Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents offers a welcome assembly of essays highlighting how modern art was experienced in the Arab world. The disciplines of Art History, History, Colonial/Post-Colonial Studies, and Middle East and North Africa Studies stand to benefit considerably from the publication of this intellectually bounteous anthology – a vast and labor-intensive gift of translation and research to these fields. Its primary source documents and supplemental essays total eighty-four and provide compelling individual, group, and institutional insights on a broad range of approaches to art production and appreciation unfolding over the course of roughly one hundred years (1882–1987). In this way, it expounds and polemicizes modernity's principles and contradictions, motivations and ambitions, and strengths and weaknesses. In their entirety, the essays reveal the intellectual discourses informing art production and reception in the modern Arab world.
Touting the broadest range of all of the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) global art history readers, Modern Art in the Arab World generously satisfies the need for a primary source project of this scope and caliber. Its content spans across twelve Arab states and extends from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. A cornucopia of sources, the primary documents comprise previously published and unpublished, public and private writings by artists, art educators, poets, gallery owners, authors, and administrators each confronting and moderating matters central to Arab art. The type of media includes newspaper articles, journal features, manifestos, artist letters, open letters, institutional declarations, exhibition literature, audience feedback, and interviews. While the sixty-six primary documents comprise the bulk of the book's substance, eighteen additional essays specially commissioned for this project strategically link and contextualize related content and recurring themes. This selection of essays encourages the examination of questions central to modern art, such as the artist's responsibility to society; the suitability of abstraction or realism to Arab expression; the relationship between art and life; and the negotiation of local, national, and global aesthetics and identities.
The book's presentation is a feat only second to locating, acquiring, and translating this volume of materials. The primary documents themselves dictate the book's organization. Clustered into “constellations,” the materials are arranged first chronologically, and then geographically, and finally thematically.Footnote 1 Grounded in two introductory essays and grouped under sixty-one separate sub-sections, the book presents a strategic ordering that encourages a wide variety of approaches to the subject. The sub-sections consist of one to six primary documents and the group subheadings designate the major theme that determined the logic behind their assembly. The materials of each sub-section are preceded by brief abstracts that provide additional information about the assembly of texts, which are often in conversation with one another. Eleven of the sections terminate with “In Focus” articles that elaborate on specific themes from the primary documents. Similarly, five of the sections end with “Personal Reflection” essays written by living artists offering their first-hand impressions of their practices within these milieus. The outcome of this organization, as viewed through the table of contents is a dynamic outline of emerging themes, concerns, and attitudes toward modernism and art in the Arab world.
A translation project at heart, this anthology enables readers to cross cumbersome language barriers and access critical insights into Arab art in the modern age. Far from a function of the book's presentation, translation also conceptually permeates the content of these essays, as it explains the transmission of ideas and images from one mode, culture, and audience to another. Many of the primary documents, written by modernists, urged their audiences to think, to communicate, and, most importantly, to see in different ways – mirroring processes of explanation and translation.Footnote 2 These primary sources allow access to first-hand experiences of discovery and creation and provide perspectives on how intangible ideas and new forms are translated from one context to another and, most strikingly, from image into text and vice versa. This anthology is the first of its kind to consider the arts of any modern nation of the Muslim world in this manner, and the documents contained within it both narrate and demonstrate how modernism, as an inescapable force and paradigm, was translated within Arab milieus through the tangible vehicle of art. The 464-page tome comes equipped with exactly one hundred reproductions (forty-nine color and fifty-one black and white), most of which are paintings. Throughout the book readers are encouraged to draw connections between the essays and the relevant artworks included. These images serve many functions, from illustrating broader trends in content or form to representing specific works discussed in a text. The reproduction of Egyptian artist, Inji Efflatoun's painting Trees Behind Walls (c. 1960), for instance, has an immediate relationship to the subject matter covered in the excerpt from her memoir, “Recollections of Imprisonment,” included in the book.Footnote 3 Abstraction, experimental self-expression, and the question of adapting European-style training arise in Syrian artist, Mahmoud Hammad's “Letter to Farouq al-Buqayli” and two of his works of art, Composition (1966) and Arabic Writing: A Word from a Merciful Lord (1965) are offered to readers to assess for themselves how the perspectives outlined in his letter manifest, visually, in his artwork.Footnote 4
Despite the vast variety of subjects and the book's suitability for teaching in the classroom, the editors do not consider this compilation a comprehensive survey of modern art in the region.Footnote 5 Rather, the volume stands as an alluring invitation to study the history of modern art in the Arab world using a range of primary sources. The mass and quality of materials should excite a new generation of scholars and scholarship on the subject and aid in the execution of ever-more informed approaches to the arts of the Arab world where the intellectual and contextual foundations of modernity and modern aesthetics are grounded in specific exchanges among art producers, educators, mediators, and audiences. The field of art history in particular will benefit from the parallel accounts of the modern experience of art-making as they apply to many communities. Many of the expressive, aesthetic, ethical, and personal struggles felt by the artists of the Arab world resemble those felt by their professional colleagues around the world.
