cineSOURCE magazine

Radical Middle Eastern Art Blows My Mind
by Doniphan Blair

Classical nude from 1933 by Mahmoud Said (1897-1964), known as the founder of modern Egyptian painting. From an aristocratic Alexandrian family, he was the son of Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Saïd Pacha and uncle of Queen Farida of Egypt but no relation to Edward Said.

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ON OCTOBER 12th, 2023, FIVE DAYS AFTER
Hamas's deadliest-ever attack on Israel, New York’s Columbia University was rocked by students protesting in support of the Palestinians and a few counter-protesters. With helicopters hovering overhead and police at the ready, it was a tough moment for Minouche Shafik, the university’s Egyptian-English president. She closed the campus to the public, rejected “abhorrent rhetoric” and claimed that she embraced those on both sides “suffering great distress” from the rapidly expanding tragedy.

What Shafik didn’t do, but should have, was recommend the protesters walk a dozen blocks to see the groundbreaking show of modern Arab art at Columbia’s little-known Wallach Art Gallery, in the university’s new Manhattanville campus. Although some of the pieces were a century old, they were powerful enough to inspire the average viewer or challenge the more PC or Islamist. Indeed, a show of such artists in Gaza surely would have been shut down or worse by its theocratic rulers, Hamas.

“Girl in a Fishnet” was painted by the Egyptian Amy Nimr, as part of her application to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, when she was only 20. That was before she went to Paris and befriended famous Surrealists, and before fishnet stockings became popular, in the mid 1920s and '30s, respectively.

Titled “Partisans of the Nude”, amazingly enough, which is what the artists called their movement, the show was curated by Kirsten Scheid, a young but accomplished professor at American University in Beirut, Lebanon, where she did a similar show, and a visiting professor at Columbia and NYU. Well aware of the show’s implications, Scheid mentions some but avoids others in her catalogue and gallery notes, due to their radical nature but also her favoring of DEI and pro-Palestinian perspectives. In fact, some of the artists' themes and ideas contradict Columbia’s famous arbiter of all things Arab and Palestinian, Professor Edward Said (1935-2003), who was born in Jerusalem and schooled in Egypt before going Ivy League. In fact, Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) largely kicked off the multicultural revolution still roiling Western civilization.

Said didn’t cover the Partisans of the Nude artists in his comprehensive takedown of Europe’s misinterpretation, colonization and cannibalization of Arab culture, which I probably would have noticed, when I read “Orientalism” 20 years ago, given my interest in the nude as well as Arab culture. Indeed, I had never heard of The Partisans, despite my travels around and readings about the region, until I was strolling along 125th Street on October 17th, as the Columbia riots were raging, and saw a simple sandwich board for the Wallach Gallery. Columbia’s first official art gallery, the Wallach opened in 1986 on the main campus and moved to its new location in 2017, on the sixth floor of one of the university's many modernist buildings, which gentrified a once-derelict, warehouse corner of Harlem.

After Cezanne by Hussein Youssef Amin, Egyptian (1894-1984).

I expected little, given the signage and location, but exited the bright, orange elevator into a wonderland of evocative images. Suddenly, I was catapulting back to my many months of travel across Islam, which were suffused with adventure and romance, including a brief affair with a Turkish girl, in Athens, Greece, who was gorgeous despite having bad acne.

As I wandered around the formidable show of 42 artists, I also recalled my readings on Arab culture, notably Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015), a Moroccan sociologist, who put her entire society on the couch and dared to delve into the subject of sex. In her best-known book, "Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society" (1975), Mernissi went so far as to predict that feminism would prove more revolutionary in Islam, due to its matriarchal and sex-positive roots, than in the West, where women were constrained by the repression of Catholicism and Protestantism.

A beautiful and evocative as well as surrealist piece by Abdullah Al Qassar, a Kuwaiti artist (1941-2003).

Mernissi was mistaken in that regard, as was Said, in his prediction that radical Islamism would soon fade away, but they were both brilliant intellectuals, attempting to forge an innovative East-West understanding, much like the Partisans of the Nude artists themselves, and were part of a mid-20th century liberalism then sweeping the Middle East. Although that tradition has been revived by the general move toward modernization as well as the Arab Spring, it is still largely eclipsed by the overweening patriarchy, nationalism, Islamism, extreme wealth and poverty in some quarters, and violence, not just against Israelis but Arab Christians, gays, women or members of minority Muslim sects, like the artistic Sufis.

After I surveyed Scheid’s show, I soon realized it was not just evocative and sensual but politically radical, comparable to Stravinsky’s 1913 “Rite of Spring”, which provoked riots in Paris. Indeed, her similar show in Beirut in 2016 was very vulnerable to attacks by extremists. Although that didn’t happen, many Arabs and others still feel the art is too provocative for public display. Regardless, it must be shown, according to Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, an Emirati writer, art collector and activist,whose Barjeel Art Foundation provided much of the show's art, simply because, “This is the most pivotal moment in the history of Arab art.”

