Biography
Mübin Orhon was born in 1924 in İstanbul. His first name Mustafa, which he never used when signing his paintings, was the name of his great-grandfather Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Pasha, the ambassador of Paris and the editor-in-chief of the Edict of Gülhane. The death of his mother at the age of 26 deeply affected the family, especially the six-month-old Mübin. According to his daughter, Bénédicte and one of his older brothers, Ragıp, the absence of his mother, whom he endlessly admired, turned into an abyss for him. The only way for Mübin to cope with his quest was to build an artistic practice based on existence rather than absence.
After graduating from the German-speaking Istanbul High School, Orhon studied at the Faculty of Political Science in Ankara. He completed his studies in 1947 and spent the next couple of months as a poetry enthusiast. He met the renowned poets of his time, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, and Hasan Âli Yücel at Orhan Veli’s partner Miss Nahit’s ‘salon.’ Upon his return to Istanbul, his family wanted to send him to London, where he could specialise in international relations. However, leaving his hometown in 1948, he could only go as far as Paris since shortly after his departure, his father brought down the family fortune on the stock market.
In France, Orhon started searching for a graduate degree to match his parents’ expectations and reached out to the artist Selim Turan, one of his childhood friends. Being familiar with Parisian ateliers, instead of prestigious schools in economics, Selim invited Mübin to join the drawing classes at Académie de la Grande Chaumière and to art conversations held at Cité Universitaire. Orhon met Jean-Michel Atlan during one of these conversations and became friends with Serge Poliakoff during another. In time, he drifted from the political sciences and took up Nicolas de Staël’s painting technique and the colour and dimension theories of Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. Soon he was tearing the covers off his economics books and painting on them. After Mübin’s death, his daughter Bénédicte Orhon gave away his art tools to his friend Selim Turan; he had encouraged Mübin to start painting.
While getting used to his Parisian life, Orhon also began visiting Europe; he went to Switzerland and visited the cities of Cologne, Hamburg, and Copenhagen. After participating in a group exhibition at Université de Paris in 1949, Mübin opened his first exhibition in Stockholm in 1950. In 1952, he settled in the same hostel with artists from Turkey, including Selim Turan, Abidin Dino, and Avni Arbaş. He also became close friends with Fikret Muallâ and Albert Bitran as they frequently visited the hostel. Dino recalled that he would hear Miles Davis and the late 18th century Ottoman composer Dede Efendi from his room upstairs. One of the records that always accompanied him while working, Ruhi Su’s Yunus Emre album, played at Orhon’s funeral. In the early 1950s, just as the melodies mingled in his atelier, his Sufi way of seeking the light was slowly seeping into the European abstraction, making his practice increasingly distinct.
In 1953, one of Mübin’s works was accepted to Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the most influential abstract art show in post-World War II Paris. Two years later, he was invited to the Salon again. His works were also exhibited at Salon des Caparaisons and Salon des Arts dans le monde et en France in the late 1950s. Orhon spent the summer of 1956 with his friend Albert Bitran in Saint Paul de Vence, a town in southeastern France, a sanctuary for painters. This vacation heavily influenced his art; geometrical collages now replaced his thick paint stains.
In February 1957, right after the gallery’s opening, Mübin participated in the first group exhibition of Galerie Iris Clert with several artists, including Selim Turan. Iris Clert hosted Mübin’s one-person exhibition in June of the same year. A critical review of the show underlined the oriental influence in his lyrical abstract language. Located at Rue des Beaux-Arts 3, the gallery would soon become one of the most notable venues of the Parisian avant-garde scene. Still, the highlight of Iris Clert’s career was the show she curated for the Micro-Salon d’Avril of 1957, including 250 small-scale paintings by over a hundred artists, by Pierre Alechinsky, Abidin Dino, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Charles Maussion, and Pablo Picasso among others. This was also the first exhibition where Iris Clert would introduce Yves Klein’s works to the Paris art world. Clert, who would later devote almost all of her professional time to Klein, promised to pay Mübin a monthly allowance so that he would not feel threatened and continue his highly successful exhibitions. However, once Mübin had freed himself from the concern of earning money to cover his rent and buy painting materials, he dove into his research in abstraction, in which Clert had little interest.
Parting ways with Clert in 1959, Mübin began to work with Lucien-Durand, another well-established gallery in Paris, where he met his most loyal collectors, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. In 1963, he was among the 11 artists invited to the Homage to Delacroix exhibition held at Valerie 7; the artists included Antonio Saura and Asger Jorn. The Sainsbury couple purchased Orhon’s work bearing the same name with the exhibition.
In Turkey, Mübin Orhon’s works were shown for the first time in 1962 in an exhibition held at the Istanbul City Gallery. The artist went to Turkey two years later to fulfil his military service. According to his daughter’s biographical notes, the political legacy carried by the family since Mustafa Reşid was vital in this decision. Abidin Dino believed Mübin picked the wrong time to leave Paris; his exhibitions were going well, and his works were being collected. To the Sainsburys, his going back to Turkey was surprising. Robert Sainsbury, who showed great interest not only in Mübin’s work but also in himself as a person since the early 1960s and who regularly came to Paris at least twice a year to visit him, wrote in a letter to him on 24 June 1964, how he and his wife deeply felt the absence of Orhon while visiting Paris as he persistently questioned, “I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve quitted painting.”
In Istanbul, Mübin moved to his elder sister Jülide’s house and started working on his The Battle of Mohacs series on her terrace. Boutique Melda, where he exhibited these paintings, would turn into Melda Kaptana Art Gallery in the coming years with the support of Mübin. Sometimes, feeling uncomfortable as his father kept interrogating him on his paintings’ motivation and meaning, he evaded all his questions and dedicated his exhibition at Boutique Melda to his mother. Historians later referred to the canvasses in this exhibition as the pinnacle of Mübin’s large-scale oil paintings; from here, he would switch to gouache on paper. His close friends Selim Turan and Charles Maussion also thought Mübin’s trip to Turkey interrupted his career. However, his daughter Bénédicte strongly believed that it mediated the emergence of paper in his works, which has been in progress since the 1970s and is now considered one of the most distinctive features of Orhon’s art.
The death of his father prolonged Mübin’s stay in Turkey. It was 1971 when he finally returned to Paris. His relationship with the city, and perhaps with the rest of the world, was minimal. As he secluded himself during the 1970s, the Sainsburys continued collecting his works and supporting him; his bed, one of the few pieces of furniture in his atelier, was their gift. The simplicity of his atelier was no accident. It consisted of a bed, a desk, a cabinet for his records, stacks of gouache, blank walls, and a coffee table with thumbtacks he used to fasten his papers around the edges. Bénédicte said, “Nothing should disturb him so that he can find his colours.”
Orhon passed away in Paris in 1981 from lymphoma. His body was brought to Istanbul by his daughter and buried in the Aşiyan Asri cemetery. The grave of his mother, who was buried in the same cemetery 57 years before, was lost during the expansion of the road along the sea, and this turned into an obsession for Mübin for almost 50 years as it felt like she had disappeared once again.
The Sainsbury family donated their Mübin Orhon collection to The University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1973, opening the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 1978. Ali Artun, one of the founders of Galeri Nev (Turkey), representing Mübin Orhon, organised an exhibition from the Mübin collection of Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury in Istanbul's Yapı Kredi Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery in 1996. Charles Maussion mentioned in the exhibition catalogue that Mübin had succeeded in making the immaterial material and wished that those with open eyes could see this in his paintings.
