Inside Beirut Anew – Universal taste and local claims:

In importing the French critics’ voices to Beirut for her own artwriting, Thuraya Malhas effaced any sense of controversy among them. Likewise, she softened the sense of Choucair’s ethnic difference to highlight the achievement of having joined a unified `alamiyya (worldlism, universalism). I would not suppose that Malhas devoted the majority of her article to translations because she herself had run out of things to say, or because she was inclined through background or education to admire uncritically French assertions. [17] Both Malhas and Rose al-Ghurayib, who also wrote about Choucair’s 1952 show, were committed Arab nationalists who believed in supporting the movement through cultural activities; al-Ghurayib led the Arab Association at the American Junior College which performed plays promoting an Arab heritage. Rather than assuming the reliance on French approval resulted from a lack of respect for “Arab cultural values,” I will analyze her importation of the French critics’ voices as a strategy and ask what this strategy meant in newly independent Lebanon.

Indeed, engagement with the functionaries of the state immediately comes to mind. Following a pattern established in the 1930s, Choucair’s 1952 exhibition was sponsored and opened by Laure al-Khuri, the wife of President Bishara al-Khuri, a fact not overlooked by the art-writers. In Paris, we recall, the Lebanese ambassador to France, Ahmad Da`uq, had attended the exhibition at Galerie Colette Allendy. According to legend elaborated years later, he made a perfunctory tour and then addressed Choucair saying, “Your type of work is curious, Miss Raouda. Have you not done for us any Lebanese works?” [18] (Zughaib 1979) Given the proximity of the two shows, it is most certain that many of the works hanging in the Ecole Supérieure des Lettres were the same pictures that had provoked such dismay from the “ambassador, to the ambassador’s wives, and on down” (Najla Tannus `Akrawi, interview, November 11, 2004). The point is that, while the stories of official rebuke were available for telling from 1951 on (and their being passed by word of mouth is what was said to have prompted the Outlook notice of success), they did not appear in Beirut artwriting until decades later. Though they were later to become a predominant motif in artwriting generally and about Choucair in particular, the scandalized voices of elite Lebanese reception did not appear in that early artwriting.

The voices that appeared instead, repeatedly translated and presented en groupe were those of French art critics, invoked to articulate how in Paris the art had been understood and to incite Arabic readers to lend their own understanding. Local audiences, official and plebeian, were to look not for the familiar but for the most contemporary, as an indication of their joining the modern world. In this sense, nationalism, as referenced in the “Lebanese-ness” of Choucair as a citizen and her patron as a state representative, was not separate from “worldlism,” or cosmopolitanism, but a step towards it. Against the idea of an art somehow appropriate to a certain nation or culture, the notion of art enacted by artwriting of Malhas, Muysati, and so on, is of a universal, border-less entity defined by its relation to a widely acknowledged pedigree that has most recently produced Picasso and Matisse. The other idea of art was certainly familiar enough to audiences of the time, but it was deliberately displaced by this strategy.

This tactic of deference to French views and viewers was well established by Beirut’s intellectuals long before Choucair’s 1951 exhibition… And as with the previous artwriting, there tended in this period to be very little description of the kind of artwork and relatively much attention to the kind of admiring audience. This is not to say that the look of the art made did not matter. Rather, I think it mattered a great deal that people wanted to make vastly different objects and yet sought to fit them to a validated conception of art, so that the artwriting was a significant stage in the production of an art that had a contested look. What is important to emphasize here is how the tactic worked equally well (or, equally ambiguously) for different styles of art-making in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the French occupation forces had finally been expelled from their former Mandate region and when French administrative and social authority had passed into the hands of locals. In order to show the versatility of this tactic, I am going to examine its use at a local institution dedicated to cosmopolitanism’s apparent opposite: Arab nationalism.

