Beirut:
A World of Art - A.U.B. Fall 2008
An insiders
guide at the 20th century art movement in Lebanon through the reminiscences
of late Lebanese artist critic Helen el Khal (1923 – 2009), and
instructor in painting at AUB (1967-76), features a selection of
artwork by university faculty and alumni, with highlights of the
AUB permanent collection.
“At ALBA from 1946 to 1948 we students were left pretty much on
our own,” Helen el Khal recalled. “The director, Cesar Gemayel,
would pass by occasionally, make a stroke, a quick change, and then
walk away. We [Helen and fellow students: painters Chafic Abboud,
Farid Aouad, Yvette Ashkar, George Guv, Mounir Eido, Nicola Nammar,
and sculptor Michel Basbous (see page 19)] learned to paint by ourselves,
from each other. I would watch what Chafic was doing and try his
way. We learned by doing it.” (Two remarkably similar paintings,
both dated 1947, hang side by side in the living room of Helen’s
Fat’a apartment; one is by Khal and the other by ALBA classmate
Chafic Abboud. Each painting portrays a young boy—the curious, moving
expressions revealed in impressionistic brush strokes, color, and
shading.)
Recalling her classmates, Khal wrote later: “They were all intensely
committed, and it was within that environment of enthusiasm and
creative energy that I arrived at a similar commitment.” In the
Bourg cafés with the male students, Helen, wearing slacks,
unheard of for Lebanese women at the time, startled the coffee drinkers.
“We talked endlessly about the French art scene at the time,” she
said, and about the works of pioneer Lebanese painters Mustapha
Farroukh (1907-57) and Omar Onsi (1906-69). (Both attended AUB.
Farroukh also taught at AUB and was the subject of Lebanon’s first
solo exhibition, held at the University in 1929.)
Several among Helen’s first ALBA class took up permanent residence
in Paris. Chafic Abboud (1926-2004) showed his paintings throughout
Europe. Farid Aouad (1924-82) exhibited widely in Europe and took
up permanent residence in Paris in 1959. Yvette Ashkar (b. 1928),
who had joined the ALBA class, encouraged by Fernando Manetti and
George Cyr, after her fingers were deemed too small to continue
her study of music, also showed in Europe but had many solo exhibitions
in Lebanon, where she taught at the Lebanese University for more
than 20 years. Sculptor Michel Basbous (1921-81), like Achkar, returned
to spend most of his time in Lebanon, where he taught briefly at
AUB before retreating in 1958 to Rachana to devote himself completely
to sculpture. All these ALBA classmates exhibited internationally.
After two years at ALBA Helen returned to the United States, where
she took courses at the Art Students League in New York City. Back
in Lebanon with her poet husband Yusuf el Khal, it was not until
1960 that painter friend Aref Rayess (1928-2005) persuaded her to
exhibit her work for the first time—at the Alecco Saab Gallery.
“At that time, I was still focused on portraits and still lifes.
I didn’t feel I should show my paintings, but Aref thought I was
the best portrait painter in Lebanon at the time—good enough to
show. He saw in my work a wider, more universal view of humanity.”
Khal remembers Rayess as a unique artist. “His work was full of
variety. He shifted and changed easily from figurative to abstract
paintings and from drawings to sculpture.” Self taught, he began
painting in remote African villages while working with his father.
“He told me more than once about how he hung his own paintings,
attended the show, and pretended other people in the village were
also admiring his work.” Back in Lebanon, via France and Italy,
Rayess set up an atelier in the family home in Aley and continued
painting. “He was important in developing Lebanese art,” Khal said,
“organizing committees and trying to persuade the government to
support the Lebanese artist.” He had more than 15 solo exhibitions
in Lebanon, and also served as president of the Lebanese Association
of Painters and Sculptors. Rayess was widely popular throughout
Europe and the Arab world. Some of his sculptures are on display
in the Gulf.
In 1963 Helen and her husband established Gallery One, the first
permanent exhibition gallery in Lebanon. She selected the artists.
“Most of them were new names nobody had ever heard of before. I
deliberately stayed away from the established well-known artists.”
