Welcome to Al-Monitor Istanbul.

November calls for nostalgia, flickering memories and a soft focus. So this week’s issue looks at Burhan Uygur, the painter who broke every rule in 20th-century Istanbul, and at the velvet-lit Orient Bar at Pera Palas. We linger in the golden age of cinema with “The Art of James Cameron,” an exhibition at an old movie house recast as the city’s cinema museum, and dive into his “Alien” and “Titanic” worlds. Finally, instead of a book, we suggest the Ottoman History Podcast, where historians take a nuanced look at the empire.

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Thanks for reading,

Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: Istanbul’s rule-breaker

Burhan Uygur’s tender sketches of Istanbul and daily life (Courtesy of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Kultur)

Few painters saw Istanbul as Burhan Uygur did, with a mix of tenderness and defiance. Born in 1940 in the Black Sea town of Tirebolu, Uygur studied under poet-artist Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu at the Fine Arts Academy but soon rebelled against its methods.

“He didn’t like rules,” recalled his wife Vesile Uygur, “but he was disciplined in his defiance.” That defiance shaped one of the most original voices in Turkish art of the second half of the 20th century.

The exhibition “Solo Botter: Burhan Uygur,” curated by Levent Calikoglu with Irem Busra Coskun, brings together more than 80 works — paintings, sketches and mixed media — along with the artist’s notebooks, a short film and his provocative quotes. “I loathe and detest anything labeled as art — including paintings — that reek of insincerity, emotional exploitation, dramatic colors, exaggerated figures or flashy brush strokes lacking authenticity,” he said.

The works reveal two distinct periods: his early academic years of controlled figuration in the 1960s, and the looser, emotionally charged works, some of which in daring splashes of red that he produced from the mid-1970s onward. In those later years, Uygur........

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