"The Hamman", a fantastic environment I experienced the male version of in Turkey, painted here in 1958 by the female Lebanese artist Simone Baltaxe Martayan (1925-2009).

Although Scheid’s show notes are couched in the contemporary euphemisms of decolonialism and identity, she maintains a stridently innovative and diverse outlook, in keeping with the values of the Partisans of Nude artists themselves. She explains how they both embraced and rebelled against French and British culture and colonizers, who took over after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, a thesis exemplified by their adoption of the nude as a central subject and philosophy. Some even went so far as to form nudist colonies, but their interests were hardly prurient. Indeed, the nude seemed to serve them as a bold expression of honesty and emotion, hearkening back to the classical Greek understanding of the form but also a modern one (see cineSOURCE article "The Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn"). Unlike current western culture, where the nude has been MeToo-ed and taboo-ed, it symbolized for them revolution, the full exposure of the self and the truth, the final lifting of the veil or hijab, which Arab feminists burnt publicly in Cairo and elsewhere in 1920s.

Another classical romanticized nude, this one by Georges Hanna Sabbagh in 1923, who was born in Cairo but moved to and became well known in Paris (1887-1951).

In fact, the bold artistry of the Partisans of the Nude movement proves the Arab efflorescence that might have been, forged by creative people transcending colonialism, Orientalism, racism, nationalism, sexism and religion—of the show's artists, nine were woman and one Jewish—while embracing the western positives of medicine and culture. Indeed, many of them attended art schools in France, Italy or England, which was where they studied the nude, mostly absent in Arabic art, and appropriated it to empower their own visions.

Their heady, cross-cultural miscegenation helped foster an Arab openness and creativity that attracted Western expats, from the radical American authors Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, who lived in Morocco, to the English Lawrence Durrell, who settled in Alexandria, Egypt, and dramatized its once-ethnically diverse community in his bestselling “The Alexandria Quartet,” starring the beloved Jewess Justine. There were also many westerners in Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, home to almost half of The Partisans of the Nude, and Cairo, which had almost all the other half. I myself encountered a bit of the same spirit when I travelled around Islam in the early 1970s. Cairo also had a substantial Sufi community, including many westerners until the 1970s, when the radical Islamists started killing people, notably assassinating the liberal President Anwar Sadat in 1981, after he made peace with Israel.

"After the Bath" (1956) by Akram Shukri, (1910-1983), Iraqi artist and architect, who probably saw some Pollack paintings.

While the Partisans were mostly men, one fifth of Scheid’s show were women, and what a crew they were, in keeping with Mernissi’s prediction. Amy Nimr (1898–1974) was only 20 when she painted the striking and meta-themed “Girl in a Fishnet”—she’s trapped in an actual fishnet, not fishnet stockings, a double entendre Nimr might not have recognized, given fishnet stockings only became available in the 1930s. Nimr went to Paris and befriended famous Surrealists, including the notorious womanizer but also brilliant author and analyst of the nude, Henry Miller, although she painted “Girl in a Fishnet” much earlier, as part of her application to London’s Slade School of Fine Art. The painting protrays a provocative balance between personal vision and Surrealism—not yet invented—and her upbringing in Egypt, making it a truly modern masterpiece.

No wonder Nimr, later known as Amy Smart, after she married Walter Smart, an English scholar of Persian and Arabic culture, soon exhibited in Paris, including a solo show in 1926, and eventually hosted Cairo's premier literary salon. She befriended many of the region's artists and intellectuals, including Durrell, Mahmoud Sa'id, the founder of Egyptian modern art, Ahmed Rassim, who wrote a book about her, and members of a Partisans-like group Art and Liberty.

A truly avant-garde piece, considering the cubist aesthetic, wine, and mixed-race couple, by Iraqi Ismail Fattah (1934-1994), painted in 1961.

Sure, Nimr's father was a rich media mogul, she was educated in France and England, and she was exhibited by galleries in London and Paris, but she remained an aggressive artist, who painted Nubians and Bedouins, sometimes in the nude, and Egypt's soon-to-disappear Jewish community. Moreover, she switched to images of corpses and apocalypse, after her son was killed by a WWII-era landmine on a family picnic in the desert, themes she maintained in Paris, where she had to flee in 1952, after Gamal Nasser's takeover of Egypt.

Sophie Halaby (1906-1997), born to a Palestinian father and Russian mother in Jerusalem, was the first Arab woman to study art in Paris. The Lebanese Saloua Raouda (1916-2017) was famous for introducing abstract art to the Middle East. Huguette Caland (1931-2019), also Lebanese, became known for her erotic abstracts, which appeared in exhibitions around the world, especially after she moved to and wowed Los Angeles. Only one of The Partisans in the show was Jewish, Azar Abdulnabi-Shalem from Iraq, but many of their patrons were, since a million Jews lived across the Middle East until they were expelled in 1948.

