• 1 Gumpert, Lynn. Takesh, Suheyla. Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, New Yor (...)
• 2 Suheyla Takesh is curator of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates).
• 3 Lynn Gumpert is an art historian and director of the Grey Gallery since 1997, where she notably org (...)
• 4 Gumpert, Lynn. Takesh, Suheyla. Taking Shape, op. cit., p. 13
• 5 The Barjeel Art Foundation was founded in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi in order to preserve and (...)
• 6 Ibid., p. 14

4“How do we study abstraction across different contexts, and what models of analysis do we use?”1 This twofold question, posed by the curators of Taking Shape, Suheyla Takesh2 and Lynn Gumpert3, introduces the exhibition in the catalogue. In other terms, what is at stake here is observing the way in which abstraction exists in diverse geographic, political and cultural environments outside of dominant models arising from American and European modernisms, as well as developing the tools that are best fitted to undertake such a study. The very denomination of “abstraction” is brought into question, as Suheyla Takesh argues: “While designations such as ‘pure abstraction,’ ‘concrete art,’ and ‘nonobjective art’ attempt to distinguish among the various streams of 20th century abstraction, they overlap in their scope and are inextricably linked to particular moments in the history of European and American modern art—as are the terms applied to later developments, such as Abstract Expressionism (c. 1940s), Lyrical Abstraction (c. 1940s), Color Field painting (c. 1940s-1950s), Op art (c. 1960s), Minimalism (c. 1960s-early 1970s), and so on. Another set of questions then arises: how applicable are these terms when construing other histories of abstraction within a global art history?”4 In order to do just that, over sixty mostly pictorial works, executed by fifty-eight artists between 1955 and 1987, and on loan from the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah5 (United Arab Emirates), were exhibited in the five American venues mentioned above, with a few variations from one exhibition to the next. The timeframe covers more than thirty years, that is to say a period marked by the long decolonization process in North Africa, the rise of Arab nationalisms, the development of mass immigration and state-building in the Persian Gulf. Suheyla Takesh and Lynn Gumpert consider a broad geographic area which includes fourteen countries: Algeria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirate, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia. Rather than a geographic designation, “Arab world” is understood in an “ethnolinguistic”6 sense, denoting a territory as well as a political situation influenced by decolonization and Pan-Arabism. It is interesting to note that the Mathaf also uses the term “Arab world” to describe the selection of abstract works exhibited in its permanent collection, where fewer countries are represented – six instead of fourteen: Saudi Arabia and Turkey (not included in the selection of Taking Shape), as well as Egypt, Morocco, Palestine and Syria.

• 7 Zebouni, Joëlle. “Asma Fayoumi : les femmes au cœur de la tourmente”, Femme, October 2011, p. 54
• 8 In 1949, Madiha Umar held a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Her work (...)
• 9 Atallah, Nadine. “Have There Really Been No Great Women Artists? Writing a Feminist Art History of (...)
• 10 See Aboudrar, Bruno Nassim. “Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s”, Critique (...)
• 11 Besides the twelve artists featured in both exhibitions, the Mathaf also features the following art (...)

6Taking Shape opens on two paintings from 1968: one by the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland and the other by Jordanian painter Asma Fayoumi. On the one hand, City 2, by Caland, where entangled quadrangles with concave sides, in blue and dark red, stand out from their white background – a painting which no doubt heralds the artist’s later series, Bribes de corps (1973-1979). On the other, an abstract painting with a similar chromatic palette, entitled Ritha’ Madina (Requiem for a City), featuring the interlaced lines and curves which are characteristic of Asma Fayoumi’s early works, an evocation of the architecture of Damascus, where she was studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts with Guido La Regina (1909-1995), a Neapolitan painter. Fayoumi stated: “Thanks to La Regina and the Syrian modernist school, I quickly chose to move away from the prevailing academicism, severing any ties with traditional aestheticism, deconstructing it in order to formulate a new artistic language. I naturally embraced abstract art. Incidentally, my first exhibition in 1966 caused quite a stir.”7 Both these paintings, that act as a prelude to the exhibition, function like a feminist manifesto, highlighting the fact that many women artists from the Arab world were featured in international exhibitions in the West from the 1950s onwards8, in actually higher proportions than their European and American female colleagues.9 Although twenty artists out of the fifty-eight featured in Taking Shape are women, the exhibition’s organisation does not address the subject except in this prologue of sorts. One of the show’s problems is that it does not offer any conceptual organisation. The hanging, which is excessively dense considering the available space, does not follow any kind of chaptering, either thematic or chronological. It is therefore difficult to identify any other curatorial concern beyond the exhibition of a body of abstract works from the Arab world. The exhibition sorely lacks a didactic apparatus – developed labels or archival documents – that might offer interpretations, points of reference, or actually produce art history. It is a pity that one should have to refer to the catalogue10 in order to make sense of the collection of works. The selection at the Mathaf, which gathers forty-five works by twenty-one artists11 is less ambitious in terms of the quantity of works and their geographic origins. However, the reflexive effort led by the two curators, Abdellah Karroum and Lina Ramadan, should be acknowledged, as they organised the two rooms devoted to Arab abstraction by theme. The first room is entitled New Vocabularies in Post-Independent Contexts and focuses on the significance of letters in Arab abstraction. The second room concentrates on Geometric abstraction under the title Mathematics, Mosaics and Universal Systems of Perception. On the one hand, an excellent museum presentation, conceptually constructed but consciously offering only a limited overview. On the other, a structureless exhibition with no aesthetic articulation, whose greater richness and diversity does pose the question of the specificity of Arab abstraction within a wider global history.

