Mourani Philippe 

Beirut, 1875-Paris, 1970

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The most revealing text about Mourani consists of the two pages that he published about the Spiridon family, whose first names he had forgotten, confusing the father and the son, who were both painters. For Mourani, Spiridon was the symbol of the painter whose return to Lebanon, from where he was originally from, did perhaps sound his death knell. He lived through the ambivalence of a situation shared between Lebanon and France even if, from the beginning, his formation as a religious painter in Italy destined him to have a Lebanese career. For him, France meant the return to painting and the desire to paint. After he received his diploma from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris (1892-1895), he lived in Beirut from 1895 to 1901, where he painted portraits, saved money and accompanied a French archaeological mission to Palmyra. After spending the First World War in Cairo, he settled in Paris in 1920.

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He travelled a lot, for professional and personal reasons alike. He had a nomadic and wandering spirit, though a curiously bourgeois wandering, for he was respectable and had nothing of the apprentice painter. This respectability was, well all is said and done, reflected in his painting.

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Mourani was a painter of circumstance, but instead of loosening the mechanisms of creation, circumstance made him dwell on them during the execution of the canvas. He had a taste for the systematic trick, invention, manual work, and his art was fixed and frozen, like the last figure of representation.

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In a time, for a limited inner circle, Mourani became the painter of an Oriental imaginary. He sold more canvases in the Orient than in Paris. Corm spoke of his own rural details precision, of the brightness and sadness of painting. But Mourani painted in an anaesthesia of feelings, convinced that art flattened everything. In sum, he had to reproduce. He did not speak about painting in his work, but about the circumstances that surrounded him – that was the problem. Nonetheless, some of his canvases set an unexpected elsewhere, open a door to something other than detail.

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His exceptional longevity, similar to Corm’s, meant the highs and lows of work were inevitable. The multiple cultural and social environments both painters moved into brought them closer. Mourani’s travels – Italy, France, Egypt, Algeria – represented the attempt to establish himself as an artisan painter. He was always reluctant when it came to talking about himself, limitating himself to te recitative of memories. 

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Called to the Lebanese National Ministry of Education to reorganise the teaching of arts and craft, Mourani quickly grew tired of this assignment, and returned to France. For him, Paris was a substitute for Beirut, but Beirut could never substitute Paris. He was an Orientalist painter in 1910, when he had to do a peinture de genre ; an Orientalising painter in Lebanon in the 1930s ; and finally, an Oriental painter in France – he never ceased to be linked to the adjective. With Mourani, the game of identity did not function relatively to the variations of the Lebanese identity,  but as his own adaptation of the image he was always asked for. 

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From the beginning, Mourani’s painting was misunderstood and misperceived, a meticulous copy frozen in details. Laurens, his professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, regretted that he never reached a global vision, and that the kind of Orientalism with which he worked, his taste for rendering the Orient, seemed to come only from the details. 

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For Mourani, painting meant copying and rendering, above anything else. He could not understand it in any other way. It was impossible for him to synthesise, to balance a canvas, to play the game that consists in highlighting certain details and blurring others. It was like developing the composition, and then covering a uniform space.