Abboud, Chafic  

​Mhaité (Lebanon), 1926 - Paris, 2004

​

After two years of studies at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), Abboud travelled back and forth between Beirut and Paris from 1946-1947, and attended classes at André Lhote’s Montparnasse studio in 1949. He then received a scholarship from the Lebanese government and enrolled at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1952 to 1956.

​

Before graduating, his first exhibition took place in the French military cinema’s hall in Beirut on 19th January 1951, followed by two exhibitions in 1955 at the Galerie de Beaune and Galerie la Roue in Paris. 

​

Chafic Abboud is undoubtedly one of the most complex Lebanese painters who lived in France. While painting in the style of the Ecole de Paris, he unceasingly expressed the conflictual dialectic of the Paris-Beirut relationship – both in his professional and personal life – without ever losing sight of Lebanon’s cultural history, and setting himself in a Lebanese perspective. This was all the more delicate so Lebanon’s multi-denominational society implied that a national culture was not possible: instead, this ‘national culture’ accommodated the culture of the many co-existing communities, rather than defining itself as a whole.

​

In his attempt of defining this Lebanese cultural identity, Abboud addressed the issue of bringing together an individual’s biography, painting, and culture, as well as positioning them in relation to Parisian painting, due to the intertwined relationship between Paris and Beirut. 

​

When Lebanon gained independence in 1943, Abboud’s generation came of age, and in the ideological trend of the time, started to claim for a national art. What model could it follow? Of course, Farroukh, Onsi and Gemayel were Lebanese, but they followed systems and norms established under the French Mandate, paving the way for a glaring difference concerning the processes between them and the following generation.

​

The core members of this new movement pushed for a real and inevitable break, expressed through a conflictual dialogue with Paris – but they were still aware that the cultural presence of Paris was as strong as that of Beirut itself, and that Paris often overshadowed Beirut in its comprehension and understanding of form, history of painting and methods used to express reality, for Paris was more present in Beirut than Beirut itself, just as Beirut would one day, with its intense character, be more present for the Lebanese in Paris than Paris. 

​

Abboud kept chasing the acceptation in Paris – a city both real and unreal – as all emigrants attempt to find place for themselves and to achieve success, without ever being certain of having succeded. Abboud’s vision is the opposite of Georges Cyr’s established Parisian experience. In many ways, Abboud was the anti-Cyr: in his comprehension, analysis, and sensitivity to forms and their use, Abboud manifested a contradiction between his personal independence and his desire to play a part in the history of painting, while defending an innocence of form and an intimate relationship with the world.

​

“One only works well in rooms,” Abboud would say, meaning that inspiration may be found anywhere, but real work could only be achieved in the studio. He is quoted as saying: “And then there is the illustrated Larousse. When I saw Léonidas in Jacques-Louis David’s Thermopylae, I understood.” 

​

His generation was marked by French culture, while being imbued with another, typically Levantine sensibility that intertwined business and literature : art as the marketing of sensitivity. This was the story of a Mandate that had certainly influenced local culture during a period of transition, while ‘mandating’ its subjects to take over, beyond the political field. Abboud was from the same generation as Aouad, but through his perception of Cubism, of European painting, and of the idea of a modernity that claimed to be different without having the means to express this distinction, he staged an intervention between reality, Beirut and himself. To do so, he was compelled to strip away his sensitivity, which had been difficult to maintain because of its links to a pictorial language, in an unstable and indefinitely prolonged cultural situation – reflecting his own hesitation between Paris and Beirut. When he was faced with the impossibility of being in two places at the same time, yo-yoing back and forth in an exhausting and schizophrenic manner, he had to make an impossible and agonizing choice.

​

Abboud certainly tried to fit in with Paris, but at some point he was forced to break away from it, to accept his marginalisation, and focus his feelings on Beirut, in the late 1960s. His exhibition at Dar el Fan in 1969 marked the opening of the Lebanese art market, which he sustained until his show at the Contact Gallery in 1978. After this date, an even greater influx of Lebanese citizens to Paris partly mended the antagonism between the two cities. But Abboud had already questioned the reality and complexity of the Paris-Beirut dynamic through his biography, his painting, and the socio-cultural reality he had helped to create with fellow painters of his generation, who were struggling with the same situation and problems. To some extent, he was a victim of the discrepancy between his interpretation and his forced desire to fulfill a pictorial and cultural vision. He was at the same time an Impressionist who used Cubism in order to express himself, and a narrator who used abstraction to tell a story. He embodied the difficulty that thousands of painters experienced: how to be yourself in relation to Paris. Lebanon intervened, with an audience and a market. The Lebanese saw Abboud’s paintings as a reading and interpretation of the abstract, but also as the homogenisation of their own reactions to the shock of the abstract and the Lebanese picturesque problematic. A significant section of the French-speaking public needed a Lebanese artist to address these problems in his paintings. Abboud fulfilled this demand, despite a misunderstanding, for he was in fact quite the opposite of what the Lebanese collectors thought they understood of him.