Historical and Regional Contexts
The practice and production of modern art in the Arab world are grounded historically in the paradigm of colonial control and the survivalist need to break from it. As an imitation or mirror of life, art discourses across the Arab world in the modern age repeatedly engage with the turmoil of Middle East and North African politics, dictated by the interests, oppressive policies, and prejudices of the imperialist powers of North Atlantic states and, to a lesser degree, the former Soviet Union. Pre-modern foreign occupation, in one form or another, began in the Arab world in the sixteenth century with the Ottoman Turks gaining control over much of the Middle East and parts of North Africa. This control was ceded to European expansion gradually over the course of the nineteenth century – a colonization effort accelerated by the invention of the combustion engine and discovery of oil in these regions. With the Ottoman defeat in World War I the last Arab territories around the Levant and Fertile Crescent were lost to British and French interests. As such, the Middle East and North African regions were the last in the world to fall to Western European powers and bore the burden of experiencing colonization from the closest of proximities to their European centers of control.
Geographically, the Mediterranean looms large in the picture of Arab modernization as the maritime access afforded by this body of water to its surrounding regions remained the same mix of curse and blessing to the neighborhood of the basin for several millennia. The framing of the Mediterranean basin as a distinct region of study has gained recent traction in historical and art historical scholarship that acknowledges the extraordinary cultural and economic entanglements of the region. Modern Art in the Arab World offers an abundance of dialogues on art and modernism that traverse these territories and in doing so reinforce the viability of this region as a unit with its own unique dynamics. The multiplicity of languages in use across the Mediterranean underscores the centrality of translation to the spread of ideas and attitudes between disparate groups and communities. Projects like Modern Art in the Arab World are critical to historical studies which are today more interdisciplinary and transnational in scope than ever before.
Striking outliers in the artistic and intellectual exchanges across the Mediterranean region between Arab states and European colonial powers are Turkey and the Balkan states. The lack of engagement with Turkey in particular is, somehow, both surprising and expected. As a new and underdeveloped state itself, Turkey, like its Arab neighbors, was also concerned with modernizing in the twentieth century, and although the country was never formally colonized, Turkish artists nevertheless looked to Europe for the latest trends in visual expression. The practice of adapting, piecemeal, the model of the modern art eco-system from Europe was one familiar to both experiences. Moreover, just as the Kemalist Turkish Republic attempted to disconnect its ties with its recent Ottoman past by designating the late-stage Ottoman Empire an enemy of Turkish independence, so did Arab states distance themselves from their own historical engagement with Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, Arab modernist commitment to European art and aesthetics and the lack of any artistic exchange or interaction with their Muslim neighbors in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean provides a noteworthy dichotomy of fragmented civilizational paths to modernity – one that certainly begs further study. While Arabs and Turks traveled similar paths to modernization, in close geographical proximity to each other, as far as modern art was concerned, they carried on quite disinterested in one another's contributions.
Modernity and the Press: Motivation and Method
The modern condition is marked with changes that were unprecedented prior to the twentieth century. In a political sense, cycles of state formation, dissolution, and wars of independence occurred at head-spinning rates. As such, international alliances, transnational allegiances, and national identities fluctuated during these times; some preferences ossified while others shifted and reversed depending on present needs and pressures.Footnote 6 The arrival of steam engines and trains, the spread of printing, photography, and telecommunication services, the emergence of aircrafts, and the development of weapons of mass destruction collectively conspired to render life more complex and chaotic and fast-paced than ever. The future became now and the present was somehow diminished, rarified, and even commodified in the process. Thus, a sense of impending doom – especially in the wake of the violence of World War I – informed notions of modernity and rendered initiatives for progress ever-more urgent in colonized or industrially underdeveloped states.
