Saghir Adel 

Beirut, 1930

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Adel Saghir studied painting at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts from 1952 to 1957, while also attending Maryette Charlton’s courses at the American University.

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  While the problems of the Academy and of resemblance were still on Lebanese painting’s agenda in the 1940s, Said Akl introduced calligraphic variations as a plastic form – partly in the wake of his poetic research. He raised a central question: that of heritage and identity, which was taken up by Lebanese painters in the 1960s – and most notably by Adel Saghir – whose work addressed the questioning of tradition and Arab cultural heritage, in their philosophical and plastic variants. 

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The main problem that arose at the heart of the Academic tradition at this time was whether “to do a Manetti” or “do a Gemayel”, which was put in perspective by Georges Mathieu’s exhibition in Beirut in 1961 and the Degottex exhibition in 1962 at the Contemporary Art Centre. It then seemed urgent to create an artistic language, especially when comparing the Japanese calligraphic identity to the Arab tradition of calligraphy. No one knew how to use it pictorially. Words always signified something – but they henceforth had to mean something when put together. The exhibition of Arab calligraphy at the Sursock Museum in Beirut in 1961 introduced new elements, thanks to pieces drawn from Lebanese collections.

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Saghir synthesised his language during his stay in Munich, from 1959 to 1960, instead of the traditional visit to Paris. He therefore had the necessary distance when integrating a reflection of the German approach to Arab culture. Since the exhibition in Berlin in 1900, the Germanic tradition had encompassed the stories of different artistic and craft traditions, without separating them from the history of culture. Moreover, Germany’s relations with the Ottoman Empire assured a sense of continuity that mitigated the ruptures in the practice and discourse. Divisions by country or dynasty according to history and geography returned to the same perspective. Furthermore, XXth-century German art brought another dimension to the teaching of modern painting. German Expressionism (Kirchner, Beckmann, Schmidt-Rottluff…) was practically unknown in Lebanon. Its discovery made the deconstruction of forms and traditional figures plausible. 

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Saghir understood that he had to work on the concepts of cultural history in a more global way, without limiting his response to recovering the artisanal practice of calligraphy. Sufism and the speculative tradition were the only fields he could exploit. Radicalism did not mean erasing five centuries of Western painting, but integrating the abstract tradition with the most contemporary practices, which seemed to mark a return to the old dilemma of figuration and the forbidden image. The problem was that in placing himself in another tradition, and submitting to the aesthetic appreciation of other criteria, his work was read in a blurred way, as it met the visual experience of the Western tradition. But his work was less about being contemporary than about being present.

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Carswell, for example, perceived the richness of the daily and picturesque spectacle  of life in Beirut, but he was too close to his internal mythology, and incapable of leaving the different sources that he borrowed to create his vocabulary. He only painted allegories where drawing lost all vivacity to become illustration. He needed the elements of painting to structure themselves into something more, which was not only about painting, but a vision, a manner of distancing oneself from individual elements, to integrate them into a pictorial framework. As to Saghir, he slowly approached an elaboration of form in which he could reflect on the possibilities of calligraphy, which surpassed the functional implication of its meaning. The possible meaning of the Arab letter could go beyond simple form, for it was not meaning that was prohibited, but its functional application. 

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Could one satisfy the variations on a fixed form, if one wanted something else – form liberated from meaning? This was the root of the problem: how to understand creation in the most literal sense. The Arab alphabet does not have a plastic or an aesthetical destination. Historically, the possibility of diverting its use was complex, because it played on the impasse between the reproductive artisan and the Islamic prohibition of recreation. 

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Saghir questioned his own understanding of how to integrate oneself within a history of Arab art. The solution came later, when he was in the USA, and created an Oriental art for the Americans. He forced a necessary break to reveal his identity – not the identity that was impossible in his own society, but the identity that was one of the principal mechanisms of American society, that is to say the dis-identification that allowed entry into the common melting pot. 

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At the time, Saghir’s “problem” with identity was asked in more cultural terms than with other calligraphy painters, and had more to do with the modernity that they ignored. For Nahle, modernity had begun with Farroukh. Saghir had spent six years at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, and then two years between Paris and Germany. To him, the problem with heritage was about how to assimilate Arab forms. The solution could only be a historical one : historical forms being too strong, trying to make them contemporary made them look like adaptations. He tried a philosophical approach, but this also led to adaptations, although his work differed from the research on art in the Arab world since the 1930s, as he focused on details and not realisation. This heaviness always ended up breaking any order and any relationship with modernity, and therefore the possibility of a dialogue between  different civilisations. Modernity, if one consideres oneself as the only representative of a history stretching over several histories – a uniform history of peoples, civilisations and cultures -, can appear as a claim for authority, for the right of ignoring the other, in a partial and biased way. 

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In Lebanese painting, Saghir asked every possible question within the community framework. Settling in the USA after a Masters in Painting at the Pratt Institute in New York did not mean that he had or had not found the answer. His ease for setting in and enjoying the American culture certainly played a part. But in the framework of this culture, was the arabesque sufficient to demand an identity, beyond the necessary confrontation with other cultures? For his part, Saghir had rediscovered legitimacy by returning to a historic source, time as calligraphy being invariant.