 Blanche
Loheac-Ammoun Blanche
Loheac Ammoun, 1912
by Nicole Malhamé Harfouche:
Of Lebanese
origin and nourished by the resplendence of our fiery sun, our starry
skies and our landscapes full of light, Blanche Lohéac Ammoun
left at a very early age to encounter the Occident. And there, in
this sensitive spirit, was the union of the poetry of the Orient
and the thought of refined French culture.
Attractive and
easy to approach, her painting reveals itself in all its magic detail.
Before the actual subject: of a sketch, the notes she takes of nature
in themselves alone reveal a very acute and intense personality.
Moved by the internal rhythms that animate her painting, she penetrates
the canvas as she throws herself into a poem where the words clash
and jangle before being ordered into sweet music.
Blanche Lohéac Ammoun is within everything she does, not
superficially by some projection of her physical image but much
more profoundly there. One might say that having seized in nature
something of its first quivering movement; she is herself what she
displays before our eyes. She invites us to a mystical ascension
which immediately places her work on a very high aesthetic and spiritual
place that at the same time excludes all the facility of either
expressionism or the abstract.
Entirely characteristic
of her talent, these paintings are feasts of light, of mobility
and spontaneous freshness that are ceaselessly renewed. This very
free and very personal treatment seems to suit her temperament,
finding in it an ideal means of expression.
In French
- Blanche Loheac Ammoun, 1912 par Nicole Malhamé Harfouche:
D’origine libanaise,
nourrie de l’éclatement de notre soleil de feu, de nos ciels
etoilés, de nos paysages lumineux, Blanche Lohéac
Ammoun partit très jeune à la rencontre de l’Occident.
Là s’unirent en cette âme sensible, la poésie
de l’Orient et la pensée d’une culture française raffinée.
Séduisante
et facile d’accès, sa peinture se révèle dans
le détail assez magique. Les notes qu’elle prend sur la nature,
devant le motif, révèlent à elles seules une
personnalité très aigue. Mue par les rythmes intérieurs
qui l’animent, elle pénètre dans son tableau comme
elle s’élance dans un poème où les mots tintent
et s’affrontent avant de s’ordonner en une douce musique.
Blanche Loheac
Ammoun est dans tout ce qu’elle fait. Ell n’y est pas superficiellement
par quelque projection de son image physique. Elle y est beaucoup
plus profondément. On dirait qu’ayant saisi dans la nature
quelque chose de son premier frémissement, elle est même
ce qu’elle nous donne à voir. Elle nous convie à une
ascension mystique qui situe d’emblée son œuvre sur un plan
esthétique et spirituel très élevé,
excluant à la fois les facilités de l’expressif et
celles de l’abstrait.
Tout à
fait caractéristiques de son talent, ces peintures sont des
fêtes de la lumière, d’une mobilité et d’une
fraîcheur spontanée qui se renouvellent sans cesse.
Cette fracture très libre et très personnelle semble
convenir à son tempérament, qui tient en elle un moyen
d’expression fait sur mesure.
Blanche
Loheac-Ammoun by Helen Khal – The woman in Lebanon
“One day, I wanted to express a pure impression
- one which the sun had left upon me. How to interpret an incandescence?
Suddenly that same day, I discovered that painting, to achieve this
aim, had to be abstract or, at least, not figurative. I have continued
in this direction; and it seems to me, with an instinct I have always
relied on, that this is the best path into myself.”
In 1931, on the graduating list of the Jesuit Faculty
of Law in Beirut were the names of two women: Blanche Ammoun and
Nina Trad, the first women in Lebanon to earn law degrees. Nina
Trad continued in the profession as the country’s first practicing
woman lawyer. In due time, she met and married another lawyer, Charles
Helou, and with him eventually achieved prominence as the wife of
a president. Blanche Ammoun, however, simply framed her degree,
forgot about it, and turned to another, more compelling interest
– art.
This kind of unusual decision, of abrupt change,
was typical to the temperament of this spirited and diversely talented
young woman. All her life, Blanche had been permitted to follow
wherever her intellectual curiosity led her. Recognizing early the
special qualities of mind and imagination her daughter had been
born with, her mother wisely guided the child, anticipated her needs
for expression, and provided her with the necessary conditions and
facilities to explore whatever gifts she revealed. It was enough
that Blanche express a desire to paint, to have immediately set
before her paints and brushes, easel and canvas… and at her side,
of course, a professor. Blanche remembers well the abundantly creative
days of her childhood in Alexandria. There was always one adventure
after another, and often all together – music, voice, drama, art,
literature.
But why law, then? Blanche replies: “It was a tradition
in the family; they were all lawyers, my uncles, my father, my brother.
