Douaihy Saliba 

Ehden (Lebanon), 1915-New York, 1994

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When the young Saliba Douaihy – who was born in Ehden and was a student at the School of the Zghorta Friars – decided to become a painter, his family and neighbours held a meeting to discuss how best to develop his talent. North Lebanese culture and a tradition of religious painting led him to the Maronite Patriarch, to request a grant to study in Rome. In Bkerké, Patriarch Hoyeck required that before leaving for Rome – like Daoud Corm a half century earlier, except that he eventually made the trip – young Saliba would be taught by a Lebanese painter, and he referred him to Habib Srour, who spent the summer in Becharré.

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From age 16 to 20, Saliba Douaihy attended the studio of Srour, who was no stranger to North Lebanon. He discovered the region’s pictorial relevance and opened it up to a young Khallil Gibran, whose portrait he painted. Douaihy’s apprenticeship taught him the classical alphabet of portrayal, as studied by Srour in Rome in the 1880s.

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The apprentice progressively evolved from the wish to become a painter to the fulfilment of his calling. In 1932, he received a grant from the Lebanese government to continue his studies in Paris. He was admitted to the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and graduated in 1936. Going from North Lebanon and Habib Srour’s teaching to life in Paris was challenging, but for a young man with a passion for painting, the experience was worth trying.

 

Living in Paris saved Douaihy from going through the cultural crisis Lebanon went through at the start of the French Mandate. Had he been around, he would have become conscious of it too late and might have missed the means and opportunities to overcome it. He faced Paris with the baggage of his traditional environment, and also with the prospect of religious painting as a potential opening to professional life.

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When Douaihy returned to Lebanon, after passing through Rome, Monsignor Arida entrusted him with decorating the ceiling of the church at Dimane that he was building. With this major commission, the painter returned to his original calling. Steeped in classical painting, in Michelangelo, Raphael and the Italian Renaissance, he started to work in that spirit. It was an important experience: this commission was the first in a series of church works that he handled in an untraditional way, in which he found the themes that served as catalysts for his entire body of work.

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When he left Dimane in the early 1940s, he probably felt somewhat disappointed, but he returned to the easel, took part in national cultural and artistic life, and travelled throughout Lebanon. In his view, the issue was simple. He wanted to create a new Lebanese painting that would carry its folklore and render its landscapes and human types. This seems to have been an obsession for Lebanese painters during the Mandate period. Such claims for authenticity, born from a deep need for identity, were articulated in such a narrow frame as far as sensibility and sense were concerned, that the artist found himself facing the subject alone, without echo nor help of any sort whatsoever: no audience, art galleries or true artistic life…in short he felt unappreciated and misunderstood.

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Douaihy reacted violently in response to the established painters of the time – Daoud Corm, Srour, Mourani – who either made portraits or executed church commissions – and he did not want to repeat what they did. He returned to North Lebanon to set down the relationship between nature and landscape, now treated in a quasi-Impressionist way – less diffuse, more constructed, with wide touches where pictorial rendering appeared less important than rendering sensations. He corrected his natural lyricism through deconstructing raw light, which owed less to copying landscape photographs than to analytic work. Steadfast in his desire to have “something of his own”, he did not keep anything from his parisian sojourn of the 1930s, from the blossoming of Cubism, Matisse or Abstract art. Only his rendering of sensation distinguished his development in relation to the history of painting, like unanimous support for a technique that was pending improvement, until something else was found, to constitute the raw material of reality. He would say later on, “With the only landscape of Qadisha, I have enough material for one hundred abstract paintings”. Success came after a 1936 exhibition in the Lebanese Parliament premises. 

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He was “consecrated” by a 1945 exhibition at the Hotel Saint Georges, with paintings of Lebanese landscapes and Druze women. The press and the audience were enraptured. The whole of Lebanon found Douaihy’s paintings to be delicate and sensitive to the colors and shades of the country; the faithful image of what it was or wanted to be. Shortly after the exhibition, he rented a studio on rue de l’Uruguay and settled in Beirut. The more his success was confirmed, the more he felt ill at ease. He lived uneasily through the late 1940s and its environment of cultural transition, but his unease also came from the feeling that he could not go further. So many honors and visits, so much wasted time, made him think of an accelerated slide down a slope that scared him. 

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What was he to do? Go back to Paris? But he had lived there for several years when he was very young, and for anyone who has known Paris in his youth, returning at a mature age leaves a taste of ashes in one’s mouth. So when the Lebanese government sent him to the USA in 1950, he went with great pleasure. Distance gave him the space needed to focus and critically analyse his work, and allowed him a fresh start. He could not have expected this from post-War Europe, between Abstraction and the uncertainty of a continent haunted by millions of dead. 

