Art: Turkish Delight

One of the most admired painters in Turkey these days is a ten-year-old boy named Hasan Kaptan. Boosters see in his work something of Picasso’s lively lines and Matisse’s blazing colors. For those not impressed by those qualities alone, his boosters can point to a large one-boy show in Paris last year, where the critics were enthusiastic, and to the fact that in three years young Hasan has sold some 55 of his button-bright pictures and earned more than $2,000.

The son of an artist father, Hasan started smearing paint on doors and walls as a toddler. Daytimes, he called for paints and brushes; at bedtime he preferred the lives of famous artists to Mother Goose. When he was five and beginning to develop a style, his family took him along on a trip to Paris; Hasan could hardly be pried away from the museums. Once, in a burst of enthusiasm, he scaled up a pedestal to a Rodin bust, hugged & kissed it. His father was studying with Painter Andre Lhote at that time, and one day he took one of Hasan’s pictures over to show the master. Lhote seized the painting, thinking it was the senior Kaptan’s work. “At last,” he exclaimed, “you have found the true feeling of the modern.”

Last week U.S. art lovers got a chance to judge for themselves. At a Manhattan gallery, 36 of Hasan’s paintings were on exhibit—delightful studies of musicians, kings, carousels and clowns—as bright and intricate as fine Turkish rugs. Hasan’s color effects are strong, to say the least: blood red and seasick green, harlequin combinations of yellow, black, mauve and blue. His figures are tortured and twisted: grinning, round-faced peasants with shark’s teeth, haunted, droopy-eyed old women, a wheel-shaped nightmare of a sea captain. On opening day, five of the pictures were snapped up and the gallery was looking for a sellout.

Hasan himself was in Turkey, painting, going to school, and playing soccer in his spare time. There wasn’t enough money to send him to the U.S. along with his paintings. But Hasan is bearing up. He would like to see the U.S. and “paint those majestic skyscrapers,” but right now there’s school, and it might not be a good idea to miss classes. As he admits himself, he is a little weak in arithmetic.