Akl Saïd  

Damour (Lebanon), 1926-Bejjé (Lebanon), 2001

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The same year he graduated from ALBA (1951), he published a collection of poems in Arabic, Tayhama, on the plastic exploration of language. He received a grant from the Lebanese government and enrolled at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1951 to 1954. He returned to Paris from 1957 to 1958 and again from 1963 for a two-year training in tapestry design at the studios of Marc Saint-Saëns and Jean Picart Le Doux.

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From his very first exhibition in 1954 at the La Palette gallery in Beirut, everyone could see the complexity of his internal world and the necessary disorder that would result from the stakes he had signed up for. He certainly forced painting in the shape of his own language, abandoning poetry when his painting touched the very source of his self-knowledge and understanding of the world. The energy of this interior world protected him from everything throughout his research.

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His stay in Paris led him to question his potential position in the art world; aquest  driven less out of naivety than by the need to find a place for himself beyond his actual life. He was from Damour, and lived there before he became a clerk at the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts in Beirut. He therefore did not have a career at the heart of Lebanese painting in the traditional sense of the term, although at the beginning of the 1960s he had an important role, asserting himself as the leading painter of a much younger group whose members experienced their confrontation with the West as a violent identity crisis, and demanded a Lebanese art that took inspiration from its Eastern heritage, which foundations and historical value still had to be studied in depth. 

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These young artists were eager to write a Lebanese chapter of History of Art, but ran the risk that it would merely be documentary, without the critical dimension necessary to prove its worth and to be admitted into the creative world, or rather, the creation of a world. They confronted this sense of urgency, convinced that they could shape an idea by assembling disparate elements and connecting them through juxtaposition with one another - namely Arab art, Muslim art, Byzantine art, and the ancient heritage of decorative arts-, as they presented a popular and powerful expression of the handicraft tradition. 

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Moreover, they saw the notion of Oriental art frow a European perspective, following the French reading of Chinese and Japanese painting. It was necessary for local art to accept this difference, so that the painter would feel himself different from Western artists, for he felt like the offspring of Western art’s tyranny and repeated its forms, failing to liberate himself from their grasp. Akl would have liked to create his own forms, to feel that they were born from him alone.

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This attempt at singularisation came from an absence of cultural distance, not from a rupture in continuity. For Akl, acknowledging the existence of heritage and defining himself in relation to it ranked alongside the impossibility of ignoring the culture of the rest of the world. His refusal to limit himself to reacting to this culture – mostly embodied by Paris – became a fertile ground for his game of influence. 

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What could a Lebanese bring back from Paris – a place of intellect, above all – if not the feeling that what struck him the most about being abroad was folklore, which was, in fact, not always Lebanese?

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Reading André Malraux and René Huyghe led Akl to these confrontations, to the awareness that he needed to clarify -at least for himself- the first terms of a national art. From the heritage of an Arab art which opened on to the desert and came more from disappearance and absence than from a civilising accumulation, he could only draw what enriched him the most: the arabesque, at once line and letter, the only perceptible sign of accumulation and expression.

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When he staked his claim for an Eastern art based on the arabesque, Akl elaborated a theoretical foundation which application, at certain periods of his life, led him to real success. In hindsight, the only possible reading of a local tradition aware of a Japanese or Chinese Orient could only rely on a different line and outline. 

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At the time, the plastic value of the arabesque seemed the only basis on which Akl could construct a theory of light in color, which replaced his need for formation, ironically laid flat by an old Oriental reaction he was not even aware of. 

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It was no longer about modeling characters in the shadow of Islamic prohibition. The plasticity of form was replaced by a transparence that he tried to render, in his first exhibition, by juxtaposing his drawings. For a long time, he tried to give his canvases the warmth and luminosity of stained-glass. His singular quality is to have pursued his creative project in cultural isolation, as if it were the only possibility to achieve self-expression. Furthermore, from the mid-1950s he elaborated a specific language – transformed into an identity by his stay in Paris – that taught him to both stand at a distance, and put elements in shape.

 

These eight years in Paris were about a Maronite Christian making a claim for an Arab art – and in no uncertain terms. On his return to Lebanon, things were decanted and graspable, and Akl experienced a moment of plenitude, painting whatever he thought about. This process began with European abstract painting, coming less from a movement of reaction than from a stark need, in which the desire to be unique had no part. This happened before the complexity of his internal mechanisms scattered the painter into research in which the demand for plastic expression depended on criteria to which he alone held the key, and which would cut him off from any possible audience.

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His vision touched something new and fundamental in regard to the perception of form itself: he made furniture and sculptures, moving beyond painting to reach a globality that he claimed at his beginnings. With Akl, the possibility of being a painter and a writer was not a duality, but an essential literary and poetic structure, a way of conferring a meaning to words beyond their common sense, of reforging them through a plastic transgression. This way of understanding form as a verbal plastic art was certainly linked to his reading of the Arabic language, where meaning and calligraphy blend together.

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From the late 1940s Akl worked in search of an Arab art that was not crushed by calligraphy but was more global in its signs and signification, without distinction with what was being made in Europe and in Paris. To reach this point, he freed calligraphy from meaning, so that it would take shape and cover everything. This was his “signature” in relation to Western art, or what he thought Western art was. For this generation of Lebanese in Paris in the 1950s, Cubism did not serve to help construct figure and space, but rather to deconstruct them, to shake up the academic approach after having understandood its limitations. The best artists learnt to reconsider their work on this basis.

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Akl did not paint a world without meaning, but a world made of signs and of the light within these signs. It is for sure that at this moment – especially in relation to the unformulated nature of most Lebanese painting of the time – he found a new expression, abstraction and “magic realism”. His creation of a system of signs led to calligraphic steles that were a new way of forming space and of seeing this space stand up to European painting of the 1950s, rather than a traditional reading of calligraphy and signs.

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He shaped this profuse and poetic internal world with a unity of expression that made the destruction of his studio in Damour in 1976 (a casualty of the civil war), all the more regrettable. It was an irreparable loss, for Akl sold little, and the fruit of 25 years of labour was destroyed. We can state this disappearance a litany: manuscripts, texts and poems written after his published collection of 1951; texts and drawings from his studies at ALBA, including his drawings of stained glass; more than 15 years of paintings and drawings of stylised calligraphy, including the different series of attempts at integrating the external world within the light of signs; tapestry projects and austere large canvases.

 

Akl had also spent a long period of time on totems, mysterious little canvases, furniture, painted chests – art created not in the vein of a nimble carpet seller, but in the diverse production of one of the most authentic Lebanese painters who ever existed. 

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From 1977, installed in a new studio, Akl tried to return to painting, but did not always manage to tie the broken thread anew.