Metrics of Modernity Art and Development in Postwar Turkey

Reviews

"Metrics of Modernity will prompt new, productive methodological approaches in the field. Notably, art historians might retool the same categories to form a shared ground of comparison that cuts across established regional and cultural boundaries in current art historical scholarship."—H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews

"Metrics of Modernity is the first book in any language to illuminate postwar art in Turkey in all its complexity, using the varied lenses of a new economy, rapid internationalization, and state support and intervention. Blending the historian’s rigor with the storyteller’s command of narrative, Sarah-Neel Smith reveals how an artistic community molded during the liberalization of the 1950s—and pulled geopolitically between the Soviets, a nonaligned South and East, the NATO countries, and Iran—built the foundations of today’s global contemporary art scene."—Vasıf Kortun, Research and Curatorial Advisor, Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

"Metrics of Modernity charts a much-needed history of a precise period and presents a remarkable narrative based on a web of interactions between objects, people, and institutions. Sarah-Neel Smith employs a new methodology based on an alternative body of evidence that moves away from mainstream institutional history. She rigorously mines a noninstitutional structure that is equally a narrative of state opposition and a history of an elite class. She meticulously plugs Turkey into the wider postwar discourse and debates about art and democracy across different geopolitical contexts, particularly through abstraction.—Nada Shabout, Regents Professor of Art History, University of North Texas