Modern Art in Cold War Beirut

Drawing Alliances

Sarah Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429615313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances examines the entangled histories of modern art and international politics during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

Positing the Cold War as a globalized conflict, fraught with different political ideologies and intercultural exchanges, this study asks how these historical circumstances shaped local debates in Beirut over artistic pedagogy, the social role of the artist, the aesthetics of form, and, ultimately, the development of a national art. Drawing on a range of archival material and taking an interdisciplinary approach, Sarah Rogers argues that the genealogies of modern art can never be understood as isolated, national histories, but rather that they participate in an ever contingent global modernism.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, Cold War studies, and Middle East studies.

1 Beirut as Cultural Capital

Cosmopolitanism in the Shadow of the Cold War

Introduction

An 1876 edition of the popular Cook’s Tourist Handbook to Palestine and Syria vividly depicts the traveler’s entrance into Beirut, then considered part of Greater Syria under the Ottoman Empire:

Descending towards Beyrout, every turn of the road gives fresh glimpses of Beyrout and its charming environs. As we clear the level a civilized region is entered, orchards, and gardens abound, pleasant villas are seen on every hand, the Pineta, or pine grove, is traversed and soon we find ourselves among the shops and paved streets of Beyrout.¹

After much disenchantment with other towns—the streets of Jaffa are “dirty, narrow, and winding”; Jerusalem is “a disappointment”—the delightful entrance into Beirut is refreshing.² But such an enjoyable experience is soon mitigated by the city’s apparently muted Oriental character:

Beyrout is the principle commercial town of Syria, and is strangely different from any other. Bankers abound; there are consulates of all the principle countries in the world. Almost everything that can be purchased in a European city may be purchased in Beyrout…. The Bazaar does not present any of those Oriental features that are so attractive in other eastern towns…. The houses are of semi-European build, and the costumes of semi-European cut.³

By 1912, guidebooks warned visitors to the region not to waste time in Beirut, because “it is essentially a modern town.”⁴ The signs of Beirut’s modernity—its banks, its foreign consulates, its paved streets—were staged as both a familiar welcome to the Euro-American tourist and a disappointment to foreign travelers searching for the adventure of difference. Such descriptions were predicated upon well-rehearsed distinctions that produced the binaries distinguishing East from West, namely those of tradition and modernity, conservative and progressive, backward and enlightened.⁵ These guidebooks suggested, however, that Beirut’s urban identity was muddled, not quite Western and not quite Eastern. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we encounter the historical germ of modern and contemporary characterizations of Beirut: a commercial crossroads and Mediterranean port where Arabic, French, Armenian, and English mix interchangeably. Endowed as such with an intermixed identity within the region, the Lebanese capital was celebrated as cosmopolitanism in certain contexts and bemoaned as indistinguishable from the West in others.

The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century tropes found in Cook’s travel guides find parallels in contemporary art historical scholarship on Lebanon. In 1996, the Swiss-based art historian Silvia Naef published the pioneering study A la recherche d’une modernité arabe: l’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak.⁶ The work’s importance is its consideration of the visual arts as a field through which configurations of modernity were negotiated in the Arab world. Through a comparative approach, Naef explores the ways in which subject matter and style are deployed to express a particular relationship to the postcolonial nation-state.⁷ She argues that modern artists in Lebanon, in contrast to those in Iraq and Egypt, were unconcerned with establishing a vernacular visual language. In the case of the first generation—those artists working during the 1930s—the choice of subject matter—landscapes and genre scenes, for instance—may be described as Lebanese, yet the styles emulate conventional European academic models. Neither social realism nor Islamic aesthetic traditions took hold as formal strategies for the formation of a national visual identity as they had in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. Subsequently, throughout the 1960s, as abstraction replaced academicism, the former was without the pedigree of “an invented tradition,” as artists made little effort to attach the formal language of abstraction to that of religious spiritualism or Lebanese nationalism.⁸ The cultural nationalism of pan-Arabism, a movement promoting Arab unity in opposition to colonial intervention in the region, failed to taint abstraction’s claims to universalism among Lebanese artists.⁹ The premises underlying Naef’s argument are that modern Lebanese art is distinguished from European art by its stylistic imitation and that a regional political art is equated with either pan-Arabism or an Arab-oriented nationalism. Furthermore, the artistic community in Lebanon was itself fragmented according to Naef—no collectives were formed and no manifestos were written.¹⁰

Lebanon’s regional artistic difference is thus defined by two related absences: the lack of a politically engaged art and the lack of a social collective that translated into an aesthetic unity. Naef writes, “It is true that Lebanese art is rarely claimed to be militant; there were no artistic collectives that defended a common artistic, political, or social cause; artistic production was always an individual experience.”¹¹ This aesthetic is a result of a conflicted political orientation in the aftermath of the 1920 creation of Greater Lebanon. As Naef explains, “This reflected the general cultural atmosphere in the country: while particular groups believed in Arabism, the dominant opinion always saw Lebanon as a point of entry between the Arab world and Europe.”¹² Lebanon’s supposed muddled identity in Naef’s argument recalls that of the nineteenth-century travel guide discussed above. In Naef’s argument, this characterization results in political and material realities: Lebanon’s failure to achieve both national and artistic authenticity. Her contention suggests the modern obsession with the paradigm of authenticity as an analytical category for art, particularly in relation to a postcolonial formation of a national identity.¹³

