Carswell John
London, 1932
John Carswell studied painting from 1948 to 1953 at the Royal College of Art, London. After three years in Jordan, from 1953 to 1955, he lived in Lebanon for 20 years (from 1956 to 1976) and worked as Professor and Director of the Fine Arts Department of the American University of Beirut. He also took part in diverse archaeological expeditions in the Middle East as a draftsman. The English often regard as a duty to be eccentric, and John Carswell did not fail this task. He took a malicious delight in being doubly eccentric: he liked to speak of his sojourn in Lebanon as a time of observing Carswell by Carswell.
Beirut was the place where he stopped painting, a captive of the easiness of the Lebanese scene as well as the milieu of the American University. In the late 1950s, his painting was typically English, on familiar terms with the formal tradition of the 1930s and also influenced by his archaeological background (working on Hadrian in Cnossos). He settled in Tabarja, in a house nestled at the back of a bay, where he lived as a pragmatic hedonist in those years when, for local painters, reality seemed difficult to grasp, beyond reach. Frustrated they undertook any job, which gave a strange flavour to these substitute activities – in his case, teaching.
When, pushed in part by the scandal of this unreachable reality, he had to work on reality, he shared his vision with archaeology, approaching his work by means of a semiology of displacement: painters of cinema posters, readings of Pop Art and preconceived intellectual and somewhat paralysing positions, in the sense that he had decided to find beauty there, and nowhere else.
His art was then conceived as a sort of gift-wrapping, a circulation of products beyond artistic circles, which was a destructive position because it was a totalitarian one, marginal and a-historic. He should either have created avant-garde works of art, or integrated his production into traditional craftsmanship and entered the circuit for tourists or blasé amateurs. Trapped in this cycle, he did not become more than an amateur artist of himself.
Carswell always had too much or not enough distance. He never applied himself to creating art made of sympathy, or of knowledge and experience, or at least from a necessary distance to give rise to an inner will to paint and to create. Far from Arab and French speaking environments, the problems of Lebanese painting seemed too local to him ; its character was insufficient to distinguish itself from others and to form an autonomous language. In sum, he was astonished that local painting did not rise up from local craftsmanship, which would have resolved all of its cultural problems. Without being aware of it, he had a British Empire vision, where everything had to be clearly ordered. He needed more folklore, for the local touch allowed him to understand local color, to know that he was truly in Lebanon. But he required, at the same time, a greater intellectualisation.
Carswell never achieved this impossible synthesis, nor did his teaching of art history move beyond formalism, which his own painting suffered from. This occurred from the moment he realised he could not draw from living sources that were foreign to him, or that he approached from the perspective of a detached observer. His humor and caustic nature were carried through the nerves of his painting, which suffered enormously as a result.
In his work one finds the typically English taste for pseudo-naivety author Gerald Durrell reproached his compatriots for. He was dominated by his awareness of a superior game, and everything that made a great part of English painting resemble a fireside chat in a cosy salon – one that lasted several centuries – while outside it rained continuously on London. He certainly brought a fresh look to Lebanon, but he was too far away from England to avoid becoming provincial, for lack of a critical audience beyond the dozen Englishmen in Beirut in 1957. In Tabarja, if he felt protected from mosquitoes, he may not have been protected from this excessive sweetness of life that makes all effort seem futile.
Nevertheless, in the 1960s Carswell experienced the crisis of representation in an active and interesting way, through a double and contradictory affirmation: not wanting to paint and yet wanting to create art. He was, alas, too burdened with British mental baggage to go beyond amused provocation. His sensitivity to Pop Art, before America’s influence reached foreign shores, and his ability to grasp other cultures and understand their originality, helped him evaluate Lebanese painting from a distance, but did not exclude distance regarding his own culture. The gaze upon the Other – an exhaustion of the Other to English eyes – was only to be seen through its own exhaustion. It was as if all Englishmen were like Virginia Woolf, out for a stroll upon this earth.
Carswell’s comparison with David Hockney, who spent three weeks in Beirut in 1961, is even more revealing because both had received the same training at the Royal College of Art. The reference to Hockney allows one to raise the issue of creativity and expression. Hockney regards his surroundings with the professional alacrity of someone who knows he has chosen painting as a career. Carswell, on the other hand, saw his paintings as slightly ironic reproductions of cultural enjoyment, so he did not have a professional painter’s career. Therefore he was the anti-Hockney, for Hockney did not function as a passing tourist; he searched for the elements to construct and characterise a drawing. He used the visual reality of Beirut as a support for the Alexandria of Cavafy, so it did not become mythical, but incarnate and more tangible.
Standing in front of Carswell’s series of gouaches from the late 1950s, one feels these paintings ambition is to translate what they keep the furthest from themselves: a reality formed into realism; a conceptualised, intellectualised perception where brute and sensual elaboration is considered impure and shameful.
Coming from a background in archaeological drawing, Carswell’s paintings tried to get beyond the documentary, but reached an impasse. From Lebanese painting, he kept the enduring freshness and novelty of the image, a reading of popular painting that was very close to his reading of Pop Art and cinema posters. In Lebanese painting he saw a form of art for which the Western and French influence had blurred all possibility of expression, and which was perhaps frozen in archaeological continuity. The Orient seemed excluded from contemporaneity, and the only manner to approach History of Art was trough archaeology and popular expression of traditional art, with recognised social affiliations.
Carswell’s anti-French bias was anti-cultural, for he scorned the population’s ability to understand, master and create in the environment of a Western culture and its landmarks. This is why he promoted a painter like Khalil Zghaib, whom he understood as the author of popular paintings whose interest laid in his distorted reading of Western representation. In Zghaib’s work he saw a cunning naivety that expressed an amused confirmation of the futility of a return to the Academy, of an assimilation of Classicism by people who, far from England, could only be interesting through their own folklore. Zghaib could only be the last representative of this naive current that, with its freshness, was supposed to comfort, refresh and confirm the tired English in their fundamental a-cultural pragmatism.
