 Georges
David Corm
French version is available!
Biography:
Georges David Corm: 1896-1971
1896 - Born
in Beirut, the second child of David Semaan Corm and Virginie Naaman,
after Charles, brother of Jean (John) and Marie.
1919-1921 - Studied painting at the Ecole nationale supérieure
des beaux-arts in Paris.
1921 - Gold medalist at the Beirurt Exhibition Fair.
1922 - Winner of the contest for the concept of the Lebanese
Medal of Merit.
-Member of the jury for the selection of a project for a monument
to those soldiers who had fallen in the Levant.
1922-1928 - Promoter and then member of the executive committee
for the setting up of a Beirut Museum of Antiquities and Fine Arts.
-Secretary of the International Archaeological Congress held in
Beirut in 1926.
-Promoter and member of the jury of the Lebanese National Conservatory
of Music.
1928 - Emigrated to Egypt, where he married Marie Bekhyt
and in 1934 with some fellow artists and writers set up the Atelier,
a group for the encouragement and diffusion of the arts and letters.
1936 - Officer of the Académie de France.
Two of his paintings were bought by the Museum of Anvers in Belgium.
1937 - Medal of Honour of the Lebanese Merit.
1955 - Elected Honorary Member of the Lebanese Merit.
1955 - Elected member of the Royal Society of Arts of London.
1956 - Returned to Lebanon.
1958 - Officer of the Order of the Cedar.
1971 - Died in Beirut on December 13th.
An itinerary…
Everything predisposed Georges Daoud Corm
to an artistic career. However, his life was a difficult but patient
itinerary to keep intact his faith in art and therefore in mankind.
Born in 1896 into a scholarly family in Kesrouan, Georges Corm was the
grandson of Semaan Corm, who distinguished himself as the tutor of the
son of Emir Bashir, and the son of Daoud Corm, who was one of the
pioneers of painting in Lebanon, famous for his religious works as well
as for his fine portraits of Lebanese, Egyptian and Roman notables.
Daoud Corm was well rooted in the Lebanon of the 19th century, which had
seen the decline of the old aristocracy; he died, say his biographers,
covered with honours. Georges Corm, therefore, found himself in duty
bound to assume the difficult role of an artist, son of another artist
of established reputation, in a society that was undergoing rapid
change.
He had first of all to make a choice among the different talents with
which nature and his family background had endowed him. The many
notebooks he left behind him full of his youthful poems (one of which,
Chez les humbles, was published in 1915) bear witness to this. His
passion for music and the evenings of chamber music at which he acted as
pianist in Beirut at the beginning of the 20th century, and his efforts
for the setting up of the Conservatory of Music, are further evidence of
his complex artistic talents.. Likewise, his activities in various
artistic domains between 1922 and 1930 are yet another indication of his
attachment to art in all its different forms, as well as of his
indefatigable desire to develop the arts in his homeland.
Why painting should finally have got the upper hand perhaps only the
artist himself could have told us. There was no doubt the shadow of his
father in a society that was still strongly patriarchal, but also the
feeling derived from the experience of his father that painting provided
the minimum material conditions of existence better than either music or
poetry. In point of fact, throughout his life Georges Corm suffered the
bitter experience of the artist’s position in a society that was rapidly
changing and had little time for art, and still less for the social
status and material condition of its artists.
One part of Georges Corm’s artistic impulse suffered as a consequence
when, living by his painting alone, he had to sacrifice much of his
spontaneous but well-structured pictorial leanings to the production of
flattering portraits of personalities of the high society, portraits
obviously made to please their models, who were unfortunately too often
inclined to haggle over the painter’s fees.
So one can hardly be surprised that from 1950 onwards, when the material
condition of the artist underwent a steady decline, there no more appear
any of those sumptuous still-lifes of the nineteen-thirties or the fine
Lebanese landscapes typical of the nineteen-twenties followed by the
Egyptian landscapes between 1920 and 1940.
But as if to provide some compensation, some of the occasional
landscapes produced by George Corm from 1950 onwards have a certain
element of fantasy and of hidden symbolism, one that is perceptible in
the form of the rocks (such as those overhanging the view of the Bay of
Jounieh), or in stalactites (in the canvases of the interior of Grotto
of Jeita), or again in the Man in the Planet and the Swan.
