The important Syrian artist Marwan Kassab Bachi (1934 - 2016) moved to Germany in 1957 and spent most of his life in Berlin, studying and then teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Unlike many other Arab artists who studied abroad, his work involves a dialogue with the German Expressionist strand of modernism, rather than Cubism derived from Paris, or American forms of Hard-Edge Abstraction.
As well as teaching in Berlin, Marwan taught a summer school at Dar Al Funun in Amman. Among the artists who attended the programme were Tagreed Darghouth (born 1979) and Ayman Baalbaki (born 1975). [i]
The work of these two Lebanese artists in some ways continues Marwan’s engagement with the German New Expressionism that began in the 1960s, but also has important differences.
The principal difference is that the work of the two younger artists has a greater sense of political engagement. Marwan’s painting, and the work of German painters of his generation such as Georg Baselitz or Markus Lupertz, has a more introspective quality. History is central to the work of some of the German New Expressionists such as Anselm Kiefer and Jorg Immendorf, but it is history treated in a melancholic and poetic way. It is also concerned with events in Germany during the 1930s and 40s, events which occurred before the artists were born. In contrast, Tagreed Darghouth and Ayman Baalbaki’s work engages strongly with current affairs. Their work has an immediacy and perhaps an anger that is very different from the work of Marwan and his German contemporaries.
Tagreed Darghouth’s painting Untitled, Tree within Series 3 is a work in the Dubai collection that in some ways seems close to Marwan and Georg Baselitz. It is on a large scale, with a single, central image or motif, in this case a tree whose branches and leaves move in the wind, and whose roots reach down into what looks like a broken and sandy landscape. The brushwork and colours suggest the work of the much earlier German painter Lovis Corinth, and also Georg Baselitz, especially in the combination of Prussian blue with white and ochre, and the way that the wet brush marks slide different colours into each other. The painting becomes a wet surface where the painter can keep adding paint, but this will also interact with the existing paint. The surface becomes volatile and can be scraped away and easily changed. This sense of an image that could easily be lost in the paint can be seen in the work of Marwan, and the idea of erasure and wet on wet painting has connections to Marwan’s German contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter.
Untitled of 2017 shows a fighter jet within a surface of expressionist drips and brush marks (fig.2). Like the painting of the tree, there is one single image or motif that dominates the painting. The depiction of a modern machine gives an element of Pop Art, of an image from modern culture that we might not normally expect to see in a painting, but the drips, brush marks, and heightened colour of Expressionism relates to the violence that the plane is designed to produce. Unlike James Rosenquist or Roy Lichtenstein’s smooth and shiny Pop Art jet planes, this image is redolent of the horror and death that the plane inflicts, where the marks look like red clouds of fire, or drips of blood or pieces of human flesh.
Like Tagreed Darghouth, Ayman Baalbaki’s work is more directly politically engaged than the work of Marwan. His Mulatham (masked) series depicts figures who look like the fedayeen freedom fighters (fig.3). Many of them are painted on the same commercial flower-patterned fabric that is used for women’s clothes in southern Lebanon where Baalbaki’s family came from. [ii]
These artworks are ambiguous. Are they celebrating the fedayeen, or do they relate to media images of Lebanon and Palestine, or to the desperation and destruction that are part of this history? They have a portrait-like and also a poster-like quality. As with Tagreed Darghouth’s jet plane, they show an image that we might see on the TV news, but the expressionist paint handling prevents the painting from becoming a smooth, photo-realist type of image. The red paint operates as a representation of the pattern of the headscarf, and as gestural mark making, but it also suggests blood, violence, and martyrdom.
Ayman Baalbaki’s 2022 painting Silos is one of a series of works about the explosion in the port of Beirut of August 2020 (fig 4). The cause of the explosion was never explained, but it is clear that the silos in the port were used to store a highly volatile chemical. The explosion killed over 150 people, left 300,000 or more homeless. [iii]
Baalbaki’s work shows the silos seen from the air, again perhaps from a media image. The slashing and violent brush marks become both an expression of anguish and the record of disaster and destruction. The area around the silos is a chaos of rubble and burnt-out fires, and much of the sea behind has an ashen and polluted quality.
In conclusion, although they are using many of the techniques developed by German Expressionists and by Marwan, the work of Tagreed Darghouth and Ayman Baalbaki is much more politically engaged than the earlier painters. Instead of individualistic introspection or a sensibility born from a 1950s existentialism and desperation, their work is more responsive to the events around them, and has a sense of anger and the need to make changes, without the resignation and scepticism of the earlier generation.
[i] Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. Review of “Marwan: Early works 1962-1972” at the Beirut Exhibition Center. Artforum. September, 2013. https://www.artforum.com/events/marwan-kassab-bachi-2-201746/
[ii]
See the short discussion of Ayman Baalbaki in Maya Jaggi. “From War Zone to Haven. The View from Beirut”. Financial Times. 1 December 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/253e7752-a373-11e7-8d56-98a09be71849
[iii] Kim Ghattas. “Lebanon is no stranger to disaster-but this is like nothing we’ve ever seen”. The Guardian. 6 August 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/06/invasions-and-economic-collapse-didnt-make-lebanons-people-as-angry-as-they-are-now
Dr. Martin Nixon
Article courtesty of the Dubain Collection