The same existential anxieties that were seeded from the threat of advancing foreign aggressors also created the motivation to change and progress toward self-sufficiency and promised security. The Arab Nahda offered a cultural and intellectual path to renewal and a vector for modern rationalism that was translated, transmitted, and transformed for an Arab audience. The Nahda marked both an intellectual and national awakening mediated by the Arabic language and united around a shared objective of modernizing and fortifying Arab society from within, although the method or specific path for modernization was always open to debate. In this manner, the Arab Nahda provided relief for the negative effects of delayed development and articulated a rational program of enlightenment directed toward recovering lost time and ceded intellectual territory.
Modernist ideologies are fundamentally utopian as they aspire to, through progress, arrive at a secure and prosperous future. The high modernist's goal is, in fact, stasis or freedom from change and this is how progress becomes imbued with significance and purpose that transcends material concerns.Footnote 7 In situations of delayed development, intellectuals may acknowledge any deterministic or external pressures on national interests but will also find fault in society and civilization, which is seen as static and in need of revitalization and necessarily, change. This flexibility and change become milestones on the path to eventual stasis. The binaries of stasis and change are articulated rhetorically as “tradition” and “innovation.” The tension between these two supposed opposites comes from this modernist utopian taxonomy. This distinction is reinforced by the methodology of revolutionary ideologies, which tend to approach the idea of progress as a series of choices meant to transform present and future. Such ideologies entail a process of choosing which traditional practices to discard, what new things to adopt, and what behaviors to encourage.Footnote 8 In this way, the bifurcated choices of retention and expulsion become translated into a cocktail of kept traditions and adopted innovations. Accordingly, if done correctly, this concoction will expedite progress and modernization.
The imperative to modernize, on an intellectual, technological, and economic level, was a matter of national security in the Arab world and in all developing, colonized territories.Footnote 9 Encroaching colonial powers equipped with superior machines and growing control over mounting resources threatened and then dominated the Arab world until the mid-twentieth century, subsequently manipulating it in a more palatable, indirect manner until the present day. This precarious predicament served as a constant reminder of the civilizational benefits of staying on the bleeding edge of what is most improved, most progressed in a given field. Yet access to modern amenities was limited and, per the principles of capitalism, was shared only at a price.Footnote 10 While print media communicated and compounded the looming threat of the more advanced states it also facilitated a practical solution to their dominance over Arab human and material resources. Indeed, it is print media that would act as the harbinger of change and spark a cultural rebirth, Nahda (awakening or renaissance), in the Arab world, one that was grounded in a shared language, literature, and readership.
Modernism's promise of serving the purpose of cultural and intellectual revival and political and economic survival is a major byproduct of its uneven and unequal distribution across virtually every class and demographic of both developed and underdeveloped nations. To this end, print technology mediated these gaps and provided a more intellectually rigorous means of access to vital information about modernization for those who were not the direct beneficiaries of the fruits of high modernity.Footnote 11 That is to say, the spread of print technology enabled the transmission and exchange of ideas to people without the means or capital to participate directly in some or all of modernity's major, visible staples: industry, fashion, travel, tech, and formal education. The advent of printing technology concurrent with the embracing of vernacular languages in Europe sparked a communication revolution that paved the way for the Reformation and Enlightenment, all of which unfolded alongside Western Europe's colonial expansion across the globe.Footnote 12 The adoption of print – and the ability to proliferate information at a much higher speed and rate than that of a scribe – was as much a matter of cultivating the literate classes as it was an effort to control information and compete with European imports. Moreover, the successful adaptation of print technology to various national contexts through the use of local languages and vernaculars stands as an example of merging an adapted technology (print) with an indigenous attribute (language) to create something new and beneficial that could be deployed toward transforming the present and future.
The origin stories of Arab modernism in general and the cultivation of modern arts in particular are inextricably linked to similar fundamental motivations sparked and fueled by the spread of print technology across the eastern and southern Mediterranean. Thus, twentieth-century Arab modernity was forged in the intellectual fire pits of the print-fueled Nahda. Similarly, it is far from coincidence that most of the primary documents featured in Modern Art in the Arab World were originally published in periodicals and journals with varying degrees of national and pan-Arab circulation, bearing witness itself to the centrality of the publishing and periodicals industries to the spread and proliferation of modernist endeavors over vast geographies.
