Zghaïb Khalil 

Dhayé (Lebanon), 1911-Sin el Fil (Lebanon), 1975

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Khalil Zghaïb started painting under the impetus of a corrective vehemence – the same one that made him walk up to a Picasso from the 1930s hanging on the wall of the French Institute of Archaeology, which, crayon in hand, he proceeded to correct. Henri Seyrig had a great deal of trouble trying to dissuade him from doing so. 

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If he did not maintain his relationship with History of Art that this story might suggest, at least he played an important role in History of Art in Lebanon through his relationship to painting and the manner in which Lebanese society perceived it.

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Zghaib was convinced he should classify himself as a naive painter to stop the futile polemics that he raised, which were only the necessary apprenticeship for his own birth as a painter. He found a place for himself within this category, and everything was understood. He could just as easily recover from this classification than become a mere object fashioned by those who discovered him. But what he really was is an important question, often asked behind a screen of misunderstanding.

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It was in 1954 that Seyrig discovered Khalil Zghaïb and took him to a course with Maryette Charlton at the American University of Beirut (AUB). At the time, Charlton – a former student of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the majority of professors came from the Bauhaus – led the department of painting at AUB, founded in 1952. Zghaïb was not interested in the tradition of classical art education, while Charlton builded on spontaneity, the search for local color, the conviction that a talent for painting was in everyone and that was enough to set it free, without preconceived rules. In this rigid Protestant climate, her attitude caused a stir and the University would certainly have suspended her courses if it had known that some students were posing as models there.

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Henri Seyrig had been the cultural advisor to the French Embassy in Washington during World War Two and was interested in Maryette Charlton’s experience. In ALBA he only saw a painful carbon copy of Paris. The difficulty was – and remains – to seize the historical figures of modern times and to search for something new, rather than mere copy. Perhaps Charlton’s occasionally naive Anglo-Saxon freedom had some chance of success, as she hardly paid attention to social classes and their games. In fact, she de-socialised the teaching of art while emphasising the students’ individuality and personal contribution, which opened the field to novelty. But what was the nature of her contribution? No longer playing with the repetition of teaching models, the door was open to everyone, even the gifted barman blessed with manual dexterity who discovered himself attracted to drawing. Perhaps, in a city where nothing like this was possible, even the very pleasant presence of a naked model played a role. Zghaib became the idol of a small Anglophone circle that considered his approach picturesque and full of local color. 

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Did this social melting pot bring something? It had its limits; the students, too young or too anxious to respect the rules of reproduction and resemblance in their drawing, deculturised and feeling that they could bring something new when rid of the weight of art history, infantilised themselves. For in painting, the new is made more from excess than by default.

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Ultimately, Maryette Charlton’s only successful experience was to welcome Zghaib, to encourage him to paint and not to corner into this folkloric representative which, in retrospect, seemed the only possible reading of Lebanese art and identity. Carswell – who was named director of the Department of Painting at AUB in 1956 – was always nostalgic for expression and original research and, exasperated by modern art, attempted personal expression before ending up in the paradox of archaeology, where he made his debut as an illustrator. He had a taste for popular art, children’s books, calligraphy manuals, cinema posters and the lids of boxes of sweets – without any reference to Rimbaud – assuming his silliness as a fresh gaze.

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To this renewal, Zghaib brought a vision and experience of life in Beirut. Some wondered what artistic value the life of a hairdresser could have. But perhaps a hairdresser’s life progressed beyond the mirror, precisely because his trade was acted out in front of the mirror. 

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Zghaib had something that was beyond the simple poetry of words. He was the unexpected exception, who confirmed the rules by attempting to leave them behind ; questioning the relevance of Francophone training and its repetition of existing educational structures. He introduced an experience of the self, of the city, the diagram of an internal world, a popular foundation – shared by everyone – that did not fail to lapse into a cheap bucolic, but which expressed a new and important questioning of reality and of the self.

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In a country where art education and its historic shift from sources in Paris prevented him from seeing reality other than in the form of scenes and landscapes that made a screen in front of him, Zghaib was the first to paint an internal world, to take advantage of the possibility of projection, of something that was not just a simple visual survey, but the expression of an internal world recomposed from elements of reality.

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This is why, at his best, Zghaib spoke about himself and expressed a local and personal vision that owed nothing to any education whatsoever. This was not because he did not receive any education. He aimed at something else, and had the technical means to convey it : a street scene of Beirut, the internal geography and a sort of condensed mental image. 

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In doing this, was he only the social creation of a naive and enthusiastic American education?

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Such a statement is too simplistic, even if he asked the same questions that Farroukh, Onsi and Gemayel had asked before him : how to paint a local reality in an expressive way, when their principal clientele had to recognise themselves in this representation, to justify their existence. He came to paint a picture-postcard Lebanon, a carbon copy of what he believed people would understand. Farroukh, Onsi and Gemayel painted for this recognition, through technical means without implying their personal experience in an obvious way. But Zghaib came to express the singularity of urban experience. In his work emerged an individual who spoke and did not content himself with conveying a technical discourse on pictorial forms and style. In Beirut in the late 1950s and 1960s, he positioned himself with the same fresh outlook and questioning as Khalifé, Melmir and Aouad.

