Guide
The İstanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (İRHM) was founded on 18 July 1937 in the Crown Prince's Apartments at Dolmabahçe Palace, and Atatürk opened it on 20 September that year; the museum describes itself as the first museum of the plastic arts in Türkiye. It was placed under the Academy of Fine Arts — today Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University — and the painter Halil Dikmen, one of the Academy's teachers, was appointed its first director.
The first exhibition was assembled from what the state already had: paintings drawn from the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi's Elvâh-ı Nakşiye collection, from Dolmabahçe, from Topkapı Palace Museum and from the exhibition Half a Century of Turkish Painting, together with works taken from various government offices. That first display held 320 works. Through gift and purchase the collection has since grown to around twelve thousand.
Its history reaches back well before 1937. The Mekteb-i Sanâyi-i Nefise-i Şahâne, the country's first institution of higher education in art, opened in 1882 under Osman Hamdi Bey; regulations of January 1887 already provided for a museum devoted to painting and carving alongside the antiquities museum. After Osman Hamdi Bey's death, Halil Edhem Bey secured an annual thousand-lira supplement from parliament to build a collection, and from 1911 paintings were bought and copies commissioned from European museums — this was the Elvâh-ı Nakşiye collection, shown publicly in the school's great hall on 27 October 1915. A room of the Cemile Sultan Palace at Fındıklı was set aside as a painting museum in July 1926, and by 1931 the holdings of 141 pieces made the search for a permanent home unavoidable.
The museum also seeded others. In line with the cultural policy of the Republic it released works so that the first picture galleries in Anatolia could open, and the painting and sculpture museums in Ankara and İzmir were formed from pieces İRHM sent them.
İRHM closed in 2007 when restoration began at the Dolmabahçe apartments. In 2011 the collection moved to Antrepo 5 in Tophane, a Sedad Hakkı Eldem warehouse allocated to the university in 2009 and converted into a museum to a project by Emre Arolat. Work on the new galleries, stores, offices, workshops, library and reading rooms finished in 2021, and the museum began reopening that December with the exhibition Serginin Sergisi II.
The conversion kept the warehouse rather than replacing it. The architects took the reinforced concrete grid — the most distinctive structural feature of these buildings, and part of the visual memory of a port and industrial district that stood apart from the rest of the city for centuries — and preserved most of the load-bearing frame while removing walls and floors, leaving a three-dimensional grid for the galleries to occupy. The result is that galleries sometimes open into one another and sometimes stand alone, linked by new routes and bridges, so the visit can follow different paths and the in-between spaces give sudden views of the city between one room of paintings and the next. The long, narrow office block next to the warehouse on Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi was structurally weak and was rebuilt with its original façades; it now holds the entrance and circulation space, workshops and public functions, with a deliberately open ground floor.
