Galerie Claude Lemand

In Modernites Plurielles, the brand new hanging of the National Museum of Modern Art col­lec­tions, the Centre Pompidou in Paris dis­plays two paint­ings by Lebanese artist Shafic Abboud. At the same time, the Claude Lemand gallery will be ded­i­cating a solo show to this artist, Shafic Abboud and Modernity, from 16 January until 22 February, and a group show Arab Modern Masters at Art Paris Art Fair, Grand Palais, from 26 to 30 March 2014.

Translated from French by Valérie Hess.
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Claude Lemand - SHAFIC ABBOUD:

 Born in Lebanon in 1926 and having died in Paris in 2004, Shafic Abboud is unde­ni­ably the most impor­tant Lebanese and Parisian artist of the second half of the 20th cen­tury. When he moved to Paris in 1947, he per­fectly blended in the intense artistic life of the Post-War years. In 1959, he was the only artist from the Arab World to par­tic­i­pate to the First Biennial of Paris. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the main piv­otal fig­ures of the cul­tural and artistic life of Beirut, con­sid­ered as the beacon-city of the Arab Near-East. His painting evolved from Lebanese poetic fig­u­ra­tive art to Parisian lyrical abstrac­tion, and then moved on towards a subtle and sub­lime form of ‘Abboudian Transfiguration’, which is simul­ta­ne­ously ancient and modern, pagan and sacred. His oeuvre is a man­i­festo for Modernity, for freedom, for colour and for light, becoming a per­ma­nent link between France, Lebanon and the Arab World.

 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, ...), in Lebanon (Nicolas Sursock Museum, Ministry of Culture, ...), in Algeria (Musée des Beaux-arts of Algiers), in Qatar (Mathaf Museum of Doha), in Jordan (Royal National Gallery), in United Kingdom (The British Museum, ...), in the 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, ...).
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Publications avail­able in the gallery:

1. SHAFIC ABBOUD. Monograph, Paris, 2006. First book pre­pared and pub­lished by Claude Lemand, 368 pages in colour, 25 x 33,5 cm.

2. SHAFIC ABBOUD. Catalogue, Paris, 2011. Prepared and pub­lished by Claude Lemand, 70 pages in colour, 24 x 33 cm.

3. ART BAHRAIN 02. Text by Claude Lemand. See News

4. ART ABSOLUMENT. Text by Emmanuel Daydé.
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Emmanuel Daydé - SHAFIC ABBOUD, THE PROPHET.

‘Where will we go when the lights go out and we gather all together?’, asked the feisty American-Lebanese poetess and painter Etel Adnan. ‘We will all go to Paradise’ seems to be the answer of her con­tem­po­rary Shafic Abboud, whose paint­ings that are ine­bri­ated with light, woven with colours like car­pets, enclosed like the Garden of Eden and rustling like Persian minia­tures, appear as trans­fig­ured visions of an intan­gible reality. It seems that his entire oeuvre fol­lows some of the Bonnardian aspects of the joie de vivre, as is proven through the title of one of his paint­ings, Cette place pour le Bonheur (‘That space for hap­pi­ness’). Abboud remains a mys­tical believer of the moment, who is capable of sac­ri­ficing every­thing to this wild god. With his trou­bled nature, the Levantine artist des­per­ately fights against time that con­sumes us and against depres­sion that threatens him. He does this by making his can­vases flutter and vibrate with a fire that burns, warms up and con­sumes itself, using all sorts of yellow, orange and red colour vari­a­tions from the com­plex East.