Similarly, a number of female nudes of this period, full of eroticism so
manifestly opposed to the mystical romanticism of the artist, reveal
themselves as a vengeful counterpoint to all those delicate, beautified
faces of the ladies of the genteel society.
It must be admitted that Georges Corm never quite succeeded in being a
man of the twentieth century or in adapting himself to the social
interplay of the new Lebanese or Egyptian élite. Of course, when on his
marriage with Marie Bekhit, daughter of Youssef Bekhit, rich
cotton-broker on the Alexandria Exchange, he installed himself in this
Levantine city in the year 1928, there can be little doubt that the
brilliant cosmopolitan life there was a strong attraction for him. It
was here that he produced some remarkable portraits, some splendid
still-lifes, and some seascapes full of subtle touches. However, art
alone is not enough for a growing family to live on and, with the
depression in Egypt during the years 1936 to 1939, the commercial
ventures he had launched became an additional cause of worry for himself
and for his wife.
In 1948 Georges Corm gave up once and for all his business activity and
from then on lived on the meagre income derived for his portraits and
from some lessons of painting. It was then that he took up residence in
Cairo, but the unrelenting nostalgia for his native soil, further
aggravated by the social and cultural changes that Egypt underwent at
this time, led him to finally settle in Beirut in the year 1957. There,
however, he soon withdrew from public and social life. He even stopped
showing his work after 1967, the year when the wave of abstract painting
invaded the chic Lebanese society, until the art critic of a leading
Beirut daily emphatically and confidently asserted that dust had
smothered his brush.
At the end of the nineteen-fifties, faithful to his early vocation as a
promoter of the arts in Lebanon, Georges Corm had all the same presented
the Lebanese government with a plan for the setting up of an Institute
of Fine Arts. However, the idea was not followed up and the Lebanese
state after its independence never thought of having recourse to him or
of honouring him, apart from decorating him with the Order of the Cedar
in May of 1958.
When in 1964 he was obliged to give up his studio and his little garden
in Khandak el-Ghamik, which he himself had caused to be built in 1922 on
the spacious property of his father Daoud Corm, his health went rapidly
downhill. A surgical operation in 1966 gave him another five years of
life. In that same year he put on show at the Paris spring Salon two
portraits that brought him several orders, which however the state of
his health prevented him from fulfilling.
Corm’s Essay on Art and Civilisation of the year 1966 is a violent
indictment against the corrosive influence of both Stalinist Marxism and
American commercialism on contemporary arts and a denunciation of the
artistic fashions launched with the backing of publicity campaigns. In
this essay Georges Corm vehemently expresses not only all his nostalgia
for the classical humanism with which he himself was totally imbued but
also his faith in the emergence of a new humanist civilisation, one
adapted to the needs of this industrial atomic era.
This was his one and only public cry of protest against the civilisation
of his century which had made him suffer in more than one way, a cry
which even today at this turn of the century is not without some strange
echoes in those mystico-religious fundamentalist movements resurfacing
in the Middle East and even in the countries of the West. Once this
shudder of revolt was done with, expressed despite his natural reserve,
the artist passed the last years of his life in silence and reflection,
so conscious was he of his approaching departure. Only a few faithful
pupils such as the deeply devoted Joseph Matar continued to surround him
with their affection, and it also gave him the greatest pleasure to
receive that other great solitary, Omar Onsi. He passed quietly away in
the evening of December 13th, 1971, bearing with him all the charm of a
romantic Lebanon now gone for ever, one that this work is trying to
bring to life.
There can be no doubt that it was Marie Corm, his spouse so
self-effacing but always present in his life, who best summed up this
artist who had a foot in each of two centuries and therefore in each of
two societies and yet never wished to compromise. He had, she said, a
soul that was pure and authentic. It is true that he suffered from the
incomprehension of the people around him. Yet, above all, he remained
his true self and up till his final hours he continued to impart to
others the beauty that he bore within him.
May these pages and these reproductions help to open the way to this
message of beauty which, like many other messages of Lebanon, has been
covered with a thick and blood-soaked layer of dust by those very ones
who in their conceit thought to build a Lebanon of earth symbol of
universal humanism. This was the Lebanon of which the departed artist
wrote in his youth:
Oh, my country, yours are the loveliest hymns of glory and the loveliest
hymns of love!
