43

tHe plasticity oF tHe syRian aVant-gaRDe, 1964–1970

anneKa lenssen

In Damascus in 1969, a ringing telephone inside an artist’s studio

might have brought a commission from a distant patron: a PLO offi ce

in Beirut seeking a painting of orange groves for one of its headquar-

ters, or a rising leader in Fatah (the Palestinian National Liberation

Movement) seeking designs for an agitprop poster.1 Following Israel’s

defeat of Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian military forces in June 1967,

what had been a state-sponsored battle for Palestine between armies

had become a dispersed choreography of paramilitary actions with

multiple heads and myriad headquarters.2 For the leading artists in

Syria, the increased prominence and coordination of armed resistance

1 Detail about oranges from Mamdouh Kashlan, interview by author, Damascus, Syria,

May 29, 2010. Detail about Fatah from Nazeer Nab‘aa: An Eye on the World . . . An Eye on

the Soul (Damascus: Tajalliyat Gallery, 2009), which states that Abu Jihad phoned artist

Nazir Nabaa in 1968 to request poster designs for the Palestinian delegation to the World

Youth Festival in Sofi a, Bulgaria.

2 Over a campaign beginning June 5, 1967, and lasting only six days, Israel seized the Gaza

Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Syrian territory of the Golan Heights. For the pur-

poses of this article, I refer to the war’s negative outcomes for Arab communities by the

euphemism “June 5, 1967,” a phrase that found frequent use in exhibition and newspaper

texts as a way to encompass both outrage over Zionist aggression and despair over the ref-

ugee situation. See Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 188–96, on the increased prominence

of the collective guerrilla warfare conducted by several Palestinian organizations, dubbed

“the resistance” (al-muqawwama).

© 2013 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00047

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groups in the region not only transformed the frontlines of the Arab

national struggle but also redoubled the networks of artistic patronage

available to them. When they returned to work in the wake of the de-

feat, their work involved supplying images to the resistance organiza-

tions given safe harbor in Damascus as well as to the Syrian state.

Whereas prior to June 5, 1967, many Syrian painters had been develop-

ing abstractionist practices that they primarily based upon experimen-

tal manipulation of irreducibly formal elements such as color and

texture, after the defeat they emphasized content as a dominant con-

cern.3 Many gave interviews to the national press, averring that recent

“events” compelled them to treat the urgent issues facing their nation,

describing a new artistic task at hand as a type of service to battle.

Given the spectacle of disappointment that had marked the conclusion

of the 1967 war, it is hardly surprising that Syrian artists professed a

commitment to mobilizing their work within a reactivated and redemp-

tive struggle. Damascus residents had watched Syrian troops return to

town bearing clean, unfired weapons and unscathed tanks.4 As the

mendacity of the confidence of Arab forces suddenly snapped into visi-

bility, the imperative to forge a radically new, actionable liberation proj-

ect became an urgent artistic project as well.

After June 5, 1967, artists and critics in Syria sought to articulate

a new social role for contemporary art, making significant revisions

to the evaluative frameworks they promoted in their columns and

roundtables. They outlined a new artistic project that entailed the pro-

duction of more widely communicative artworks, and the embedding

of emancipatory content within them. New entries appeared in the

iconographic catalogue of Syrian art, as paintings of oranges, guns, and

martyrs became privileged subjects at national exhibitions as well as in

illustrated magazines. As illustrations of change, these overt alterations

to the face of contemporary art in Syria make a compelling display. As

indicators of the conceptual parameters for the country’s artistic van-

guard, however, they necessarily prove insufficient. The shift in the

imagery and circulation of the Syrian avant-garde at the end of the

1960s must also be engaged as a significant conceptual transforma-

3 I base my summaries upon interviews conducted in Damascus during multiple research

trips over several years, 2007–11, the arts coverage in al-Ba‘th newspaper (1965–68), and

exhibition pamphlets and press clippings regarding exhibitions held in the Syrian

National Museum in Damascus.

4 Asma Fayoumi and Ghassan Jabri, interview by author, Damascus, Syria, March 6, 2011.

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tion. As new cultural priorities found articulation in conjunction with a

reformulation of the idea of national struggle, the consensus around

the nature of artistic work shifted, moving from an emphasis on

abstracted painterly form as the consummate model of serious artistic

inquiry toward an emphasis on well-formed expression as a social

agent. Syrian painters not only took recourse to legible content and the

patronage of paramilitary groups, but also endeavored to replace their

reliance on received artistic models with a sensitivity to inchoate

human experience, and to then skillfully direct that experience into a

means of affective communication. This particular substitution of an

applied model of art in place of nonpurposive disciplinary expertise

tracks with changes in Syrian national policy, including strengthened

defense alliances with the Soviet Union and other communist bloc

countries. At the same time, it marks the new attitudes toward the

institution of art then emerging worldwide at the end of the 1960s.

