Onsi Omar 

Beirut, 1901-Beirut, 1966

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Omar Onsi personifies the first generation of Sunni artists in Beirut, who found their inspiration there and painted the city’s character. His journey and biography are important to understand how painters operate in Beirut – the way in which they are attached to the place by links that go much further than just living there or their physical presence.

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His grandfather, Hajj Omar Onsi, was born in Beirut in 1822 and had a brilliant career in the heart of the Ottoman administration. He was close to Sheik Ibrahim Yazigi. His father was a renowned doctor. A great liberal and occasional poet, he set an example of urbanity which was the very essence of city life. Onsi grew up in a refined and cultured environment. His studies were solid, with a preference for letters.

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In 1920 he entered the American University of Beirut to study medicine, following in his father’s footsteps. However, he did not forget his love of painting and drawing. One day the painter Khalil Saliby noticed a drawing of Onsi on the cover of the AUB student magazine. He contacted him immediately and passionately told him that painting was his real vocation and that he should not be afraid of it.  From then on Omar Onsi often visited Saliby’s studio. In June 1922 he went to Jordan for a two-week holiday at a cousin’s house. He stayed for five years: King Abdallah asked him to teach English to his son, the future king Talal. In 1927 he had an exhibition in Jerusalem. This show was not fully understood or appreciated, in spite of its financial success. Onsi’s style was already demonstrating a desire to go beyond the basic painterly reproduction that established him as a regional painter – capable of portraying the characteristics of a landscape, or of reproducing “scenes de genre”. He left this behind him, for more extreme work. That same year, he returned to Beirut where he spent a lot of time with Khalil Saliby, who convinced him to go to Paris and meet Youssef Hoyeck.

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During his stay in Paris from 1928 to 1930, Onsi fell in love with Emma, who would come to join him in Beirut in 1933, and built up a friendship with Hoyeck that would last his whole life. In Paris, Hoyeck identified embodied conflict – in the imagination of three societies, languages and culture: French, Arab and Anglo-Saxon – with the ambition of an artist from the Renaissance. Onsi came into contact with European values and landmarks. His stay in Jordan as well as his studies had certainly brought him into contact with English influences, but his assiduous visits to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, other painters’ studios, museums and exhibitions made him increasingly conscious of the history of painting and inspired him to find his own place within it. However, the split went beyond ambition. Everything that happened made him feel as if the weight of learning techniques was digging an impassable divide, and preventing him from forming and speaking a universal language. It was as if nothing existed any more but the desire for the simple appropriateness of a Lebanese landscape, painted in watercolors. After crossing swords with Paris, a definitive provincialism could have led him to be the exotic and touristic painter of a country under Mandate, if he had not known how to overcome these contradictions in his life and art, and pushed himself in a clear and articulated way towards painting and its methods.

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Overcoming his difficulties was possible because it had a poetic basis – that of Beirut, where Onsi returned in 1930, settling in his family house in Tallet el Khayat. He set himself to painting the coastline of Ouzai and Ain Mreisseh, the Beirut landscape that faced the sea, but also the heart of the city. The particular architecture of his home – built in the mid-XIXth century – with Arab gardens, green fields, goats and gazelles, springs and pond, progressively formed a body of work that offered him a way of recreating the artistic exploration of the world, but in his own house, where he paced back and forth in a very real sense as well as in memory.

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He painted the architecture of the place, but also the architecture of the time, because in 1950 Beirut experienced the development of a city where space, instead of just being lived in, adapted to its inhabitants’ wishes and ways of life. The gardens and houses, always filled with plants, and the rooms with green wooden shutters, had become mysterious and secretly harmonious places. Even during the cold and wet winters, when the oil heaters in the living rooms weren’t enough and needed the help of small electric radiators, the rooms breathed with domestic harmony. For a century and a half, time and space in the city had passed seamlessly. What took the place of history was not to be seen in architecture or urbanism, but in the changes in the residents of the public buildings, while the city lived its life without caring of anything beyond the headland and the peaceful, happy sea. 

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In this environment, Onsi found his rhythm: he had few exhibitions, but throughout the entire 1930s and 1940s he enjoyed regular journeys to Europe – France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. Through his intense production and his openness to the outside world, he escaped to the picturesque and touristic. At the heart of his painting he spoke about the city, about all the different elements he had feelings for – feelings that refined and formed themselves on the experience of his work. For while his work always had a fundamental simplicity, where a desire for resemblance and representation could be found, at the same time a strong desire for affirmation and characterization played upon the canvas – probably under the influence of Saliby – which he was aware of and knew he had to master.