​

Abboud wanted abstraction to be a language and he brought a weary virtuosity to it with great skill, as if it were playing a game with itself. It would have been a dead end to explain himself beyond the canvas so that the canvas could speak. For Abboud, painting was about the language of the painting only, and had no other meaning. At the outset, his work only expressed his anxiety about the possible language of painting, and then became more anxious about the painting than about the subject. When he had to return to the subject, trying to forget these years of practice was as difficult as trying to part with a piece of himself.

​

Abboud explored different possibilities in a systematic way and, instead of seeking solutions, faced the reality of a language whose complexity excluded pictorial clarification of different semantic and historic levels. Painting the desire to paint and the pleasure of painting, while keeping Lebanon as a privileged interlocutor and engaging presence, was more important to him than pictorial fact, and explained his trajectory.

​

Abboud’s dissatisfaction with ALBA, his expanding horizons, his early entry in the Lebanese art market and the Parisian galleries, and his life until the mid-1960s would have been the perfect model of the Lebanese-Parisian trajectory. Yet there were difficulties and failures that came with the will and conviction to represent Beirut through paintings made in Paris. But what other position could he have taken? Stay in Beirut? Confine himself in the search for an Eastern or national art, or “authentic” pictorial elements? He clearly saw that he did not find any answer to the problems encountered by painters of his generation at ALBA. The real problem was not to find a solution, but to know whether the problem was, or not, fecund. The influence of European painting, and even its fragmentation, always overrode a fundamental misunderstanding in formal research: that his generation of artists had to both assimilate Europe in a kind of apprenticeship, and question a local heritage that was not even perceived as one, but only as the existence, on a local scene, of painters like Onsi, Farroukh, Gemayel or Cyr. Their points of reference not only lacked the possibility of a historic perspective, they also lacked the mastery of different modes of expression, without which pictorial technique would only be an embroidery frame on which they practiced their stitches. Abboud’s work addressed the central problem of such discrepancies, in relation to these moments of grace where technique and expression came as a pair.

​

One should not restrict the history of painting in Lebanon to a conflict between the influence of Western painting and the demand for a Lebanese artistic identity. Many painters would have this fundamental and unchanging experience, because each of them understood it in his own way or experienced it for some time.

​

Abboud is also a Lebanese painter, and in this framework, paradoxically, a successor to Gemayel in his struggles with light and color. Our point here is not to say that a painter can be reduced to problems of light and color, but to mark the continuity from Khalil Saliby, Gemayel’s teacher, to Gemayel, Abboud’s teacher at ALBA. 

​

From the moment he placed Gemayel in the history of Lebanese painting, Abboud splitted from this line of succession, but he fully overcame this gap when he returned to Paris, wanting to be the product of contemporary painting, not of his teachers.

​

From Gemayel, he kept the pleasure of painting, the enjoyment of working on the subject and even the obsession with color. In the end, he sought to render these through the opacity of the paint alone, as the return to a pleasant and abstract interpretation of Impressionism seemed too easy to him. With Gemayel, the sensitised pictorial idea was a pretext for the work, the catalyst often being this sensual presence, rendered by variations in tone with colors in fashion at the time. Gemayel sometimes introduced an awkward acidity, seen as a chromatic freedom, which transformed the forms in large and thick strokes of paint. To his mind, this had less to do with the influence of Saliby than with a visual reading of Romantic painting, and specificly of Delacroix. 

