Galerie Claude Lemand

Claude Lemand. I have great admi­ra­tion for the art of Shafic Abboud and a faithful affec­tion for his person. I am happy and proud to have been able to keep the double promise that I made to him shortly before his death on April 8, 2004: to pub­lish his first mono­graph in 2006 and, in 2011, to orga­nize in France the most impor­tant ret­ro­spec­tive of his work at the Institut du monde arabe. And here I am once again happy and proud to be able to cel­e­brate his memory and his art, on the occa­sion of the cen­te­nary of his birth. With the sup­port of his most loyal friends and col­lec­tors, I hope to live up to the mis­sion entrusted to me by Christine Abboud, his only daughter, who granted me the exclu­sive inter­na­tional dis­tri­bu­tion of her father’s col­lec­tion, in order to con­tribute to high­lighting his per­son­ality and his emi­nent place in the his­tory of art. A choice of the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive paint­ings from this Estate will be exhib­ited at Art Paris 2025, on stand D21 of the Galerie Claude Lemand.

Born in Lebanon on November 22, 1926 and died in Paris on April 8, 2004, Shafic Abboud is the most French painter in the Arab world. He had a great affinity with the painting of Pierre Bonnard and with the pic­to­rial tech­nique of Nicolas de Staël. He had also suc­ceeded in abol­ishing the border between this learned Western art and the pop­ular Lebanese cul­ture with which he had been deeply imbued since child­hood. His paint­ings are a man­i­festo for color and light, for freedom and Life; they cel­e­brate the sen­su­ality of pic­to­rial mate­rial, of women’s bodies, of shim­mering tex­tiles and the inspiring and heav­enly beauty of the country of his child­hood. His lumi­nous work and his endearing per­son­ality func­tioned as a per­ma­nent bridge between France, Lebanon and the Arab world.

Shafic Abboud wanted and was able to develop a per­sonal dia­logue between Lebanon and France and it was in Paris that his art matured and flour­ished in stages: from the defense and illus­tra­tion of tra­di­tional pop­ular Lebanese Arab cul­ture (1947-1953), then the con­quest of the cul­ture and painting of Western Parisian moder­nity (1953-1963), his period of research for an art of cross-breeding, which allowed him to freeing him­self from the dog­matic shackles of this abstract painting (1964-1968), towards the devel­op­ment and blos­soming of an art that is both per­sonal and uni­versal, a trans­fig­u­ra­tive cel­e­bra­tion of the beauty of Woman and Nature (1969-1979), then the recovery in paint­ings of his fab­u­lous mem­o­ries of child­hood and youth, during the fif­teen long and painful years of war in Lebanon (1980-1991), until the excep­tional emer­gence in number and quality of paint­ings from his last period, despite his serious health prob­lems (1992-2002).

Shafic Abboud was very attached “to a cer­tain Lebanon”, to its land­scapes, its light and to its mem­o­ries of child­hood and youth. He was of Lebanese Arab and mod­ernist cul­ture. He was impreg­nated from his ear­liest child­hood by the sto­ries of his grand­mother, the vil­lage sto­ry­teller, by the sto­ries and images con­veyed by itin­erant sto­ry­tellers, by the cus­toms and pop­ular cul­ture of the vil­lages of Mount Lebanon. His view was influ­enced by the Byzantine icons and rites of his church, which exalt and sing the res­ur­rec­tion and trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Christ, unlike the Roman Catholic tra­di­tion which rather mag­ni­fies the Passion and saving suf­fering. Later, his intel­lec­tual for­ma­tion would be marked by the writ­ings, debates, strug­gles and ideals which accom­pa­nied the Arab Nahda, this mod­ernist and anti­cler­ical Renaissance of which some emi­nent pro­moters were Lebanese writers and thinkers, such as Khalil Gibran.

The young Lebanese arrived in Paris in 1947 and inte­grated into its artistic and social life, like the many artists who came from all over the world after the Second World War (from the Americas, Europe, Asia and North Africa) and who con­sti­tuted the second great migra­tory wave towards Paris, which was still the City of Lights and the first des­ti­na­tion for future artists who sought moder­nity, embodied by the last Monet and by all the great Parisian artists who made the 20th cen­tury. In 1953, he was the first Arab artist to pro­duce painter’s books, the only artist from the Arab world whom the French com­mittee of young art critics had invited to par­tic­i­pate in the First Paris Biennale in 1959, alongside the most promising young Parisian artists of the time: Yaacov Agam, Avigdor Arikha, Martin Barré, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Yves Klein, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, Serge Rezvani, Jean Tinguely, ...

