Melmir, Michel Elmir  known as

Hénin Lietard (France), 1930-Beirut 1973

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Michel Elmir was the son of a Maronite doctor who had moved to France. He returned to Lebanon with his family at the age of twelve, and settled in the village of Batha in the Kesrouan area. 

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A background of disruption and social rejection made him leave the family home, when his father declared that painting was not a honorable profession. 

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He settled in Damascus, where he lived for several years while working at a record store to earn a living, and held two exhibitions in the early 1950s.

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He had an open temperament and a generous vitality, sustained by his love for his profession. His painting is characterised by the impasto work as well as by his rapid manner of approaching the canvas. His work does not lack interest, especially if one compares it to the cautious Lebanese painting of the time, unable to choose between the abstract and the figurative. 

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Elmir’s work was figurative, solidly constructed by instinct, and sharply colored. He enjoyed an immediate style of painting and managed to cover the canvas with signs that reminded the subject and specified the motif. His benchmarks were based on a fundamental situation: he was Maronite and Francophone, but this was tempered by his studies at the Collège des Frères in Gemayzé. The years he spent in Damascus made him reconsider the problem of figuration and modernity in Lebanon.

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His painting was indeed designed at some very important point, when it was hardly possible to escape influences, although the ground was cleared as soon as they all were assimilated at once. The painters suddenly found a new personal status as they became aware of the autonomy of the canvas, a freedom beyond the motif and the client’s requests. 

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In Elmir’s work, this can be seen through a form of sensuality, a desire for an immediate plastic response, that he could only satisfy by the direct spreading of the color on the canvas.

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In his Damascene period, Gemayel’s teaching was overtaken by a more restless exploration and construction of the canvas. In the 1960s, he created a sensual classicism without heaviness, where the eye was pleased by a lightness in the flesh of the canvas, despite the painter’s evident desire to continue showing his restless questioning.