It may seem ironic that at the Arab Cultural Club (ACC), the Arab nationalist organization Choucair helped establish in the mid-1940s, part of the program for the propagation of a modern Arab identity for the new nation of Lebanon was the appeal to local intellectuals and activists to appreciate and assimilate developments in contemporary “French” art-making (and symphonic music, but that is another story). As Munah al-Sulh has put it, these were years when the state of Lebanon having been declared but the French army still very much present, the populace was at struggle to determine the character of the new entity (Sulh 1994). Politically, they sought to define how this state would be independent from the regional colonial powers and how it would be affiliated with neighbouring states. Culturally, they sought to define its language, a program and institutions for “social revival,” and development of common intellectual assets. Thrusting themselves upon this situation, the members of the ACC had twin goals of (1) promoting intellectual interaction of its members and of them with their society, thereby strengthening local ties, and (2) providing members of local society with resources deemed necessary for local development (Nadim Dimashqiyya, interview, November 11, 2004). In opposition to a subjugated colonial identity, a discredited Ottoman-Turkish affiliation, or most importantly, a self-limiting sectarian identity, Arab nationalists exploited as an asset the veneration of Paris-based `alami (worldly, or universal) art.

The sum of this story is that Choucair and her cohorts at the ACC did not chose between “Arab” and “Western” identity; they used a sense of Arabness to create a culturally relative sphere that could be different from “Western,” as in their art lectures that tied the art-making of each society to its environment and mentality; and they used “Western,” as the embodiment of modernity, to demand that their consociates embrace specific social reform programs. In other words, these apparently mutually exclusive identities were simultaneously evoked through certain media, such as fine art, to posit for the citizens of the newly independent republic ambiguous identities that were not limited to the previous moulds of “Arab colonial subjects” or “Western anti-Arab colonizers.”

In the 1950s, Choucair’s art benefited, to a certain extent, from looking like something that had been accepted among certain of Paris’s avant-garde circles. Its strangeness could be grasped through the ambiguous identities some among Lebanon’s intelligentsia were constructing to deal with the necessities of nation-building during the Cold War. This artwriting points to the conception of “art” as a necessarily universal (non-local) social value that can help people adapt to contemporary life. However, with this conception of art, engagement of Choucair’s work was deliberately limited to that which fit current aesthetic standards propagated by a France that was unified in Beiruti artwriting. The other elements of Choucair’s artwork seemed secondary and received much less attention. They were to be drawn out and praised by subsequent artwriting. (See Samir Sayigh’s essay translated in this exhibition).

 

Notes:

1. The following is a slightly revised selection from Chapter 4 of the doctoral dissertation entitled Painters, Picture-makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State (Princeton University, 2005).

2. Unfortunately, I have not tracked the timing of this professionalization. The people cited in Chapters One and Two, Karam Milhim Karam, Yusif Ghussub, Fu`ad Sulaiman, and Khalil Taqi al-Din critiqued their society in many ways, art exhibitions being one facet of their intellectualization of their engagement in society. Some of the people discussed in this chapter who started writing in the 1940s, Thuraya Malhas, Rose Ghurayib, or Victor Hakim, for example, studied aesthetics or literature formally and wrote articles without appearing to have any contracted employment. My impression is that professional art-writers began to be hired by the local newspapers in the 1960s, long after the papers had already allocated sections to reporting on “thaqafiyya” (cultural) events and ideas. Today many of Beirut’s newspapers and magazines either give the job of artwriting to an interested and cash-strapped artist, such as Gaby Ma`mari who wrote for Al-Diyar in the 1990s, or assign it to a reporter who worked on another beat, such as Ahmad Bazzun who has written for Al-Safir since the mid-1990s. Some prominent papers have long-term contracts with people who have undergone training accrediting their opinions, such as Nazih Khatir, who undertook museum studies at the Louvre in the 1950s and has for decades now written for Al-Nahar (Nazih Khatir, interview, June 21, 2000), or Maha Sultan, who has been writing for Al-Hayat since the 1980s and, after studying art history in France, wrote a masters thesis on Habib Srur at the Université de la Sainte Esprit (Maha Sultan, interview, November 17, 1996).

