(Istanbul 1905–1938 Paris)
Untitled (La France), 1932, signed and dated, signed and dated on the stretcher, oil on canvas, 54.5 x 65 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Jeune Europe, Paris (label on the reverse)
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Paris, Galerie Jeune Europe, 1932 (label on the reverse)

Hale Asaf was born in Istanbul in 1905. As the daughter of high-ranking Ottoman government officials, she enjoyed a wealthy upbringing and a refined education.
She arrived in Rome at only 14 years old, on the outbreak of the Turkish War of Independence. There, she started studying painting, thus beginning her cosmopolitan artistic education which would span the major European capitals: Paris, Berlin, and Munich, where she was a pupil of Lovis Corinth.
But Paris was her heartland. It was here that she moved in 1931, when, bored with provincial life in Bursa, she decided to leave her husband of just three years to devote herself completely to painting.
The Ville Lumière was the scene of Hale Asaf’s artistic rebirth. It was here that she embarked on an affair with Antonio Aniante, an Italian intellectual and owner of the Galerie-Librerie Jeune Europe, of which she was soon to become artistic director.
Hale led a bohemian life in the Montparnasse district during these Parisian years, exhibiting her canvases and continuing her artistic research by developing work freely drawn from the painting of Matisse, of whom she was a great admirer:
“Having regained her courage, Hale went back to work (...); avant-garde painter and admirer of Matisse (...). She loved working with paintbrushes as big as dustpans (...)”.
(A. Aniante, Memorie di Francia. Il rapisardino arcimiliardario a Montparnasse, G.C. Sansoni 1973, p. 70)

The artistic trajectory of the ‘Capinera del Bosforo’, as she was known, was as brief as her short life; her already precarious state of health plummeted, and she died of cancer aged only 33 and was buried in the Parisian cemetery of Thais.
Antonio Aniante left Paris shortly after Hale Asaf’s death: too sad to live there without his beloved.
“I did not resist such profound anguish for long, such desolation, such obstinate presence of memories, of objects and images dear to me; as soon as evening fell (...) as soon as I turned on the light, the flowers, landscapes, birds, waters, skies and seas that the beloved creature painted suddenly appeared before my hallucinating eyes. I got up, filled a suitcase with rags and fled, abandoning everything forever: books, manuscripts, sculptures, everything in the hands of my concierge’. (A. Aniante, Memorie di Francia. Il rapisardino arcimiliardario a Montparnasse, G.C. Sansoni 1973, p. 97–98)

Those of Hale Asaf’s works rescued from dispersal and destruction are exhibited in major Turkish museums: Painting and Sculpture Museum, Istanbul; Rezan Has Museum, İstanbul; Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Istanbul; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul, and at the Painting and Sculpture Museum, Ankara.