 César
Gemayel (1898 - 1958)
César Gemayel
was born in 1898 at "Ain al Touffaha" near Bikfaya, and
died suddenly in Beirut in 1958, working up to the last: he is rightly
viewed as a leading figure in Lebanese painting, of which he was
a lifelong pioneer by his example and teaching, alongside Youssef
Hoyeck, Georges Corm, Omar Onsi, Saliba Douaihy, Moustapha Farroukh
and a handful of others.
Before those figures,
who each in his way freed nascent Lebanese art from the straitjacket
of various forms of inculcated academicism and formalism, a first
series of painters and sculptors from Lebanon had paved the way,
making the compulsory pilgrimage to the capitals of western art:
Rome, Paris, London and, even then, New York. These "first
generation" artists, unlike the "second generation"
of which César Gemayel is one of the most representative,
were still too often permeated with the lessons of the museums and
cramped by the do's and don'ts of the art-school: nor should one
overlook the fascination inevitably exerted in those days by photographic
resemblance. Even so, some of them, notably Gemayel's teacher Khalil
Saleeby, had begun to open their windows, eyes and hearts to what
lay to hand in the outside world, and to bedazzlement of the landscape.
For, like the masters
he revered - not only Renoir but Reynolds and Jean-Paul Laurens
(Whose studio he attended) - César Gemayel was a pre-eminently
sensual man who insatiably consumed with his eyes everything that
could feed his appetite for colour - colour before shape - and set
his palette ablaze. César Gemayel, or the "ardent brush".
His themes - the female
nude, glowing flowers, landscapes green and red, dances and "dabkés",
the occasional epic evocation - are the product of his almost aggressive,
feverish thirst for living and painting. The various techniques
he employed reflected that same impetuous curiosity.
Portrait by Cesar Gemayel - 26 x 21 cm, Oil on Canvas
(Private collection artist Joseph Faloughi)
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
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