Fikret Moualla (1903-1967) is a Turkish painter, who, like all great artists, reached the zenith, after having passed through several agonizing stages. Because he has spent more than three decades in Paris, he came to sign his name as “Moualla” whereas the correct Turkish spelling is “Mualla”. He is unique both as an individual and as an artist. He lived, wrote and spoke in a style combining poetry and blasphemy, subtle respect and ironical outrage. As an artist, he distinguished himself in an environment of art, no less than Paris, where in his time, painting was the business of perhaps fifty-thousand men like him.
Moualla was born in istanbul to a family of a well-paid Ottoman official. Two events in his early age helped to shape his life and personality. An accident that he suffered when he was only a 12-year old child affected his future, just as a similar event had changed the flow of Toulouse Lautrec’s life. In the years, when almost the whole of Europe and Ottoman Turkey were embroiled in the battles of the First World War, the child’s idol was his uncle Hikmet, the football player...

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