There are some aspects of a metic­u­lous alchemist in this magi­cian of colours, as is proven throughout his books of paint­ings or his note­books cov­ered with sen­tences neatly framed, sim­ilar to some form of patch­work that is to be read as well as being looked at. There is also the notion of a musi­cian lost in the har­mony of spheres in this man crazy about Beethoven’s quar­tets. The latter sup­pos­edly pos­sessed ‘the gift of per­petual migra­tion’, according to his friend André Boucourechliev, the com­poser. For example, in his Quatuor (‘Quartet’) of 1977, Abboud’s painting is never still as there is always move­ment, sparkling, pas­sion, iri­des­cence. Finally, there is a mys­tical approach to the flesh in this wounded hedo­nist, who wants to ‘look at Nature straight in the eyes’ and who paints nudes like land­scapes and land­scapes like nudes on the ceiling. Born in the Greek Orthodox vil­lage of Mhaidsé in 1926, at the heart of the Lebanese moun­tains, Abboud the sen­su­alist painter remained a maker of icons all his life, these ‘splen­dors of light and beauty, glo­rious with liquid gold’, as the poet of the two river­banks, Georges Schehadé, called them. Although he moved away from his child­hood mem­o­ries when he set­tled down in France, next to the enchanted garden of the Montsouris park, and that he ended up rejecting the con­fes­sional pol­i­tics that sparked the fire in Lebanon, he never stopped sanc­ti­fying the sec­ular between Beirut and Paris, painting here ‘where the heat is appeasing’ during the summer, and there, ‘where the tem­per­a­ture brings the brain to a boil’ during the winter.

As the paths of moder­nity were inscrutable, that of Post-War abstrac­tion only served him as a way of cul­ti­vating his garden by irri­gating the tra­di­tion of new lights. Just ten years before he passed away, he wanted to see again the Greek Orthodox monastery of Saidnaya one more time. Located on the Syrian foothills of the Anti-Lebanon, his mother used to take him on pil­grim­ages when he was a child to go see one of the three paint­ings depicting the Virgin Mary and attributed to Saint Luke. From his fas­ci­na­tion with icons - and hence from Siennese painting, stem­ming from the latter - Abboud pre­served the idea of not rep­re­senting the world around us but rather trans­fig­uring it. Even when he doesn’t use the deep and abso­lute matt of tem­pera, he employs light and pure colours, from which emerge his hypo­thet­ical fig­ures in a static and frontal way, illu­mi­nating them from within (and not from behind, as in the black Midi works of his friend Marfaing). There is no better example that alludes to the theory of saints in Orthodox deism than his painting of his golden brown Ladies of the gallery of 1977 – without men­tioning his series on Simone’s dress or the full-length por­trait of a Saudi woman, titled Widad Dress. Even when all fig­ural traces seem to have dis­ap­peared, the child of the moun­tain pur­sues his visions in ecstasies of colours: ‘The col­li­sion of two colours pro­vokes light… Colour, I will never escape from it, it is a fatality, it is my nature’, he used to say; ‘my eyes must have been daz­zled forever’.

Even if it was only a way into his later oeuvre, the moving poetic fig­u­ra­tion of his paint­ings from 1947 to 1953 her­alds a uni­verse of dreams that are already com­part­men­tal­ized, through soft grey colour tones, almost trans­parent. He uses a folk­loric con­struc­tion, sim­ilar to that of Zoran Music’s small Dalmatian horses. His slender and dream­like strokes are bor­rowed from Paul Klee, whilst the little secret sto­ries that the Fous or La boîte à images tell each other refer to the happy child­hood days, when young Shafic was like a bird, living off clean air and fresh water by absorbing the sto­ries that his grand­mother used to tell him. Yet there is no need to begin such an ordi­nary nar­ra­tion in the Paris of the 1950s that strives to forget the hor­rors of the war through the regen­er­a­tion of abstract art. Although he fun­da­men­tally rejects its com­po­nents, the Lebanese painter adheres to the lyrical Abstraction praised by critic Roger van Gindertael and applies an inte­gral abstrac­tion in the same way as Poliakoff, finding the inner realm he sought for in the Russian artist’s com­bi­na­tions of silent shapes. However, he com­pli­cated these sen­so­rial, and here again iconic puz­zles, by building them with stacks of colours, just like in his dense cycle of the Saisons (‘Seasons’) dated 1959, depicting an imag­i­nary muddy topog­raphy that fore­shadows Eugène Leroy’s rotten mag­matic Saisons. Far from being a Middle-Eastern epigone, Abboud is a dis­cov­erer. If we attribute the inven­tion of the ‘black-light’ to Pierre Soulages, then we need to attribute the inven­tion of the ‘colour-light’ to Shafic Abboud, con­sid­ering his skill in making his canvas colour­less through the use of colours. As in the art of manuscript illu­mi­na­tions, he knows how to extend his monochrome neu­tral fig­ures through coloured images. Yet the empty space of abstract art, that approaches strict geom­etry, was begin­ning to suf­fo­cate him. A painting such as Enfantine of 1964 tac­itly echoes the lumi­nous com­po­si­tion of Nicolas de Staël’s Méditerrannée.