To juxtapose Cook’s nineteenth-century travel guide next to Naef’s contemporary analysis of the development of modern art in Lebanon is to document the historical longevity and discursive persistence of the supposed “muddled” urban identity of Ottoman Beirut, an identity that later, as the city transitioned into a twentieth-century national capital, became a stand-in for modern-day Lebanon. This chapter historicizes, through a focus on the visual arts, the production of what is often termed cosmopolitanism in the case of Lebanon as a putatively national trait.¹⁴ In Naef’s argument, aesthetics and the nation mirror one another in a self-referential circle. This chapter takes a different approach to art, focusing instead on discourses on art in order to consider art not as a natural outgrowth of the independent nation-state, but rather as constituted by dynamic social networks and processes to be inherently Lebanese. As scholar Elizabeth Thompson has studied, the press under the French Mandate (1920–43) constituted a significant forum for debates about national visions of independence.¹⁵ Moreover, by the late 1920s, the visual arts were a regular feature in certain publications, particular the francophone ones, and as this chapter documents, these art reviews engaged national debates. Indeed, Kirsten Scheid’s scholarship examines the reciprocal relationship of the visual arts and the nation-state, characterizing both as “unsettled” during this historical period of the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁶

The chapter thus begins in the 1920s, when Lebanon was governed under the French Mandate and political and cultural figures charted a vision for a future nation-state, promised by European powers under the post–World War I mandate system. Of particular relevance to the present study is the formation of a cosmopolitan nationalism—based on Lebanon’s ancient Phoenician roots and a Franco-Mediterranean cultural orientation—fashioned at the hands of Maronite Christian politicians, economists, intellectuals, and cultural figures. An analysis of one of the earliest periodicals to feature the visual arts, La Revue du Liban, considers how a Christian nationalist vision was disguised as a cosmopolitan nationalism. As such, cosmopolitanism emerges as a national trait and an aesthetic vision that is discursively constructed and whose meaning is institutionally contingent, rather than a sociopolitical cultural reality reflected back in Lebanon’s aesthetic orientation, as suggested in Naef’s argument of modern art in Lebanon.

The second half of this chapter considers the ways in which this Euro-Christian cosmopolitanism would render Lebanon, decades later, strategic to the United States during the Cold War. When the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine acknowledged the popular and political power of then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), the United States issued a Cold War policy shift; rather than attempt to isolate Nasser and his position of pan-Arabism and third-world alignment, the United States would instead work to strength conservative Arab governments with pro-Western leanings, such as Lebanon. The chapter concludes by detailing the cultural resources that accompanied that shift in United States policy, one that sought to explicitly exploit Lebanon’s purported “muddled” identity and call on cultural forums such as the visual to play a prominent role in the Cold War battle for “hearts and minds.”

La Revue du Liban, Art, and Maronite Nationalism

In 1928, the francophone weekly La Revue du Liban reproduced a seemingly mundane oil painting, Le Cèdre du Liban (The cedar of Lebanon) by established Lebanese artist Philippe Mourani (1875–1970) (Figure 1.1). The work is exemplary of Naef’s characterization of painting in Lebanon during the 1930s. The subject, a tree native to the area of Mount Lebanon, attaches the painting to a geographical location, whereas Mourani’s artistic language draws on European tropes of arcadia.¹⁷ Recalling an unspoiled wilderness, Mourani acknowledges his artistic training in Paris within the French Academy yet posits a natural setting removed from the historical realities of Lebanon at the time. As historian Elizabeth Thompson details, the 1930s witnessed volatile political contests as organized social movements not only actively opposed the French Mandate, but also forcefully worked to transform the civic order under mandate rule. Such social movements included women’s federations, nationalist parties, religious organizations, labor unions, and proto-fascist youth organizations.¹⁸ Mourani’s choice of the cedar tree thus idealized and naturalized the concept of the nascent nation-state at the moment when its sociopolitical reality was in the very fragile and fraught process of being constituted. A brief consideration of the text accompanying Mourani’s painting underscores the role of art in this acclimation of the nation-state.

Figure 1.1 Reproduction of Philippe Mourani’s Le Cèdre du Liban (c.1920s) in La Revue du Liban, 1928.

Source: Public Domain.

A small text describing the role of painters in celebrating the cedar tree aligns the painter—a novel profession in Lebanon at the time—to artists working in the already culturally sanctioned forms of poetry and song. The text reads, “As the poets do in their songs, painters immortalize this symbol of force and duration on the canvas.”¹⁹ The painting’s caption connects the subject of the work to the act of production so that the painter assumes responsibility for preserving Lebanon itself for the future. Mourani would reinforce those same claims in his 1932 essay, “The Role of the Fine Arts in the Life of the People,” also published in La Revue du Liban. Establishing an ethical role for painting and sculpture, Mourani argued that the visual served...