Najm Mounir 

Deir El Kamar (Lebanon), 1933-Paris, 1987

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Mounir Najm enrolled at the studio of César Gemayel from 1951 to 1952, and then at ALBA from 1952 to 1955. From 1955 to1959 he studied in Paris, first at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts (1955-1956), then at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1956-1959) and also at André Lhote’s studio from 1957 to 1959.

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All the Lebanese who were taught by Lhote, Léger, Metzinger and Goetz were encouraged, in a striking way, to embrace modernity and an abstract sensuality that echoed perfectly with their Oriental sensitivity. This helped them to have some distance from the prominent figures of the local Lebanese scene and the teaching of ALBA – of which they were the product. ALBA had also introduced them to abstract painting, which was seen as a natural language that only raised technical questions that were inherent to the canvas itself, and not the initial problem of choosing between one style and another.

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This evolution was very different from the approach of an era in which young student painters struggled with the ABC of the figure, having to choose between the “Impressionisme à touches”, as César Gemayel practiced it, or Fernando Manetti’s Italianised “Cézannisme”.

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In Paris, Najm confronted the deconstruction of the figure by Cubism, where he saw Western representation destroyed by its own means. Lhote’s teaching had a lot to do with it, and that was what he needed. As he grew older, Lhote’s teaching was no longer about post-Cubism, but about intelligently moulding the scene and breaking down its elements; the moment when European pedagogy floundered in post-War reconstruction and found a foothold in the recovery of Cubism. Lhote was, furthermore, far more of a great pedagogue than a painter, but this is another story.

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For the Lebanese, this reconstruction corresponded with the claims linked to their own vision : the Orient, identity, other forms, other colors, another light, and the expression of all this on the canvas. Historically, the question was not asked in these terms. At the very beginning of the 1960s, an abstract academism existed that could have posed the problem outside the figurative-abstract conflict, but instead positioned itself within a figurative language enriched by the contributions of the abstract. This is why an experience like Cyr’s arose from a misunderstanding and an absence of historicity.

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In Paris, the issue was even clearer as taking a distance had been more rapid. As the language of the West was dismantling, it was necessary to rebuild its own vision. At the end of the 1940s, Cyr went through a crisis that focused on his place in the history of painting and the way in which he could integrate his thirty years of painting in Lebanon with the painting that was being created at the time in Paris.

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What Najm saw around him was the experience of ALBA’s first generation of students, who were only a few years older than him. This experience seemed like a headlong rush, and an impossible recourse. To take one one example, for cultural and financial reasons it was not possible for young painters to go to New York. They needed to push much further into the canvas itself. It is striking that in Onsi, Farroukh and Gemayel’s generation, it was really Gemayel who held on to historic modernity with his Impressionism, construction of the canvas and brushwork, while Farroukh and Onsi worked with an academic language and academic means.

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For the greater part of his production, and with no other reason than personal inclination, Farroukh never distanced himself from line, contour, or drawing. His primary concern was always about resemblance, an obsession with rendering, since his public seemed to understand and appreciate nothing but this overcome difficulty.  In his first watercolors, which he signed O. Unsi, Onsi colored the background and then drew with the tip of his brush. After his stay in Paris, he did not see painting’s modernising tendencies from Cubism to Abstraction, but only saw a destruction of painting and a sacrilege in respect to History of Art. It is astonishing to note how conventional he was in respect to figuration, when his background was so rich.

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Onsi understood Impressionism as an immediate rendering. He did his utmost to realise his vision with a shaky cloudiness, like a watercolor of feeling, a way of soaking the view in order to render it, to the point where the drawing disappeared under the water. His sensitivity was incapable of erasing the details that he felt were necessary to read the scene, and he was frustrated by the desire to gather every necessary detail to create a likeness. For Onsi, artistry laid entirely in the painter’s touch, which rendered the resemblance and conveyed a supplementary manner of looking. 

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The duty of rendering and the precision of the details thwarted the blurriness of Impressionism. With Gemayel, the tyranny of the impressionist touch created a just-about recognisable scene, a skillful rendering of flesh and light. At least he resolved part of the problem for himself through the pleasure of painting. His justification for his painting progressed from resemblance to enjoyment, without understanding the impasse that his students experienced when they sought to imitate his technique without having the means to go any further.