John Carswell (AUB professor of art from 1956-76, see page 16) later
wrote, “The exhibitions held at Gallery One had an edge which removed
them from the numbing commerciality of most of the shows with assured
sales . . . to clan, family, and friends.” Helen showed Hrair, Assadour
(Bezdikian), and Mohammad Sakr. Sakr was “a poor fellow, a carpenter
with a shop in Manara, where he was painting, all by himself—completely
self-educated.”
By 1967 Helen had joined the art department of AUB as a part-time
instructor of painting, a position she held until 1976. The evolution
of art departments at AUB began with the first solo exhibition of
Farroukh in 1929. Appointed full-time art instructor in 1935, he
taught until his retirement in 1954. At that time President Stephen
Penrose initiated the Department of Fine Arts under the direction
of Maryette Charlton and George Buehr, two artists recruited from
the University of Chicago. The department flourished, bringing art
to everyone through popular art seminars open to the public, several
lecture series, and the establishment of a Mini-Gallery on the third
floor of College Hall. David Kurani, former chair of the current
department, remembers taking lessons in drawing from Charlton as
a child.
Helen reminisced about Carswell: “He was a very unusual person.
He had a marvelous creativity in whatever he was doing. His mind
was really inventive and inquiring—the way he was teaching, the
way he was living his life. (In his home overlooking the bay of
Tabarja, he kept a small elephant, a real stuffed elephant.) No
one was allowed near his studio at AUB.” When preparing pieces for
shipment to an exhibition in London, he “paint sprayed, rubbed,
and polished their wooden surfaces to a smooth silk finish before
sending them off.” Carswell, she pointed out, was in the vanguard
of artistic change in Lebanon. His famous installations—the tying
together of the AUB campus ( see “Reflections,” p. 48) caught excited
students and faculty alike, and his 1972 Jafet Library display of
a long plastic tube of garbage collected from the beaches of Lebanon
significantly foretold current concerns about environmental pollution.
Helen also remembers Arthur Frick (see “Reflections”, this issue),
another American faculty member of the Department of Fine and Performing
Arts from 1956 to 1976, and the first chair of the department. Frick
was a conservative traditionalist, but, said Helen, he knew all
about different techniques, and he mentored burgeoning Lebanese
artists, for example, persuading Mouazzez Rawda (1906-86) to embrace
sculpture. His students emerged from his courses well grounded in
the essentials. Recalling his early days with the AUB art department
in a 2003 lecture, Frick said, “The intellectual disciplines were
exacting and the standards were high,” and described the arts seminars
as “one of the most effective and contributive activities encountered
at AUB.”
With the outbreak of the civil war both Carswell and Frick left
Lebanon, and in 1976 the department was forced to close. When they
returned in 2003 to lecture and exhibit, both of them contributed
fundamental and useful recommendations for the reconstitution of
the art department, which reopened in 2005, this time as the Department
of Fine Arts and Art History.
Helen, who had always wanted to be a writer before she discovered
painting quite by accident, had a simultaneous career as art critic
and editor. Peter Harrison Smith, chair of the AUB art department
in the early seventies, wrote, “from the early sixties she guaranteed
a refined place among the best art writers on contemporary art in
the Middle East.” She wrote frequently as an art critic for The
Daily Star and Monday Morning.
Fascinated with the predominance of women on the Lebanese art scene
(in the 1980s Helen found that 25 percent of artists were women),
she launched into a study which led to the publication of The Woman
Artist in Lebanon (completed in 1976, publication delayed until
1987) in which she documented the lives of 43 Lebanese women artists.
Of these women, thirteen, including Helen herself, either studied
or taught at AUB. Four were among twelve closely profiled: Huguette
Caland, a prolific and original painter, studied at the University
(1965-69); Saloua Raouda Choucair, an innovative sculptor, a special
student while working in the library; Mouazzez Rawdah, a rigorously
independent painter and sculptor - a student and later an instructor
(1957-66); Helen herself was a part-time instructor of painting
from 1967 to 1976.