In any case, his life and his work have fully and faithfully fulfilled
this promise.
Georges. G. Corm,
Beirut, September 1980.
Portraiture as a search for the Man:
Extracts from an article The Uncontested Master of Nature (Le
Maître incontesté de la nature), by Ethel Adnan.
In the work of George Corm
there is an overriding number of portraits. It is certain that most of
these were done on order; the artist was always faithful to his
subjects, for when these were superficial people he produced works that
were essentially worldly, not without beauty, well executed, but of no
great interest. However his artistic instinct came fully to the fore
when he was confronted with outstanding personalities, in whom he found
his proper measure. It is a remarkable fact that his best portraits are
not only those of kings, princesses and poets but also ones of simple
people, peasants, Egyptian fellaheen. These representatives of the
common people have an aristocracy about them similar to that of the
artist, for their worth comes not from money or social position but from
a kind of human nature that is fully exposed. The young Lebanese artist,
exiled and in this sense also exposed, finds himself among these beings
who are proud, with a strong look in their eyes full of fire, beings
whom he pursues with his pastels and his colours.
I shall go further and state that in the art of portraiture Georges Corm
found an absolute liberty. In front of the human faces, the absence of
national tradition in painting has no more play. The human subject
overwhelms by his presence any alienation that the painter might feel
about his historical situation in relation to Art. He has no reason any
more to wonder what school he should follow; at least, if he does ask
himself any questions, they matter little.
When doing the portrait of Abdul Aziz Ibn el Saoud, his chief concern
was to give this person and his history their immediate and present
greatness. The same holds true for the others. Faced with these men and
women seated before him, he hastened to seize the life in them with an
urgency to counter that anxiety that a Lebanese artist could not fail to
feel when thinking of his Parisian comrades who could come with the aura
of celebrated museums and of famous traditions. These long years of
labour were therefore years of liberation.
Georges Corm was a humanist and he said so in his Essay on the Art and
Civilisation of the Present Time (Essai sur l’Art et la Civilisation de
ce temps). For him, painting a portrait was a more important study, at
least at the beginning of his career, than doing a landscape because in
the hierarchy of beings man is at the summit. – certainly a Christian
point of view coming from this son of the mountains of Lebanon. He must
have felt the nobility of his office when he was painting Khalil Moutran
or the famous Madame C H.
Egyptian Peasant, charcoal 65 x 50 cm, during the nineteen-fifties
Self-portraits:
Extracts from an article The Uncontested Master of Nature (Le Maître
incontesté de la nature), by Ethel Adnan.
But as for myself, what strike me most in this work are the
self-portraits of Georges Corm. After, we may suppose, having studied
numberless faces, he has left of his own face some staggering evidence.
This was a strange destiny for a painter who could see himself as one
would like others to see oneself, and an extraordinary power.
We have one self-portrait done when he was young and several done in the
years of his maturity. When young he looks at himself with the eyes of
Dorian Gray. One sees in him Alexandria, with a refined sensuality that
has come down the ages, a certain heaviness weighing on the eyelids, the
feverish tint of a young man, a rose without any cosmetic, a head which
by the extreme fragility of its colours rivals the solidity of the
marbles of the young Ephebians of Alexandrine Hellenism. The painter
knows that he has a twofold expression that we grasp from the picture;
there is the regard of the young æsthete philosopher who judges all
those who look at him and also that of the young artist whose
indifference to his public allows him to reflect on his technical
problems and on his interior torment. On seeing this portrait I thought
of those slender and intense autobiographies of Joyce or Evtoushenki,
and of those admirable self-portraits in which Modigliani knows - and
knows how to prove – that he is a dandy who goes far beyond mere
dandyism.
There is one self-portrait that I would happily entitle The Artist in
his Laboratory. Georges Corm sets to work in his studio wearing a white
blouse, like a doctor. How often, surely, he must have examined behind
the wrinkles the personal tragedy of some woman who wished at any price
to be seen only under her most superficial aspect, the one that she
judged to be her best!
And is the studio not a laboratory where the artist studies each form
much as a biologist might study an amœba? On the configuration of a
flower its very being depends. From the movement of the body of a street
vendor one can divine his joy or his effort. Every studio of a true
artist is the crucible of his personal alchemy, of a learning that
cannot be transmitted to others; it is a laboratory for just one scholar
and for just one knowledge.
