Gemayel César 

Ain el-Touffaha (Lebanon), 1898-Beirut, 1958

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Gemayel first studied to become a priest at Cornet Chehouan, but abandoned this project in 1911 following the death of his father. In his work there was a vitality and exuberance akin to Khalil Saliby, his first teacher, who pushed him to leave the pharmacy where he was an assistant, in order to devote himself to painting. Their relationship was essentially a meeting of two temperaments. In 1927 he received a grant through the office of Sheikh Mohamad el Jisr, the President of the Lebanese Parliament, and went to Paris. 

From 1927 to 1930 he was enrolled at the Académie Julian and immersed himself in the atmosphere of the 1920s, with its taste for female nudity and fresh landscapes. His first Lebanese model would later recount with what patience he had convinced her to undress.

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In 1943, César Gemayel and Alexis Boutros founded the Department of Painting at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), a fundamental initiative to assimilate and surpass the experience of the Mandate. It benefited from the contribution of Pole émigrés who had had to leave their country, and among whom numerous architects, engravers and painters could be found. Gemayel hired them to teach at ALBA, and their know-how was the foundation for producing an image and not just copying one. They came from an old tradition with a well-established pedagogy, and even if their cultural background was sometimes off-centre from the rest of Europe, it did not lack interest. ALBA played the role of a national university, and the majority of its young intellectual teachers went on to enrich the cultural environment of the State of Lebanon.

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Gemayel’s painting mixed a taste for women with creative passion. For him, painting was an act of love; he loved colors and textures. He tended to see the whole canvas as one colored mass, a distant echo of Impressionist teaching, along with the example of Delacroix, on whom he published a book.

For him, the pictorial time was frozen, shifted, and only breathed at the surface of the canvas. He started out by imitating Saliby, with a freshness given more by color than by the way it was brushed – as he interpreted it. He did not manage to overcome the gap between pictorial technique and the modernity of the subject, anatomic ellipsis and a manner of abbreviating  through color.

His catching enthusiasm made Gemayel an excellent teacher. For him, the different schools remained linked to a chronology and a scale of refinement by their techniques. This optimistic manner of seeing a continuous progress in the history of painting translated into his manner of remaining insensitive to form, or perhaps more simply, of interpreting it otherwise.

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In the context of his times, Gemayel brought a frankness of color, an ellipsis of drawing, as well as a fervor, a hurry in the manner of seizing form and color – in short, a painter’s temperament and a taste for painting that was new in the Lebanese landscape. He knew how to paint with clichés. He had not chosen, as one might have believed at first, staunch Impressionism, but Parisian painting of the 1920s and 1930s – Parisian by the subjects, and by the technical manner in which Academism was grafted on to the vivacious aspects of Impressionism. This style of painting responded to public taste and feeling. The formula that he repeated – “I came from Paris and studied in Paris” – was excellent for his reputation.

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Gemayel was not going to make a technical and pictorial revolution on his own. His problem, whatever was said about it, was not about a historicity that he participated in and felt challenged by. He came from the Beirut of the 1920s where, for him, the echo of painting was how he perceived art and the condition of artists. Painting was a way of being, as exemplified by Saliby, who encouraged him to do likewise.

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From his studio in a building on the Place de l’Etoile in Beirut, he could lead a bachelor life in the intellectual circles of the moment, essentially those of the press and cultural reviews, including Emile Lahoud, Fouad Hobeiche, Toufic Aouad, Gabriel Murr, Maurice Gemayel and Habib Abi-Chahla.

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The most difficult thing was to overcome contradictions. History of Art may have allowed for some distance in relationship to form, but he did not perceive it this way. First was his love for painting, and he clung to that. It was because of his love of painting that he produced so much, for the better or the worse. His best work was closest to what he was himself, closest to his desire and ambition. The worst was, obviously, the opposite; beyond the destruction of originality by the copying technique ant the creating clichés, the object was empty because the subject was empty, reality annihilated the image. Victor Hakim, who closely followed Gemayel’s work in the 1930s, criticised him for not going beyond Impressionism, but he was too dependent on technique to be able to go further. Hakim also criticised him for being behind the times and for keeping an old-fashioned pictorial culture. The world was changing, but Lebanon was retreating timidly into the past, or an immobile image of it.

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But it would be incorrect to see nothing but hedonism in Gemayel, only a passion for naked ladies, a misuse of Impressionist touches, of heavy commas of paint and colors that were like the last outcries of a love for painting attempting to reach the surface.

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The drama in Gemayel’s work lies in never destroying the subject to the benefit of the painting. The influence of Saliby’s rebellion would have helped him, but this Impressionism, for which he embodied the herald of a technique, made him too concerned with balance, where kindness and sentimentality equalled light audacity in relation to the Lebanese pictorial landscape, and far less in relation to Paris. Saliby set up his easel in front of nature and painted a screeching purple if he saw it, while he would also set up his easel in a hotel in Cairo and paint in heavy gold. Gemayel set himself in front of a model and would paint a naked woman, the painting being – for Lebanese society – the pretext for his vision of nudity. He secretly kept Saliby’s refusal of this Lebanese society, in which he played a role that he sometimes felt was playing with him. 

He was a free man, but had his regrets.