(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 the 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.
Address: Kfar Mashoun, near the Naamtallah Hardini Church Edde Jbeil-Byblos, Lebanon
Email: [email protected]
Call: +961 3 348919