But self-knowledge could be no more than the ultimate knowledge for this
being who was essentially classical in his way of thinking. Georges Corm
looks on himself without pity and above all with an unimaginable
interior concentration. This particular painting surprises him in all
his depth. The eyes haggard but sure, the high forehead, the thin erect
body existing only to bear a pure psychological frame, with all these
the dandy has disappeared. He stands in front of us in his spirit at the
summit of his ability, someone knowing the past, come from afar, but
having a spiritual force like that of steel penetrating the future. This
is a self-portrait which should figure among the best-known in the
history of art.
There is also a portrait of the artist at the time of his maturity.
Neither dandy nor surgeon of the soul, the artist here is at an
intermediate interior level, rather as if he were telling his own life
story. This man of a pure aristocratic elegance looks at the world as he
looks at himself, without real passion, without either favourable or
unfavourable prejudice, but with a perfect sensitiveness to the
fundamental nobility of all that exists. He seems to define himself with
a keen awareness of his own worth, a worth that experience and
familiarity with his own life have proved to him. The true artist is
always in contact with his subconscious and with his temporal history,
knowing nothing if he does not know himself. The quality of this
portrait is a sort of guarantee of his other knowledge.
Self- portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, oil,
27 x 22 cm – 1930
The woman, the source, and Nature:
Extracts from an article The Uncontested Master of Nature (Le Maître
incontesté de la nature), by Ethel Adnan
Here we must mention one quite particular
painting, one of those works in which a great painter manages to express
all the dimensions of his own being.
On its left this painting shows us a woman making a gesture that
indicates that she might be bathing. The nude is seen from behind. The
flesh has like that of most Mediterranean woman the colour of ochre.
Following the classical tradition, the body is pure, strong and
sculptural. The woman is bathing at a spring against a mountain
landscape that is lofty and sombre.
This picture should be analysed as a complete work. It is a
philosophical essay, as might be said of a work by Leonardo representing
the thought of the great Italian painter.
I find in this painting a sort of microcosm. The woman is surrounded by
nature but she is herself also nature, which explains this feeling of
energy that she communicates to her surroundings.
Nature here is not just an image, a detail or any precise place. Precise
and evocative of those caverns and valleys of Lebanon, mysterious
despite the blaze of the daytime sun, nature in this painting attains
another dimension which we cannot describe as pantheistic, because of
its relationship to the female personage and the feeling of an eternal
presence which it also possesses. Here we have a masterpiece that makes
us regret how the works of Georges Corm are scattered here and there
around the world and regret also that the vicissitudes of daily life did
not allow him to develop to their highest degree in his painting the
infinite riches of his thought and of his talent.
The Young Woman and Nature, oil, 60 x 50 cm. –
Lebanon
The Lebanese landscape:
Extracts from an article The Uncontested Master of Nature (Le
Maître incontesté de la nature), by Ethel Adnan.
View of Ain Mreisseh, oil, 64 x 45 cm. – Lebanon,
during the nineteen-twenties
The Lebanese landscape is particularly
difficult for a painter. It is beautiful, as is only too clear. It is
dramatic, jagged, sundered, full of surprises, and vigorous. The eye has
hardly had time enough to become used to a contour when there is a
change. Comparatively small mathematically speaking, it yet gives the
impression of great dimensions and is even grandiose in places. This
evident beauty of the Lebanese scene is a snare for the artist, for it
acts like a real mirage. There are sketches of a corner of the sea, of
some trees, of a bend in the road, studies which are both precise and
swift, snapshots that seize the essential structure of the forms. These
sketches are always sharp, bare, belonging to that aspect of the spirit
of the painter which is incisive and without pity. From the
self-portraits to these drawings of prosaic nature, there is a passage
which is quite natural though not very evident. They all bear witness
however to an equal power of perception.
The oil landscapes are among the best in Lebanese painting. Only Saliba
Douaihy (before her voyage to America) and Omar Onsi were able to render
the Lebanese countryside with the ability of Corm.
Mountain scenery in Lebanon is bathed in a light which dissolves into a
blue smoke. The problem for the painter is to render the force of the
rock of which the eye is aware as hiding behind the impalpable mist
which surrounds and covers it. The task is almost inhuman.
