Haddad Farid 

Beirut, 1945

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For a few months in 1962, Farid Haddad attended Onsi’s and then Guvder’s studios, before enrolling at the School of Fine Arts at the American University, where Arthur Frick and John Carswell taught. He was an anatomy preparer at the Faculty of Medicine at the American University in Beirut. He passed from the apprenticeship of forms through geometry, to a saturation in which he understood the necessity of emotion and personal expression, for he could no longer function with instrumental drawing alone: he had to synthesise Orthodox mysticism and the lessons of a chemist father at the American University.

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Haddad only perceived the signs of emotion. A first sojourn in the USA helped him decipher the irruption of the emotional and the affective into the canvas. His Anglo-Saxon education in a family converted to Protestantism, and then his stay at Onsi’s studio made him see painting as a necessary pragmatism.

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But he still had to question this pragmatism. After settling in the USA in 1976, he worked on fields of color, close to the American experience of animation of space by color. His freedom of touch seemd to lead him towards a repetitive emptiness composed of strokes and hatchings, since it no longer tried to seize the motif, and since the pictorial matter was no longer sufficient to catch the gaze. Haddad presents the case of a typically American influence in the history of painting in Lebanon. In the Anglophone circles of Beirut, Saliby and Farroukh were the highlights of the local painting scene, representing the only comprehension of reproduction and of portraiture, and there was very little interest in modern American painting.

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Haddad therefore clung to the American train. His painting was perceived as a deciphering of Jack Tworkov, for its freedom of appearance and brushwork. Later, through refinement, he simplified the forms as much as possible and worked with more vehemence and freedom of color on the surface and the background. It was the first time that this happened in Lebanese painting. He worked with a realisation that was stronger and more real than painting. This language, articulate as it seemed, only responded to the echo of American painting. This was what happened with Douaihy, under the influence of Abstract Expressionism. Haddad was influenced by this, and absorbed it, certainly because he had not submitted to the ascendancy of a radical figure or a strong personality. Tworkov was relatively little known beyond the circle of painters, and the articulation of his work to the history of painting was not something fundamental, but the echo of diverse influences.

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Like him, Haddad used sign and color in an Abstract Expressionist way, but he radicalised the sign at the technical level, as the one possible structure for the color-canvas. The sign then lost its reference to become the gesture of the brush on the canvas itself, not in the sense of gestural painting but like a variation in which color placed itself on the surface and generated signs. This was a kind of duality that functioned uniquely in color. The difference resided in the technique of utilisation.

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Is Haddad’s painting abstract? It represents the moment when it only questions itself about itself, and only functions on its own signs. But what was the minimal sign, or the minimal structural field which varied the color, reduced to ? Which technique could make the variation of the color field perceptible to the eye ?

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Haddad’ reading did not imply, in the tradition of Impressionism, a continuity in the history of painting, but he worked on color in the American cultural tradition. This reduction to signs was practically the only means of not being carried away by the pathos of signification and research. It is not sure if he would have been able to carry this project with more originality than the radicalisation that he brought into the actual practice of painting, even if he was strongly criticised for what was described as a deculturation and a break in the history of painting in Lebanon.

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He exhibited in Beirut in April 1971 at the Kennedy Centre; in March 1972 at the Contact Gallery; and in 1973 and from 7th to 24th April 1975 at the Delta Gallery.