Like any cre­ator, Shafic Abboud was com­plex and mul­tiple. He knew how to enjoy the simple joys of life: eating well, drinking, loving, being touched by a cer­tain light on a land­scape, a fabric, a face or the body of a woman. His life was also a con­stant battle with him­self, with painting and with the out­side world, a mul­tiple battle too. He often doubted and ques­tioned the legit­i­macy and rel­e­vance of his work. But, out of mod­esty, he only spoke of his moments of hap­pi­ness, of his loving and enjoy­able rela­tion­ships with painting.

Shafic Abboud was not the painter of a single image, repeated in stereo­type and in mul­tiple vari­a­tions throughout exhi­bi­tions and years. His work is learned and thoughtful, his work hard. He was in con­stant search: he exper­i­mented, delighted in finding, doubted and ques­tioned him­self. But he remained faithful to the var­ious facets and meta­mor­phoses of the inti­mate and per­sonal rela­tion­ship that he had estab­lished with Woman and Nature, with Life on our blue planet: the Seasons, the Windows, the Workshops, the Gardens, the Rooms, the Nudes, the Nights, the Sunken Cafés, the tem­peras of his Childhood World, the tem­peras of the ancient Arab Poets, Simone’s Dresses,...

His paint­ings are often an invi­ta­tion to the joy of living, a pagan hedo­nism, tem­pered by the limits of our fragile human con­di­tion. This does not pre­vent the tragic force of some of his works, with light or obvious ref­er­ences to the dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances of this or that period of his life or those of his friends, of Lebanon, of the Arab world and of tragedies in var­ious parts of the world. Certainly, he never high­lighted his com­mit­ments, but his work and his inter­views with the Arab press tes­tify to his opin­ions and his great polit­ical and social sen­si­tivity.

Over the sea­sons and through slight shifts, his painting will evolve from Lebanese poetic and pop­ular Figuration to Parisian lyrical Abstraction, then from Abstraction to a subtle and sub­lime form of Abboudian trans­fig­u­ra­tion, which is both ancient and modern, pagan and sacred. I have described his mature work as trans­fig­u­ra­tive, because it is the term which seems to me to best cor­re­spond to his search for a syn­thesis between his enchanted world of child­hood and his tech­nical mas­tery of Parisian abstract painting. Stimulated by Pierre Bonnard and Nicolas de Staël, he wanted to go beyond this painting, to give it a per­sonal soul and a rich and lumi­nous paste: to show in painting the mul­tiple visions, inti­mate or daz­zling, of his inte­rior and exte­rior worlds. He trans­fig­ures into paint­ings images that had already passed through the fil­ters of his memory. This is how he painted Les Cafés engloutis in 1990, vast col­orful and lumi­nous com­po­si­tions of a tragic reality: the destruc­tion by the Lebanese war of the seaside cafes in Beirut, which he loved to fre­quent during his annual winter stays until 1975. He sim­i­larly trans­fig­ured in 1997 into spring can­vases the memory of Simone, beyond her death, a friend who amazed him with the shim­mering and varied fab­rics of her dresses. Certainly, Shafic Abboud was nei­ther a prac­ti­tioner nor a believer of any reli­gion, but he was very influ­enced in his child­hood by the splendor of the Byzantine Greco-Arabic icons and liturgy. Art tri­umphs over death, if only sym­bol­i­cally and, as his friend Adonis says, “Great artists never die!” ".

Claude Lemand,
Gallerist and art pub­lisher in Paris since 1988
University pro­fessor, researcher and exhi­bi­tion curator
Collector and major donor to the Museum of the Institut du monde arabe, Paris

(Claude Lemand, Shafic Abboud, Retrospective. Catalogue Art Paris 2025, Grand Palais).

Public and Private Collections:

His works (paint­ings and works on paper, ceramics and sculp­ture pro­jects, car­pets and tapestries, lithographs and artist’s books) fea­ture in many public col­lec­tions in
 France (MAM de la Ville de Paris, Museum of the Institut du monde arabe, FNAC, FDAC, Mobilier national, Centre Georges Pompidou, ...),
 Lebanon (Nicolas Sursock Museum, Ministry of Culture, ...),
 Algeria (Musée des Beaux-arts of Algiers),
 Qatar (Mathaf Museum of Doha),
 Jordan (Royal National Gallery),
 United Kingdom (The British Museum, Tate Modern),
 UAE (Abu Dhabi),

... and in a large number of major Private col­lec­tions (France, Lebanon, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, USA, ...).