Helen recalled independent sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair. “She
was, in my opinion, the best artist of her time.” Beginning as a
painter, Choucair was attracted, Helen later wrote, “to the cool,
pure abstract intricacies of design she found in Islamic art; and
it was the conceptual and formal genius of this art that finally
caught her imagination, directed her creative impulses, and turned
her into an abstract artist—the first in Lebanon (and perhaps in
the Arab world).” After an exciting three and a half years in Paris,
Choucair returned to the relative artistic isolation of Lebanon
in 1952 and “with remarkable determination and a dogged faith” continued
working, “moving from painting to tapestries, to jewelry and sculpture,
to graphics and stained glass and enamel. . . . It is for her extraordinarily
abstract and mathematically conceived wooden, metal, and stone sculptures
that she is remembered today.”
In a post-script to The Woman Artist, Khal cites two artists teaching
at the time at BUC, who are now members of the AUB faculty. Each
was profoundly influenced by Helen in her formation as an artist.
Leila Musfy, currently chair of AUB’s Department of Architecture
and Design in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, managed
to squeeze in two semesters as a student in the art department in
1976 before the outbreak of the civil war led to its dissolution.
Earlier, Aref Rayess had recommended that she study painting with
Helen Khal in the Extension Program during her last year in high
school. She encountered Helen again during her one year at AUB when
Helen took over some courses as other instructors left the country.
“When she gave us painting she was really popular because she was
such a well-known artist. She came to the rescue at a difficult
time, taking over courses and giving us the grades, but apart from
that she was such a great teacher.”
Later, after Musfy completed her BFA and MFA degrees in the United
States, she once again encountered Helen in 1981 in Washington,
DC. The two painters had kept in touch over the difficult war years,
and Leila now persuaded Helen to teach her once again. Together
they set up a studio in the basement of Helen’s Washington house,
bought easels and canvas, and recruited students—four in all. The
students posed for each other, and eventually found a model. “I
stayed with Helen for a year and a half. As a teacher she was fantastic.
She never forced any ideas on you, but rather made you think. She
urged us to find our own solutions—in the color, the angle, the
shading.”
Another painter now teaching at AUB in the art department, Afaf
Zurayk remembers Helen’s teaching from 1967 to 1970. Like Musfy,
she first encountered Helen outside the University. Her mother brought
Helen to their home as a special tutor for the talented 15-year
old. Afaf recalls Helen’s teaching, her insistence on independent
solutions. “She was spare with her words. She showed me certain
brush strokes, of course, but she left me pretty much on my own.
But I loved it. There’s nothing like learning from someone who’s
a master.” At the time, Zurayk painted mainly portraits.
Studying at AUB in the late l960s, Zurayk described the art department
at that time as “so exciting, so lively. It was a family department,
a fun department. We were all characters—odd balls on campus.” She
recalled the inspiring teachers: John Carswell, Arthur Frick, Joseph
Tanous, Erica Dodd, who taught art history in the history department,
and Helen Khal, whom she now met at the university level. Recently,
Zurayk wrote, “Helen as an artist and a person (Can we separate
them?) inspired me early in my life. Her fierce independence of
character combined with the spiritual use of color in her paintings
had a lasting influence on me as an artist and a person. Helen taught
me gentleness in applying color and refined my overly emotional
tendencies. For that and so much more I thank her.” All the faculty
members, Zurayk said, contributed to the special atmosphere of the
art department and to the students’ passion for the study of art.
The AUB Art Committee generously granted us full access
to AUB’s unique contemporary art collection. This committee, which
was established by former president John Waterbury, manages the
university art collection, sponsors arts related lectures and events
on campus, and is charged with re-establishing AUB as an innovating
contributor to the art movement in Lebanon and the Middle East.
– Ed.
Farid
Haddad
Farid Haddad, a painter and media artist, graduated from the AUB
Department of Fine Arts and Performing Arts in 1969 (BA). He holds
an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
From the mid- to late 1970s, he taught drawing and painting at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and since 1979 he has been on
the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History at New England
College in Henniker, New Hampshire. He is a former Fulbright Scholar
(1972) and is a recipient of two Individual Artist Grants from the
NH State Council on the Arts (1983 and 1984). His early works as
a painter dealt with color field painting, and in the early eighties
he turned to an art based on experimental abstraction. He has had
one-person exhibitions in Beirut, Kuwait City, Rome, New York, Paris,
Milwaukee, WI, and Henniker, NH. The artist has also participated
in more than forty group shows (since 1968) in Europe, the Middle
East and North America.
