Elbacha Amine 

Beirut, 1930-2019

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The painter and the city form one of the most curious and important couples in modern times. This has to do with the way in which their relationship is perceived and experienced by one or the other. The city responds to the painter with its signs.

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In the 1920s and 1930s, Lebanese painters certainly approached the city, but they were usually in search of an anecdotal image, a touristic or picturesque scene. They practiced genre painting, although they were anxious to introduce immediately recognisable characteristics and to demonstrate their identity by the identifiable. The gaze, manual dexterity, ability to precisely express and share a vision with the greatest number of onlookers seemed to be the most evident characteristics of Lebanese painting at the time.

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Through painting, Amine Elbacha introduced the city into modernity while questioning his art’s possibilities: how can a painter live in a city – his own city, which he loves, and be happy by just showing its exterior as if it were an object? How can he live in the heart of Beirut, a poetic city, with its tangible and visible signs, while pushing further towards this inner vision that is, for every human being, the experience of a place and its metaphor? Did Amine Elbacha find the answers to his questions? Did his audience discuss what Beirut signified in his paintings? Did he take the steps that separate the sensitive and intelligent illustrator from the painter, the bearer of a feeling and a world that he articulates through form?

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Certainly the prejudices surrounding these questions are complex. To connect a painter to a city is to classify him as a local or regional painter, which risks reducing the feeling and scope of his work. Nonetheless, the argument has little weight. Even Giorgio Morandi, after his avant-garde period, spent decades in his village with a table and two pitchers, tirelessly painting still lifes.

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With Amine Elbacha there is a progressive reinterpretation of the world, where he takes ownership of his life and his town as he goes along. Elements of his painting are autobiographical. Everything is mixed together, autobiography and painting, as if to make the effort to remember, when the passage of time is like nostalgia for the heavenly birth of each canvas. So the scene was repeated to say the same thing, and he painte tirelessly as if every time was the first time. 

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“I have three ages,” Elbacha would say. “I was born in 1930, but no one registered me on the civil status list until 1937, when I was put down with my sister, who was born in 1934. If we do an average, I was born in 1932.” From the beginning, he played with the most serious thing about an individual : with his date of birth, his moment of entry into the world. As a child, he discovered Beirut and, above all, a typically Sunni urban space, where daily and social life were organised on the basis of the Sunni social codes and traditions. He explored every inch of the Ras el Nabeh area of his birth, went to school at the local Sheikh’s, travelled to Aley where the family spent three months every summer, putting furniture and bundles of luggage in a cart. These displacements formed a sort of poetry. He learned about the changing world slowly, discovered its chessboard forms in the path between Beirut and Aley, on the road to Damascus. The other element that marked his childhood was to visit Ain Mreisseh with his parents and to discover the red sand dunes and cactus plantations that demarcated properties in XIXth-century Beirut. Only nostalgia could render this: the smell of the sea, the desert landscape, the backwash, sometimes wolves.

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The poetic elements in Elbacha’s work were present in Ain Mreisseh at the time, where women did not bathe during the day but went with the children to bathe at night. Elbacha always had this memory of women and the sea at night. He built an urban space for himself in his relationship to different neighbourhoods. Here were their beaches, with colors that one finds his abstract canvases, tablets of colored wood, reconstructed mental puzzles. The conductive element was that link between one neighbourhood and another.

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Elbacha’s father was a cashier at the Banca di Roma. The painter went to l’Ecole de Saint-Sauveur (The School of Saint Saviour), led by Father Spiridon Riachi, in Caracol el Abed. He spent some happy and peaceful years there and came first in Catechism, held up as an example to the other students. Then a decorator hired him and, as he would later recount with irony, his work consisted in going to the seaside with a wheelbarrow to collect pebbles and little rocks to put them in the decorative vitrines of Bab-Edriss. 

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He then worked at Radio Orient, which did not mean leaving out painting. At this time he became acquainted with the Hungarian painter Lokos, who led him to painting from nature and who continued to encourage him right up until his departure to the USA in 1953. Elbacha’s maternal uncle was a musician by profession and painter by hobby. This sharing between two activities, this game on two registers, was very important for Elbacha as a child, for he considered it natural. Later, in his abstract paintings the game of music will be found, line and color creating shapes with no relationship to the tangible world. Elbacha always had a great facility for speaking about music and making something of it, although he was totally incapable of speaking about painting.

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In 1954, Elbacha took the plunge. Once his elder brother Toufic had finished his music studies, he did not see why he could not do what he wanted to do. He enrolled at ALBA and pursued his painting studies until 1957. That year, he won a four-month stay in Paris in a competition organised by the French Embassy. He went on to stay there for 10 years, until 1968, and married in 1966. On his return to Lebanon, with Pop Art serving as his catalyst, he wanted to assemble a varied personal imagery, but it was far too garish.

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For Elbacha, painting meant the return of memories. It was to paint the sea, which, as a child, he had heard from his bedroom in Ain Mreisseh without seeing it because of high windows. But the color of the sea can sufficiently spell reality when reality is tangible. He could paint with his sense of hearing or with his sense of smell; to speak about music was easy and to speak about painting was uncomfortable. Painting, shapes and colors, could replace all the other senses: this was the correct lesson to be drawn from Klee and Matisse. For in painting, poetry was born from the replacement of one sense by another, from the rescue of the senses by turpentine and watercolor.

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Elbacha did not claim for a pictorial identity but for an immersion into an environment, and the expression of that environment, which in Beirut was Sunni and European at the same time. He wanted to compose the smiling fullness and happiness of the world. He had a modernist vision and a Sunni watercolor tradition – not only by subject and treatment, but also in the way that a genre progresses from sensation to realisation. He placed himself in the wake of painters who, like Marzouk and Eido, claimed for a European interference in a literal way, as the generation who had twenty years of Lebanese independence would interpret it. The following generation added its specific identity and political claims, suggesting that they were not narrowly denominational, when in fact they were.

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Elbacha exhibited in 1959 at the American University of Beirut, in 1960 at the Ecole Superieure des Lettres, in 1961 at the Harmouch Gallery, in 1967 at the Manoug Gallery, in April 1968 and 1970 at Dar el Fan and from October to November 1972 and in 1973 at the Contact Gallery.