, all the labouring hands, and he also narrated the May '68 in Paris, the Bolshevik revolution, Chernobyl, and the nomads of Anatolia which he held in admiration, the Sufi music he listened to in reverence, and an apple tasted. He kept an account of life itself.
