Farroukh Moustapha 

Beirut, 1901-Beirut, 1957

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At the beginning of the 20th century, Beirut was a fully developed harbor and the seat of an Ottoman vilayet that enjoyed remarkable prosperity as a commercial hub driven by an active bourgeoisie. Moustapha Farroukh was born into this environment in 1901 from a Sunni family. He was the only one of his siblings to be sent, in 1907, to Sheikh Jomaa’s school, on the same location as the present girls’ college in Bachoura. In 1910, he was at Taher el Tannir’s school, where he studied Arabic under the direction of Sheikh Moustapha El Ghalayini. The following year, he enrolled at Dar el Ouloum, which closed after six months due to financial difficulties and nationalist agitation.

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From 1912 Farroukh started providing the review founded in Beirut by Taher el Tannir with drawings. He then got to know Jules Lind, a German photographer settled in Beirut, near the Bassoul hotel. He could often be found at Lind’s, whose daughter he introduced to watercolor.

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How did this young, Sunni Beiruti come to break away from Islamic prohibition about representation? The story goes that one of his friends was a sheikh, who promised to breathe life into these drawings of soulless bodies on the day of the resurrection, which released the young man from his terror and from the curse of another sheikh. Farroukh became a subject of interest for the Sunni bourgeoisie and when Daniel Bliss, the founder of the American University in Beirut, died in 1916, his son Howard Bliss offered him a grant. However, after consulting the family, his mother preferred to enrol him at the Ottoman college where its founder, Sheikh Ahmad Abbas el Azhari, welcomed him.

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In 1916, Farroukh met Habib Srour, who went on to be a faithful friend and great support. While allowing him to attend his studio, Srour encouraged him to study French and Italian in order to travel in Europe and perfect his technique. 

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From that moment, he started to save up for the trip and when, on the recommendation of Nessib Chedid (the brother of Bishop Chedid), he was provided with accommodation in Rome in an Italian family, the Pisanis, he embarked on the Italy-bound ocean liner Brazil on 15th September 1924, as Daoud Corm and Habib Srour had done before him. When he arrived in Rome, Farroukh enrolled at the Royal Academy and the Free Academy. The four years preceding his diploma were ones of discovery and hard work. He visited the museums, met with Italian artists and multiplied his landscape sessions in the Roman countryside.

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In July 1927, a first and short sojourn in Paris ended as a disappointment. Not knowing anyone, he only visited a couple of museums. In December that year, he returned to Beirut and, under the patronage of the Muslim scouts, organised an exhibition of his work at the Palace of Ahmad Ayass. The following year, a retrospective of his painting was presented at the West Hall of the American University. With some government aid, this allowed him to spend three years in Paris to specialize. 

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This time he was sympathetic to the fascination that Paris holds over all painters. He exhibited in various salons, met Forain and Chabas, received his old Italian professor, Calcagnadoro, and undertook a voyage to Spain that inspired him a book on Arab civilisation in the Iberian Peninsula.  On his return journey at the end of 1931, he passed through Italy once more.

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At last settled in Beirut, Farroukh gave several exhibitions. In 1935, he got married and began teaching painting at the Ecole normale and the American University. But he started suffering from leukaemia. Until his death in 1957 at the hospital of the Makassed, he worked intermittently, during whatever respite his illness allowed him. “I am going to die,” he would say, “and I want to paint as I please.” The vision became more simple and uncluttered.

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Farroukh practiced a continual questioning of European heritage and, after Lebanese Independence, manifested a wild desire to lay the groundwork for Lebanese painting. Having adopted painting as a profession, he had rented a studio in Souk Sayyour since 1935. Convinced that a painter had to be able to live from his painting, he paid the price for this challenge, which he took up despite his perpetual anxiety about returning to poverty, which was for him the absence of color and the return to a childhood where he could not buy any.

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Farroukh approached his Islamic culture in a consistent manner. He never cut himself off from Sunni circles in Beirut. Because of his relationship to his origins, he did not claim to be a Westernised painter but called himself a Muslim one, open to Islamic culture, and never shirked his primary clientele. At the same time, as a painter he was forced to address the problem of figurative representation, sometimes only escaping it through decoration and arabesques.

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Would he become the Muslim painter of Francophone society in Beirut? This was not the case. He travelled through the country, sketching landscapes, monuments and characters, not in the folkloric spirit of postcards, but asserting painting as a commitment and duty. Upon his country’s access to independance, he represented along with Onsi, Gemayel and Douaihy those for whom Lebanon was not a landscape, folklore, or political slogan, but a place to practice painting.

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The realist framework in which his painting functioned allows us to see clearly that from the outset, his exploration of reality was neither based on an imaginary, nor on the formation of another world or personal interpretation of form, but based on what it brought to the visual tradition of painting. His systematic exploration of Lebanon always preserved a human dimension; he painted villages and their inhabitants, their characters – not because of a taste for the picturesque but, because of an appetite for the image – and livelihoods. Surveying his work, one understands that for him, painting the world was the only possible response to it, both a question and its answer, a problem and its solution.

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One cannot separate his themes from his treatment of the themes. For him, watercolor was the ideal medium, painted on location or in the studio, with large sheats of paper filled with notes, sketches and rough drawings, allowing us to understand the variety of his means and, above all, his technical insistence in rendering what laid before his eyes; the object he looked at and his way of looking at it. He sometimes showed a virtuosity that goes beyond mastery of an instrument practiced for a long time.

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With Farroukh, the biographical and pictorial facts are as important as the decoding of intentions and possibilities. He clearly represents the Beirut Sunni approach to painting and the intellectual expression of this approach, which he led throughout his career, from 1924 to his death on 16th February 1957.

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The birth of a vocation in such a precise setting, was intersected by several factors at the time: Lebanese painting during the Ottoman period, the practice of painting in Sunni environments, and updating this relationship with painting in this traditional and popular milieu. The questions that arise here are not so much about the relationship to modernity – as could be believed at first sight – but about the fundamental problem of reality – of the historic reality and the reality of the era. Painting was not only a simple testimony : it fulfilled the need to express all the culture and sensitivity of an era in the language of modernity or tradition. Farroukh could be seen as one of the rare painters who could be approached and read in a historic way, from the portrait of Jamal Pacha to the English propaganda posters he made during the Second World War, a quarter of a century later.

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The fundamental problem concerning Farroukh and reality lies in his response to his real or supposed market: postcard landscapes and characters or local types destined for his public. When he approached reality the most, along with the pictorial experience enclosed in it, his realism met a demanding and politician vision. Even if he set himself the task of looking at a mop and painting it, he always maintained the ideological varnish of demonstration and also, above everything else, a light divertion of reality that he only used in the imagery of its simplified function.

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Farroukh exhibited in Beirut in 1935 at the l’Ecole des Arts et Métiers, in 1937 at the Cercle de l’Union Française, and in 1938 in the West Hall of the American University. He also exhibited in 1946 at the Cultural Club in Tripoli, in 1949 at the Sports Club in Beirut, and in 1953 at the Maison des Najjadés in Beirut.