ACHKAR Yvette 

Sao-Paolo (Brazil), 1928

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Yvette Achkar moved to Lebanon with her family in 1938 and enrolled at ALBA from 1947 to 1952. She first exhibited in Beirut at La Licorne gallery in March 1960, and at the Alecco Saab gallery in April 1961 and from 23rd March to 4th April 1964.

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She mainly questions the morality of form, the justification of the abstract and the need to paint as an expression and justification of life. Compared to the rest of the Lebanese pictorial scene, she has a different tone and manner of expression that has nothing to do with her simply being a woman. Instead of a typical feminine scheming one could have waited, her painting bears witness of her inner demand.

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Achkar was born into a well-off family of Lebanese immigrants. From childhood she showed no interest in the piano, popular among many bourgeois families, but revealed a seed of artistic sensitivity that developed from an early age. This sensitivity was not feminine in the established sense of the word; it was forceful, a construction and elaboration of feeling rather than an appreciation or enjoyment of it. She was attentive to form in the sense that it expressed this elaboration, concerned about the structure that could best contain and express it. Does her painting reveal a French influence, even a trace of a local “French school”?  A closer look reveals that it is less about influence than assimilation of a way of living. The mechanisms she employed were never about identity or making claims. 

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Although he never taught there, from the moment Achkar entered ALBA it was Cyr who represented French painting for Lebanese French speakers, with all the worldliness this suggested. She took classes from Gemayel and Manetti, an Italian in love with painting and life who had settled in Lebanon. Her lyricism is linked to the Cubist movement of the 1950s, but she imbues it with such sensitivity that she destroys all the rigor of geometric construction in favour of grasping sensations.

At ALBA she opposed Gemayel and refuses the social and sophisticated set that painters moved in at the time. She did not want to create a canvas or a drawing, but she concerned herself directly with how to construct form. Influenced by Manetti, who had imitated Cézanne as much as pre-Renaissance Italian painting, her treatment of form and muted colors created a work liberated from Academism. Above all, her modernity was based on the act of painting outside the framework of Lebanese art in the early 1950s.

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Achkar worked on the exploration of space started by the Cubists ; she worked systematically with different modelling tools, even when her themes are, at the beginning, figurative. Boats in the harbour, landscapes, still lifes: what is essential in her work is not the quality of perception or representation, but its progressive refinement – the manner in which perceptions of form can be structured on the canvas. From the 1960s, her painting assimilated European abstraction and progressively built on her original intuition, working on canvases where she developed her questioning of form and her work with colors. 

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At the end of the decade, her paintwork no longer looked like magma, but became transparent and evaporated in a cloud crossed by scratches, to burst out under the pressure of its own plastic means. With increasing refinement and without preciousness, the painter progressively reconstructed the heritage of the first artistic vocabularies, searching for the abstract not from the outside, but from a personal study of the concentrated energy field of the canvas.

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The strong planes of the painting withdrew from the figuration, or were rather abandoned by it. They blended into the painting in a more physical way, through the thickness of the paint, to return in a double motion of condensation and expansion to a place where the pictorial planes, worked on individually in a vibrant space, found their initial energy. Like a spiritual purification they asserted themselves on a fragmented but mastered space – the only possibility for the painter to introduce her vocabulary and to rediscover the initial tension. Certainly painting lives through its pictorial qualities and not through the spiritual and inner qualities of the painter, but here the intensive work of the painter is inner work.

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Yvette Achkar taught for more than twenty years at ALBA and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University. She brought her sensitivity and consciousness of form to students watched by the formalism of the abstract, which was seen as a style and not as a discipline or moral asceticism. It is nevertheless important to recognize that, for the general public, her presence was hardly perceived in this way. But she  maintained, in Lebanese painting, the possibility of morality, and she cut short the old dilemma – as agonising as outdated – of the absolute gratuitousness of abstract art, which could be a completely useless and incomprehensible game.

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When some of her contemporaries, such as Said Akl or Najm, tried to find the source of Arab culture, Achkar wanted to find a way of staging an intervention of the “real” directly onto the canvas. We can read the influence of the 1960s on her work: Mathieu, Hartung, Japan, the zen passion and the spiritual search for the geometry of things that is not revealed uniquely by geometry but through the secret order of the world.