Modernism and/as Image Management
The intellectual exchanges that print technology facilitated, including translations and publications circulating the latest scientific discoveries and current events, rendered Arab scholarship current with global developments. However, the production of images – an even higher-stake endeavor – was slow to catch up to text. Arab presses did not start experimenting with illustrations until the Nahda, after which Arab image-production became more widespread, consistent, and commercialized throughout the twentieth century.
Three texts from the volume aptly illustrate several predicaments concerning images from the early to late Nahda. In his pivotal essay written circa 1882, “Taswir, Peinture, Painting,” Butrus al-Bustani claimed that at that moment, the art of painting was “totally forgotten” in Arab countries and that existing paintings were usually brought from Europe.Footnote 13 However, the fatwa issued in 1904 by the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Abduh (included in the volume), evinces a growing ubiquity of images in Egypt. In a fatwa entitled “Images and Statues, Their Benefits and Legality,” the Grand Mufti approaches the matter of the legality of images using reason, but with a hint of mirth in his tone.Footnote 14 His statement on the matter betrays a subtle sense of boredom with the question, as if the Grand Mufti cannot believe that it requires his attention. The simultaneous demand for the fatwa and its positive attitude toward images suggests two things: that this matter is close to being settled and that he is addressing perhaps a (vocal) minority of straggling iconophobes.
Egyptian artist Mohamed Naghi's speech “The Popular Arts in Egypt,” delivered in Prague in 1928, offers another dimension to the Eastern Arab art scene as it pertained to the popular arts.Footnote 15 Here, Mohamed Naghi outlines the existing parameters of popular arts, but laments their loss of vitality and the growing preference for European art, claiming that modern life has “threatened its very existence.” The speech itself was a rebuttal to the French-appointed head of Egypt's General Administration of Fine Arts, who had claimed that folk arts no longer existed in Egypt. All three of these statements depict image-scapes in flux and, as such, varying levels of audience demand and acceptance of images, fine art, and folk art from 1882 to 1928.
Thus, while the Arab world was weighed down with matters of dying artistic traditions, encroaching artistic competition, and, at some levels, image-opposition, the North Atlantic bloc had already established a firm grasp of its arts, an uninterrupted, centuries-long art tradition with grounded institutions and a mastery of their various systems of image production. In fact, the North Atlantic image-production tradition was so developed that its practitioners were also in the business of shaping the images of their neighbors and conquered subjects. Supporting technologies such as steamships, trains, and airplanes enabled the rapid dissemination of books and periodicals alongside their human couriers. Similarly, the later advent of film and television allowed for an even faster and swifter transmission of images across borders and continents.
The ubiquity of images of Arabs in Orientalist art at the highest level, and in popular literature such as travelogues, maps, chapbooks, satirical journals, popular illustrated gazettes, and dailies, predates direct Arab involvement in the production of Arab images by several centuries. The discrepancy between European control over the Arab profile on a global or transnational scale and when Arabs themselves began participating in the modern act of self-fashioning is one of the many – and perhaps most significant – manifestations of the lasting impression of delayed development experienced on a visual level. Meaning, European branding of Arabness preceded Arab self-branding to such a degree that overcoming this image battle was one of many efforts to “recover,” “rebirth,” and “revive” Arab civilization in order to catch up to colonial entities. The arms race of image-making that began with the advent of print in Europe has continued uninterrupted to this day. Arabs (and others) have been subject to the adverse effects of limited participation in this activity as the European image-machine continues to enjoy the extended privileges of its technological and ideological head start.