At the same time as cre­ating his abstract reli­gious school, he illus­trated fairy-tales for his daughter Christine as well as pro­ducing a mag­ical lantern in the shape of a cinema-box, that shows movies that are as still as the Quay Brothers’ short ani­ma­tion films. ‘I do not oppose abstract painting against fig­u­ra­tive painting’, de Staël claimed to his accusers, ‘A painting should be simul­ta­ne­ously abstract and fig­u­ra­tive. Abstract for acting like a wall, fig­u­ra­tive as being a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of space’. This space is what Abboud wants to con­quer from that point onward, taking some­thing caused by reality as the starting point to then be blurred in the great Baroque car­pets gleaming with colours, or, on the con­trary, in the white­ness of immac­u­late snow or the dull­ness of min­imal night. Then, the entire world wears clothes worthy of the Thousand and One Nights, whether it be in the shim­mering fab­rics of the Saint Pierre market, his mother’s blue-stained stretched out dead body, Merce Cunningham’s Zen per­for­mance at the Fondation Maeght, the nos­talgic memory of Paradise on Beirut’s beach, the chil­dren’s beds in the room, the fields sur­rounding his little house on the Loire river banks or the ulti­mate monochrome beaches, ‘so soft that they can be touched with the eyes’.

In a time where there becomes here, when the Museum of Modern Art of Paris is get­ting ready to ded­i­cate a large exhi­bi­tion to Iranian artistic cre­ation and the Pompidou Centre is fea­turing Arab informal abstrac­tion in its show enti­tled Modernités plurielles, it is only nat­ural to turn towards Modern Lebanese Art and its soli­tary pioneers, headed by Saliba Douaihy and Shafic Abboud. Being the only Arab artist who show­cased his works at the First Biennial of Paris in 1959 - exhibiting side by side to Yves Klein, Martin Barré, André Marfaing and Joan Mitchell - Abboud suc­ceeded in escaping from the Second School of Paris, by breathing into his lumi­nous and formal con­quests an ori­ental incan­des­cence, that is as daz­zling as it is unex­pected.
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Note on the prophet by Claude Lemand

* The prophet is a twofold allu­sion to Gibran Khalil Gibran’s famous book enti­tled The Prophet (1923) and to the French art move­ment known as the Nabis (1888-1890).

1. Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese writer who lived in New York. He wrote The Prophet in English, which con­sists of 26 poems written in prophetic prose. The book was quickly trans­lated into Arabic as well as in twenty other lan­guages. Gibran is one of the founders of the Nahda (Arab Renaissance move­ment, for the lib­er­a­tion from the Ottoman Empire, from local civil and reli­gious feu­dal­i­ties and for women’s rights), his writ­ings had a great influ­ence on the youth of the Middle East and on Shafic Abboud, born in 1926.

2. The Nabis, other­wise referred to as The Prophets, was a group of painters founded by Paul Sérusier, the cre­ator of Talisman, a mas­ter­piece inspired by Paul Gauguin in Brittany. The Nabis group lib­er­ates itself from the Impressionists’ her­itage by moving away from reality and extolling vibrant colours and light. They drift away from Christianity, find inspi­ra­tion in var­ious other theoso­phies and come closer to Symbolism by empha­sizing the sacred role of art and painting, where light becomes a wit­ness of spir­i­tual life. The Nabis do not restrict them­selves solely to painting as they also throw them­selves in many other types of artistic pro­duc­tion. The group was influ­enced by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, and also by Orientalism and Japonism. Its main fore­run­ners include Sérusier, Vuillard, Bonnard, Denis, Roussel, … From them, Shafic Abboud will pre­serve Bonnard’s colours (that he had always admired), Vuillard’s inte­riors, Gauguin’s sacred and pagan sen­su­ality pre­sent in his ‘women-land­scapes’, as well as being drawn by the Nabis’ exper­i­ments with var­ious applied arts.

 Published in French by Art Absolument.

 Translated from French by Valérie Hess.