3. Starting in the early 1940s, more and more artists and artists-to-be headed for New York where American administrators were eager to promote artistic production in order to prove American cultural superiority and to justify and sweeten American economic and political superiority. “It had to be seen that America was in fact defending the same complex and cherished civilizations as the Europeans” (Guilbaut 1995:33). Even Paris was infected by this New York pull. Though on the home-front Abstract Expressionism, exemplified by Jackson Pollock, was scorned and feared as subversive, indeed potentially pro-communist, painters associated with the style came to be promoted abroad by the US government, specifically the CIA, as an expression of American individualism and liberty (Monahan 1995, Cockcroft 1974). While the CIA connection was not publicly known, many Parisian-based artists were antagonized by Abstract Expressionism’s apparently anti-ideological stance. Abstract and representational styles were “in violent conflict,” according to a contemporary commentator, and were conflicted within themselves (Descargues 1950:170). In their quest to be the most forward-looking heirs to Picasso and Matisse, French artists faced several choices: perpetuating figurative art (Dunoyer de Sergonzac was very popular; Post-Impressionism and Surrealism were generally the most modern the broad public would accept); embracing social realism (the official style of the French Communist Party after 1947); or, formulating an engaged abstraction that rivaled Pollock aesthetically but embraced specific visions for modern society. These choices were debated throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s in publications such as, Combat, Arts de France, Art d’Aujourd’hui, XXème Siècle, the latter two of which frequently featured American abstract artists. Across the Atlantic the Magazine of Art commissioned critiques of the various French trends for its April 1950 issue.

4. This painting is currently in the MOMA’s collection in NYC. During autumn 1949 Léger showed it in a highly celebrated solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris (Art d’Aujourd’hui 1[4]:back cover).

5. In the preparatory sketch at the Minnesota Institute of Art it is a damascene-worked table with two-toned decoration and arabesque curves, but on the final canvas it has been simplified into squares and trimmed with three small white circles only – pearl inlay?

6. For example, the furniture is a divan with sumptuous pillows of damascene red and gold design tossed across it; the floor covering consists of harlequin patterning and bold stripes in a contrasting color, and the wall behind is a jumble of rectangular patterning.

7. The only feature jarring that space is a long thin tubular shape that may simply refer to Leger’s characteristic “tube-ism.”

8. Interestingly, when in November 2004 I showed copies of the pictures to Choucair, who was by then suffering from Alzheimer’s, her immediate response was to see them as a version of the Three Graces, except for the numerical difference.

9. I am inspired in my reading of this by Linda Nochlin’s (1999) discussion of George Seurat’s Poseurs.

10. The artists who worked there were primarily pooled from a group that had been showing together since 1946 at Denise René’s gallery (Koenig 1995:8).

11. On topics such as “What is Painting?” “What is Figurative Painting?” “What is Abstract Painting?” “Science and Beauty,” “Mondrian and Neo-plasticism,” “Constructivism,” “Paradoxes of Decorative Art,” “Color,” “Kandinsky’s Theoretical Writings,” “The Technology of Painting.” (Art d’Aujourd’hui 2[3]:30, 2[5]:31, 2[7]:30, 2[8]:30).

12. Jack al-Aswad (see his essay translated on this site) notes that Pillet called the patterns he turned and traced “patrons,” but he asserts that the technique of composing the picture was basically the same.