That Syrian artists abandoned their previous benchmarks of academic

training and the judgment of international juries to seek new grounds

for a national avant-garde testifies to a reformation of their understand-

ing of the ontological basis of the artwork itself.

Some of the effects of the revisions to the conceptual parameters

of the Syrian artistic practices in the period may be tracked in the

career of painter Nazir Nabaa. Then an emerging artist with a solo

show in Damascus’s one private gallery under his belt, Nabaa had com-

pleted an art degree at the Egyptian Academy of Fine Arts in 1964

before landing employment as an arts specialist in the Syrian educa-

tional system and teaching art in rural school posts for several years. In

1968, he took an appointment in Damascus as an illustrator for the

Schoolbooks Directorate. In the same year, he fulfilled his first com-

missions for resistance-themed graphics, contributing ink drawings of

the sun, the pistol, the fedayee freedom fighter, and the pigeon to

numerous book, magazine, and poster projects, including those of the

Syrian Ministry of Culture, the journal Filasteen al-Thawra, and Fatah.5

By 1969, a bare, sacrificial body emerged as a recurring motif in this

growing graphic oeuvre, each time providing a dramatic synecdoche of

the imperilment of humanity under the regime of capitalist-militarist

5 Nazeer Nab‘aa, 20. For a portfolio of Nabaa’s designs from this period, see the Palestine

Poster Project digital archive, http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/

artists-and-collectives/natheer-nabaa.

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power. The same figure also provides the central imagery for the oil

paintings that Nabaa exhibited in these years. Such illustrative rep-

resentations of Palestinian dispossession might have been rejected

as too-shrill kitsch if they had come under scrutiny as either self-

sufficient political or artistic statements. Yet this kind of channelized

scrutiny was not the operative mode of art criticism in Syria after 1967.

Rather, from 1968 onward, Syrian art critics—including Nabaa him-

self—articulated a set of conjoined terms for an effectively vanguard

art that required not only the presence of correct politics but also the

quality of plasticity, that is, the physical quality of being moldable and

holding the potential to be actively formed and re-formed. For a work

to factor as good, it had to both present stirring content and signal the

fact that it had been brought into form by an artist’s will. Eventually,

the primary basis for recognizing a Syrian avant-garde art became the

idea of production by means of human labor located within the strata

of essential artistic form.

Several terminological notes are in order regarding the twinned

keywords of avant-garde and plasticity as I have just introduced them,

and as I apply them in this article. In the context of Syrian cultural

practice, the term avant-garde signals more than the generic liberal

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notion of the innovative or visionary artist who emerges to lead an

artistic movement. The term designates the ideal conjunction of

advanced or radical activity in both the artistic and social realms.6

Indeed, given the proximity of armed liberation struggle in the Syria of

the late 1960s, one can hardly dismiss the positing of causal links

between political and artistic quality as if it were merely a holdover

from a more vibrantly revolutionary moment.7 Even prior to 1967, art-

ists in Syria self-consciously assumed the mantle of a progressive social

agenda, typically wrestling with questions of strategy for best realizing

the obligation to perform the roles of conscientious witness and vision-

ary forerunner. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, cultural ministries,

newspapers, and literary journals across the Arab region gave ample

representation to the rich Marxist tradition of deputizing poets, writers,

artists, and other intellectuals as scouts along the path to a progressive

future—including several leftist political-cultural publications that

were actually titled al-Tali‘a.8 Yet despite the multiple fora available to a

politicized version of the avant-garde, as I will detail, the kind of van-

guard practice that found greatest traction in the mid-1960s was a ver-

sion of the ostensibly apolitical pursuit of art for art’s sake. Until June

5, 1967, the artists with the highest profile in Syria tended to argue for

art as an exemplary realm of cultivation and not as an agentive catalyst.

The center of the discussion shifted after the defeat, as the intellectuals

with access to the country’s increasingly constrained media outlets

began to speak of discipline and technological capacities as the rudi-

ments of a fully developed culture.

6 Linda Nochlin, “The Invention of the Avant-Garde: France, 1830–1880,” in The Politics of

Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989),

1–17.

7 Hal Foster’s critical reading of the global art world of the 1990s, “The Artist as

Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 171–204, exemplifies the kind of dismissal to

which I refer here. Foster’s essay of course promotes the critical framework of Walter

Benjamin’s 1934 talk “The Author as Producer” as the example against which well-

meaning contemporary critics fall short.

8 This is the Arabic term meaning “avant-garde.” As in the French, the Arabic term carries

both the military meaning of foremost rank and a more metaphorical connotation of cut-

ting-edge. I am aware of at least three relevant publications titled al-Tali‘a: a communist

newspaper printed in Syria established in 1962, a high-brow leftist cultural journal estab-

lished in Egypt in 1965, and the weekly political-cultural supplement to the Syrian news-

paper al-Ba‘th published in the late 1960s (I have not been able to confirm the starting

and ending dates of publication for this supplement, but an artistic roundtable it pub-

lished in 1969 provides a source for this article).

