Yusuf Franko Kusa Bey (1856-1933), a high-ranking bureaucrat in
fin-de-siècle Ottoman imperial administration, was also a talented
caricaturist. Because of his duties in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, and
spending most of his life in Istanbul, he was both a member and an
observer of high-society social circles in Pera [Beyoglu].
Ambassadors, ministers, diplomats, famous opera singers, painters,
Pashas and Efendis, Madames and Monsieurs, were part of this social
milieu, and most of them became eternally recorded through the 'types
and charges' in Yusuf Franko's caricature album. Including images of
himself, he charged his subject materials, the people in his social
network, with their particular qualities and transformed their portraits
into witty caricatures that reflected contemporary scenes of social life
and political debates in Pera. This book, which accompanies the
facsimile of Yusuf Franko's own caricature album, Youssouf, consists of
three articles and an annotated appendix. While the articles analyze the
majority of his caricatures from diverse perspectives (his family
history and biography, the history of contemporary European caricature
art and politics, and the social and spatial context in which he drew
his caricatures), the appendix gives brief information about each
caricature plate following the exact order in the facsimile. These
extraordinary caricatures are published for the first time in their
entirety since they were discovered in an antique rug dealer's shop in
Istanbul in 1957.
