AUB's Art Exhibition on "The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener"

Beirut has always been a city that has seemed more cosmopolitan than much of the Arab World, and the American University of Beirut (AUB) has often been in the forefront. As part of AUB's 150th anniversary celebrations, AUB has been hosting an art exhibition called The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener. It closes this week, so I'm a bit late in writing about it. There was a conference held on the subject as well. At a time when puritanical censorship is growing in many Arab countries, the willingness to address artistic nudity, both male and female (though from the photos mostly the latter) is what still makes Beirut distinct.

From the reviews (a few: here and here and here and here) it's clear this is not about the Orientalist fantasy nudes, erotic harem girls who existed only in European sexual imaginings of the exotic East, so prominent in 19th century art (a subject for another post), but nudes in the work of Arab artists, and an attempt to situate their appreciation of the nude in the context of the broader Arabic cultural awakening, the nahda. The reviews emphasize that the exhibit did not minimize the obvious masculine viewpoint of the artists. A summary from the exhibition's Facebook page:

The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener examines the way in which artists and intellectuals of the Mandate era engaging in a double struggle against imperialism, Ottoman and European, resorted to an ideal form or pictorial device to concretize their visions of Arab modernity. For them, to be “Arab” was as much a matter of ambiguity and ambition as was the quest to be an artist. In fact, both labels required leaps of imagination over local conditions and imperial plans. What claims for identity, community, and political society were invested in the divesting of Arab bodies of their clothes? Our exhibition documents the debates that met the genre of the Nude in exhibition halls and newspapers. It situates artistic practices in relation to ongoing, urgent discussions about the meaning of citizenship, urbanity, and internationalism carried out amid movements for women’s rights, pan-Arabism, and various nationalisms, as well as educational reform, militarization, the scouting movement and nudist colonies. Without espousing the role of awakener for artists, our subtitle foregrounds the social, political or cultural motivations for these artists to embrace and adopt the genre of the Nude in their artistic careers.

Or as the last of the reviews linked above says:

More importantly, perhaps, it addresses the idea that these artists used their work to express liberation from Ottoman and European colonisation. As the title suggests, the exhibition, curated by Octavian Esanu and Kirsten Scheid, seeks to establish to what extent these artists used their artistic explorations of the nude as a means of promoting social change in line with the spirit of the nahda – a period of modernisation known in Arabic as the “awakening.” In the context of discussions about the meaning of identity, community, citizenship and internationalism, and of what it meant to be “an Arab,” what was the significance of the Arab form laid bare?

Beirut in the "Golden Age" Before the Civil War

A little Friday night nostalgia: I first saw Beirut in 1972, three years before the civil war began. For those who never saw the Lebanese capital in its glory days, or for those who want to recall it as it once was, here is a collection of photos from the 1960s.

The Burj al-Barajineh Bombings

Today's bombings in Beirut's Burj al-Burajineh neighborhood,which killed at least 41 and wounded 200 or more, is the worst bombing attack in terms of its human toll since the Lebanese Civil War.And the Islamic State is reportedly claiming credit. This appears to be the worst blowback yet in Beirut from Syria's civil war and an ill omen for Lebanon.

Several headlines I've seen in Western media refer to the attacks as being in a "Hizbullah stronghold." I think that's an unfortunate choice of words, as it suggests Hizbullah was the target. One bomb went off near a a Shi‘ite mosque and the other at a bakery: civilians were the target, in one of the most densely populated areas of the city. The civilians may have been targeted because they are Shi‘ites, but referring to it as a "Hizbullah stronghold" distracts from the reality that the victims are civilians, not Hizbullah fighters.

Video of Beirut in the 1920s

Via the blog Hummus for Thought, here's a video (silent, with French title cards), showing Beirut in the 1920, during the French Mandate:

If Only Mosul Had Been So Lucky: How Maurice Chehab Saved the Beirut Museum During the Civil War

Note: I'll be in an MEI staff retreat all day today. This will be my only post unless I have something this evening. 

Yesterday's shocking videos of ISIS destroying antiquities in the Mosul Museum again underscored the threat war and instability pose to irreplaceable historical and archaeological heritage. Not since the Nazis looted Europe of art treasures during World War II (many of which have never been seen again, despite the efforts of Allied forces as depicted in the film The Monuments Men), have so many historical and archaeological treasures been threatened. The civil wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and the 2011 Revolution in Egypt, all saw cases of looting of museums and archaeological sites, as well as collateral damage from artillery of ancient and medieval monuments. But ISIS is embarked on a campaign to destroy antiquities not as a casualty of war but as a matter of direct policy. Shi‘ite, Christian, and Yazidi religious sites and libraries were first, but now the ancient heritage of ancient Mesopotamia is being targeted: the walls and gate of Nineveh and the Mosul Museum.