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In sum, the conflict between what is recognisable and what is new is an essential and exclusively personal path in History of Art. It becomes the history of an individual confronted by their choices, outside historic time. Reality, seen as the painting’s subject, gets further away from the image when it must be translated with an advanced pictorial technique, like Impressionism. Yet Gemayel did not dare push further into the only thing that led him to paint in the first place – the passionate outburst of color and form. Instead he froze in reproduction and coloring, reducing the problem of Lebanese History of Art to a mere technicality and series of procedures.

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Even if he overcame this gap, Najm did not solve the issue raised by Gemayel. The specificity of Oriental art, the desire to recover certain colors, a particular light, such were the problems that Gemayel had made him sensitive to, in an Impressionist environment where Najm ended up developing an Abstract Impressionism after an exclusively Abstract period.

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Pictorial techniques turn to method when the artist is not able to construct something he feels to be its unique owner, when it not only a variation in the interpretation of pictorial and intellectual currents that he does not really participate in. When the complexity of the Abstract froze him in a kind of painful autism, when he understood that the stakes of his painting were in Lebanon, Najm found in his friend’s research the echo necessary to pursue his work. At his beginnings, he had practiced Abstract Impressionism in a typically post-Romantic manner that he constructed for himself, with the vocabulary of History of Art. Through refining this vocabulary and using a thematic poetry whereby form became color, he was taking into account all the potential of a pictorial heritage in which the greatest sensitivity to color went strangely hand-in-hand with the greatest insensitivity to form.

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Najm pursued form, but only in order to color it. This is not about stating an easy distinction between drawers and colorists. Putting aside the historic shift from Europe, Najm attempted a theory, a manner of establishing his own History of Art with all the data he had at his disposal: ALBA, the experience of Paris, Gemayel, the Lebanese painters living in Paris (Abboud, Aouad, Elbacha) and his friends in Beirut (Scamanga, Saghir, Achkar). He wanted to substitute the historic shift from Europe with another reading, a History of Art that was his own, or that at least justified his practice. This did not lack didacticism or literal simplification, but allowed him to paint in a way that he never could have if he only defined himself through relationship to Paris.

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This attitude did not come from a simple reaction to the West, and went deeper than an East-West dichotomy. It was about taste and about the practice of painting. Here Gemayel left his watermark, despite the fact that his technique submitted to the public taste.

Najm went further than the Abstract, and progressively constructed a vocabulary that, at best, owed its plastic expressivity to itself, without ignoring the irregularity of his production. 

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Indeed, at the end of the 1960s, the elements of this vocabulary perfectly expressed formal sensitivity, since they were borrowed from Klee or Macke.  But if these forms were new to them and to the German school of pictorial Orientalism, they were not for contemporary painting. Archways and squares of color go below the pictorial purpose ; if they construct the canvas, they pull the spectator too far back while playing with references and blurring the work on color.

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How could he share any sensation, without having to structure his frame through déjà vu ? In some of his pictures, Najm solved this problem by deciding, quite simply, not to have a structure, and to return to color alone. Influenced by his German friends, he made a claim for Oriental art as an explicit way of reclaiming his identity. It is remarkable that, in his case, this claim passed through a preliminary European reading, while the sources were literally under his nose. He could only read them with sociological connotations. By identifying with local art, and therefore with historic continuity, Najm drew into his original mechanisms and the feelings and memories of his childhood, the fields where he accompanied his father hunting, the smells of the forest and the color of the light.

Gemayel supported this, and his time at the Ecole normale in Beirut left him with didactic concerns, but his progressive reading of the influences that he assimilated shows that he only jumped on the bandwagon when he had the opportunity. His claims for the concept of an Oriental space were justified by data from European History of Art.

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Najm’s perspective, his manner of rendering space by color and its modulation, was linked to German research at the beginning of the century. In the environment of Lebanese painting in the 1960s, he came close to the approach of Adel Saghir. At the end, his production slowed down. He was too concerned with a sensual anxiety whose fulfilment did not always come from painting. He died in Paris in 1987.