13. For Magnelli see the retrospective essay by Léon Degand in XXème Siècle 1(1):39-42. For Deyrolle and Dewasne see Art d’Aujourd’hui 1 (3):29 and XXème Siècle 1(1):58. Also, a long essay on Deyrolle by Charles Estienne appears in Art d’Aujourd’hui 2(5):18-21. For Pillet see Léon Degand’s review of Pillet and accompanying illustration in Art d’Aujourd’hui 2(2):31. For Mortensen see Degand’s review of his show at Galerie Denise René, in Art d’Aujourd’hui 2(1):30. For Vasarely, see the painting reproduced for the critique of the Salon de Mai in Art d’Aujourd’hui 2(6):28 and XXème Siècle 1(1):58.

14. The closest in approach is perhaps Edgar Pillet, yet his work confined itself to the basic geometric trio of circle, square, triangle, and he did not allow his forms to wander, so to speak. Choucair’s other great collaborator in experiment was probably Alberto Magnelli, who generated compositions from the accumulation of a few repeated shapes with complex layers of overlapping indicated by tonal shifts. Yet a distinction could be drawn from Magnelli’s work, too, for Choucair’s stenciled shapes strictly echo each other whereas Magnelli’s shapes get pressed, stretched, or otherwise distorted by apparently external forces. In other words, Magnelli’s compositions speak to forces other than repetition whereas Choucair’s explore the variety that can result from endless but strict repetition. A review of the impact of mathematical studies on art-making can be found in Mankiewicz 2000.

15. Serge Guilbaut (1995:63) wrote of this period, “What is complicated and fascinating in this duel is that, at this exact same time, some French artists and critics in Paris were also trying to define a new type of art in opposition to the traditional school of Paris and were using some of the same arguments as the American critics.”

16. The statement appears in the inaugural issue of Art d’Aujourd’hui. Other “Eastern” artists whose sojourn in Paris was celebrated by the magazine were Najed, Fahr-el-Nissa Zeid, Olive Tamari, Schalhoub, and Jamil Hamoudi.

17. Al-Ghurayib attended a French Catholic elementary school and then the Sidon American Highschool, the American Junior College in Beirut where she studied Sufism, and the American University of Beirut where she specialized in Arabic literature (Rose al-Ghurayib, interview, October 2, 2000). Sadly, I do not have information on Fu`ad Muysati or “S.H.”

18. The legend varies: sometimes it is “`amal” (works) and other times “`alam” (flags) or “al-`alam al-lubnani” (the Lebanese flag) (cf., F. Sultan 1980, Zughaib 1979).

 

References:

 

Adib, Al-

1952 Barqiat (Telegraphs). Al-Adib11(4):70.

 

`Akrawi, Najla Tannus

1962 Salwa Rawda Holds Exhibition. Alumnae Bulletin 9(2) Archived material, Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon.

 

Allsen, J. M.

2004 World of the Arts. Electronic document, http://facstaff.uwww.edu/allsenjm/WOTA/IMAGES/leger.htm, accessed October 10, 2004.

 

Andraus, Farid

1962 Salwa Rawda: une imagination sans limites (Saloua Raouda: an imagination without limits. Magazine, March 8, 1962, p. 61. Archived material, Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon.

 

Baxandall, Michael

1972 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Beaulieu, Simone Aubrey

1962 Les Quatres royaumes de Saloua Raouda (The Four Kingdoms of Saloua Raouda). L’Orient, February 24, 1962. Archived material, Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon.

 

Becker, Howard

1982 Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Berggren, J. L.

1985 History of Mathematics in the Islamic World: The Present State of the Art. Middle Eastern Studies Association, 19(1):9-29.

 

Clark, Kenneth

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Cockcroft, Eva

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Descargues, Pierre

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Fawaz, Leila

1983 Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-century Beirut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

Garb, Tamar

1999 ‘Men of Genius, Women of Taste’: The Gendering of Art Education in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris. In Overcoming All Odds: The Women of the Académie Julian. Pp. 115-133. New York: The Dahesh Museum and Rutgers University Press.

 

Gates, Carolyn L.

