Corm Daoud 

Ghazir (Lebanon), 1852-Beirut, 1930

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Daoud Corm was born in Ghazir and certainly had the opportunity to meet the painter Kenaan Dib in nearby Dlebta. In fact, Dlebta played the role of a pictorial and cultural centre, with its different monastic traditions and networks.

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At the time, it was not Italy who arrived in Lebanon with the Jesuits, but France. In creating the legend of his father, Charles Corm connected it directly to Renaissance Italy, thereby justifying an imagined continuity with History of Art. In making his father the founder of painting in Lebanon, he also obscured the historicity of Lebanese painting and prevented any reading of painting’s passage from the religious to the profane just at the moment when the cycle of the “clerics painting” was coming to a close.

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Corm raises the problem of the interaction between the painter and his era: he established himself in Lebanon for a long period, expanding over two generations, from the Mutassarifyat to the French Mandate. His painting, often mistakenly interpreted as maintaining neo-classicism is, in fact, quite singular. It is impossible to see it only as the emergence of the individual, of personality, and therefore of the portrait, in a XIXth century Lebanon engaged in an Arab renaissance, modelled on the Italian Rinascimento, which inspired so much hope, disappointment and success. 

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Corm had chosen to study painting in Rome at the moment when, even for priests, Italian ceased to be the lingua franca of the East. Did he want to repeat the Italian Renaissance in a fully urbanised Beirut, where he settled after a brief Egyptian interlude? He nurtured the ambition to work on the reproduction of rendering. The problem did not present itself in a theoretical and comprehensive manner, for he had to fulfil civil and religious painting commissions. The friendship with patriarch Hoyeck, whom he had met in Rome, earned him a series of commissions for convents and churches.

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His work on the image and its composition seemed like the last echo of Italian religious art from the counter-Reformation, strongly influenced by Jesuit imagery. He had to choose between Giusti and Kenaan Dib, between Italy and the tradition of Maronite religious painting. Even though he lived in Beirut, through his contacts and sensitivity he remained open to his place of birth on Mount Lebanon. He prolonged the current of Italian religious painting, and actively took part in the development of civil society, even if his work was decipherd in portraits, genre scenes and still lifes.

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Why did not Srour play this role rather than Corm? Comparing dates demonstrates the inaccuracy of the rumour that Srour, a Professor of Arabic at the Sultaniyeh who taught Arabic to Daoud Corm’s brothers, became interested in painting and was encouraged by Daoud to study in Italy. The true explanation is sociological: Srour was a Greek Catholic from Aleppo. Beirut and Mount Lebanon were not places where he could circulate in a familiar social network. His bohemian and nervous character and his sensitive and anguished talent were the opposite of the Corm, who were notably well settled.

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To maintain his role, Corm had to be in Lebanon. Srour was fully engaged in painting as he understood it ; while Corn was fully engaged in himself, living and understanding painting differently. His work may seem naive, but this quality allowed him to approach each new canvas with a fresh gaze. Certainly, there is an element of serialisation in his work, and some variations on theme and composition, but on every canvas he gives the feeling of learning how to paint anew, not to discover a secret but to capture the profession, the composition of the scene, the project and its treatment. The cultural and pictorial references do not play on continuity, but are a selection linked to good taste.

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Raphael and the influence of Italy: this was the framework that he gradually left behind, in an excessive pictorial overload somewhere between decoration and naivety. Other Maronites before him had also worked in the shadow of Italian painting, but he was the first to have a direct relationship with photography, which imprisoned his art in resemblance. His approach could have seemed to make mere copies from a photographic grid. He reached for a resemblance beyond resemblance, without questioning this resemblance but rather the very act of painting. 

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Srour, Giusti and Mourani, the latter a little less scalded by his Parisian sojourn, worked with brio and a desire to show off their virtuosity, perhaps the only way for a painter in a hurry to fulfil all his commissions. Srour’s problem was at the most complex level: his relationship to the painting itself. But Daoud Corm deciphered the painting and mastered it up to the point where he saw the experimentation of rendering as a boring artistic dimension. From this came the thick noses, the way he depicted eyes, the earrings worked in a paste of paint. The rest of the portrait – the rendering of the fabrics and the silks, the variation of forms, the rings on fingers – all of these were linked to a pictorial vocabulary, but also to another vocabulary that one senses in the best portraits and canvases : a trembling tension in the manner of submitting to the space of the canvas and bringing forth the portrait. His process was less naive than it appeared, for it was drawn from a traditional Oriental technique where paintings had no perspective.

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The portrait had always been flat – showing the corner of a table, a book set here, or a hand leaning on an armchair sufficed to give the illusion of perspective. This was a convention; it did not have anything to do with the possible adoption of Renaissance rules, but to the reading of photography, which did not exclude the models who sometimes posed for Corm. This is how he captured the sharpness of line and full contours of their shape in order to let his colors shine through.

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Corm’s obsession for detail, accuracy and rendering of lines were not so much virtuoso performances but rather a systemic clarification of the various stages of portraiture. In all his portraits he used photography and the grid technique, brushing the canvas with broad strokes after working the face in meticulous detail. How did they distinguish themselves from traditional portraits of the time, and even from the shift towards European portraiture that Corm had learnt and rendered? Even the fastest and most trivial commission was rescued from anonymity by his formalism or by a pictorial sign that brought a formal solution: background color, precise design or quick sketch of a plastron

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Apart from some teenage works made with Giusti in Bzommar, Daoud Corm joins the tradition of religious painting and portraiture whose best-known representatives are Kenaan and Moussa Dib. This kind of painting has a socio-confessional character; it is not explained by the relationship between the East and the West, or an Eastern apprenticeship of the West. Quite evidently, its happy simplifications had nothing to do with the subject. They were rather linked to a way of seeing time as motionless, and to the social function of painting. 

