Hoyeck Youssef  

Halta (Lebanon), 1883-Jounieh (Lebanon), 1962

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Youssef Hoyeck studied in Beirut at the Collège de la Sagesse, from 1898 to 1902, where he was friend with his classmate Gibran Khalil Gibran. Just as Gibran represented an artist’s relationship with Paris, America, painting and literature, Hoyeck was an illustration of the artist’s relationship with Paris, Italy, Lebanon, and exile, in a strategy that seems less conquering, because it was less complex. From the outset, Gibran diverted Hoyeck away from painting, to the benefit of sculpture. For him, the investment in the model of a mythical Italian Renaissance that could be reactivated in the Orient, four centuries later, had to collapse, but he was not aware of the historic shift, of the weight of the Ottoman Empire and the European industrial revolution. Hoyeck was in the line of Maronite cultural history and its overtures towards a questioning of Arabism. Daoud Corm had been its representative and, like Hoyeck, had outlined the ideal scheme for an Arab Renaissance modelled on that of Italy. But Corn could only remain attached to painting, for he did not have to assume the patrician and disappointed responsibilities of a nephew of the Patriarch. 

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Hoyeck’s experience was that of Paris with Gibran, between 1908 and 1910. Until the end of the First World War he divided his time between Paris and Rome, where he settled in 1921. On his return to Lebanon in 1939, he spent ten years in Beirut at Charles Corm’s house and then had a disenchanted retirement in his birthplace – the village of Aura – where he died on 21st November 1962.

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Hoyeck tenaciously pursued the idea and realisation of a sculpture that was totally anti-modern in its vision of a historic continuity of classicism. For him, the pedagogy of this culture was essential to people’s artistic development. He was a victim of his excess of sensitivity, along with his vision of a suspended time. Through an ironic misunderstanding, he was the author of Martyrs’ Monument on the Place des Canons (Cannons Square), erected under the French Mandate as part of the Franco-Lebanese dialogue, which went to be the object of a polemic, attacked with an axe and damaged as a symbol of the collaboration with the Mandate power. The perpetrator probably ignored Hoyeck’s role in the Arab movement that unfolded around King Faisal. For him the ideal moment was when Lebanon stabilised at the end of the Moutassarifiat, when the Christians fought for Arab independence.

A sculptor by nature, Hoyeck painted works that were nevertheless interesting and showed the influence of poetic realism.

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Hoyeck was divided between a relative who was a member of the Arab government of King Faisal (proclaimed King of Syria afterwards), and his direct relationship with Patriarch Hoyeck, the principal negotiator of the creation of Lebanon with Georges Clémenceau. 

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Charles Corm invited Hoyeck to return to Italy in the early 1930s, to settle in his studio located in a wood cabin in his garden. Hoyeck worked there for more than twenty years, selling little, living off the substitute of sponsorship, which is customary on the Lebanese artistic scene. 

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In a dire financial situation at the end of the 1940s, he confided in Corm, who promised to buy his work on several occasions. None of these promises were kept. From then on, Hoyeck broke with Corm, leaving all his work on the spot, not even having the means to move them, and settled in his family house in Aoura. The very little respect artistic circles payed to Corm from this moment was a small consolation. 

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The house in Aoura was closed after his death, then slowly plundered. This was a bitter defeat, made worse by the physical destruction of the memory of his work.