Obituaries
Filiz Burhan: In Memoriam
Patricia Mainardi is professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Filiz Burhan
Filiz Burhan died unexpectedly in Paris on May 23, 2011. She was 60 years old and a longtime faculty member at the American University in Paris, where she was associate professor of art history.
Burhan was born in Chicago of Turkish parents—she was fluent in Turkish—and received a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD from Princeton University. Her 1979 dissertation, “Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences, and the Formation of a Symbolist Aesthetic in France,” inaugurated a new area of scholarship and was far ahead of its time. She received numerous offers to publish it, but, being a perfectionist, she always wanted to work on it a bit more, and so, like Frenhofer’s “Unknown Masterpiece” in Balzac’s story, it remained a work in progress. “Vision and Visionaries” was hardly unknown. Available through UMI, it found its way into footnotes of all the subsequent major publications in its field. Because Burhan was so scrupulous in her scholarship, she published little; her influence, however, was out of all proportion to her publications. Her ongoing interests in the interrelationship of art and science won her a fellowship to the International School for Theory in the Humanities in Santiago de Compostella, Spain, and resulted in an article, one of the few that met her exacting standards, “Rendering Visible the Invisible: The New Science of the Soul.”1 A long essay, “Marcel Duchamp, or the Weaver of Morphisms,” originated from the 2004 SANART conference at Ankara’s Middle Eastern Technical University, and was published in Turkish in the conference proceedings.
Burhan moved to Paris to conduct research for her dissertation, where she met and married Alexandre Tourraix. She traveled with him to Senegal, where she taught at the Université de Dakar from 1980 to 1983. On their return to France, she helped to reestablish the Parsons School of Design Program in Paris and, in 1984, joined the faculty of the American University of Paris (AUP), where she remained for twenty-five years, serving as department chair for eight years. Although her marriage eventually ended in divorce, the couple remained on friendly terms.
A passionate teacher, Burhan constantly expanded her horizons by offering new courses and keeping in touch with former students. Besides a full range of classes in modern art, she developed courses in the history of photography and in film studies; for her last semester at AUP, she designed and taught a special course on global contemporary art. In recognition of her pedagogical efforts, she received a Mellon Grant in 2000, and was given the AUP Best Teacher of the Year Award in 2002. Along with her teaching and AUP administration, she found time to serve on the Fulbright grant commission to France for many years, and to lecture for numerous programs that brought groups to Paris.
An outgoing, funny, and vivacious person with a formidable intellect, Burhan remained at the crossroads of French studies, keeping up an impressive correspondence with dozens of scholars. Throughout the summer of 2011, new arrivals in Paris reported that they had been in email correspondence with her all spring and were planning to see her during the summer. Outings to her favorite Turkish restaurant in Paris, Le Janissaire, were a treat that brought together new friends and old, and also brought fabulous food ordered, in Turkish, by Filiz. Outings to exhibitions with her were another delight since, regardless of the subject, she always seemed to have read everything on the topic and stimulated discussion. One of her special interests—which, she explained to me one day, she shared with most art historians because we are all detectives of some kind—was a good mystery story. As with everything else she did, Burhan knew so much about the genre that she could have taught a graduate seminar in it, and she made a special point of ferreting out novels from other cultures, which she generously shared with friends. Nor did her interest in art end with its history. She dressed with a kind of flair that inspired the envy of all her friends, drawing on a seemingly endless collection of the Kenzo scarves that she loved.
A memorial service was held at the American University in Paris on September 10. Filiz Burhan leaves her brother and sister-in-law, Charles Burhan and Patricia Holden; her former husband; and numerous greatly saddened friends.
1. Filiz Burhan, “Rendering Visible the Invisible: The New Science of the Soul,” in Margery A. Safir, ed., Connecting Creations: Science–Technology–Other Cultures (Santiago de Compostella, Spain: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, 2000), 293–320.
Published on November 8, 2011.
