Seraphim Juliana 

Jaffa (Palestine), 1934-Jounieh (Lebanon), 2005

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Juliana Seraphim was an official for UNRWA in Beirut, from 1953 to 1958, and began to paint in 1957 in Georges Cyr’s studio.

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After various Matterist periods and experiments with calligraphy, she asked the question of Surrealism in a society where interest in the Abstract – and an Abstract practiced in a far too figurative manner – rarely went beyond the patterns of Soviet bloc curtain fabric from the 1950s. Nonetheless, Seraphim revived the tradition of woman painters from the 1930s, such as Marie Haddad and Blanche Lohéac-Ammoun.

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Initially, Seraphim showed an unselfconscious vitality, a fascinating femininity, while being an example of an emancipated woman who attracted the curiosity of the press and the public. However, she ended up becoming a social phenomenon and became a woman painter phenomenon, turning the attention away from her painting. She was not listened to ; she was looked at, and her painting was not – which caused some rivalry, and its cruelty had to be exercised against her own fundamental goodness.

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After being a Matterist of some talent, she structured her canvases around a primary Orientalism to create an atmospheric art that was linked to her research. This evolved, in the mid-1960s, into the Surrealism popularised by the magazine, Planète. But this was a Surrealist pseudo-revolution, neither that of Breton, nor that of the 1930s, but an imported, chic and fake spirituality from Parisian salons. Seraphim was no more of a victim of this import than others – she was no fool – but she made herself a type out of it, and the accompanying paraphernalia provided her with a machinery of fantasy.

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At the end of the 1960s, Surrealism appeared in Lebanon as something more offbeat than literary, and was related to the eruption of a reality that began to weigh more and more heavily on artists and writers. They understood that their Orient would never come to speak in a comprehensible and articulated manner to a West that had taught them part of their language. They tried, without always having the necessary tools, to come closer to another language, even if it was a bit simplified. This radicalism was not always as radical as Seraphim hoped, but it tried to pass for a political art.

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Painters had to make a choice. The salons of Beirut no longer dictated intellectual criteria, but were no longer proof of lightness either. Seraphim chose to settle in Paris and to launch a new genre of painting, a Surrealism that some galleries were interested in. She therefore had to stick to a rhythm of production. She did not play the game, for reasons that were not only about painting. She had trouble entering the commercial circuit, which had constraints she could not bear. It should be noted that she was one of the first painters in Lebanon to live on painting, without financial support from her family.

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Juliana Seraphim held a vehement discourse on her Palestinian Christian origins, as if to leap over the Christians of the Orient to join a Latinity that she traced back to the Crusades. This did not serve to legitimise European cultural influences, but the graphic language of Surrealism, to justify its cultural presence and dispel the scandal it had caused in Lebanese society. For the fundamental point about Seraphim was her discovery of Surrealism, which seemed to channel her research at a time when she needed to affirm her female autonomy in the environment of Beirut. She merged all the forms of the rather insipid echo of literary Surrealism: women-flowers, women-sex, and the entire Symbolist array. However, she certainly worked on other themes and had a Phoenician period and a series working on Arab letters.

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In Lebanon, Seraphim was at once the star and the victim of a social fringe where the functioning of painting, the burgeoning art market, and the competition among painters and galleries began to give the illusion of creativity, while they were actually a distant echo of games of influence. She had the intelligence to rarely be fooled.