One of the show's few male nudes done in 1920 by Georges Daud Corn (1886-1971), from Lebanon.

Also represented in the show are many of the Middle East’s most respected male artists, too many to list but including Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), the wunderkind artist and writer from Lebanon. Although he was a Christian, who moved with his single mother to Boston at age 13, Gibran drew on Sufi mystism and Arab romantic poetry for his “The Prophet” (1923), which still sells well a century later and helped inspire the humanist mysticism of the ‘60s.

Middle Eastern progressives have a tradition of studying in colonialist capitals. Long before Mernissi attended the Sorbonne in the ‘50s, the Arab activist and modernizer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897) was hard at work there. Al-Afghani’s protégé, Muhammad Abduh was so inspired by the art he saw in Europe that, after he became Egypt’s Grand Mufti, he issued a fatwa allowing the depiction of people, which is prohibited by Sunni Islam, although he may not have signed for full frontal nudes. “The Koran” enjoins women to cover their breasts, but says nothing about their hair or faces.

Said, meanwhile, took degrees from both Princeton and Harvard. While he rejected the European misinterpretation of Arab culture and was an active member of various Palestinian councils, he played and performed classical piano, not the Middle Eastern oud, and was very much at home on Manhattan’s largely Jewish Upper West Side, suggesting he should have written a companion piece to "Orientalism", “Occidentalism”, about his own assimilation of European culture.

This painting by Saloua Raouda is one of the best pieces in the show, since it incorporates nude, abstraction, a comment on male gaze, and Arabic script, including an Arabic letter which looks like a breast.

The Partisans made similar intellectual leaps, from appropriating Cezanne or Jackson Pollack to integrating Arabic history, lore and script. Unfortunately, painters often rely on rich patrons, some were compromised by their involvement with decaying, corrupt societies, and their imagery was often too incendiary for widespread display. Although some adapted new political ideas, like the Bahraini Abdullah al-Muharraqi (1939-), who combined nudes with political or Palestinian themes, they were criticized and overshadowed, first by Arab nationalists and then by religious zealots. The Partisan spirit, however, lives on in the cosmopolitan Arab cities of Cairo, Beirut or Dubai.

The implications of the Partisans of the Nude Show are obviously much more acute amid the horrific Hamas-Israel war and the increasing antisemitism and Islamophobia across the West, a testament to the transcendence of artists, regardless of ethnicity or class, which is why it embodied so much special meaning for me.

As it happened, I was 17 when I immersed myself in Arab and Muslim culture, a decade before I started studying my Jewish roots or my mother’s experience in the Holocaust. That was when I travelled for six months through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, where I stayed in Kabul for a month and toured Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and elsewhere for another. Then I visited northern Pakistan, not far from where bin Laden was captured—fantastically beautiful country—and India’s Muslim, desert state of Rajasthan, also fascinating. The people I met, and the thoughts and hashish they sometimes shared, affected me deeply, but so did the visuals. Indeed, the curving Arabic script, desert panoramas and colorful clothing inspired me to invent a painting style called “Abstract Arabic" and, combined with the ideas, a philosophy, “Abstract Aborigine.”

"Pregnancy"(1959) by Egyptian Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985), is an integration of Arabic language script into painting, which ties into my "Abstract Arabic" work.

Hence, when I saw the Partisans of the Nude show and realized I was not alone in my exploration, I was so thrilled, I raced home and posted a long review, “Enlightened Arab Art Show At Columbia University” on my Facebook page, one of the first reviews of the show available online. Although the curator, Kirsten Scheid, didn’t respond to my messages, I became friends with one of the gallery’s attendants, Daniel Austin, a lovely guy, dedicated artist and “partisan of the nude,” insomuch he draws and paints a lot of nudes (full disclosure: he did one of me).

Despite the importance of the show, only a few Columbia students made the effort to attend, and I saw less than half a dozen people the two times I visited. That increased somewhat, according to Austin, after a couple more reviews, including one by Yasmine Seale, for the website 4columns (see it here), which waxes a bit pedantic but does a decent job.

The New York Times finally covered it on December 14th, see “Spotlighting the Body in a Nascent Arab Art World”, an extensive review which does highlight the radical nature of the work, although it spends too much time trying to refute claims that Arab culture didn’t include nudes. Alas, coming out only a month before the show’s closing was not enough to inspire the stampede to the Wallach Art Gallery the Partisans of the Nude deserved.

"War Generation" (1970) by Abdullah al-Muharraqi (Bahrain, 1939-), is one of the few pieces of the Partisan of the Nudes show to be overtly political.

This is a tragedy, since so many Columbia students as well as young people and leftists worldwide tacitly or implicitly support Hamas, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, who would oppress or murder modern Partisans of the Nude. Given the immense focus on Arab culture of late, if mostly political, it behooves us to know what their visionary artists were up to. Indeed, knowing one’s artistic roots is essential to evolving a more functional culture any where, but no where more so than in the Middle East.

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Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Feb 19, 2024 - 05:28 PM