• 12 The académie de la Grande Chaumière is an art school founded in 1904 by a Swiss woman, Martha Stett (...)
• 13 The académie Julian was a school of painting and sculpture founded in Paris in 1866 by French paint (...)
• 14 It should also be mentioned that several Italian artists, such as Ottorino Bicchi, Amelia Da Forno (...)

8When looking at the fifty-eight works presented in Taking Shape at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, one might think that a significant proportion of these paintings seems inspired by Western models, and more specifically by Informal Art. In the very first room, five out of the eight paintings hung on the same wall display the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism, an aesthetic that flourished in France and Italy after WWII, before being eclipsed by other tendencies in the early 1960s. The Light from Within the Green (1958), by Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar, Untitled (1959), by Samir Rafi, Untitled (1961), by Juliana Seraphim, Alea (1965), by Ahmed Cherkaoui and Composition (1969), by Jilali Gharbaoui all have in common a non-figurative, non-geometrical pictorial style. There are few solid colours; a mostly dark, mixed palette; expressive, sometimes tachist gestures; and, on a deeper level, a type of abstraction that feels more like a pull towards abstraction than like a total break with representation. In the remainder of the exhibition, the same assessment can be made of Sans titre (1960), by Aref El Rayess, Composition (1973-1975), by Miloud Labied, Abstraction verte sur fond orange (1969), by Mohammed Kaddha, Sans titre (1980), by Yvette Ashkar and Al-Muntassirun [The Victorious] (1983), by Shakir Hassan Al Said. Painted in a relatively muted chromatic palette, these productions echo informal lyricism and expressive painting. These artists’ biographies can explain the traces of informal abstraction in their work. They all left their respective countries in order to study in Europe. Ahmed Cherkaoui studied at the école des Métiers d’art (Paris) from 1956 to 1959, the year he discovered Roger Bissière’s work, which had a decisive impact on him. In 1962, he exhibited his work at the Charpentier gallery in Paris, during an exhibition devoted to the School of Paris, signalling the beginning of his recognition as an artist as well as his affiliation to that group. His fellow countryman Jilali Gharbaoui, considered as one of the first abstract painters in Morocco, left Fez to study at the Paris école des Beaux-Arts and later in Rome. Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar also moved there in 1951 (and exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale in 1952, 1956 and 1960). Gharbaoui’s promising career was cut short suddenly: in 1971, his lifeless body was found on a bench on the Champ de Mars in Paris. He was forty-one years-old. Miloud Labied, also hailing from Morocco, showed his work in 1969 in Copenhagen and was admitted to the Paris école des Beaux-Arts in 1974, after having studied in Casablanca. In 1954, Sami Rafi left Cairo for Paris in order to write a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne under André Chastel’s supervision. In 1959, Juliana Seraphim moved to Florence, where she spent several years, and later to Madrid. After an exhibition of his work at the American University in Beirut in 1948, the self-taught artist Aref El Rayess relocated to Paris where he became friends with André Lhote, Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine and trained at the Grande Chaumière12 alongside the painter Mohammed Khadda – regarded as the founder of Algerian modern pictorialism –, before continuing his studies in Rome and Florence in 1956. Yvette Achkar, a fellow Lebanese, followed in his footsteps in Paris and Italy. Her work was exhibited in Germany and Yugoslavia in 1959. Before founding the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951, Shakir Hassan Al Said studied in Paris at the académie Julian13, the école des Arts décoratifs and the école des Beaux-Arts, becoming an active member of the Association of Arab students in France. These artists, each with their own distinctive career, all experienced a profound connection with the vocabulary of Informal art during their prolonged stays in Europe, which were absolutely determining for the construction of their pictorial language.14

