Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveOpera and painting biography

Semiha Berksoy was Türkiye's first woman opera singer, and over seventy years she also acted on stage and screen, wrote and painted. Her paintings bring self-portraits, stage roles and memories together in a dramatic world of their own.

Semiha Berksoy

ArtBiography

The story behind the card

Berksoy was born in Istanbul in 1910; her mother was a painter, and she studied theatre, music and painting in the city. In 1931 she acted in İstanbul Sokaklarında, the first Turkish sound film. In 1934 she sang in Özsoy, composed by Ahmet Adnan Saygun at Atatürk's request and regarded as the first Turkish opera, at a performance in Ankara for the visiting Shah of Iran. In 1939 she sang the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos in Berlin during celebrations of Richard Strauss's 75th birthday, becoming the first Turkish opera singer to perform on a European stage. Her paintings, on canvas, cardboard or fabric, show frontal figures, often herself, surrounded by written names, dates, stage curtains and people from her life. She was named a State Artist in 1998 and died in 2004.

Türkçe oku
Semiha Berksoy, Türkiye'nin ilk kadın opera sanatçısıdır. Yetmiş yıl boyunca tiyatroda ve sinemada da oynadı, yazdı, resim yaptı. Resimlerinde otoportrelerini, sahnedeki rollerini ve anılarını kendine özgü, dramatik bir dünyada bir araya getirdi.

Berksoy 1910'da İstanbul'da doğdu; annesi de ressamdı. Bu kentte tiyatro, müzik ve resim eğitimi aldı. 1931'de Türkiye'nin ilk sesli filmi İstanbul Sokaklarında'da rol aldı. 1934'te, Atatürk'ün isteğiyle Ahmet Adnan Saygun'un bestelediği ve ilk Türk operası sayılan Özsoy'da, Ankara'yı ziyaret eden İran Şahı onuruna verilen temsilde sahneye çıktı. 1939'da Berlin'de, Richard Strauss'un 75. doğum günü kutlamaları sırasında Ariadne auf Naxos operasında Ariadne rolünü söyleyerek Avrupa'da sahneye çıkan ilk Türk opera sanatçısı oldu. Tuvale, kartona ya da kumaşa yaptığı resimlerde, çoğu zaman kendisini gösteren cepheden figürlerin çevresini yazılmış adlar, tarihler, sahne perdeleri ve hayatındaki insanlar doldurur. 1998'de Devlet Sanatçısı unvanını aldı, 2004'te öldü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Semiha Berksoy
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveArt

Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was one of the first women in Western Europe to build a successful career as a painter. She painted heroines from the Bible and ancient history, such as Judith and Susanna, as strong women who act, not as decorative figures to be looked at.

Artemisia trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic use of light, and finished her earliest known painting, Susanna and the Elders, at 17. In 1612 she testified at a public trial in Rome of the painter Agostino Tassi, who had assaulted her; he was found guilty. She then moved to Florence, where in 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. She later worked in Rome, Venice and Naples, and from 1638 in London at the court of Charles I. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. After her death in Naples, probably in the mid-1650s, she was largely forgotten until the Italian critic Roberto Longhi wrote about her in 1916. In 2020 the National Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition.

BritannicaRead card
DriveArt

It is often said that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard. In fact that is just his best-documented sale: the Van Gogh Museum lists several others, and he also traded many works with fellow artists.

The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles in November 1888, was shown at the exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists' group in Brussels, in early 1890. The Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, bought it for 400 francs; it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The Van Gogh Museum names other sales too. His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered 19 views of The Hague to help him get started. The Paris paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy bought a painting, and his brother Theo sold another work to a gallery in London. Van Gogh also often swapped work with other artists and, when he was younger, for food or painting supplies. Exactly how many works he sold is not known. He died in July 1890, a few months after the Brussels sale.

Van Gogh MuseumRead card
DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

Medici BankRead card
WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

Zaha HadidRead card
DriveBiography

Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra travelled through her country in the 1950s, collecting folk songs from rural musicians. She carried what she learned into radio programmes, records, her own songs and her visual art.

Parra (1917–1967) came from a family of artists; her brother Nicanor Parra became one of Chile's best-known poets. She sought out elderly singers whose songs had never been written down, and her own compositions, above all Gracias a la vida (1966), gave that tradition new life. She also made arpilleras, pictures stitched from fabric, and in 1964 became, by most accounts, the first Latin American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Louvre palace, in its Museum of Decorative Arts. Her work laid the foundations of the Nueva Canción Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 1967.

Violeta ParraRead card
Next card in the archiveFüreya Koral was one of the pioneers of modern studio ceramics in Türkiye. Besides vessels and sculptures, she made large ceramic wall panels for hotels, universities and other public buildings, bringing clay into spaces people use every day.Read next →