Aouad Farid  

El-Midane (Lebanon), 1924-Paris, 1982

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Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square (also known as Cannons Square) played a mythic and determining role for Farid Aouad. It was a place conducive to watching the spectacle of the world go by, where he had been living with his parents since childhood, at the beginning of rue Gouraud. He remained attached to this human geography his whole life, to the point of gravitating towards similar places when he settled in Paris, in order to catalyse his painting through a sort of emotional fixation.

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It would be too simple, perhaps, to cling to the biography that the painter chose to hide for different reasons. Aouad was born in Midan, in the caza (district) of Jezzine in South Lebanon, in 1924. His father was both the village mayor and a grocer. In 1934 the family settled in Beirut where, with some difficulty, they managed a small boarding house frequented by workmen and day labourers who came to seek employment in the city. Aouad studied at the Collège de la Sagesse in Gemmayzé. His father died of typhoid in 1938. When he was in second grade, the brilliant student suddenly became uninterested in his studies and began to draw, asking a neighbour who worked as photography retoucher to give him painting lessons.

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At the age of eignteen, he was admitted to ALBA, the only painting school in Lebanon at the time, founded by Alexis Boutros and César Gemayel. In 1940s Beirut, studying art involved a carefully considered choice. The first students at ALBA were made aware that they were embarking on a historical journey, while the Lebanese at the time were only interested in defending representation which, to their eyes, came less from a pictorial culture than a manner of painting that conformed to standards and to resemblance. It seemed to the young painters of the group that the only possible answer to this problem was Paris, not only for its geographical distance, but also for its mental space, which enabled a questioning of the history of painting and aroused a violent desire to find a place for oneself there.

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For two years Aouad only drew, for the simple reason that he was without a penny and ALBA provided paper. This was the first sign of his picturesque poverty that should be clarified. It certainly corresponds to the combination of a mythic place (Martyrs’ Square) and a way of living, but for Aouad the problem was put in a different way, not just because poverty is only picturesque for those who aren’t experiencing it, but also because the drifting that it introduced was part of his relationship to reality – not at the human level of feelings and ideas, but as the plastic reality of forms and colors. In his work, forms are rapidly seized, almost stolen, for he seeks color, which is forgotten as soon as it is mastered.

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From Cyr, who did not teach at ALBA, Aouad only retained the need to draw: a “Parisianised” approach to drawing that was encouraged by Gemayel and that he probably followed more for the memory of his years in Paris than for any other reason. Besides, Cyr saw in Aouad an elegant and fast draftsman, in the academic tradition of elegance and of the conventions of the Parisian sketch. Yet his importance does not reside in these qualities, but in the personality and the art that is revealed in a series of canvases from the early 1950s, reflecting the truth of experience and a vision of life and painting.

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In a fundamental way, Aouad raises the issue of the relationship between culture, painting and real life. Therefore, he is one of the rare Lebanese painters who managed to link this real life to this particular time of society, and to pictorial culture. From the beginning, he worked on the difficulty of the figure, a deliberate choice where the questioning of the painting made itself clear. He forged a style of overcoming necessity, a manner of painting that he created on site.

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Why did such an artist paint in Paris (1948-1951) and Beirut (1951-1954), canvases where reality reached a both magic and religious emotion ? A few faces, butchers’ stalls, still lifes and, on a grey table, an orange bowl of such intensity that the painting is no longer the product of an exercise, but the result of itself. This undoubtedly represents a key moment in Lebanese painting, as revealed in his two exhibitions of 1951 and June 1954 at the Fritz Gotthelf gallery in Beirut.

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As time went on, painting interested him more than Lebanon did, when he discovered that the painful distance of taking charge of reality was a moral problem, and a matter of lifestyle and ethics. For the essential thing is to live without compromise or lies, and this is the true subject of painting as he saw it. Painting does not only issue from a man, but from the natural exercise of returning to the primary emotion, to the first stirring of the desire to paint – a moment where reality unties itself in the process of constructing itself. Painting with this intensity could not go much further; this very  intensity being a limit, implying the disappearance of reality into the canvas, in a kind of total autism – while reality was precisely what Aouad would have wanted to rediscover, maintaining a dialogue, a representation and a presence. But in his work, purity often destroyed reality and any possibility of relationship or dialogue with it, due to the lack of distance in his original intentions. 

