Today, Cemil Cem is remembered as a cartoonist, although he also managed the School/Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul for four years. An additional little-known fact is that, while director of the school, he supported Russian-speaking émigré artists.

After studying law in Istanbul, Cemil Cem worked in a number of Ottoman consulates and embassies in Europe, including in Paris and Vienna. As a person interested in art, he met and communicated with various artists in these cities and also created some caricatures himself. At first, he occasionally sent his work to the Ottoman magazine Kalem but, after a couple of years, decided to quit his diplomatic career and take up the profession of cartoonist in Istanbul. There, he began publishing his own magazine, Cem, in which he was not afraid to satirise famous political figures and the social follies of his day. Two years later, in 1912, the magazine was shut down and its owner left, first for Izmir, and then for Europe. He later returned to Istanbul and from 1921 to 1925 was director of the School of Fine Arts (Fine Arts Academy) in the city. It was during this period, in 1923, that he provided assistance to the Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople. Unfortunately, it is not known how exactly this assistance was expressed, but the fact that Cemil Cem was elected an honorary member of the union speaks volumes. During the entire existence of the union, only a few such members were ever elected, all of them individuals who provided support of various kinds to Russian artists, including assistance with organising exhibitions. We have every reason to believe that Cemil Cem helped organise the final exhibition of the union, which was held in a YMCA building in Istanbul in 1923.
In 1927, Cemil Cem resumed publication of Cem magazine, whose last issue appeared in 1929. According to Yasin Kayış, the final closure of the magazine was not because of censorship, but because Cemil Cem, who used to draw “Ottoman characters in fez”, simply failed to maintain his popularity in the new Turkish Republic. Thus, it is to the cartoons he created during the Second Constitutional Monarchy, rather than those of the Republican period, that he owes his status as “Father of the Turkish Caricature” (Kayış 2018). The last years of his life were mainly spent drawing and engaging in agriculture. He died on 9 April, 1950, at his home in the Moda district, in the street that bears his name and where his cartoons can be seen today. After his death, he was buried in the Istanbul graveyard of Rumeli Hısarı where Leonore and Curt Kosswig’s graves are located.