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Onsi had a taste for watercolor, which could immediately record a feeling and bring his vision closer, but with a lightness of touch. It was said that his disinterest for the material, especially oil painting, was due to the price of paint : it was not so, even though he had this naturally parsimonious side, which comes from every craftsman’s practice. In the early 1930s he rented a shop near Souk El Franj, to display and sell his work. At the time, watercolors sold for less than oil paintings. French amateurs would search for sketches to remind them of the country. Onsi did not only paint for them, but the fact that his second wife, Marie Boyer, was from Alsace, worked at the Collège Protestant, opened him the way to foreign cultural circles.

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Onsi is often taken for a painter of touristic watercolors, while the essence of his work does not fall into this category. There is also a risk of distorting his own explanation, since the problem of local characterisation, if not a national painting, came to him in a natural way. He did not claim for it, but asked himself the question as part of his exercise as a painter. Therefore, when he travelled to Jordan, he painted Jordan; and when in Djebel Druze, he painted the Druze. The oil paintings of this era have an exquisite freshness and often a strength of construction that is quite interesting.

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Onsi was an old Beiruti. If he didn’t have a taste for introspection, he nevertheless withdrew from society, living in his old house in Tallet El Khayat, surrounded by a garden full of flowers, plants and the eucalyptus trees that he often painted, as well as his Noah’s Ark of gazelles and goats at the heart of a Beirut that would founder only a half-century later. He painted what he saw, which was what he lived in: his own house. Everything came to him there, which one had to be careful about, with deceptive simplicity – except for the self-portraits scattering his work: they come from triumphant disguises, when he started out, to the exploratory and anxious watercolors of his maturity and old age.

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Were Cyr and Onsi competitors in the 1930s? They met one another often, and Onsi did not feel the effects of competition in commercials terms, even if he experienced periods when he had to paint in order to live, if he did not want to rely on his wife’s salary. He situated himself in a historic and cultural continuity that he was not really convinced by, despite his years in Paris and the two French ladies he married one after the other. For him, painting was a job and, up to a point, the craft of rendering. This came from his old family background and way of life, from a way of opening one’s eyes to the world every morning. What role did culture and feeling play in pictorial continuity? The problem was not asked at this level. The mental and social structure in which he lived let him avoid a great deal of inner turmoil, such as rejections, protests and cavalcades of anxiety. He saw a restrained circle of friends, including Youssef Hoyeck, for whom he always had a room in his house. The two of them lived in the nostalgia of a classicism that they understood as a sensual and sensitive art. Hoyeck conveyed all of this in his sculpture, made of a confinement of sensitivity which did not exclude the power of distress. 

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Onsi explained very well the difficulty that he faced in evolving into the environment of claims for a Lebanese painting after Independence. Strangely enough, his work gives the impression that the game of influences and the dialogue with local and European circles had been stronger under the French Mandate. He went back to oil painting towards the end of the 1940s, and his canvases from the 1950s were not just transpositions of his watercolors into oil paintings. 

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They also revealed a blossoming mastery of composition and form, even if he gave the feeling of repeating himself, of sometimes pushing his research in the direction of useless variations. He was no more driven by his sensitivity, and his work became all the more blurred because, through painting, he lived the notion of modernity as if it was an attack and a break; for him, it stopped being a problem that could be pushed aside and that would transform, with time, into an additional annoyance. His discretion, his shyness, his taste for maternal women who were older than him – it all ended by weighing upon the recognition of his public, even if it was limited to the few amateurs without whom a painter does not feel he exists.

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Cyr, as he grew older, had attempted to tie together his different pictorial experiences into one sheaf, and he hoped to bring something new to contemporary painting with a new version of Cubism that he believed was experimental, but in fact he confined himself to repeating, 3 600 kilometres away, the neo-Cubism of post-war France. As for Onsi, he saw how the young Lebanese painting of the 1950s and 1960s was trying to form itself, but he could only remain the primary witness of another way of painting and feeling. What he brought to Lebanese painting that was new, it was the witnessing of a way of life and, up to a point, watercolor as a superior amateurism, as well as some oil paintings whose subjects were often about the relationship of painting to one form or another, metaphors of the tools that he used, from clear or symbolic stories to the feeling of the great energy that oil and color can summon.

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His autobiography through painting ensured Onsi a place in the history of Lebanese painting, where resorting to the individual offered one of the rare escapes from an often crushing European pictorial and cultural scene, where the absence of an unfolding of time was the only measure of a painter’s historicity and cultural value. But Onsi was not the sociological witness of painting in Lebanon, for such an approach most often excluded painting to the profit of sociology. The biographical bias ended by being a valuable documentation, not for seeing him as a local Orientalist, but as a man carefully measuring the extremes of his life in front of painting and, also, trying to save a way of life in Beirut. He performed a typical Sunni exercise: flowers, landscapes, women, architectural interiors, everything being painted as if to preserve it. In doing so, the painter considered himself the biographer of himself and others, safeguarding tradition. If somebody objected that we are only seeking psychological explanations from him, unable to locate him within History of Art, we would answer that the latter was made of different individuals who did not interact a great deal, because of the differences between the sociocultural environments they belonged to and which, in Lebanon, were all environments that were defined by religion. 