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In some large canvases representing scenes from the metro, the subject distances itself by its very presence. At this moment, the canvas comes to life by its “pictoriality” alone. The subject is forgotten in order to see clearly what is specific to the painter: a touch, a way of grasping colors and posing forms. Aouad confronted the singular dialogue between painting and life, where the despair of life can play on the despair of painting. Paris repeated this confrontation for him, but came with a broadening of the pictorial field, of experience and of cultural contacts.

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Paris was also necessary for him to escape the internal lie that Beirut represented for him, probably because of the familial drama that tore his life apart. He perceived the Beirut society as willing to feel good about itself while reducing itself to a distinguished miserabilism, like the bourgeoisie that hang copies of Murillo in their dining rooms. In Paris, he often saw Abboud. To express himself, he had recourse to a pictorial language whose vocabulary was already formed in Beirut. He was late in becoming aware of this descrepancy; for him, what was essential was going beyond the picture. But to a superficial reading, he ran the risk of being taken for a touristic painter of the city where he lived, and whose metro and cafés he painted. One cannot transform the metro into the symbol of a mysterious and terrifying world – here the discrepancy does not result from the expression, but from the rendering. What Aouad tried to say goes beyond the metro and Parisian life. Nonetheless, even at its most humble level, this life seems to respond to Parisian folklore, as a foreign observer might perceive it. Whoever lives in Paris ends up forgetting the metro, especially if they take it every day. Aouad gave the impression of leaving Paris for another Paris that was personal to him, and whose cafés and metro were an integral part of. It was difficult to go further than him into the contradictory intimacy of the crowd, this other way of being misunderstood. How many times did people come to pick a quarrel with him in the Parisian cafés where he drew all alone in his corner? In Beirut, as an attentive observer, sketchbook in hand, he was sometimes mistaken for a police informer and risked being lynched.

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His painful incompleteness was not linked to his painting, but to his personality; his way of facing the world, unable to defer yet at the same time unable to do otherwise. It was a sort of slowness, where life was rejected because it was perceived with dread and fascination; where it no longer had significance but limited itself to an image that had nothing more to say, an image obstinately present, silent, and immobile.

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If Cannons Square had never been painted, Paris was a city that had been painted for centuries. What could Aouad add to it, then? Choosing Paris was for him the result of a preconceived idea about ethical order, holding on to the desire to live his truth through painting. His blatant failure was not in this choice, but in having confronted the problem of his truth in this part of Paris, which had obviously become a transfer of Martyrs’ Square. It was not possible to go any further. Aouad had to put the moral dilemma aside to commit into something that truly did not touch him: “Parisian fashion”. Consequently, he risked being taken for a painter of Parisian bistros, of folklore, instead of a painter who seized life with his bare hands.

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How did he function from the moment he decided to settle in Paris, in 1959 ? Apart from the exhibition organised by Fritz Gotthelf at the Raymonde Cazenave Gallery in 1964, he only exhibited one canvas from his abstract period, which did not last longer than two years, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In fact, he did not find sufficient resonance in abstraction; the mere enjoyment of playing with color and form was not enough for him. While painting in Paris, he exhibited in Lebanon at the Dar El Fan cultural centre in 1968 and 1971, and then in Germany in 1972 and 1978. But this does not mean he produced “fancy goods from Paris” destined for Beirut or Berlin.

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His comprehension of Paris played on a misunderstanding. He did not see it as a source of poetry – unlike the majority of Lebanese painters, for whom the city exacerbated a narcissicistic streak – but a place that he could paint, a place that made painting possible. In his eyes, between the sun and the chitchat Lebanon was too demanding. But was he really aware of what being a Lebanese painter living in Paris implied, and moreover one who painted scenes of the bistro, metro stations or the port in Brittany where he spent his holidays?

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The answer was not to make Lebanese folklore for Paris, but a painting that bore his own stamp. In the best of his work, Aouad was not a Lebanese artist painting Paris. He no longer spoke of the city, but of the possibility of painting not an otherworldliness, but but what was in front of him : this café and these passers-by. In this way, everyday life was directly connected to the painting, and not to a literary symbol or to a rhetoric about real life. A moment of life passes in the act reproducing it, and watching becomes posessing.