Mass media has yet to publicly confess to its less physically violent but larger-scale role in image vandalism and iconoclasm, as the press has the ability to amplify and multiply destructive images.Footnote 16 Regardless of their veracity, images carry the potential to shape ideas, opinions, and beliefs and the dangerous potential to represent and replace knowledge. But what happens when print media amplifies and multiplies a misleading image, a defamatory image, a dishonest image? What happens when that image is a caricature and that caricature is the first to greet a reader with no prior engagement with that which the caricature represents? Roland Barthes has highlighted a similar concern with regards to the media and its ability to proliferate myths, especially in its use of images, which are malleable and incomplete in their communicative capacities and thus primed to carry and transmit myths.Footnote 17
The issue of image management and control over one's own image, thus, is far from an innocuous matter. Euro-American images helped create prejudices and shaped the Arab profile for generations. This is, of course, one of the negative sides of print media and the modern condition. Benedict Anderson rightly identified print capitalism as a means by which national communities took shape in the imagination.Footnote 18 But what happens when print, like much of modernity, spreads across the globe at an uneven rate? And what happens when, rather than shared languages, shared images begin to shape national consciousness? What happens when one nation's capacity to utilize print capitalism far outperforms another's? Or more sharply put, what happens to an imagined community when their national profile has been preemptively shaped from the outside and that image precedes their engagement with print and image making? What effect would this have on the more nascent national image, imagined or not? These are questions that occupy my mind when reading many of the essays from this volume. The repeated discourses of forming, framing, identifying, cultivating, and nourishing a national art, a visual profile, a unique aesthetic are all latent with an urgency, an immediacy, a conviction that asserts existence, vitality, and necessity. This obstacle is overtly confronted in the book's essays with art, as was the case with Azouaou Mammeri's “Letter to Jean Alazard, the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Algiers” (1929).Footnote 19 Here, the Moroccan artist, having recently sent several paintings to Algiers for an exhibition, writes about his wish to present “from a Muslim's point of view, an important portrait of Muslim society to counteract countless prejudices.”Footnote 20 At other times, preconceived notions of Arab creativity or the capacity for visual expression are countered with words, research, and logic, as was the case with Mohamed Naghi's speech on folk arts.
Modern Pursuits: Between Being and Becoming
By the time Arab intellectual discourses of progress and national identity arrived at full maturity in the early twentieth century, the damage to the Arab brand had already been done. Orientalist painting and photography (which carried with it a misleading aura of documentary accuracy), as well as popular caricatures and other depictions of Arabs, freely circulated in the Mediterranean region, unchallenged. In the current volume, we witness time and time again the artist taking seriously the task of participating in the game, no matter how perilous.Footnote 21 Art, as the highest expression of modern values and national potential, emerged from this context as a saving grace, an opportunity to display Arab creativity in the medium par excellence, painting. To this end, Arab states began sending their best and brightest students to Europe to study art with the promise of returning and cultivating the masses.Footnote 22 In the process, the value of art and images, and the importance of managing and curating one's own national image, became increasingly apparent through intimate contact with Europe, especially in the context of Protectorate–colony relations. It is from this environment that the potential of images to crystallize and reinforce identity (imagined, idealized, or otherwise) was realized.
But this process itself brought about complications. The interrelated concerns of progress, modernization, and nation-building – all utopian pursuits – necessitated revolutionary change that would separate practices, traits, and values into neat piles along the lines of the aforementioned questions: What to retain from tradition, what to adopt as new, and what to encourage and value. While borrowing or adapting certain things (e.g., art education from Europe) was a logical solution to “catching up” to a more technologically advanced civilization, it came with a stigma, a catch-22. Accordingly, the act of borrowing was viewed as a mark of weakness and impotence by some and blind imitation by others, rather than a method of catching up or a means of avoiding having to recreate the wheel, so to speak. Yet there is a double standard, especially in our field of art history, concerning who is allowed to borrow and whether borrowing is an act of creative abundance or bankruptcy.Footnote 23
The simplicity of this binary system between tradition and innovation is so compelling that it permeates all aspects of modernist discourse, including ideas regarding different approaches to art. Modern Art in the Arab World reveals the broad scope of debates among artists on the place of tradition in modern art and the appropriateness of adopting European trends. Numerous essays and artist responses attempt to articulate the bounds of what is acceptable content and form for modern Arab art and what ratio of Arab and European referents are acceptable for the production of an art that is globally legible, nationally relevant, and locally representative.Footnote 24 Such opinions necessarily create fissures in artistic approaches along the spectrum of these fabricated binaries and civilizational boundaries that modern art and national arts are attempting to permeate and dissolve. Moreover, the polemics of this dichotomous mapping of the visual buffet from which artists draw also reflect the psychological predicament of a modernity dependent on change and progress – a state of being that is never complete, never settled.
Capturing and reflecting the artist, art, and national identity in flux, in transition, means that they are never simply allowed to be, as they are always in the process of becoming. This psychological bifurcation is no doubt the effect of the narrowing of the present and increased preoccupation with the future that is necessitated in progressive modernist ideologies. Consequently, artists in the modern age are forced to operate in a precarious present that is in permanent motion, and this rings especially true in the case of an Arab world that is constantly in the process of being made and unmade from forces and pressures both external and internal.Footnote 25