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Onsi rarely managed to go beyond the anecdote, to go beyond a sensuality that was too thin in its impressions, and all the more restrained since it was washed in the cold water of aquarelle. The immateriality of watercolor is too easy to read, with its capturing, touches and notations. It would always lack what a painting had, that is to say a voluntary materiality and not the easiness of white space, which Cyr fiddled with and used like a negative of speed in constructing space on the canvas. Anecdote is not enough to construct or literalise the subject. Building on this anecdote – Trans-Jordan, Djebel Druze, Lebanese mountains or the sweetness of his Beirut studio – Onsi never fell for the degeneracy that such a closed society favoured, where taste was no longer safeguarded by continuity and respect for tradition, and attention was only aroused by substitutes for decoration. Why did he not make this mistake? Perhaps because he was the first. Or perhaps because it was righter to invoke a Beirut continuity, which for him meant membership of an old, well-read family. For sure, Farroukh is the author of the famous portrait of the Turkish general, Jamal Pacha, in the lobby of the Gassman Hotel, but Farroukh valued his survival, while Onsi valued his melancholy and his retreat from the world.

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He found solace in painting, like a talisman protecting him from existence; his deer in a garden were not metaphores or figures of style, but his manner of conveying poetry and protest, of fulfilling them in the dream of an idyllic, unattainable Eden that his painting would pursue. For Eden does exist for some deer. Onsi enclosed the world within himself, as much to protect it as to protect himself, to determine a magic territory where feeling would only seek its own expression – at least when he did not have to make watercolors to earn his living, like at the time of his brief experience of the shopping malls at the Souk el Franj at the beginning of the 1930s.

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He painted the way one washes his face in the morning, with the difficulty of waking up. But what he dipped into the cold water of aquarelle was the exuberance and richness of feeling. In his oils, if there is certainly less to see, the technical spontaneity of watercolor can often be found, despite the thickness of the paint. The colors are grasped and set down in full strokes of paint, an expressive sensuality that results from reflection on the subject and its color, a harmonious painting whose success comes from the nervous impatience to overtake the response of rendering, and to go beyond the vows of representation. One had to wait for this measured and prudent man to lose his temper about painting in order to see him paint more than heraldic scenes of naked women accompanied by deer, in front of which one is tempted to wonder if one and the other were walking side by side in his garden.

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Yet Onsi had a more demanding response, a gentle yet persistent rigor, which was only capable of helping him resist the formidable social machinery that, by its inertia, made a frightening factor of destruction and self-destruction out of the rejection of the very idea of being a painter. For religious prohibition cautioned the arts and representation, which were not seen as models of Westernisation but as one more technique. He had to battle against all of this, but he responded as much as he could. He needed literary subjects and needed to use or to illustrate symbolism. Local landscapes and still life finished by making his gloomy delight seem an exercise in repetition with some variations. But would the historic and sociocultural circles have allowed him any other form of self-expression? One could often see in his work a counterpoint of the way his father, who was a doctor, and his grandfather, who was a poet, used their sensibility in the continuity of the Sunni Beirut family.  

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When he no longer had a live model, a rather dry and vengeful voyeurism made him use plaster models to remember how light falls on the body; he stirred up the vengeance of a reflection on vanity that he pursued in his last expressions and memories. What could a body speak of, if not about its inescapable disappearance? Onsi would have preferred to render it with a wash of watercolor rather than drown it in arak, far from the tradition of vanitas, made of skeletons and skulls. When he bathed in this tradition of politeness, retreat and silence, his work had a sugary sweetness.

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The problem with Onsi was not his technique, which was out of step by some fourty years, but the pictorial and mental frames it implied. For his part, it is important not to simplify,  and not to see him as the complete expression of all, or even some of these frames ; but to explain how his sensitivity fit into the socio-confessional environment he belonged to. In his very apprehension of the world, there was a protected urban tradition, the validity of self-confidence, the absence of historic perspective, since the protective power of the Empire kept everyone under its wing – in short a painting without Oedipe complex. One can notice the apparent pointlessness of women in a world where everything depends on what fathers pass down to their children, and where poetic feeling only exists in the sensuous way of life – a sensuality seen as an exercise of the sense of smell and touch.

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Onsi’s reading of the world was one of despair and truth. It was less about exercising an easy psychoanalysis on himself, than about seeing his paintings and watercolors disarticulating themselves while articulating themselves, the water of the watercolor being here the only link. And yet it evaporates, once the pigments fixed by Arabic gum. On all this, glides a silence : water as a unique possibility of waking the senses and colors, in a cleaning of the old weariness of looking, as one washes down a house. Onsi disliked this the most.

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He had two exhibitions in Beirut, in February 1951 at the Fakhreldine Gallery and in 1964 at Gallery One. He died in Beirut on 6th June 1969.