Curiously, when he distanced himself from his preferred themes – cafés, crowds and the metro – proper painting began to appear on the canvas; color without rendering, a work freed from the background of Lebanese society’s good taste. Lebanese painters of his generation living in Paris had, for the most part, recourse to non-figuration, in order to find something in the art of painting they could claim belonged to them. Aouad, in this generation, ended the possible relationship with Paris – a relationship where the symbiosis of a double culture did not come from comfortable conditions, but from a difficult schizophrenia, from a painful split between self-expression and interaction with the environment.

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For a Lebanese painter, to live in Paris suggested the possibility of going to Lebanon from time to time, exhibiting there and earning some money in order to pursue their Parisian sojourn. Economic problems changed everything, and the Lebanese in Paris became henceforth the distant echo of a Lebanese society that found in Paris neither its homogeneity, nor the possibility of being welcomed and of exchanging. The Lebanese micro-society of the time met the challenge of a lost identity by simply sticking together. The problem had certainly changed, and from now on painters could only choose between Paris and Beirut in terms of how to function within a culture.

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Aouad had chosen Paris as the ideal place and the place of all ideals; he chose it for the pleasure of walking down the street, frequenting cafés, and going to the Louvre. This was a good attitude especially for his years of studying: that of the student who discovers his freedom in relation to Beirut. What remained was for him to discover his freedom in relation to Paris. In Lebanon he found relative comfort and a distance that came from sorrow or resignation – it is unclear exactly – that was a way of life. A vagabond with a pure heart, he took everything, painting as well as the world, in the most literal sense. He lived in Paris in a radical loneliness, and felt all the sorrow that the world inflicted upon him as a personal reproach.

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He needed to leave his discomfort behind, to escape from his anguish through pictorial work. This objectification also functioned in his relationship to himself. He drew the strength of his art from reality and from the representation of reality – his manner of bringing his emotions to the foregrond, of sticking to his own life, without standing by things that had already been said. Everything was simple and transparent to him : the mere movement of painting, the work, the life of a laborer, a repetitive stubbornness devoured by the formalisation of subjects. He had to work at a distance and through memory, so he forged a style between nostalgia for Lebanon, and a distanciation from a history of painting that he made no effort to conquer, refusing to understand that this history was his own and that it was important to venture towards it.

He watched and did not make any progress, because he was not watching the art of painting. He understood too late that what he was looking for was not rendering a few pictorial truths, nor a style set in the double perspective of the teachings of ALBA and of the Parisianised catalysis of Cyr. He was too humble when confronted to painting, and he understood late that he had to be a little bit rough with it, like whith life itself – not that he had to mistreat it, but he could sometimes have dared to rough it up. 

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Facing the paintings in museums is an essential dialogue, but it is a frozen, mute confrontation, where no one answers you and shows you their humanity, their weakness, their generosity or their pettiness, where no one gives you the chance to know happiness and the risk of disappointment that accompany all human relations. 

Aouad lived to the end in a contradictory movement in which nostalgia was ever present – in order to survive the devastation of the presence of Beirut for every Lebanese painter in Paris. He also experienced the cultural problem of distancing: to accept the canvas as something physically separate from oneself and to accept the subject and the visible as separate from oneself. Thus does he seem to make us believe that he should have stayed in Beirut instead of losing himself in Paris. 

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How would he have evolved if he had stayed in Beirut? This is a pointless debate,  the cruel innocence of Aouad being sufficient to invalidate the work of the majority of Lebanese painters of his generation. However, this innocence only exhausted itself and led him, if not to a definitive voyeurism, at least to a pure and simple impossibility to communicate. He met with a blatant failure – and this is not a judgment. This failure was neither in his painting nor in his life. It came from the interaction between them – not from the fact that he did not realise his ambitions or satisfy his needs, but rather from a historic failure of expression. There is no purpose in drawing the same conclusion about other painters, for one very simple reason: they did not even touch upon this problem.

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This failure was unavoidable. It is not to be confused with the historic artistic divide between Paris in relation to Beirut and Beirut in relation to Beirut itself. Did the painter see it as some kind of value? We do not think that he did but, lacking other possibilities, he defended it. For he was fundamentally shy, and felt hesitant when faced with an existence that condemned him to incompletion.

