Haddad Marie 

Mekkine (Lebanon), 1889-Beirut, 1973

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A French-educated writer and painter, Marie Haddad published a collection of tales, Les Heures Libanaises, and exhibited in Paris in 1933 at the Georges Bernheim Gallery, and from 16th May to 10th June 1937 at the Rotgé Gallery. She also took part in the New York International Fair in 1939 and the International Exhibition of Cleveland, in the USA.

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She was one of the best representatives of Lebanese culture of the 1930s and 1940s, through the research on identity and specific forms. She has an abrupt manner of painting that goes directly to the construction of the picture – sometimes stiffening the pattern with style so as not to destabilise the first attack – but she also shows sensitivity to the tiniest details.

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Perhaps there was no other possibility but to go straight to the pattern in Lebanese painting, but she felt it was necessary to respond to urgent needs, and that the most urgent need was to see what exists around us. Half of the approach to painting consists in understanding this. 

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But was Marie Haddad’s Lebanese painting influenced by what the French audience thought a “Lebanese” painting should be ? Her temperament, her sincerity, the pictorial means that she used, had to counterbalance the public’s expectations from the outset. For her, to write and paint was not a demand, but the conscious construction of a strongly lived reality that was transmitted without psychology.

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A pre-existing, strong and massive framing removed all suavity from her manner of distancing reality, by a shifted pictural practice applied to all the subjects that she undertook to paint. Folklore and anecdote hence disappeared from her canvases of landscapes and Bedouins. 

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Farroukh did not address anecdote either, but approached the same subjects in a similar way, and in an optic more linked to the situation of Lebanese painting, to his cultural formation and community background. During the entire period of the French Mandate, it was taken for granted that one painted only to produce an image. It was necessary to provide an image of oneself to this Other, present in the country, who usurped all the possible images and, up to a point, was mandated to make you one. 

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Marie Haddad was also as important in establishing Lebanese painting at the intellectual level as were Farroukh, Onsi and Gemayel. She belonged to this generation of women, all students of Kober in the 1930s, who established themselves and their reading of reality with an astonishing strength. 

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From the 1940s, she became marginalised after entering the orbit of a Lebanese sect, Daheshism to which she devoted her time, her resources and her work, translating from Arabic into French the poems and texts of Dr. Dahesh, the founder of the sect. As Michel Chiha’s sister, and a relative to the President of the Lebanese Republic, Béchara el Khoury, she fought the latter publicly by publishing books and pamphlets and taking a stand for the founder of the sect, who had been deprived from his Lebanese nationality.

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Many of Marie Haddad’s writings – notably a very important journal, her archives, drawings and canvases – were deposited in New York after her death, on the 1st of January 1973. Her family background was very important, due to the involvement of Michel Chiha on the cultural and political life of Lebanon. She evidently found in Dahesh the antithetical figure not of her husband, a confirmed Daheshist, but of her brother.

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If, at the beginning of the 1930s, she appeared as the Parisian representative of a country under Mandate, can she be reduced to this image ? Her strong desire for emancipation was not uniquely linked to the strength of pictorial touch and the desire to appropriate reality. Beyond painting, she was connected to all the social structures of the era. She wanted to go further or, perhaps, to have a greater need for poetry. She spoke of how vain Beirut society was, facing the legerdemain of an Oriental magician like Dahesh, who challenged it with one stroke.

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Was she searching for the truth of an illusion? Dahesh was not a metaphor, but he made her clearly understand that she had to interfere with this illusory society with her own truth. Her character was not one for empty talk. She brought Dahesh to Béchara el Khoury to nurse his nervous depression, and  he also tried to cure Michel Chiha.

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Only the publishing of Marie Haddad’s journal and a detailed biography of her work would allow her actions and contribution to be put in perspective, in order to determine how deeply revealing she has been regarding the way Lebanese society was constructed.