MAHMUT CUDA

In 1918, he enrolled in Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi Alisi and studied at Hikmet Onat and İbrahim Çallı Workshops. In 1923, he went to Munich with his own means and worked in the Hans Hofmann Workshop for about a year. Successful in the European exam held in 1924, he studied at the Lucien Simon Workshop in Paris for four years. In 1929, he worked at the State Academy of Fine Arts for a short time. The artist, who started working as a cartographer at Istanbul University Faculty of Letters in 1935, retired from this position in 1969. Some time before his death in 1987, he was honored with the title of "Honorary Professor" by Mimar Sinan University.

Artistic perspective:
Mahmut Cuda's art is closely related to the understanding of volume and plan values of the Painters and Sculptors Union, which he took part in founding. In this respect, the artist should not be separated from the common tendency of the 1930s generation, which reacted to the impressionist and academic understanding. However, although Mahmut Cuda shares this tendency, he has also managed to bring a personal perspective and interpretation, especially in his still lifes. Each object that makes up his still lifes not only contains the feeling of a plastic mass in space, but also goes beyond this feeling of mass with a clear and bright image of object-space relations. It draws the viewer into the mystery of a world beyond nature that is “more nature.”

The artist, who did not attempt to distort the form in Independents, on the contrary, respected nature at a level of taste that can be called classical. Although Mahmut Cuda always maintained the connection with the classical painting masters, he did not seek to revive this relationship. His paintings, which are the products of his direct and sincere observation of nature, were directly modeled on the objects themselves, not their photographed images. Mahmut Cuda is also an artist who has a unique place among his contemporaries because he acted from a simple and unpretentious approach in a period when Western movements and tendencies were unquestionably adopted.

In a period when Turkish painting began to experience a radical change in line with concerns about modernism, Cuda; It exemplifies a painting that is formally sound, clear and expressive. The artist, who pursued a dynamic pictorial formation in his early periods, only gradually began to adopt an "idealism" in which he described the color and formal values of objects and figures with absolute observation and developed his own measurements.
This absolute realistic approach, which has been the constant style of Cuda's long-term artistic life, almost turns into imaginations that rely on technical perfection and create their own imaginary world in a misty atmosphere. Fictional still life works, which the artist systematically turned to, especially in the 1940s, essentially aim to create new meanings for themselves with the special and selected objects they contain.