Perhaps Aouad lived too intensely to be aware of the tragic dimension that his situation implied, and which would have devoured him if he had become conscious of it. He nevertheless experienced life as something to be voluntarily pursued through solitude, distress or disarray, to which he could not escape if he wanted to continue painting. Behind the door of his studio, he had stopped battling with color and no longer chased after shadow, disorder, and mysteries to which there were no answers. The world seemed joyless to him, without the joy of painting. He struggled with forms that had to be abandoned, and those of this world no longer spoke to him, because  the forms he knew through painting had become inaccessible and those that were accessible were frozen in the sole contrast of black and white. It was as if a veil had covered everything and he had to extinguish this black sun to recover any recognisable form from memory. His last canvases revealed only suffering and distress; something even beyond lassitude and disenchantment. They reject painting as history and continuity, and establish in an abrupt way his refusal to paint for the living, and his will to paint for the people of the dead – as he considered the living. 

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He had to live over and again on canvas the subject he was becoming himself. He became vulnerable voluntarily. He could only respond to the issue of pictorial identity by repetition, the emotional transfer of Beirut to Paris, a questioning of the self that he failed to lighten. He wanted, in some way, to move beyond the tragic interior life that was usually expressed through coulour, to an external life where form and color gave themselves more willingly, and where freedom seemed to come as an extra.

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His solitary drift seemed to turn everything into tragedy. The more he tried to identify himself with something, the more he seemed to disidentify himself and to blunt his original emotion, which only remained in his touch, in his very pictorial work. His abstract period was nothing but striking a crisis of reality. He had to cut up parts of the canvases that he could not bring to a conclusion, in order to frame them. But it would be unfair to accuse him of not having followed the abstract current. He had a passion for Kandinsky and Pollock and possessed the unshakable conviction that a man had to stand by and support his painting.

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One sometimes has the feeling that Aouad could not improve his autonomy for a wide variety of reasons – his studio was too confined, his canvases had small dimensions, he was harassed by misery. The man who coughed and spat blood in his studio on rue des Haies was not a cursed artist. But he painted the memory of a world where color no longer existed, like a blind man who staggered in the dark.

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With Aouad, the time when it was possible for Lebanese painting to paint with innocence and to believe that color could free us from the world came to an end. Aouad also marks the end of a possible romantic reading of this painting. At the same time, he ushered in the possibility of success for his generation, outlining the boundaries of failure in a dialogue with Paris, and facing the trap set by a city so anxious about its appearances that it leads the painter to forget the essential. Yet he wanted to find the essential by relying on appearances! By the time he understood that painting was only about the act of painting alone, he was already ill and his diminished strength allowed him to grasp one thing only: that the most incomprehensible forms in the world did not have to be understood. As to painting, that was a long and ongoing battle about learning how to grow old.

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One part of the pictorial drama lies between the methods used and the forms given to these methods. To this problematic, Aouad added the freshness and distress of his gaze upon the world, concious that he would not find any answer to everything that made him vulnerable. This is why, above all, his painting could only be a reflection in the mirror, with no illusions of going beyond what it showed. His sovereignty was all that remained for him – both the desire to preserve it, and to paint in accordance with its requirements. He had to say everything in one go, with absolute urgency. He knew he was cornered and ill. If he was led by his situation and his culture to socially acceptable images, that does not mean he did not explore the entire domain of Lebanese figuration of the 1950s. Without the means to destroy the kind of naivety he was attributed, he lived stubbornly alone, facing a world that hurt him. But, if he had the means, if he had been able to understand, would he have weighed the consequences of what he would have understood ? A child looks obstinately at the world. The man who carries this child within himself continues to look at the world as if for the very first time, understanding that the world conceals meaning, and that the violence of this meaning goes far beyond what can be understood. This devastating emotion led him to the borders of autism. His inner artist was confronted with the impossibility of formulating the forbidden image, that of the horror and repetition of memory. It is impossible to paint this image, not because of the social prohibition that weighs upon it, but because of an emotional and affective knot. In his painting there is a break, which does not have a psychoanalytic explanation but is due to the relationship with the image, where truth is linked to terror. The painter is there, like an innocent witness of a murder, guilty by the sole fact of sharing this gaze. Thus Aouad could only communicate with the world through the image, but could not share the images of others: solidarity and disposession at the same time.