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Corm’s way of painting in a still time was the old traditional source that did not only emerge from mere resemblance, but also from his technical and pictural personality, and from a rendering driven to a kind of hallucination of perception. He believed in the magical art of the portrait, and was aware of painting’s mysterious power, for to create a figure is to possess it. Corm’s most emotional moments came when the feeling of rendering slowly come to life and a likeness appears. In these moments he rediscovered the old Oriental foundation of portraiture, a creation whose magic did not rely only on pictorial elements. There was nothing mysterious about this – except the secret conviction with which he pursued his career. Even in his conventional series of angels, copied from the Sistine Chapel, these chubby angels were visual metaphors for his own art. He aimed for a scenography of representation, especially in the large religious canvases that he worked on in a variety of techniques, while respecting the rigidity of the rendering.

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Corm belonged to a tradition in which the love of painting was disproportionate to what European culture of the time could provide. As far as we know, he did not have a solo exhibition in his lifetime, not because of business or personal reasons, but because he belonged to a community where painting took place in the context of his studio, at the heart of Lebanese society. But everything was not so perfect: Corm sometimes saw himself – and behaved – like a studio-factory for color prints and copies of famous paintings. It was true then, that for him painting became a commercial consideration.

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The long and complex trajectory of Daoud Corm gives us the opportunity to understand how a pictorial system is also a way of painting, of choosing what to put on a canvas, and how to construct it. Even his portraits, in which some only wanted to see an interesting collection of Oriental types, do not fit in the frame of Orientalist painting. The act of painting actually offered him the possibility of closing the distance between the painter and the model, so that it was only a question of painting.

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Was his work about a craftsman’s honesty and a merchant’s know-how, or simply about the desire that had fuelled his ambition as a child, drawing birds on the seashore? He knew very well that it was impossible to tell Lebanese society about his desire to stop being a craftsman and to access to a world where painting would become an art, becouse it would go far beyond reproduction, whose variants he had exhausted, copying religious images as well as historical chromos.

 

Corm knew this, and also that the image of Lebanese society was still to come; that it would not be established by portraits, but by an imaginary world. For him, Beirut was the essential place, the capital of the province and the gathering place of the civil and religious societies that would constitute the city and country. These various societies formed the basis of his clientele. He adapted to each one of them, following the cultural scheme that they proposed and the reflection that they were looking for in the mirror.

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Up to a point, Corm created the conditions of the existence of an art market – he even imported painting products and materials and, in his studio in Khandak-el-Ghamik near the road to Damascus, he welcomed clients who came for a portrait or a canvas and also intellectuals wanting to converse with him. 

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In Lebanon at this time, there existed a society whose economic wealth allowed it to struggle against death through photography and painting. Since there was an awareness of death, the portrait effectively became a social necessity. Corm offered this society what it was waiting for.

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He went further than Giusti or Spiridon, and often was a true painter when they were not. He learnt more from Italian art than from the Academia San Luca and from Bompiani: this secret moment of desire for color and form, when the painter turned back to be and remain an apprentice to mystery once again, knowing the only response is hidden in his art. This is why he touched the truth of painting, and achieved an authenticity in his production of religious imagery as the arbitrary production of a system. But, seized by the fear of competing with the Creator, he could only devote himself to manufacturing pictures. Suddenly the iconoclasm and the unending debate where Byzantium exhausted itself reappeared. 

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Daoud Corm is the painter of the Mutassarifyat the way Habib Srour is the painter of the Vilayet and Gemayel, Farroukh and Onsi were the painters of the Mandate. But the real problem was that they were all painters of the metaphor of painting, and without any metonymy. 

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Above all Daoud Corm expressed the cruelty of resemblance, and what he posed in a radical manner remained the model of resemblance. It is obvious that he was not lacking talent, where the appearance can not be acquired by the only talent of the unique art of being. These were not the bet and the bid for this long, confused and prolonged moment that lasted for more than a century, and did nothing but instigate a sequence of massacres and murders. Lebanese society was mutating.

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Daoud Corm loved his younger sister Marie passionately. She married a Frenchman, and went to live in a house in Marseille at the other end of the Mediterranean with some canvases of her father’s, as if to remind herself of love and painting. She distanced herself more and more quickly from her father, in this way of running away from love, the way one knocks on all the doors and shuffles all the cards, waiting for another partner who never comes. 

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The ace of spades wins the round and the time has passed. Daoud’s son, Charles, would have liked us to believe that there was no painting in Lebanon before his father. He thus attempted to prevent anyonf from putting his work in perspective, even while participating in this in a fragmented way, by attracting attention to religious painting.

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Religious painting therefore escaped from oblivion through the tradition that his father took charge of, but it was too narrow and insufficient to assume the multi-faceted and complex history of the relationship between representation and the image.

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All Lebanese painters seemed to infinitely repeat the same solutions and the same problems without variation. The only variations came from social, familial and cultural data. 

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All this was repeated on the canvases – that deep void that repetitionhad become. As to painters, they were the same painter painting the same painting with no sense of shame, repeating the division of the name over and over. 

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The mysterious creator who says the entire mystery of creation and truth definitely lies elsewhere, and does not speak this language.