Source: phoenicia.org

It's a good time to remember the work of the late Maurice Chehab, Director of the Lebanese Antiquities Department and Curator of the Museum during the Lebanese Civil War, and a man who saved much of the collections even though the Muesum was quite literally on the front lines: the division between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut (the Green Line) was the street in front of the museum, and a key but dangerous checkpoint between the two sides was called the Museum Crossing. Lebanese know this story and have honored him; I suspect it's less well known outside.

Emir (Prince) Maurice Chehab was a scion of the Chehab or Shihab dynasty which once ruled Mount Lebanon; originally Druze, the family today has both Maronite and Sunni branches; the former produced Maurice, as well as former Lebanese President Fouad Chehab.

The National Museum, Beirut

Born in 1904, Chehab attended the Jesuit St. Joseph University in Beirut and then did graduate work in France at the Louvre. He became an accomplished archaeologist and specialist on Ancient Phoenicia, and dug at Tyre most famously but also elsewhere; from 1928 onward he held various official posts under the French Mandate and after independence, heading what evolved into the Directorate-General of Antiquities.He taught at the Lebanese University and was designated as the first Curator when Lebanon's National Museum was being organized in the years after 1928; it opened in 1942.

Wartime Museum Damage

He was a distinguished scholar and already past 70 when the Civil War broke out in 1975, when the grim twist of fate brought the war quite literally to the Museum's doorstep. Eventually, the Museum would not only be the target of artillery but would become a frontline bunker for militiamen and a death trap for anyone else. The card catalog, photographic archive and much else were lost.

But not the prize collections. Early in the war, using a rear entrance as the story goes, Chehab and his wife Olga (with a few other senior people) gathered the smaller objects on display and moved them to basement storage to avoid looting. The area was sealed off with steel-reinforced concrete. The larger objects, including the best-known objects, the stone sarcophagus of Ahiram and the other Phoenician sarcophagi, were also encased in wooden or concrete coverings.

Maurice Chehab retired in 1982 and died in 1994. In 2013 the Museum rededicated one of the key galleries as the Maurice Chehab Hall.

You can find other retellings of this story here, and at the museum's Wikipedia page, and even fuller accounts at several tribute pages: here and here and here..

Mosul could have used a Maurice Chehab.

Remembering 30 Years Since the Beirut Marine Barracks Bombing

October 23, 1983 — 30 years ago today — the US Marines suffered their worst single day of losses since Iwo Jima, and the French Parachutists too their worst losses since Algeria, when two truck bombings ripped through their respective headquarters in Beirut. It was one of the earliest uses of vehicles for suicide attacks, a weapon that would become all too familiar in subsequent years. At the US Marine Barracks near the airport, 220 Marines, 18 Navy and three Army personnel died, along with one Lebanese. At the headquarters of the French 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment, another bomb killed 58 paratroopers.The group that would soon emerge as Hizbullah was widely blamed.

It was not America's first baptism of fire, coming four years after the Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, but the toll of dead was a shock and there was a rush to assign blame, leading to the Long Commission Report and to the withdrawal of the Marines. (Though the Reagan Administration was interventionist, it knew when to cut its losses and go home.)

I'd have to put America's loss of innocence in the Middle East quite a bit earlier, but it was a shock to the public (and the voters) who thought the Lebanon intervention was essentially a separation of forces peacekeeping mission. (It started that way, but then we took sides.)

None of my friends died there but I knew a lot of people involved with Lebanon at the time and one old friend wrote a lot of the Long Commission Report, so a lot of this is fairly fresh in my mind. Let's hope we learned something.

Another Anniversary: 29 Years Since the Beirut Marine Barracks

Not only is today the anniversary of El Alamein, it's also the 29th anniversary of the bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983. That bombing, which killed 220 Marines, 18 Navy and three Army personnel, was the greatest loss the Marines had suffered in a single day since Iwo Jima, and the greatest US military loss in a single day since the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. One Lebanese was killed. On the same day, another truck bomb struck the headquarters of the French 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment and killed 58 paratroopers, the French Army's worst day of loss since the Algerian War.

Imad Mughniyya, later a key figure in Hizbullah, was later accused of planning the attacks.

Truck and car bombings became a common weapon in Beirut; one aimed at Sheikh Muhammad Fadlallah in 1985 has sometimes been seen as a retaliation by US surrogates Hizbullah, though that group was not yet using that name in 1983.

And as we have been forcibly reminded just in the past week, the car bomb remains a weapon of choice in Beirut.