Law was the natural, logical choice for my formal university education.
But that doesn’t prevent one from doing other things, does it? My
father was not only a lawyer; he was a poet and statesman as well.
My brother, a lawyer, was also a UNESCO delegate, and always intensely
interested in all the arts, he was, in fact, the one who most encouraged
me throughout my career as an artist.”
It was, however, the early influence of her mother
that established the future directions of Blanche’s life. Half Italian
and with a strong European cultural heritage, Victoria Chiha was,
in Blanche’s words, “… a born artist; there was nothing she did,
at home, in her life, without a sense of art. I still remember how
she put together the many pieces of a broken mirror, turned it into
a fascinating mosaic design – still a mirror, but also a work of
art.”
Blanche had her first painting lessons at the age
of 10. Later, when the family returned from Egypt to live in Lebanon,
the painting lessons continued. Law studies or not, there was still
time for art, and for writing, which was to become also an important
medium of expression for Blanche. She speaks about the journal she
kept during her years at law school, the daily entries of events
and experiences, many illustrated with small, humorous sketches.
She speaks also about her art teachers and the other girls with
whom she painted.
There was in Beirut during that time of the early thirties a Polish
painter, Jean Kober, to whom a number of mothers entrusted the instruction
of their daughters. The painting classes were a fashionable, social
activity, and hardly intended to produce serious, professional artists.
But to a few of the young women, the experience became more than
pleasant afternoons of light gossip and the easy production of pretty
pictures; they discovered the adventure of painting, the mysterious
magic of transforming color and form into art. Along with Blanche,
they participated in the group exhibitions of the day; art critics
reviewed their works and wrote about them in glowing terms in the
Beirut cultural press. Their lives eventually took other directions,
but during those years, as a group, they comprised the first generation
of contemporary women artists in Lebanon.
Blanche also spent a brief period of study with
the Lebanese painter, Habib Srour. She recalls it as a distressingly
boring experience: “How unlike Kober he was in his teaching approach!
With Kober we were permitted free expression, each to develop an
individual style. But with Srour… how can I forget the week after
week after week of painting the same chair, each week the same chair
but from a different angle.
No matter how much we protested, he simply pointed
to the chair and said, “Paint”
Blanche Ammoun the artist, meanwhile, was also very
much Blanche Ammoun the woman. Like any other young, privileged
lady of that period, full of an ebullient taste for life, she went
to tea parties and dances, sported the latest fashions, and from
under her parasol flirted with the young men… until finally she
fell in love with one, an officer in the French Army. In 1944, Blanche
Ammoun and Colonel Andrea Loheac were married. Soon after, they
went to live in Paris.
Blanche chose her husband well. Andre Loheac, although
a man of military discipline, was also a French gentleman of culture
and learning. Avant garde in his thinking, it pleased him that his
wife was an artist, and throughout their life together he gave full
encouragement to her efforts. With such support (and with her own
inexhaustible energy), Blanche was able to do what few women artists
can – to combine, with harmony and success, love, marriage, children,
and art.
There were three children; to them Blanche was a
devoted, conscientious mother. There was a large household to manage;
in it Blanche was the responsible and efficient mistress. There
were social obligations, military and diplomatic; here Blanche was
the gracious hostess, the elegant wife of the Colonel. And then
there was her own private world – her studio, her study, her salon
– where Blanche became the artist and writer, in one moment an intense
working artist in paint-spattered coveralls, and in the next the
feminine, silk-robed and gold-bungled lady of the salon, where each
week she received the writers and artists of Paris.
Her production? Notable by any standards. She has
two books to her credit, both illustrated with her drawings, one
of which gained her a French Academy award in 1964. In painting,
after years of a continuous search for original expression, she
finally found her answer in a seemingly unimportant bag of sand
and mica she had collected on a holiday. Out of this material, she
produced a series of iridescent abstract paintings, which stunned
the Parisian public in the early sixties and prompted more than
one critic to announce: “A new art is born.” Along with painting,
her production in jewelry and ceramics also reveals a characteristic
inventiveness. Today, she is working on another approach – that
of combining jewelry with painting.
Each summer for as long as she has resided in France,
Blanche returns to Lebanon where she also maintains a permanent
home. Her love and loyalty to family and country is also proclaimed
in the Loheac-Ammoun duality of her name. French and Lebanese, woman
and artist, materially secure, protected and encouraged, permitted
the freedom to develop as a child and in marriage, she has had the
best of two worlds. How did she combine it all? As a friend once
remarked about Blanche: “Her secret is that she loves whatever she
undertakes… but she only undertakes, it is true, what she loves.”
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
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