When Cézanne paints a house in Provence, there are real shadows and
colours before him. When he paints trees, there are solid forms that he
can easily express. It is only when he paints Sainte Victoire Mountain
that there is a problem like the one facing the Lebanese landscape
artist, that of a mountain which is at one and the same time massive and
unreal. This incidentally explains why he passed his whole life
stumbling against this problem, always coming up against it, until his
dying day. This mountain was the contradiction that he had to resolve,
the challenge he had to take up, the truth he had to face.
Georges Corm attacked the Lebanese scene that was the most difficult to
put on canvas. He did not paint the little mountain dwellings, the
gardens with their wonderful play of shadows, but studied the mountain
itself, with its great valleys that descend in diagonal lines, with arid
stretches studded with villages. Seen from afar, these landscapes melt
into the light and one has to bring their colours to life without
however betraying the grey or rose tints into which they lose
themselves. George Corm succeeds admirably and together with those we
have mentioned he will always remain the uncontested master of nature in
Lebanon.
But Lebanon is not only a country of mountains. These plunge down to the
sea sometimes gently and sometimes abruptly and the coast itself
presents the painter with new difficulties. There can be no question of
painting the coastline in summer, for then it is drowned in a blaze of
sunlight. But in autumn, winter and the early spring, the season, unique
in the richness of its colours, gives subjects of passionate interest. I
am thinking in particular of those seascapes that are both subtle and
austere, communicating all the mystery of the encounter between earth
and ocean. Georges Corm does not stop at the anecdote, at all the
sensual shimmering irridescence that Georges Cyr has rendered so well,
nor above all at the charm and folklore of the Ain Mreisseh genre, but
rather at the coast grasped in all its purely planetary mysterious
simplicity.
The same may be said of that other aspect of the Lebanese coastline, one
where it is more sandy than rocky. The south side of Beirut, as George
Corm once knew it up to the early nineteen-sixties, presented a quite
peculiar and striking character. Four elements were always there to
divide the space between them, namely the sky, the great diagonal line
of the mountain range sloping down as far as Tyre, the gentler slope of
a wide stretch of sand, and finally the sea itself. The colours often
complemented each other in a most astonishing way; between the sky,
either blue or grey, and the sea, either blue or green, there was always
the contrast between the mauve where the mountains disappeared and the
orange colour of the sand. These views that I have so often contemplated
from the Corniche were painted by Georges Corm with a power and
acuteness of vision that for me now bring the past to life again.
I should also like to mention the studies of the terrain surrounding
Beirut, half way up between the city and the mountain. The sand changes
to rock and its orange colour to a deep rose, like the struggle on the
borderline between desert and forest. A few pine trees, so typical of
the Lebanese scene, begin on this heath to march as it were in single
file. From these places now almost entirely vanished Georges Corm has
produced masterpieces.
One cannot end this study without at least mentioning those paintings
and drawings of boats on the Nile and of room interiors and the
still-lifes.
What should be particularly noted is the unity of this pictorial work
underlying all the diversity of its subjects. For example, a painter who
goes from portraiture to still life is not an eclectic if the
workmanship is consistent and the quality does not suffer. One might
even go further and say that, with the exception of a few society
portraits, there is a still deeper unity in all this work; there is a
Platonist meaning which transmits itself through the painting, an
idealism, the presence of the painter’s meditation behind the object
described. The boats on the Nile express the long, unbroken historical
duration of Egypt, the Lebanese landscapes recall the religious feelings
existing in this part of the world, and a miniature watercolour of a
divided watermelon shows the passion for living. So it is that behind
this strangely discreet and scattered work there stands a visionary of
genius.
Some works of the artist are available in
gallery Bekhazi Beirut, Ashrafieh - Telephone: 01-321487 Fax : 01-200749
The items of information are taken from
the book "Georges Daoud Corm, peintre et portraitiste libanais,
1896-1971", Beirut, 1981, bilingual French-Arabic, 167 pages,
cloth-covered copies numbered 100 to 600 and leather-covered copies
numbered 1 to 100. The book is available in gallery Bekhazi Beirut.
►► Some
of the artist's Artwork
►► Meet the artist in Art Direct Sale!
Contact:
gecorm@inco.com.lb
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