Cyr Georges 

Montgeron (France), 1881-Beirut, 1964

​

Georges Cyr was becoming a recognized a painter in Paris when a personal drama made him leave France in 1934. 

​

Almost by chance, he chose Lebanon, where he spent the next 27 years. From this date, all of his work was made in relationship to Lebanon. He came by chance, but stayed by choice.

​

He did not experience problems of adaptation at all and was surrounded by a circle of close Lebanese and French friends who lived in Lebanon: the poet George Schéhadé, the architect Antoun Tabet, the literary critic Gabriel Bounoure, the mathematician Jean Chevrier, the archaeologist Henri Seyrig, and the journalist George Naccache. He worked in a modernising current within this small set, in an avant-garde of local color. Everything became more difficult from the moment when, in his role as artistic adviser to the French Embassy – a post that he held for several years – he became the informal mentor of a Francophone public ingenuous enough to believe itself at the centre of intelligence and good taste. There reigned a  hedonistic good taste, until the end of the Mandate. Cyr’s work corresponded to the division between the Mandate and Independence, and he wanted to appear as a relay between the two periods.

​

Like Seyrig, he had contracted the mysterious virus that is a taste for life in Beirut, an extreme province at the extreme point of Asia. But where Seyrig found discipline and the imperious requirement to be fulfilled in a desert, Cyr discovered a circle of ambitious young Lebanese for whom he represented Paris and the avant-garde, or at least what they imagined Paris to be. 

​

He therefore had to play the role that they assigned to him. He became a part of the French presence in Lebanon, and delighted the society that welcomed him because it found him to be the mirror of their self-justification.

​

At the time, painters had to live by selling their paintings, and there was a necessary part of craftsmanship in the production of representation. Cyr was a painter with more of a craft than of a profession, and more professionalism than creativity, but he knew how to maintain the liveliness between his profession and its exercise. He transposed local color into his own dreams, which made his paintings appear as irrelevant parodies, perpetually changing illusions.

​

In order to live, he sold watercolors, as did Onsi and Farroukh, who also painted Lebanese landscapes and “scenes de genre” for wealthy buyers. Cyr maintained friendly relations with Onsi, whose Alsatian wife who was a gardener at the Collège Protestant, ensured that her husband could occasionally sell a watercolor to a teacher or visiting friend. Onsi was relatively retired from the social scene and did not figure as a rival in the circles that Cyr frequented. Onsi, Farroukh and Gemayel had studied in Paris, and therefore Cyr did not teach them any lessons.

​

He settled quickly into the pictorial and social systems of Franco-Lebanese society’s cultivated fringe. Farroukh found himself at the dividing point between the Sunni society of his birth – which provided his clientele – and the French society that he felt he had an arrangement with, not because of his studies in Paris, but because it represented a public of potential buyers. Cyr considered Gemayel, who was active in intellectual circles, as a worldly painter, dedicated to the ease of making portraits to special order. They did not frequent the same circles, and all evidence shows that their worlds did not meet. Gemayel was the painter of a Lebanese bourgeoisie in whose eyes he personified painting, while Cyr was taken for a Parisian bohemian. Cyr also saw the return to a pleasant Impressionism in Gemayel’s painting, which was not entirely justified.

​

Towards the end of the 1940s, Cyr experienced a severe crisis, questioning his place in the history of contemporary art. His great concern was his difficult and offbeat dialogue with Cubism, such as Cubist painting was understood in the 1930s, but which in his case, was continually whipped up by the heat and light of the Mediterranean and a sensuality that he could no longer translate into watercolors.

​

Having exhausted the potential of watercolors of Lebanese landscapes, he wanted something more constructed, which measured up to his relationship with the history of painting.

Having closed the watercolor chapter, Paris interested him anew as a necessary challenge. He travelled there every year, and exhibited in the aftermath of his post-Cubist interrogations. His feeling for light came from his former life painting the guinguettes along the banks of the Marne; he had discovered the Orient but always kept an eye on Paris to appear “up to date” to Lebanese eyes. Unlike Onsi he drew himself to exhaustion by asking questions, and felt that watercolors had not given him anything but a nonchalant sensuality where the painting became no more than an exercise in voyeurism, exhausted by sensation. 

​

Cyr attempted to preserve himself from this voyeurism through the forced rigor of Cubist construction, perceived through his reading of the 1930s and through the constantly diverted temptation of joining an avant-garde that was merely the commercial vitrine of a country under a French mandate, trying to imitate its capital. But at the end of the 1940s his painting was often of great quality, in the post-Cubist manner: elaborate and clear, measured and elegant.

Cyr’s subjects were typically French and he could draw from his early painting studies. For him, Cubism seemed the only possible structure, the only pictorial foundation of modernity. 

