Today’s Zaman, Turkey
March 15 2008

Syrian show traces European influence on Arab art in 1900s

A rare exhibition of Arab and Italian art in an old caravanserai in
the heart of Damascus is challenging taboos about European influences
behind a late 20th-century renaissance in Arab art.

The exhibition, in the domed 18th century Khan Asaad Basha, shows the
work of Arab artists hanging alongside ones by Italian artists who
had either inspired or taught them. The result is a powerful
demonstration of how modern Arab artists adopted European styles and
then transformed them to reflect the political turbulence of their
countries.
`We’re in difficult times and it is important for art to resist
culture wars. One can see how Italian schools … influenced leading
Arab artists,’ said researcher Martina Corgnati.

Many Arab painters and sculptors left for Europe, mainly Italy and
France, after World War II as authoritarian rulers cemented their
grip on power across the Middle East. Those who returned from exile
brought back European 20th century styles which underpinned a modern
Arab artistic tradition now gaining new recognition and popularity.
`They adopted the Italian school in their own way,’ Corgnati told
Reuters.

Corgnati spent two years collecting works of Egyptian, Lebanese and
Syrian artists as well those of their Italian mentors for the
exhibition, which opened in the Syrian capital last month and will
also travel to Beirut and Cairo. The idea is to present the works in
what the organizers call `couples’ or `duos’ to try to show scholars,
art lovers and the general public the similarities between the two.

Organized as part of a series of events celebrating Damascus as this
year’s Arab Capital of Culture, the exhibition is also well-timed to
cash in on a boom in demand for modern Arab art. Gulf buyers, flush
with cash thanks to soaring oil prices, are investing heavily in art
from around the world and are willing to pay sizeable sums for
original works by fellow Arabs. For example an untitled work by the
late Syrian master Fateh al Moudarres sold for 26,000 pounds
($52,000) at London auction house Sotheby’s in October, double the
estimate. Two works by the late Syrian artist Louai Kayyali, who died
in 1978 aged 44, were sold for a total of 59,000 pounds.

Touting Western influence publicly is rare in Syria, which has been
ruled by the nationalist Baath Party since it took power in a coup 45
years ago and banned all opposition. The Baath Party considers itself
a bastion of `Arabism,’ a secular creed with undertones of perceived
cultural superiority. It is therefore highly unusual to argue — as
did Syrian painter Fadi Yazigi — that Arab art might have remained
confined to `icons, calligraphy and simplistic realism’ were it not
for the influences of western art.

The exhibition, however, aims to show how the artistic influences
between Arabs and Europeans on either side of the Mediterranean were
mutual, with both the richer for it. Sculptor Mustafa Ali, for
example, said he was influenced by Etruscan art, and later discovered
that Etruscan works had traces of the Middle East’s Phoenicians.
`Syria produced Roman emperors and popes. We were not that separate
culturally from the West,’ Ali said.

The exhibition is at its most powerful in showing how the Arab
painters, when they returned from exile in Europe, were affected by
the culture in which they found themselves. Facing repressive
governments which restricted public criticism, they turned to
expressionism to depict ideas which people feared to declare openly.
These included despair about successive military defeats — Israel
defeated combined Arab armies in 1948 and 1967 and foiled an
offensive to regain Arab land in 1973 — and frustration that Arab
rulers remained in power despite these failures. Moudarres, for
example, using his trademark surreal faces, depicted refugees fleeing
the Golan Heights after it was captured by Israel in the 1967 war.

According to art experts, the repression of public criticism drove
art so deeply into abstraction that it produced a powerful
renaissance in Arab painting that would become quite different from
the European styles which inspired it. Looking at a 1969 untitled
work by Moudarres hanging in the exhibition alongside an oil painting
by his teacher Massimo Campigli, it is hard to see the resemblance.

A painting by the late Palestinian artist Paul Guiragossian hangs
alongside one by Italian painter Remo Bianco. Yet while both share
the same pale colors, the similarity stops there. Guiragossian’s
painting, like much of his work, is full of tormented elongated
figures, reflecting his own family’s difficult life. His parents were
Armenians who fled the Ottoman Empire first to Palestine and then to
Lebanon. He died in 1993.

The exhibition, called `Arab artists between Italy and the
Mediterranean’ and supported by the Italian Foreign Ministry and the
Arab League, moves to Beirut in April and Cairo in May.