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In the melting pot of New York, where members of the European intelligentsia and refugee artists had settled en masse – Matta, Max Ernst, Zadkine, Masson, Duchamp – any regionalism seemed a definitively out-of-date language. There was no longer any question of faithfully rendering Lebanese folklore and landscape. 

With his classical training, marked by Habib Srour and the Beaux Arts in Paris, it was obvious that Douaihy could no longer impose his norms. Besides, in his own country he had succeeded beyond expectation.

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The need to break away from old colors and to open up to the world appeared then more real and urgent to him. What could the Lebanese bring to international art? He understood that the true challenge was only about himself. He had to give priority to his true nature over the outside world.

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He spent his first six years in New York (1950-1956) in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism, and he lived through that period as if it was a both difficult and happy dry period. In response to American Expressionism, he reinvented the primary vocabulary of painting to face this most difficult art scene. Sensitive to contemporary trends in American painting, he used their language to construct a formal specificity and a kind of settling that curiously elevated his work to an international level, without losing its primary character, the initial reference to the sensible world. 

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His true birth as a painter dates back to this New York trip; to his discovery that it was possible to be reborn each time and to find a relevant answer to each crisis.

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Back in Lebanon in 1956, Douaihy saw confirmation that his country was indeed important to him, but on a different scene than before. Between North Lebanon, Paris, Beirut and New York, he discovered a cultural road to follow.  

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In 1959, he went back to the USA, where he lived until his death in New York in 1994. The years in Lebanon had made him understand that he loved his country more than anything else, that he did not emigrate for the sake of it, but he had to complete an internal exile, between what was initially acquired and what was to be constantly conquered. 

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Six years later, after a visit by Betty Parsons to his studio, an exhibition was organised at The Contemporaries Gallery on Madison Avenue. It was a huge success and several American museums bought his work. The Lebanese press of the time was disoriented by this triumph and wrote, “Saliba Douaihy goes from the figurative to the abstract” and spoke of his “renouncement”. The painter, beyond the seas, seemed lost in the traps of a loud modernity. 

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Douaihy’s relationship with Lebanese painting is explained, in his own eyes, by the variations of his frescoes and the style influences that they reflect – Byzantine, realistic or Renaissance Italian. By giving up these frescoes he broke the bond that tied him to Maronite religious painting, but this did not prevent him from continuing to execute commissions for religious paintings. 

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In his view, generational issues were no more present at the social than at the cultural level, because although painting was not always seen as craftsmanship, it required an apprenticeship where the master stayed the master, and the Europeans the greatest masters. Besides, since the exhibition organised for the third session of UNESCO in Lebanon, he was able to verify how much the generation gap blurred all possible readings of the history of local painting, even when there seemed to be nothing more than an argument about pre-eminence. 

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What would happen to what was there from the start: tradition, religious painting, St John of Zghorta and the convent of Ain Warqua? Douaihy did not hesitate to use past periods as style variations, as external objects whose re-used vocabulary did not have much importance and whose chronology could be ignored. His solitude had made the task difficult because of the extent of the areas he tried to cover, and because of his pathological sensitivity to anything concerning the press and the judgement of others in any way.

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The tradition of Lebanese painting – studio, continuity, transmission and sales depending on the laws and the taste of the market – implied a tribal integration of culture. Douaihy knew when to leave this landscape for true painting. With him, we go from sociological illustration to the history of painting. The only possible confrontation with modernity was a break-up with the self-made history of painting in Lebanon. It is less a single break than a series of successive small breaks that we should describe and date. At first sight, all that could be seen was the search for a universal art, from which all local specifics would be excluded. What Douaihy started to see after a little while was not the object, but the painting, no longer the landscape and nature, but the question, “How should I paint them?”

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In exile, his approach was the same as Gibran. His time in America was marked by a kind of Gibran syndrome: a desire to conquer, night classes, intensive reading of philosophy and spirituality. But Gibran had a political ambition and wanted to reconcile the East with itself, outside all religion.

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One has to know Saliba Douaihy to understand how he worked: as a man from North Lebanon, one of those radical Maronites whose identity stems from stubbornness, to a degree that can hardly be measured, and for whom emigration is less about the desire to integrate a universal culture than about the absolute necessity of survival. As one of his fellow countrymen said, “In his mind, he stayed in his village.” Of course, he travelled, but he did so following a strangely religious circuit: a Maronite hostel in Paris, Maronite church in New York, Lebanese migrant communities. To what extent does an individual maintain himself in regard to the world? But doesn’t the relationship to the world result to some extent from a confinement, a withdrawal into one’s own criteria and choices?