In an alternative reading of this cultural self-exhaustion that was, at heart, the mark of an extreme awkwardness, the Francophone milieu valued what he understood to be abstract art - and it was not about devaluing one or the other reading, following the signs of an authenticity blurred by modernity and Westernisation.
It is surprising that Carswell, living in a Maronite area, was never interested in religious imagery. He found it to be overloaded with a foreign theological significance that made it difficult to approach. He was not interested in the Sunnites either, whose impressive and coded tradition was turquerie in his view. He preferred the seriousness of higher eras and established traditions, like the French whom he criticised so fiercely.
What is also striking is the way in which Carswell distances and reduces the paintings he pretends to decipher, referring to them from his own grids, selection, reading and judgement criteria, which reduce and destroy them from the start. This is stronger and even more systematic in the Anglo-Saxon world than the Francophone community. When he helped organise an exhibition for Jean Khalifé at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, his attempted anti-French demonstration confirmed the opposite of what he wanted to.
Carswell’s painting must be read as a fascinating lack, a paralysing self-observation that he tried to balance with colorful hedonism – of the sun and beach kind. Carswell worked in such a manner that he lost himself through his work, into a blurring caused by his talents and technical facility. He had the self-destruction of the artist, mixed with a typically English reheated chilliness.
His luck was to experience Lebanon’s potential in the 1950s and 1960s, not only as a witness and privileged participant in everything, but in the continually blurred observation of another way of seeing things, whose thematic figure was this English archaeologist, in his isolated village house beyond Tabarja, with a piano and a library, objects brought to recreate the English cottage look rather than symbols of loneliness.
This was the echo of another culture and another view, which lasted far longer than a tourist’s. Astonishingly persuasive and amused, the naive art of a poet without Harrar, entirely turned towards the past, freezing the future in a cultural aloofness, which was the only way he understood how to create form. England returned to its colonies, in a kind of escheat that troubled Carswell even more than Lebanon had not been an English colony.
Carswell’s vision partly hailed from an Anglo-Saxon critique reading of Beirut’s Francophone culture, seen as a combination of the Jesuits and the Achrafieh area of Beirut.
As for Lebanese painting, his overly literal and daring eccentricity distanced him from it far more than it allowed him to get closer. Moreover, it was really his own reading that he wanted to confirm in his unexpected productions, which were falsely eccentric in their local color. This way of posing, which took years to develop, finally turned against him through the insidious presence of an English morality and art of living that he believed to have bent to his desires.
His principal argument turned against him, because he reproached local painters for not being sufficiently local. He always had this mania of the native in the land of the subjects of the British Empire.
Only Khalil Zghaib, a second-degree eccentric, found favour with him for having painted the American landings during the Lebanon Crisis of 1958 that same year. He was astonished, he later said, to find in a newspaper kiosk in Turkey the photograph of an attack against a streetcar in Beirut in 1958, and by the fact that not one local painter had explored this theme – which is very revealing.
In fact, what interested him and what he wanted to explore was drama as a formal game. That was his truth.
Drama as a formal game was the result of his own drama. Because what was he painting in Beirut in 1958? Falsely symbolic and out-of-step allegories of the worst English painting of the 1920s – a game of formal and contrasted dancing skeletons, of flowers in vases, a gently aesthetic interpretation of the world where gouache seemed to have covered the pages of newspapers and photographs of current affairs. It was being out of step that was the most flagrant thing about him, making demands for one style of painting when in reality he was doing quite another.
He had to understand that painting’s only message is itself, and not this protruding plaster of the British world in 1950. The pictorial awkwardness added to his clumsy ideas appeared so clearly that it looked like mere illustration. All this only represented the illustration of the English desire and the boredom of the colonies and fake colonies.
Carswell came to falsify the reading of Zghaib to such an extent that he made him appear as the junction of a conflict of interpretation between a false primitivism and a cunning naivety; at the intersection of Anglo-Saxon and French cultures in Lebanon. Moreover, this was entirely his own problem, even if he did not associate himself too much with Francophone circles.
He also came to reduce Zghaib to the way his public and collectors received him; as the generic and picturesque product of a representative art whose principal function was the pleasure of a forced wink to cheer up his heirs, all readers of a synthesis of naive painting and an Orient all the more tacky that it is reduced to tackiness. It was the reality of a reality, a second degree that could not be practiced any other way. Nothing could have forced Zghaib to a more obvious simplicity, if it were not for for the unreal and chimeric distance of a human being placed on earth, in a being-there between the Café de la République, the Ecole des Arts et Métiers and his apartment at the Salomé roundabout.
If Carswell can be measured in these terms, he can also be with this kind of falsely suspicious naivety that blurs any possible innocence when the appeal to art gives you the means to speak, and in this case, to speak without having anything to say.
What are the points of reference of Carswell’s painting? A very modernist discourse on History of Art, not so much Surrealist, but rather linked to Dada. But it implied that the setting of a literary imagery, drawn largely from the 1920s English painting codes, was considered exclusively as the expression of an aesthetic fussing over reality. A torture of the figure and forms. His fake and unrealised ingenuity made his drawing style caricatural. The allegedly illustrated reality ends up running away out of boredom.
All this was meant to impressing the small English clique in Beirut at the end of the 1960s. But Carswell himself abandoned all this whil creating installations made of a lonf thread on which empty bottles of mineral water and beer cans were suspended, to protest against the pollution of the sea.