Untitled 

This untitled painting was made by Fikret Mualla Saygi, an artist who died in 1967. It depicts four musicians on an orange background, two holding saxophones, one with a banjo, and another singing. Mualla, who was Turkish, spent much of his career in Paris. He chose subjects such as street scenes, cafes, and circuses, painting them in a deliberately naive style, using expressive colors. This image might speak to the popularity of American jazz music in Europe in the mid-20th century. Perhaps, it is a memory of a performance witnessed in a Parisian nightclub. The power of this image lies in its tension. The painting is both celebratory and, in its exaggerated figuration, subtly disturbing. As art historians, we can explore the way this painting mediates between the local culture of Paris and the global phenomenon of jazz, using sources such as periodicals, photographs, and other popular imagery from the time. These tools help us consider how the image comments on the shifting social landscape of post-war Europe.