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Douaihy reviewed the entire history of painting in Lebanon, which he saw as a stop outside history. He closed the Impressionist period within the framework of Lebanese painting, but he did so negatively, by missing out on his practice. Importantly, he discovered that dialogue with the canvas was the only solution, the only possible solitude, and that to break it up one must seek refuge in the irreducibility of identity; take one’s distance while it sticks to one. He therefore introduced the fundamental relationship with modernity, impossible without a break-up, and the necessary correlation between the two terms. Because in the history of Western painting, European as well as American, modernity was always achieved by the will to break up. But he went towards modernity with the ancient baggage that his 19th-century training had given him. This is what explains the repeated attempts to get out of prisons and shackles, and also the violence of shapeless color, of the first Lebanese painter whose break-up was not only rhetorical and verbal but also semantic. 

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For it to happen, there obviously had to be something to break up from. He did not do it while he was first at the Beaux Arts in Paris because the teaching he received there was steered towards making sensitive and realistic paintings. The question about History of Art had not yet surfaced in him. But this story had to be embodied in a society and an environment for the question to be raised, and for a break-up to happen for the first time, the founding act and mainspring for another Lebanese painting. 

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With Douaihy dead, everything seemed to sink without a trace. The complex links between Paris, New York and Lebanon had opened the way to an expensive oblivion and the traffic of forgery. The life of the painter, his times and production were disassociated. 

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Before settling in Paris in the last years of his life, Douaihy lived in London for a few years and sold several sets of his paintings there. In Paris, which presented a more complex terrain, his principal customers were Lebanese. 

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After his death several very obvious forgeries appeared: an overly new frame, hooks never used by the painter and above all a geometrical copy in the spirit of his work that distinguished itself by its weak variations, too close to the spirit of the painter to be from his hand. Without forgetting stylistic variations that were too forced to be by him. His imitated signatures were so awkward and obvious that what identified him clearly was when people said the works were fake. The colors used, with overly-modern polymers and not acrylics, the way of applying color to the canvas, the way of signing it and stretching the frame – all the physical aspects of the painting said that they were fake. But the circle of collectors was so infiltrated by this shocking, massive fraud that it ended up imposing another look on his entire work so that these fakes took the place of the painter while imposing themselves as replacements. This clearly said, “We are the entirely homogenous and fake work of the replacement of the work of Saliba Douaihy, destined to respond to the demand for paintings whose provenance is not known.” 

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Settled in Champigny-sur-Marne, on the first floor of a house furnished as if he was getting ready to leave, he had built a workshop-in-progress at the bottom of the garden, where no one ever saw a painting. On the floor, his only books were the Encyclopedia Britannica, with some boxer shorts left to dry on the balustrade. 

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In London he had sold many of his old paintings and had kept others in his studio in the USA. Literally divided between Europe, America and Lebanon, he tried in vain to regroup the complexity of his cultural belongings, of his pictorial and formal readings and practice. 

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He had remained, despite his marriage, a bachelor settled in the studio under the Maronite church in Brooklyn, to pursue the anti-destiny of a Gibran realised in painting. This was certainly an anti-journey, the ascent of immovable time, a true regression. 

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He was fooled by lawyers, journalists, literary men or collectors who promised him exhibitions, monographs, and to whom he left canvases that he did not dare to take down, exerting himself endlessly for imbeciles and crooks. He had given his word and stuck to it. 

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He had also kept a grateful respect for the politics and wealthy people that had bought his paintings, as if the need to subvert his own work did not have to go against those who multiplied the traps for their own benefit. 

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He had not realised the horror of returning half a century later to his starting point. He was always under the illusion that Paris allowed him to save every explanation, when it actually suffocated everything, gathered in the excess of the desire for an explanation. Every painter believes he has found his ideal interlocutor in this city, but the mirror was biased. 

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For him it became so difficult to shuffle the cards that he could not play any more. How could he manage to elude the fakery? He had undertaken a backwards tour from London to Paris. He felt everything was leading him to Lebanon, but he did not want to return there. 

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From the paintings of Dimane to the return to Syriac writing and to the Abstract canvases of his final period, he was the only Lebanese painter who tried to ask questions when faced with the culture of the world. 

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The consideration given to his painting was so mediocre, fragmented and marginal that he was even more shaken by the wave of fakes, made in his lifetime from 1950 to the 1980s, in a systematic enterprise of duplication and reinterpretation of his entire work. 

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An entire system of counterfeiters was built on the steep hiatus of his absence. 

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Douaihy was the only master of exile and even more so of American exile, when all the others were only the minor masters of embroidery, false drama and decoration. 

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The master of exile is quite simply he who makes himself master of his creation.