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Aouad never cheated, never surrendered his supreme, blind innocence. Therefore he was a painter – and one of the rare ones to merit this title – and undoubteldy the most secret and the richest one, even if he knew the grimy misery of which De Kooning said, “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” 

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Aouad was a painter, despite the errors, delays and wandering, despite his naivety of form, which is not the same as naivety of the expression of the form. He worked on the self and never allied himself with any cultural path. He went every morning to his studio on the rue des Haies and returned in the evening to rue Mounet-Sully. At the end of his life – he died in 1982 – he refused to open the door of his studio and to receive anyone there. He was a free and sovereign man whose example and demand for truth made a large section of Lebanese painting scene seem like a painful lie.

It must not be forgotten that the Abboud-Aouad duo set themselves up as rivals and also as mutual admirers in the Parisian landscape. Until Abboud let his admired brother outside the social set be destroyed and neutralised. 

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Both of them were exluded and marginalised. Through this rupture with figurative art, Aouad took the longest path while sinking into the paintwork of abstraction and believing that he could join the avant-garde milieu of the 1950s by doing so. 

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Abboud played it by ear when Aouad showed his stubborn ways, especially since he was only out of sync because he could allowe himself to be, in the echo of Gotthelf’s admiration, who was living in Paris at the time. Abboud had to prevent Gotthelf from listening to Aouad. Gotthelf. This was not too difficult, for Aouad was seen as clumsy in the vertiginous but authentic impasse that his series of white canvases represented, composed by 60 or 80 F, where twenty centimetres of abstraction rejected any attempt to go further into the construction of the canvas.

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Aouad began to lose ground and to enter an erratic poverty, only supported financially by J. Wardé – when what he really needed was more of an echo and a personal relationship, a sort of intellectual structure. Everything crumbled around him because of the mediocrity of the people he spent time with. 

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Despite all the possible romanticism of Paris, he was no Lautrec. He increasingly risked to fall into a miserabilist or picturesque Parisianism, that did not derive from Buffet or Gruber, but from a distant echo of Cyr’s lightness, which was only in respect to Cyr’s pleasant depictions and use of watercolor. It was useless to search any futher into what was only the watery and gentle touch of reality. This break was even more painful for him because of the worldly reversal of Abboud. He had the impression that not only was his only spectator turned against him, but that he was setting himself up as his direct rival. 

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The Greek-Orthodox from Mhaiteh turned against the Maronite from Jezzine by the growing awareness and elaboration of his status as a painter. Abboud blocked the path to the status of the cursed artist while endlessly dragging his feet in front of the mental doors of galleries. Even more, at that time he reached a status of normality through the monthly instalment of a gallery, regular production, a marriage and the purchase of a car. 

This was new in Lebanese painting and in its perspectives. The social criteria of success were fully integrated into the history of Lebanese art, not as a desperate attempt at normalisation, but as a guarantee of social integration. 

All this obviously came at the moment when everything lied further and further away from Aouad’s reach, carried along by his social drift while rejecting it at the same time. It must also be said that Aouad’s art was asocial despite the variety of his depictions of crowds, the metro, cafés, bars or street scenes. 

He seemed to depict people only to distance himself from them even further – and  even to conjure any possibility of a reunion with other human beings any level. 

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What he understood about Paris was therefore only the metro, the café, the bar and the street scenes, with a passing voyeurism, a huddled crowd without any individual.

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Aouad continued to paint in his stubborn way, without allowing himself to think, but only responding to this brutality of reality, where poverty played too great a role.

Without becoming too metaphysical, his character slowly let itself become enclosed in a prison that was far more real than imaginary. The impasse was the debarment of reality. 

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If you sink into despair where reality no longer signifies anything to you, you cannot even respond to it, to the point where representation itself crumbles away in an ease of depiction that turns into a mere process. 

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We went from the hope for poetry to an extravagant rumination on the banal and the expected visual. One can be the poet of one’s life, such as Naffah or Aouad, but from the moment when the means of expression no longer serve this possibility, one moves on to another level. 

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The two opposite pictorial and social strategies of Abboud and Aouad reveal two attitudes, and two different ways of relating to Paris in the history of Lebanese painters. 

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In one single glance, the vertiginous distance from the provincialism and complaisance of Lebanese painters of the mountains could be seen, for whom the only alternative to Beirut was Paris, and not the painting 

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Aouad would come to live this blatant failure where the metro becomes Acheron and hell. His symbolic power was not understood beyond the public transport system. It was the only place where it could be heard.