Vladimir Tamari
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1942, Vladimir Tamari studied physics
and art from 1957 to 1963 at AUB, where he was art editor of Outlook.
He has continued drawing and painting up to the present, while maintaining
parallel careers as an inventor and physicist. Since 1980, in addition
to his artwork, he has conducted intensive studies in optics and
imaging, and has developed a new theory to unify quantum and relativistic
physics. He is currently finishing work on designing AlQuds, a sans-serif
Arabic font for the computer, a project that he started in his student
days at AUB. AlQuds Arabic font will be released as part of Tasmeem
in Adobe InDesign CS4 this year.
Huguette Caland
Born in Beirut in 1931, Huguette Caland is an abstract painter and
sculptor who has also worked in fashion design (notably for Pierre
Cardin) and filmmaking. The daughter of a former president of Lebanon,
she trained under Italian artist Fernando Manetti and Rumanian sculptor
George Apostu and at AUB, where she graduated in 1968. In Lebanon,
she cofounded the Inash al-Mukhayyim art center. She lived in Paris
for many years and participated in individual and group exhibitions,
primarily in Europe and Lebanon. She has participated in major exhibitions
in Europe, notably the Venice Biennial, and currently lives in California.
Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui
Over the years, Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui, an AUB student (1962-64)
and instructor (1993-96) has produced an extraordinarily rich variety
of work in graphic design, film-making, lithography, and painting.
She has designed stamps, pamphlets, posters, and children’s books
and games, and was in charge of the Graphic Art Department of the
Lebanese Council of Tourism. Winner of many prizes, she has held
numerous exhibitions, both group and solo throughout Europe and
the Middle East. She is listed in the world reference, the Bénézit
Dictionary of Artists under the name Bassili Sehnaoui. Her painting,
“The Fortune Teller,” donated by the artist in 1999, is a part of
AUB’s permanent collection.
Ghada Jamal
She has been seriously painting and exhibiting since 1985. Currently
she is working on a body of work of a specific theme: “Trace and
Remains”. Her earliest paintings were Lebanese landscapes on sight
.When she moved to the States her art dramatically changed to reveal
violence and sorrow in war torn landscapes and desolated cityscapes.
In 1993 her art work became tamer and started to express her surroundings
and scenes from her studio's window in California. Point, line and
horizon were a mural that expressed her peace with herself, past
and Lebanon. At the same time she started to working on the sound
of Classical Arabic music and visualizing it in abstract paintings.
In 2002 she returned and took Beirut, Lebanon a place of residence.
Mohammed Rawas
Mohammed Rawas was born in Beirut in 1951. He studied painting at
the Institute of Fine Art of the Lebanese University, and graduated
in 1975 with honors and received the Lebanese University Scholarship
to study abroad. The year of his graduation witnessed the beginning
of the civil war in Lebanon, which led the artist to stop painting
and to leave his country to Syria, where he worked as a stage designer
at the Syrian Television. Then he traveled o Morocco where he stayed
for two years in Rabat, teaching art and resuming painting. He came
back to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show before joining
the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year.
Upon his return to Beirut in 1981with a Master Degree in Printmaking,
he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the
American University of Beirut that lasted for 27 years.
Mohammed Rawas served for 9 years as a secretary general of the
Association of Lebanese Artist and is a founding member of the Syndicate
of Lebanese Artists.
Since 1979 Rawas held 8 individual exhibitions in Beirut and London
and participated in more than 40 international art biennials and
exhibitions in England, USA, Norway, Tunis, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait,
France, Holland, Egypt, UAE, Poland and China. In these international
shows, he claimed 5 prizes and honorable mentions, including in
2008, the prize of Alexandria Biennial of the Art of the Mediterranean
Countries, for his first installation and video art piece.
His work is found in many Museums and public collections in Lebanon,
Tunis, Iraq, Jordan, Sharjah, Norway and England.
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