​

Did he have the ambition to innovate in a synthetic Cubism, in relation to Lhote’s success and to the fashion of neo-Cubism after the Liberation? In any case, he desperately wanted to be recognized in Paris, his only necessary challenge, while maintaining, in his lively and fertile fashion, a French cultural presence in Lebanon that helped a good number of young Lebanese painters to stand out, after spending time in the constraining mold of his studio.

​

After the Second World War, Cyr weighed up the anachronism of his situation and challenged the value of his own painting. He wanted to immerse himself in Lebanese life. Whether he wanted to or not, he became a catalyst for the idea of Lebanese painting made by Lebanese painters. He could only ask himself the agonising question of his own place in the history of painting, and in the Lebanese painting. If we can say that he did not take part in them, it is only because this natural development did not exist. 

Up to a point, every painting is an accident – and a happy accident when it brings something new. Because of his Lebanese experience and presence, Cyr had a real historicity through his influence and his way of responding to an atmosphere and a country, participating in its cultural life during a period that was sufficiently long to be of significance.

​

He exhibited in 1935 and 1938 at the Hotel Saint Georges in Beirut; from the 11th to 28th February 1949 and from 10th to 21st May 1950 at the Centre for Higher Studies in Beirut; in February 1953 and from 30th June to 16th August at the Galerie Art Vivant in Paris; in December 1954 at the Fritz Gotthelf Gallery in Beirut; from 25th October to 12th November 1955 at the Galerie Art Vivant; from the 13th to 19th May 1956 at the Center for Higher Studies in Beirut; from 5th to 20th April 1957 at the Perspectives Gallery in Beirut; and in 1960 and 1961 at the Alecco Saab Gallery in Beirut. 

In 1962 at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Beirut there was an exhibition dedicated to him – “Retrospective, 1933-1962” – and, in 1963, he had an exhibition in the offices of the Journal d’Orient.

 

From the 1930s to the 1960s Georges Cyr made Beirut an anti-Paris, in regard to the Mandate and to a provincial dimension, going over the years through fashion, standards, surface, heaviness, and so little unexpected. 

​

The shutters of his studio opened only onto the sea – that was already huge but that was all. As he had made Paris into an anti-Beirut, because he was the only one whose double position allowed him, for more than a quarter century, to go back and forth in a regular rhythm, at least in his mind. 

For Lebanese painting, to speak about Cyr was above all to connect the necessary origin of a place, and of a link to anti-exile. For the Lebanese, Cyr’s ancestors were simply French painters. It was a Lebanisation where Lebanon’s presence justified itself only by its passionate relationship to Paris. 

​

It must always be kept in mind that around Cyr, there were Gabriel Bounnoure, Schéhadé, Naccache, and the 1930s. Cyr also introduced the possibility of a questioning and reading of the picture, of the methods of this reading, and of its past history. 

​

Until this point, this was not possible in Lebanese society. There were no historical antecedents for art criticism but, following the plans of 19th-century European salons, fairly regular salons were slowly established from the 1930s at the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, at the headquarters of Lebanese craftsmanship,  Place de l’Etoile, and in the buildings of the National Ministry of Education at UNESCO. 

​

Individual exhibitions were articulated with other practices by implementing socio-denominational cultures in their interaction with the projection of a national culture. The story of these cultural practices also led to official commissions in the 1950s and 1960s, and to different prizes awarded by the Ministry of National Education and semi-official or municipal institutions. 

 

The 1950s also saw the birth of the first galleries beyond the halls of hotels or rented exhibition rooms.

​

Cyr’s principal activity would remain painting but, selling little, for several years he had to earn a living, so he opened a teaching studio – which had been one of his projects from the outset, because he obtained the necessary authorisation for it with Nelly Marez-Darley the year after he settled in Beirut. 

​

In the 1940s he made a series of broadcasts on the Lebanese radio about initiation to art, and also served as artistic adviser to the Embassy of France in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

​

Cubism and Abstract art were at the heart of his exploration of modernity, where the careful and tasteful synthesis that it elaborated was more of a harmonious method than a radical search. 

​

He had made some attempts to make himself heard and exhibited in post-war Paris between Henri Lhôte and post-Cubism. But, on his return to Beirut, he could only play the patriarch for the art lovers at the Centre of Art and navigated between Fritz Gotthelf and René Drouin. 

​

The dices were not loaded, but were no longer in his hands. He had become too Lebanese by setting down this relationship between times and discrepancy, which shattered any possibility of a real relationship. 

​

His inscription in the thread of history, and above all a history of culture,appears as deeply problematic due to the fragility of repetition. 

​

It also must not be forgotten that Cyr had an oblique position in his relationship with painting in Lebanon. He may have become a Lebanese painter, but he remained the French painter of the Lebanese society that looked towards Paris. Cubism had set him questions and answers at the same time, and the answers were ready-made because they implied a real exploration of the canvas, just as the post-Cubism of the 1940s and 1950s had seemed to be another means of reconstructing the canvas without realising that it was mostly a return to Academism.