​

Abboud used abstraction as a pretext to go straight to the heart of the problems of light and color. There is an intellectual background for this: identity, Arabism, and Lebanese pictorial specifics. His task was to find a way of conveying his confrontation with Paris, with the necessary blend of shrewdness and innocence, although this confrontation only existed in the imagination of a few members of his Lebanese audience. He just wanted to paint. For his connection with Paris came from color, from the assimilation, the copying, and finally the refusal of Cubism. Cubism would have been his classical alphabet, the elements of a vocabulary that he later had to turn away – this was a methodological awkwardness, but only André Lhote and Fernand Léger were to be found in 1950s Paris. What Abboud wanted to paint was the light and color of his village, as well as the lessons of Gemayel at ALBA. When he enrolled at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, he wanted to safeguard his Eastern sources without cutting himself off from Paris, where he had to live and express himself as a painter. The teachings of Lhote and Léger and the influence of the Neo-cubism of this time allowed him to deconstruct the classic Lebanese canvas. This prepared the ground for abstraction, which he practiced from the outset as a language waiting to be explored.

​

At the start of an abstract painting, there is this sensation of a naked model, striking a pose and then becoming the catalyst for the artist’s taking possession and geometrisation of the canvas, through a game of form and color. Abboud creates his painting by a series of intuitions and assimilations that he applies and explores right to their very end. From the beginning, it is his manner of being one with the spirit of the times, of measuring this spirit against what he wants as a visual artist, of working through variations rather than verifications. His desire was to let the painting work by willingly loosening the abstract structure and leaving every Oriental note behind. In the end, Abboud practiced the European abstract style of the 1960s, and his situation as a Lebanese settled in Paris brought personal rather than artistic problematics. The misunderstanding regarding his art has to do with his inability to work on the “personal” through the “picturesque”, the picturesque structures he used being inadequate to the task. 

​

Cubism, with its lessons of order and clarity, of construction and clarification, was indeed the opposite of painting with the ambition to render a sensual and literary elegiac style, an expression linked to a series of emotions, memories and ideas that are unusable as figures of rhetoric or of style. Abboud’s painting has a desire for a narrative dimension, a desire for a structure simple enough to let him tell his story, and a willingness to recover a vocabulary of form and color, although his intentions do not always appear in such a clean and clear manner.

​

Some have said that his painting is like a sumptuous pictorial cuisine, while his detractors find his abstraction limited. According to his own terms, he considerably expanded this language by incorporating a desire for narration and figuration, which was the graphic equivalent of poetic expressionism, at least as he understood it. Without necessarily being literary – even if he forced literary elements into his work – Abboud tried to work on the question of identity in the canvas in a biographical frame, connecting the creative and plastic parts of a language born from the plastic mastery of non-figuration. But this return to pictorial narration conflicted with a kind of sentimental nostalgia, marking the evolution towards an allusive poeticisation of the plastic and pictorial elements. By working on these very elements, he tried to capture the poetics of identity with a net of sensitivity that became the frame of the canvas. Abboud’s painting, offering the possibility of gloss – and one of the only kind to offer the possibility of criticism and variations of reading, by the consistency of what it does and does not say – has to do with both precautionary intelligence, and a cunning mastery and enjoyment this “cuisine”. 

​

Why does Abboud never seem to go beyond the picture? This is one of the lingering questions regarding his work. The answer is brief: what is beyond the picture is no longer painting. He always maintained the complexity of the frame that supported his questionong – preserving the contradictions as a necessary dialectic for the advancement of his work– until violent crises when there were no practical answers, and when dilemmas and personal conflicts obstructed his work. Of these dilemmas, the identity crisis was paramount, for identity was no longer seen as a personal testimonial but as the essential and founding act on which pictorial work was constructed and pursued. During a brief moment, the work was no longer seen as a monolith, but as a necessary addition of different tests and trials. The viewer had to accept dates, history, and historicity. A forgotten time, unclear at the beginning, was now the fundamental basis to read the canvas. 

​

Abboud’s bet was risky. Physically present in Paris while desperate to be in Beirut, he had to maintain this duality, without severing one part of himself from the other. It is also true that part of the necessary solitude of working in Paris was compensated by frequent stays in Beirut, but this was not for tourism. Abboud felt that he belonged to an idea of Lebanon that led him not to the revendication of a village, but to the revendication of a childhood and of the pictorial elements of happiness: the sunshine of colors, the color of light, forms and rendering of a whole. While Lebanese painters would go to Paris for their studies and, finding this inadequate, return to Beirut; Abboud stuck it out, not for the pleasure of winning his bet but to fulfill an essential need : he had chosen a way of painting which, for him, was made in Paris. 