• 15 Umar, Madiha. “Arabic Calligraphy: An Inspiring Element in Abstract Art” [1949], in Modern Art in t (...)
• 16 Ibid., p. 141
• 17 Grabar, Oleg. L’Ornement : formes et fonctions dans l’art islamique, Paris: Flammarion (Champs Arts (...)
• 18 Gauthier, Michel. “Casablanca, l’abstrait et le vernaculaire”, Farid Belkahia et l’Ecole des beaux- (...)

10In the American exhibition, as well as in the Mathaf installation focusing on artistic vocabularies reconsidered through a postcolonial lens, the vernacular roots of Arab abstraction are made clear. They come to light through the fascination many artists felt for Arabic letters and calligraphy. The abstract potential of Arabic characters was used and theorised in 1949 by the Syrian painter Madiha Umar in an article entitled “Arabic Calligraphy: An Inspiring Element in Abstract Art,”15 in which she states that “each letter [whether kufic or mashq] is able, and has a personality dynamic enough, to form an abstract design…”16 Her watercolour Sans titre (1978), which is exhibited in Ithaca, is made up of colourful curves and arabesques set in a swirling motion, demonstrating the abstraction-generating power of written symbols. According to Madiha Umar, Arabic characters serve a twofold commitment in her work, making it at once modern and traditional. Calligraphy conveys a sacred heritage connected to Koranic scriptures. By freeing letters from the strict rules of traditional calligraphy, artists allow them to be contemplated and treated like plastic forms in their own right. Works by the Egyptian artist Omar El-Nagdi – The One (1960, oil on canvas), exhibited at Mathaf and Sans titre (1970), displayed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum – also show how abstraction maintains a constitutive relation to vernacular and ornamental art, totally contradicting Clement Greenberg’s major modernist myth. His paintings, which embody calligraphic modernity affiliated with the Hurufiyya movement (from the Arabic harf meaning “writing”), all repeat the same black symbol – a fragment of Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet – on a light background. This repeated gesture on the canvas’s surface generates an almost musical dimension (El-Nagdi was also a composer), a structure reminiscent of repetitive, collective, trance-inducing dances and the incantatory reading of prayers. In Madiha Umar’s and Omar El-Nagdi’s paintings, letters have lost their meaning, becoming pure forms. Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata’s work, however, displays a use of the Arabic alphabet as abstraction that does not renounce the original linguistic meaning. Fi-I bid kan-al-Kalima and Al-Zahir-al-Batin (1983), both exhibited in Ithaca, offer content to read as well as to look at, since behind the abstractions, made from intertwining coloured lines, Arab proverbs and religious verses are hidden. When gazing at paintings by Madiha Umar, Omar El-Nagdi, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Mohamed Melehi and Rachid Koraichi, which all use the Arabic alphabet in thoroughly modernist pictorial projects, one is reminded of the words of Oleg Grabar, a specialist of Oriental civilisations, on the subject of Islamic aesthetics: “the experience of a scriptural form is not the experience of text.” Moreover, in the aesthetic register which traditionally incorporates writing in the decoration of objects, “the function of writing is no longer the concrete message conveyed by the words but something else altogether.”17 There is a tension between the form and the sign here: the former has forgotten its meaning, whereas the latter retains its ghost-like memory. Modernism as the rejection of tradition, such as it was theorised by historical European avant-gardes, is challenged by this form of modernity deeply rooted in vernacular traditions. Michel Gauthier states, in a recent book devoted to the School of Casablanca: “The point and specificity of postcolonial modernity lies in its ability to reverse the connection between artistic modernity and traditional culture: no longer the fantasy of absolute rejection but the effectivity of a dialectical reference.”18

• 19 Beyond or alongside the various exhibitions focusing on the School of Casablanca, several books add (...)
• 20 The founders of Aouchem (a word meaning “tatoo”) are Choukri Mesli, Mustapha Adane, Saïd Saïdani, D (...)