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The ambition of a greatly pessimistic and literally black art, of an inescapable blackness, passes into anecdote, and reduces itself into makeshift theatrics where the setting dives into anecdote instead of expressing its own tragedy. 

It is nothing more than a black and white illustration of the metro as a means of transport. 

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The realism and blackness killed the drama, and the heaviness of the inverted black, as a photographic film, does not provide a plastic equivalent to a negative. 

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Aouad interpreted this series of canvases of the metro like a mental and physical exercise of an photographic inversion. The problem is that this did not work, neither as a vision nor as means of expression. The metro is too present and heavy a structure to allow for any symbolism. The figure is an illusion when it becomes the very drawing hand, and does not stop seizing and stylising a form while forming it. 

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The true problem is not that he never stops, but that the line never goes beyond figurative stylisation. An elegance that ends up becoming cruel, in the way that it is not able to separate itself from its point of departure, while confusing it with the rendering, and desperately attempting to join the elegance of form and the uninterrupted spectacle of its virtuosity. 

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At the same time, this elegance deprives the canvas of any possibility of research for speculation, or painting. One must think about the produced object for just a moment, or on the drawing itself. Abboud rejected its modernity and relevance. 

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The original beauty – that is to say the reality and the visible – are rendered in the representation in the same way as the wings of a butterfly are put back in their display case. Of course, the point was not about wanting the butterfly to fly again, but about knowing that at least it had fluttered for a moment in his design of a butterfly. 

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A Maronite from Midane, a village in South Lebanon not far from Jezzine, Aouad passed from a moral poverty to an urban proletariat in which diplacement and violence were marked for him by a peculiarity all the more terrifying that it had nothing to do with the sweetness of his character, but with the literal murder that surrounded him. 

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The strength of the symbols resided is the violence of their attributes, and not in the very personal reasons and motives that could generate or carry them. 

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His radical poverty, finally understood in spiritual terms, did not explain anything in Aouad’s case. 

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So, taking a cheap flight from Paris, he arrived in Beirut with his canvasses rolled into a bundle and landed at 1am at the airport. Without a penny, carrying his rolled canvases and unable to find a taxi, he walked to his brother’s house. He did not dare to ring the doorbell and waited on the staircase until dawn, which he gazed at until 6 am before announcing himself.

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Aouad scratches away the possible prettiness of the canvas as one picks away his dead skin. He also applies the masochism of disappointment; this completely Oriental manner of believing that one has to resuscitate everything that has been put there.

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After his death, he was betrayed by those whom he considered to be closest to him – his wife with whom he lived, and a close friend. The latter emptied his studio after his death and found a way to re-use the canvases by painting on top of them – a way of killing him a second time. He pretexted that he did not want to leave unfinished paintings to posterity. What is even more astonishing is that when Aouad was dying of cancer at the hospital, his partner, who lived with an antique dealer, gave his collection of drawings to an usurper who signed them himself and stamped them as if they came from his own collection.

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There was certainly jealousy and a stupid plot around Aouad, who became the object and the subject of the impossibility of being a painter. 

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Aouad was a victim, in as much as on can be the victim of the absence of breadth of one’s pictorial projects. Even if this project above all was to confront reality, and to  make the composition of a drawing possible. 

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He was literally the opposite of Manetti, his teacher at ALBA: a chaotic aspect where the lessons of Cézanne caught up with the Italian pictorial tradition, rendered in such a grumpy and thwarted way that it no longer corresponded to the intention. 

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Aouad played on the double contradiction of the constructed sketch and of the redering of reality, and was forcet to spare both of them. 

Something in his development had stopped there, rubbing the painting to remove any color, convinced that these successive coats of paint would allow for the sensitive depiction of feeling – his personal archeology. But there was no archeology of feeling in this case. 

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Abboud dragged along a cultural sensitivity he could not apply to painting until the moment he understood that he had to go through this do-it-yourself of the self,in which Lebanon had more to do with baking than with engraving or terra cotta. 

Aouad dragged along a extreme sensitivity where the radical charm of his character was no longer sufficient to carry a painting which poverty closed all the doors and windows. He was secluded and penniless, reduced to loneliness by becoming the attentive Cerberus of himself. 

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He had to live like this for several long years, which contributed a great deal more to the weakening of his strength and of the breadth of his intention, and prevented him from the socialisation he needed, in terms of mere survival. 