​

In 1950 he addressed once again the issues of pictorial heritage, in the continuation of the researches and interrogations of Lebanese painters in Beirut. But the history of modern art suddenly distanced itself from images of Oriental ewers and silver bowls, considering this an art of pre-determined forms, with only variations allowed, rather than a contribution to living art. Oriental influences had led to the impasse of folklore. Abboud endeavoured to work more on the level of language, story, and literary form, which provided the space for freedom to construct or digress at leisure. Was it possible to literalise this form and to apply it to a personal experience? The Popular Tales that he transcribed and illustrated, and later his illustration of poems and his need for books as formal and plastic objects, mark different septs of this process. 

​

Abboud made his voice better heard with the subtlest modulations, while listening to others. For him, the canvas was a place for dialogue, and not only a place for aggressive and violent self-affirmation. His interpretations were always filled with these literary and theoretical round trips, because after a certain point of engagement into the creation of a painting, hindsight became impossible. Besides, praise often allows nothing more to be understood. In Abboud’s case, the parts of his work that did not receive praise should be the most dignified, because they were the most revealing of his pictorial experience, and brought to light its failures, as a testimony of what would follow, and not disguised as a success.

​

Abboud’s belonging to the Christian Orthodox community and the political position of his village partly excluded him from a “Maronite” situation, clearer in our days than it seemed at the time. His work has less to do with the conflicts of the Paris-Beirut cultural relationship, than with his exemplary personal trajectory, in the traditions of the Beirut-Rome relationship, or of the Lebanese painters who studied in Paris at the time of the Mandate. As far as the latter are concerned, Cyr’s inverse trajectory should not be forgotten. But Abboud decided to stay in Paris. Was it a mere strategy to settle there? It does not look like it. His motivation was far more complex, arising from his awareness that he was a Lebanese in Paris by experience and a Parisian in Beirut by reality and, with time, by need.

 

Abboud perceived himself badly in regard to Lebanese painting, which led him to a closed horizon. As a result, from 1955 his work steered towards the international painting movement being created in Paris. What he brought was linked to the difficulties of explaining a country, and something more fundamental: he saw himself as ‘reading’ painters whom he liked or was close to. He played an important cutural role, through his presence on the Parisian scene and by the way in which the Lebanese wanted to perceive him: at one extreme, by changing perceptions and also highlighting the need to pay a little more attention to things, not by a change in style, but through a dimension often overlooked in Lebanese painting – the minimum of critical sense. It was certainly necessary to have the means for it, but it was also necessary to understand that a critical dimension could help the advancement of an art whose variations of expression relied as much on the spectator’s and the improvised amateur’s ignorance, as it did on the idea of a product imported from Paris. 

​

Abboud struggled with this situation, but what saved him was that he did not live in Beirut but in Paris, where the only danger was of sometimes granting secondary problems an importance they did not have. Indeed, he represented the sum of the conflicts and contradictions of Lebanese pictorial culture, and of the image of modern Lebanese culture in general.

​

It was much later, at the end of the 1960s, that he tried to “culturalise” the elaboration of his own image, from the moment when this elaboration itself was integrated in his work. His image arose from the manner in which he preserved his innocence, keeping the two cities – their images, countries, cultures, emotions, feelings – as a double presence and refusing to be identified with Paris alone. How could he work on time, moreover on a time divided between two cities, and on which painting is powerless ? To his concern, it came down to a survival instinct.

​

From the outbreak of war in Lebanon in 1975, the problem was no longer posed in such a radical way, as dividing time between Paris and Beirut became impossible. But Abboud continued to travel to Lebanon until 1980, and took the destruction of his country as a personal injury. He had made Lebanon the secret and affective driving force of his painting, both as an internalized country and, in a bizarre contradiction, a place outside oneself, somewhere both real and unreal. Certainly, a great part of Abboud’s analysis and mental work consisted of setting Lebanon at a distance as a malleable perspective he could use in his work. Lebanon was there for poetic resonance, it represented a goal, but a poetic goal. He worked on constructing an Oriental image – understood in the broad sense of the term and which varied, according to the era, from total abstraction to attempts at figuration where color took the place of construction. For him, the issue for Lebanon was the light in the paint itself. He actually realised this painting, and the refinement of the paint itself could no longer be worked with matterist brutality, but only with emotion, with feeling and memory, in an interlacing of painting and life. To do this, a certain naivety was required to integrate the double equation of painting and of Lebanon in the practice of daily life and of time. 

​

Abboud worked on cultural history and on the history of his painting. He succeeded to evidently establish this part of himself that he would not have wanted others to define – this strong, violent and undefinable Paris-Beirut relationship, which was also the only means of averting exile through painting.