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His experience of Cannons Square and life in the neighbouring alleyways was not folklore. If we make a “national naïf” out of him, we erase his interior expression of the image. Few painters chose his subjects, not because they had to live there in order to speak about it, but because they lacked the personal experience to catch reality. Zghaib opened his eyes and painted what surrounded him – without the subject becoming academic : still life or landscapes depicted as the application of a theory of painting. He questioned the artist’s personality, his poetry and expression, through painting his own vision of the world. In the early 1960s, other painters were working on canvases of Beirut that were neither poetic nor plastic interpretations, but documentary. This did not last a long time, because the city became more and more complex, and no longer allowed for partial vision that sometimes revealed everything else.

 

Zghaib exhibited in Beirut in 1955 in the West Hall of the American University; in 1961 at the Alecco Saab Gallery; in 1965 at Gallery One; and in 1971 in the l’Orient newspaper building. He took part in the salons at the Sursock Museum in Beirut from 1961 to 1974, and in the Alexandria Biennale from 1957 to 1970. 

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Everyday, when he went to the Café de la République on Cannons Square, Zghaib had the feeling of being welcomed there by the Republic. 

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Behind its small panes and red windows, one might have the impression that the whole French Republic had installed itself in the shop windows of the café, whose regulars were spectators and slightly tired Peeping Toms, while being involuntarily excluded from the place. 

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This café nevertheless illustrated all the possible imagery that Zghaib wanted to represent.

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The mental folklore of a country reduced to its folklore mentality, the lack of understanding and the awkward effects that would very quickly transform into a criminal madness. 

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The cafés in Beirut were the only places where it was possible to spend time and to make it known that that was what you were doing, like a film or a movie without actors. Zghaib went there to mark of his disenchanted sociability among all the Lebanese passers-by. He collected the last crumbs of the feast and of destiny combined. With his habitual neuroses – a blend of self-pity and irony – and celebrated by the press for some exhibitions from the 1960s, Zghaib had begun to be forgotten and if he sold little, he still had a small clientele of collectors, astonished by the visibility of the mystery he practiced. 

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He painted with every appearance of naivety, a montage of shifted representations of language and symbol. 

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This painting was the most learned painting, in the way that it used different levels. Every representation passed through it, up to the reading of the local press and of its imagery. 

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Zghaib painted linguistic and formal shifts of representation and reality. Something of a fusspot, he was not a hairdresser for no reason, in his way of splitting hairs. Zghaib was not the first Lebanese naive painter, but he was the first to show how naive Lebanese painting was, by the visible and frustrated use of representation. He diverted this to the benefit of an even more naive expression, wanting to make us believe that it was modern by doing so. 

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We are obliged to be our own contemporaries. From then on, what are the reference points and latitudes of Lebanese painting in its history and its contemporaneity? Excluded from the social imaginary, at the opposite pole of previous fictions, common to the Lebanese scene, Zghaib settled himself through this discrepancy into a claimed modernity. 

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He tried to investigate every possibility of figuration that was not thematic but representative. Therefore, every time, he came up against the impossibility of going beyond appearances, depicting them in such a clear manner that this desired proximity became the very subject of his canvases. 

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What he explored was not the limit of imagery, but the proximity of this imagery and what was missing to become an image, that is to say the articulated expression of appearance and the visible. This vocabulary was not religious but visual. 

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Zghaib covered the canvas with what hid it instead of what revealed it. He covered it with every visible layer in the breadth of memory. Even if this memory was carried through the picturesque or folklore, he came to articulate the vibration of memory.

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From the mid-1960s, the problem with Zghaib was that his painting was not in fashion. He gave in, quite obviously, to the greedy parsimony that came from great art. It must also be acknowledged that Zghaib radicalised the misunderstanding through this paranoid propensity to consider the external world and society, if not like the consequence of his painting, then at least like the application of this consequence.

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Yet they did not obey, as he would have wanted or hoped, to his frustrated wishes. Besides, his principal wish was that the importance of his painting would be acknowledged, from which all the rest would ensue. 

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All of Zghaib’s painting was built on these discrepancies and the juxtaposition of different languages, styles and representations. He carried the vehemence of his explanations all alone. The most astonishing fact is that this happened in the environment of Lebanese painting, as worried about the canvas and the image as about stylistic unity – that is to say recovering the styles of common understanding more at the level of good taste and furnishing, than of the canvas. 

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The question, and the problem – for every question is not necessarily a problem – that Zghaib raised in the history of Lebanese painting was about innocence. 

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Innocence would be additionally about painting, but it would be seen that this aspect of painting was the least innocent, and the part of imitation that it implied did not question the problem of identity, but of repetition, copying, the tired gaze, convention and expected effect. This innocence was not a pictorial but a mental affair. It was the possibility of claiming for, and putting into practice, a vision of painting and its realisation. 

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It must not be forgotten that at a young age, interested by painting, he had been pushed into traditional plans, offering him to become both a seminarist and Daoud Corm’s apprentice. 

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His first attempts were copies that had nothing to do with the expected manner. He would progressively radicalise his source of inspiration by using press photos. In an approach that remained more synthesised, articulated and mastered, with him the act of looking was the act of reading. His early vignettes – prints of riders, poodles, and touristic décor – were images that dawdled under one’s gaze. 

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He was only interested in the history of painting as a possible technical vocabulary. The man and the painter were inseparable and preceded from one another by a combination of fusion and confusion, but perhaps they separated in him just as cards can be shuffled in another way. 

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However, his innocence, because of what it brought, became contagious to the spectator’s gaze, pursuing it until the trap of its very simplicity, too cheerful not to know more than it showed.