There may have been some heroism in his misery, but without going to this way of breaking his own strengths when facing a hostile gamble. Or by an even deeper sealing, for these painters of the Lebanese independence generation, Abboud and Aouad chose Paris as the country of painting and of a possible life, where Paris came to replace Beirut in its entirety. 

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The main illusion was more about experience than about painting. The distance between Paris and Lebanon was that of the exile, the sensation of being far from the painting confused with Paris. 

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The 1950s were a time of socialisation and of the conflict between Abboud and Aouad. The conflict was linked to their desire to settle in Paris, and to access a gallery and a circle of art lovers and collectors. Since 1954 Aouad had exhibited at Gotthelf’s, who more or less took him under his wing, when Abboud was only under the wing of Gindertaël at the end of the 1950s. 

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The hands, nerves and eyes of Manetti and Cyr poured into Aouad. His dry sketching simplified forms while giving them a geometry, and broke with the tradition of the preparatory drawing and of the grasp of the motif, to the profit of a completely new idea about elegance as an Italo-French import. And that is exactly what hurt in this case: elegance. 

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For Abboud and Aouad, Paris was a place of projection, where everything was possible and livable, but it was another kind of economy. The place of one’s imaginary projections and of their pictorial realisation, such as they both understood them – but it was another economy and both understood it in contradictory ways. 

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A heavy style of painting, oily in the worst possible way, a false Baroque composed of repetition of its elements; the clichés of Abstract vocabulary adapted to a return to  narrative, made even more naive by its unconfessed desire to return to the source. 

The hand of Cyr and the ambition to possess Parisian elegance could be seen in Aouad’s sketches. 

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Abboud was Gemayel, and a palette of colors revived by their pose and by the gesture of this pose – that is to say this precise rhetoric that ends up being strictly literary. The entire tradition of a colorist and Impressionnist tendency in Lebanese painting. 

With Aouad, the pitfalls are obvious: Jezzine, the picturesque, Martyrs’ Square, rue Gouraud, folklore, and poverty – which is another form of the picturesque for those who have not experienced it. Fritz Gotthelf and then the influence of the ladies, Laure Sednaoui and la Licorne, Raymond Cazenave and L’Amateur gallery.

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In Aouad’s drawers were his papers, his alarm clock, and cuttings from newspapers,  Paris Match and France Soir. It can easily be seen that he carefully looked at the photographs, and questioned the balance of the black and white shades, a radical reflection he pursued towards the end of his life. 

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With Aouad, it was always about stories of murder, assassination and poverty. All his painting is about conjuring the anguish and terror of his gaze. 

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Nevertheless one must dare to recognise that his stubborn and fundamental honesty led to some greatness and poetry, especially the last canvases, even if few people understood them. Black canvases of subway trains, negatives of reality, the metro on its way down to hell. A man demolished by himself, the weight that makes us realise that everything collapses at once, and what makes everything collapse. 

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He returned to this same wandering that only the combined fate of poverty and drawing could authorise, but that could not succeed if graphic sensitivity overtook oversensitivity, less in the rendering or the expression than in the structural frame of the drawing itself. 

More clearly, it was useless to draw sketches his entire life while looking forward to their becoming oil paintings, which he could not afford financially or emotionally. 

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Sunk into this despair where reality no longer gives you any sign, to the point where the representation itself crumbles in the ease of depiction. When the depiction itself becomes a mere process, it becomes a total dead-end, because the drawing is nothing more than a copy of itself. An extravagant rumination on banal and commonplace visual elements. 

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It is also necessary to understand that it is not a question of wickedness, but that for once one must dare to place Lebanese painting outside its only understood environment, where the only adjective unwinds all the excuses of mediocrity or weakness.

 

Aouad’s life was entirely punctuated by his going back and forth between Paris and Beirut, like the pendulum of a difficult happiness – that of the painter. He discovered Paris and painted the metros, cafés and bars, as a tourist. But we could expect that he would discover painting. He discovered it incidentally. All this has already been painted. Lautrec and Degas will not have saved him from being a tourist. 

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What sometimes saves him was the chromatism of his hallucinations of hunger. But Much reappeared. He believed that he drained these too visible subjects ; the eyes get bored of what they have already seen too much. 

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The real scandal is still the liquidation of his personality and of his workshop after his death.