The essay explores how the Syrian artist Adham Ismaʿil (1922–63) linked his modernist painting strategies to the activism of the Baʿth political movement during Syria’s independence decade through a conceptual reworking of the “arabesque”—the rhythmic pattern of unending line and pure color that Orientalist scholars considered a product of the Arab and Muslim episteme and French modernist painters adopted as a fresh compositional device. It draws on a new archive of correspondence, writings, and sketches, supplemented by political memoirs detailing Ismaʿil’s experience of displacement after the 1939 transfer of his native Alexandretta to Turkey, to uncover his efforts to forge new aesthetic unities as a mechanism for Arab activation and rebirth. Ismaʿil and his comrades accorded a radical charge to the concept of vital Arab energy in particular; once manifested in the sensory experience of line and color, it promised to assemble audiences in new collectivities and to help topple the Syrian status quo. The essay thus analyzes Ismaʿil’s radical Arab painting as evidence of not only the complexity of the intellectual debates in the Middle East but also the generative fragmentation of modernist tenets under the (not quite) postwar, postcolonial world order.
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Philip Shukry Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 723.
Watenpaugh, “‘Creating Phantoms,’” 370; Shields, Fezzes in the River, 59.
Watenpaugh, “‘Creating Phantoms,’” 366. Al-Arsuzi, too, was an ʿAlawite with ties to the Ismaʿils’ neighborhood of ʿAfan.
Dalal Arsuzi-Elamir, “Zakī al-Arsūzī and Syrian-Arab Nationalism in the Periphery: The Alexandretta Crisis of 1936–1939,” in From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon, ed. Thomas Philipp and Christoph Schumann (Beirut: Ergon Verlag in Kommission, 2004), 307–27.
Ismaʿil Marwa, “Sulaymān al-ʿĪsā: Ḥulm ʿArabī Damuhu wa-Nabḍuhu wa-Fikruhu al-ʿUrūba,” Bayt Filasṭīn li-l-Shiʿr, April 2012, http://www.ppbait.org/ .
Designation in al-Jundī, al-Baʿth, 27. The term “Sufi” was used to designate not membership in an institutionalized ṭarīqa, or way, but rather a practice of seeking internal knowledge. Tellingly, al-Arsuzi considered Henri Bergson to be a Sufi. See Salīm Barakāt, “al-Fikr al-Qawmī wa-Ususuhu al-Falsafīya ʿinda Zakī al-Arsūzī” (master’s thesis, Damascus University, 1979), 79.
Sidqi Ismaʿil, “al-Shallāl,” in al-Kalb: Jarīdat Siḍqī Ismāʿīl (Damascus: al-Idāra al-Siyāsiyya, 1983), 422–24.
Bruno Paoli, “Jean Gaulmier le Syrien,” Les carnets de l’Ifpo (Hypotheses.org), April 24, 2012, http://ifpo.hypotheses.org/3334 .
Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 73. Much art-historical attention has been paid to the ideological rivalry between the French promotion of the École de Paris and the American “New York School” of abstract expressionism. The classic polemical account is Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 75. The important interwar history in France of a highly racialized construction of the foreign (read Jewish) membership of the École de Paris is detailed in Romy Golan, “The ‘École Française’ versus the ‘École de Paris’: The Debate over the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars,” in Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 (New York: Jewish Museum, 1985), 81–87.
Kirsten Scheid, “Distinctions that Could be Drawn: Choucair’s Paris and Beirut,” in Saloua Raouda Choucair, ed. Jessica Morgan (London: Tate Modern, 2013), 41–55, at 53.
Jacques Lassaigne, “Il Est,” in Jamil Hamoudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad (Paris: Voyelles, 1950), exhibition booklet in private archive of Ishtar Hamoudi, Baghdad, Iraq, consulted via photographic scan. “National genius” is also repeated in R. V. Gindertael, “Hamoudi,” Art d’Aujourd’hui 3, nos. 3–4 (Feb.–March 1952): n.p.
Jamil Hamoudi, “L’Art en Irak,” Arts: Beaux-Arts, Littérature, Spectacles (April 28, 1950): 8.
Roger Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation,” The Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (June 1993): 295–316, at 297.
Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll—Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture: Topkapı Palace Museum Library MS H. 1956 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 61–71.
Ibid., 65; Finbarr Barry Flood, “The Flaw in the Carpet: Disjunctive Continuities and Riegl’s Arabesque,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 82–93, at 83.
Afif Bahnassi, “L’Arabesque Contemporaine,” in Consultation collective sur les problèmes contemporains des arts arabes dans leurs relations socio-culturelles avec le monde arabe (Hammamet, Tunisia: UNESCO, March 1974), 3–4. This text was published again, with minor modifications, in UNESCO’s 1977 Cultures bulletin.
Benjamin, “Decorative Landscape,” 309–10. Benjamin notes that Gustave Moreau’s discussions of the arabesque, for example, usually employ examples from sculpture, and that Matisse, too, recognized precedents in statues by Michelangelo and Giambologna. He also sees evidence of Matisse’s “sculptural investigation” in the heavy outlines of The Joy of Life.
Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), 21.
Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 201–9.
Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 209.
Badiʿ al-Kasim, trans., “Madhāhib al-Rasm al-Ḥadīth,” al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī (April 1950): 605–12.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 242–69.
V. C. Scott O’Connor, The Charm of Kashmir (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920). Two color illustrations and a report on the book appear in L’Illustration in 1921, under the title “Les Jardins du Kashmir,” L’Illustration no. 4103 (October 22, 1921): 382–84. It would appear that literature of this type circulated widely in Syria in the 1920s, as the Aleppo-born artist Fateh al-Moudarres mentions reading books about the “Maharaja of India” as a child. See Samar Ḥamārna, Kayfa Yarā Fātiḥ al-Mudarris? (Damascus: S. Ḥamārna, 1999), 10.
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The essay explores how the Syrian artist Adham Ismaʿil (1922–63) linked his modernist painting strategies to the activism of the Baʿth political movement during Syria’s independence decade through a conceptual reworking of the “arabesque”—the rhythmic pattern of unending line and pure color that Orientalist scholars considered a product of the Arab and Muslim episteme and French modernist painters adopted as a fresh compositional device. It draws on a new archive of correspondence, writings, and sketches, supplemented by political memoirs detailing Ismaʿil’s experience of displacement after the 1939 transfer of his native Alexandretta to Turkey, to uncover his efforts to forge new aesthetic unities as a mechanism for Arab activation and rebirth. Ismaʿil and his comrades accorded a radical charge to the concept of vital Arab energy in particular; once manifested in the sensory experience of line and color, it promised to assemble audiences in new collectivities and to help topple the Syrian status quo. The essay thus analyzes Ismaʿil’s radical Arab painting as evidence of not only the complexity of the intellectual debates in the Middle East but also the generative fragmentation of modernist tenets under the (not quite) postwar, postcolonial world order.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1076 | 181 | 17 |
Full Text Views | 108 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 107 | 21 | 0 |