1998 The Merchant Republic of Lebanon: Rise of an Open Economy. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers.

 

Ghurayib, Thérèse

1962 Sajjad, lawhat, siramik, wa nahat (Rugs, Pictures, Ceramic, and Sculpture). Al-Nahar, March 4, 1962. Archived material, Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon.

 

Guilbaut, Serge

1995 Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick. In Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964. Serge Guilbaut, ed. Pp. 30-79. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Koenig, John-Franklin

1995 [1992] Abstraction chaude in Paris in the 1950s. In Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964. Serge Guilbaut, ed. Pp. 1-16. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Lederman, Rena

1989 Contested Order: Gender and Society in the Southern New Guinea Highlands. American Ethnologist 16(2):230-247.

 

Malhas, Thuraya

1962 Salwa Rawda tidf’a rishataha fi rukab al-`alamiyya (Saloua Raouda Pushes Her Brush in the Stirrups of Worldlism). Baryut 16(4315):3.

 

Mankiewicz, Richard

2000 The Story of Mathematics. London: Cassell and Co.

 

Monahan, Laura

1995 Cultural Cartography: American designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale. In Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964. Serge Guilbaut, ed. Pp. 369-416. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Muysati, Fu`ad

1952 Fann al-tajrid wa fann al-ta`bir fi al-rasim (Abstract and Expressive Art in Drawing). Al-Hayat 7(1789):4.

 

Nochlin, Linda

1988 [1971] Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays. Pp. 145-178. New York: Harper and Row.

1999 Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses. In Representing Women. Pp. 216-237. London: Thames and Hudson.

 

Panofsky, Erwin.

1991 Perspective as Symbolic Form. Christopher Wood, trans. New York: Zone Books.

 

Salomon, Nannette

1996 The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History’s `Hidden Agendas’ and Pernicious Pedigrees. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. Griselda Pollock, ed. Pp. 69-87. London: Routledge.

 

S.H.

1952 Ma`rad li al-rasim al-tajridi fi Bayrut (An Exhibition for Abstract Painting in Beirut. Al-Nahar 19(5022):4.

 

Shaybub, Edvick

1951 Ma`a al-fannana Salwa Rawda (With the Artist Saloua Raouda). Sawt al-mar’a 7(12):36.

 

Shone, Richard

1997 Fernand Leger. Artforum 36(3):105-106.

 

Sulh, Munah

1994 Shihada li ustath Munah al-Sulh (The Testimony of Mr. Munah al- Sulh). In Masira al-khamsin `am: al-Nadi al-Thaqafi al-`Arabi, 1944-1994 (A Fifty Year Journey: The Arab Cultural Club, 1944- 1994). Pp. 25-28. Beirut: The Arab Cultural Club.

 

Zughaib, Henri

1979 Salwa Rawda Shuqair tahtaraf fann al-nahat bi f`il `ibara sadamatha min Charles Malik (Salwa Rawda Choucair Professionalizes the Art of Sculpture by Acting on Her Shock from Statement Made by Charles Malik). Al-Hawadith, March 16, 1979, pp. 70-71. Archived material, Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon.

 

 

 

Bio:

Kirsten Scheid is a Beirut-based anthropologist and art historian who writes regularly on modern and contemporary art in the Middle East. Her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class. She teaches at the American University of Beirut and is completing her Ph.D. at Princeton University. Kirsten combines her academic interests with local cultural engagements in her capacity as the coordinator for a series of Arabic children’s books, as a member of the editorial board of the Arabic bi-monthly political cultural review Al-Adab, and as an activist for popular movements to invest in local economic and cultural resources in the face of dispossessing globalization. In 2001, Kirsten helped co-found a cultural facilities center accessible to Beirut’s lower class and refugees. At this center she curated Women at an Exhibition, showing 4 generations of local women painters painting women; she also helped formulate a ground-breaking exhibition and conference on censorship and its resistance in the Arab world. In 1992-3 Kirsten conducted independent field research on the contemporary Palestinian painting movement in the West Bank.