11Although the exhibitions discussed in this essay do not explain things in this way, most of the chosen works lead one to think that the specificity of Arab abstraction lies precisely in the fact that it is not obsessed with its own pictorial specificity, that it speaks of something besides itself, drawing from graphic, artisanal and vernacular traditions. The members of the School of Casablanca, Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Mohamed Chebâa and Mohamed Hamidi have a strong presence in both exhibitions and are all firmly rooted in this perspective. In 1963, these figures of the Moroccan postcolonial pictorial avant-garde, which were recently re-discovered by the history of modernity,19 proclaimed that their art, closely connected to the vocabulary of the Bauhaus, maintained close relations with popular art forms while heralding social and political progressivism. The major players of the “School of Casa” are featured in Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, in what is perhaps the only coherent part of the exhibition. On the same wall, L’Algue bleue (1968), by Malika Agueznay, is hung alongside the coloured meanders of Mohamed Melehi’s Composition (1970), an untitled yet explicitly sensual work by Mohamed Hamidi (1971); an untitled geometric abstraction by Mohamed Chebaâ (1974), and Aube (1983), by Farid Belkahia. This assemblage convincingly highlights the distinctiveness of this category of Arab abstraction. However, it is unfortunate that the Bagdad Group for Modern Art and the Algerian Aouchem group20, which were active from 1967 to 1972 and developed similar aspects to those embraced by the Moroccan group, should be practically missing from both exhibitions. Rather than foregrounding this determining aspect of Arab abstraction, the curators of Taking Shape decided to create a purely formal dialogue between the paintings of the “School of Casa” and a handful of geometrical abstraction masterpieces by the Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy (Sans titre, 1960), Jafar Islah, from Kuwait (Colors with Black and Grey, 1968), Samia Halaby, from Palestine (Two Diagonals, 1968), and Mahmoud Sabri, from Iraq (Water, 1970).

• 21 See note 7 and Mikddi, Salwa. “Recollections: Women and Abstraction in the Arab World, 1960-1990”, (...)

13The position of Arab female artists is one of the issues this exhibition could have addressed. Although, as previously mentioned, their paintings were acquired early on by museums (the Cairo Museum of Modern Art bought a painting by Effat Naghi as early as 1927), they received grants in the 1930s (particularly in Egypt and Iraq) and were exhibited in international exhibitions,21 it seems the question has not yet been at the centre of a large-scale exhibition in any major institution. At the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Elles font l’abstraction (19 May-23 August 2021), which brought together the works of one hundred ten female artists, only seven of them hailed from the Arab world (Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Helen Khal, Nasreen Mohamedi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Fahrelnissa Zeid). On the international scene, over the past ten years, numerous monographic exhibitions have been organised, offering a much more precise vision of still little-known practices: in 2013, the Lebanese painter and sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair’s work was exhibited at the Tate Modern; recently, the Guggenheim Museum in New York payed tribute to Etel Adnan (8 October 2021-10 January 2022), and Simone Fattal’s work was exhibited almost simultaneously at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (21 September 2021-14 June 2022). Another recent example is the Belgian contemporary art centre, Wiels, which gave pride of place to Huguette Caland, in a large-scale exhibition (25 February-12 June 2022) featuring over a hundred works on paper, as well as paintings, kaftans, sculptures and notebooks, which, for the most part, had never been exhibited, thus demonstrating the breadth of her work. It is also interesting to note that, contrary to the curatorial proposition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, the exhibition in Belgium was conceived from a firmly feminist standpoint, shedding light on the subversive nature of Caland’s practice: born in 1931, she left her husband and children to go live in Paris, creating paintings which celebrated intimacy, sexuality and the freedom of women.

• 22 See Mikddi, Salwa. “Recollections: Women and Abstraction in the Arab World, 1960-1990”, op. cit., p (...)

14Similar exhibitions have yet to be organised for the work of Menhat Helmy, Samia Halaby, Asma Fayoumi, Munira Al-Kazi and Seta Manoukian. Are their productions not just as important for the history of abstraction? Works by these artists, most of them politically committed to defending women’s rights,22 are exhibited in Taking Shape, but their scattering throughout the rooms does not foster reflection. Happily, one of the essays in the catalogue deals with the issue of what a practice of pictorial abstraction might represent for a woman in 1950s Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait.