Manoukian Seta 

Beirut, 1945

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Seta Manoukian completed her studies rapidly and brilliantly, revealing a precocious interest in painting. At eighteen years old, she won the first prize at the end of year school competition and a study grant from the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut, and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. She then received her diploma in 1966 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, with a thesis on Cubism.

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For her, Italy was an opportunity to come into contact with live painting – that is to say, the canvas as a canvas and no longer just as a reproduction in a book. She would later react against Italian aestheticism, against this formal beauty, as immaterial as it is magnificent, on which she worked for more than five years before doing other things and following her work in other directions. She spent another year in Rome, and took part in various group exhibitions. At the end of 1967, she returned to Beirut and gave her first exhibition at the Alecco Saab gallery.

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Her exploratory work and critique of the Lebanese intellectual and cultural scene is more intense than her pictorial work. She was conscious of the almost painful and constant shifts in Lebanese painting, which was always at least a generation late and always lagged behind the last European trend, when was is not a displaced plagiarism. “The problem is no longer theoretical,” she said. “The problems of shifts, of reality, the everyday, the search for identity ; these are made every day.” After five years of research and wandering, her exhibition of 1972 at the German Cultural Centre in Beirut reflected the pain and delirium of the void and empty space. Her work continued in this direction: having assimilated the Italian experience, it revealed a great plasticity, leaving herself margins to explore the canvas, but the result could not be clearer. It is a sorrowful, blatant emptiness, expressed with great subtlety while remaining faithful to the reference points of figurative painting. It is emptiness nonetheless, for which an answer has to be found, an answer that would allow her to continue living, if not to continue painting. For a painter, there is only one solution: to open oneself to reality, to the external world.

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Seta Manoukian’s artistic path was clearly outlined in 1973, after a stay in London, when she undertook political painting: the solution could only be found if she gave up abstraction. Having understood that a painter is also a creator of images, she confronted the real problem that a painter has to face sooner or later: how to create a world.

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“A city is something alive and moving, and finally reality is not only expressed as a projection of oneself,” she says. “Each of us consists in one city, in one sum of internal and external visions, emotions, feelings and memories ; the streets, the people, the building entrances, the walls, the apartments, the colors of day and night.” From 1973, four themes emerged through her work: the city and its inhabitants, autobiography, photography and people’s relationship to one another. The interaction of these complex and modern factors weaved progressively throughout  her pictorial work. 

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First, the city and its people. The city is obviously Beirut. Let us leave the painter express it : “What I would like is to paint Beirut. To paint what one knows about it. When you have these photos of Beirut – the repertoire of oneself, the internal and external themes – you choose the pictures that touch and interest you, which are close to you. There are also the childhood memories. Finally, this is a city: the past and the present reunited, you already see the future. Obviously this is simplified in painting as a vision, but it is accurate.” This problematic displaces the other traditional issue of the painter – his relationship to the canvas and the surrounding environment.

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How important are painters from the 1960s generation? Without doubt, the fact that they imposed a much-needed and violent critique on the preceding generation. For the first time, they created a Lebanese pictorial tradition, and one that was not only about the dialogue between the painter and himself or the European pictorial tradition to which he belonged, through his travels and studies in Europe. They began their work while taking this critique of their predecessors into account. It is no longer possible to believe, in the world we live in, in the spontaneous generation of talented painters : the appetite, the desire to paint, the love of painting and, even, the know-how are no longer sufficient qualities to create a painter and allow him to finish a work. Culture and criticism became essential elements of awareness and presence in the world – without them every artist is threatened, not only by a stifling provincialism, but also by the solitary sclerosis that has nothing to do with the solitude necessary for pursuing his work.

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In this sense, Seta Manoukian is exemplary, and her career interesting. She has more than the rudiments: if the preceding generation was essentially concerned with a Lebanese pictorial identity, it was only to face the great tradition of the European figurative whose power, know-how, and definitive education of the eye had completely erased them. To escape this fate, the following generation could only confront what came next – European Abstract art, in which they tried to inject a certain claim for authenticity, if not local color.

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Painters from Manoukian’s generation rapidly reached these conclusions. They understood that it was not something new just for the pleasure of novelty, but a position that was more attentive and radical in the confrontation with European culture, in a pictorial Lebanese tradition that it was no longer possible to ignore. The elements created by these complex and multiple interactions gave birth to a Lebanese painting scene that was as anxious for authenticity as for modernity. It raised issues in a new way – especially at the level of the canvas and working technique – while being acutely aware of the cultural weight, now ubiquitous, of any painting project.

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Since Delacroix, the controversial role of photography in modern painting has not been a controversy anymore. The use of photography in elaborating the canvas gives a fresh look on classical anatomy, as the positions of bodies, faces and places which are not tied to classic pictorial space evidently show. But most important is the relationship to reality and place. For this empty space in which the canvas is constructed, in Seta Manoukian’s paintings, is not a place of metaphysical void. It is a purely technical void, that makes every element that is introduced important. The space creates and highlights. It is possible to construct shapes and images, from only one element of reality introduced into that space, but also to set them in relationship with one another – to create a painting, in other words.

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Stated in this cold intellectual manner, elements appear as a simple mental representation, when the slow elaboration that each canvas implies should not be forgotten, not only at the level of its construction, but also at the level of the relationship the elements maintain between themselves and reality.

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“Drawing the elements in the reality of Beirut. Trying not to be regional, in the narrow meaning of the term. Trying not to be folkloric. Many things are linked to the vision, to the functioning of the eye in front of the canvas”. Indeed, in this particular case, the painter would risk being no more than a photographic director, if the complex game of what touched and moved him or her did not intervene. Of course, no edited photo would not be indifferent, but it would remain uniquely a photograph, while we are confronted by a painting. 

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In Lebanese artistic circles, Seta Manoukian caused a general outcry due to her use of photography, but the true problem did not lie there. The essential claim of the painter in creating reality has always implied that he copies it, if not faithfully, at least in a comprehensible and visible manner. When a painter creates a more complex reality with elements of another reality – photography, in her case – one loses sight of the fact that we are witnessing the deciphering of an unfamiliar language and vocabulary. But does renewing a pictorial vision not imply to dare using different languages on the canvas, in order to say things which go beyond a simple artistic appreciation ? 

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Her painting certainly closes a period in Lebanese painting, which she summarises and questions at the same time. After the 1980s, it became more and more difficult to take charge of painting in Lebanon as a history and culture, for the de-structuring of society made the confrontation and dialogue between the different cultural and confessional components very difficult. 

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Manoukian came into her own truth partly thanks to her desire to take charge of reality - and also to leave her multiple contradictions behind, from the moment she caused a sort of community rupture through her open mindedness towards other communities. She was the first to grasp the importance and interest of this sociology of forms as a tool of analysis and a pictorial instrument – the everyday life of the quite refractory Sunni and Shiite working-class, the mixed life in the city centre, and  the deaf anxiety at the start of the war in 1975, which gave the impression that everything was going to disappear. Some members of the team she had tried to set up for a collective work and reflexion only understood these popular forms of expression as data linked to an image. But Manoukian experienced more than an Impressionist feeling for the picturesque with its sensuality of forms and colors, until the moment when she had to leave Beirut, as a kind of definitive expulsion, even beyond exile: it was a manner of being simultaneously kicked out, threatened with death, and destroyed in the extreme complexity of the personal and affective mental network linked to her work.