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The concept of plasticity may then seem to make an odd pairing

with an investigation of avant-garde artistic practice and its relationship

to armed struggle. Redolent with the midcentury modernism popular

in New York and the European capitals, the category “plastic arts” most

often connotes the value of harmony, as achieved by successfully resolv-

ing a prototypical fine art problem: transcribing three-dimensional spa-

tial experience onto a two-dimensional surface.9 Yet when I use the

term here to denote a defining element of Syrian avant-garde practice, I

am mobilizing it in the way it was used in the post-1967 period. The

Arabic term al-fann al-tashkili (literally “plastic arts”) first appeared in

the terminologies of national arts administrations in Arab countries in

the 1950s and 1960s. A direct translation of the French term arts plas-

tiques, it reflected the rapid expansion of the international infrastruc-

ture for arts administration as part of the obligations of UNESCO

member states.10 The term came to replace al-fann al-jamila (the fine

arts) in the Syrian state’s promotion of the arts only during Syria’s ill-

fated union with Egypt, 1958–61, when administrative terms were stan-

dardized along the Egyptian model.11 The purview of the “plastic arts”

in Syria opened dramatically outward after June 5, 1967, as articles in

the state newspapers began to reference expansive notions like “our

plastic life” and “our plastic movement.” These later usages work by

activating a concept of art’s formal malleability that lies within the

Arabic word tashkil itself, that is, its quality of being available to form-

ing by artists.12 As a keyword, plasticity can be seen to emphasize

9 This is Hans Hofmann’s definition, as cited by John Loftus, “The Plastic Arts in the

Sixties: What Is It That Has Got Lost?,” Art Journal 26, no. 3 (Spring 1967): 240.

10 Most prominent in Syrian arts administration was L’Association Internationale des Arts

Plastiques, an association first created in 1952 intended to represent artists internation-

ally and to associate them closely with UNESCO’s work. Copies of the association’s

French-language bulletins are present in the uncatalogued papers of the first director of

the Modern Art wing of the Syrian National Museum, Damascus (hereafter NM-D).

11 In 1957, the Syrian national exhibit was still named as an exhibition of “fine arts” (al-fann

al-jamila). Under the union, a stand-alone Ministry of Culture was established in Syria

for the first time and within it a Directorate of Plastic and Technical Arts. A Permanent

Exhibition of Plastic Arts was installed in the National Museum in 1960. Given the atmo-

sphere of constant reshuffling of offices and ministries, however, these terms were not

consistent even within the Syrian bureaucracy. Memos from 1967 refer to a Directorate of

Fine Arts, not Plastic Arts.

12 The conceptual connection between plasticity and agentive formation is a clearer one in

the Arabic than in the English. Tashkil is the verbal noun form of the causative version of

the verb meaning “to form,” such that tashkil literally means “making be formed,” and

tashkili in turn is the adjectival form of that product of causative action.

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human will as the central motor of a creative formation. A plastic life

would be a whole mode of being, a strategy rather than a tactic.

In the article that follows, I offer an archaeology of transforma-

tions in the significance accorded to plastic form—the irreducibly

artistic element of any painterly artwork—within art writing in Syria

on either side of June 5, 1967. As the one element within formalist

practice to accrue rather than shed prestige after the war, artistic

plasticity provides a primary ground for tracking these transforma-

tions. Accordingly, my excavation begins with a history of several

ambitious pedagogical and exhibition programs in the mid-1960s

that were undertaken within a national imperative to gain international

exposure and approval for Syrian acumen, and which privileged artistic

form as a most impressive final product. Even while the results of these

initiatives attracted a series of critiques from within the Syrian art

scene itself, they gave shape to certain attitudes toward formalism

that later proved essential to revised, post-1967 artistic practice. In par-

ticular, they promoted an understanding of formal abstraction as a

demonstrably contemporary technology that gained new purchase

in the wake of the defeat. In spite of an outpouring of testimony

confirming a violent rupture in the order of things on June 5, 1967,

Syrian critics and practitioners did not purge their critical frameworks

of the conviction that abstraction offered a transnational tactic of ideal-

ized construction. Instead, they returned to the understandings of

abstract art galvanized in the preceding debates and mined them

anew for their humanistic resources.13 Effectively recasting artistic

form as an armature for active struggle rather than mere cerebral

research, they developed new evaluative criteria around the capacity

of plastic art to integrate nonhuman techniques with constitutively

human expression. The antinomy that structured the post-1967

avant-garde in Syria was neither a divide between abstraction and

figuration nor a question of content (or lack thereof). Rather, it

was a newly enforced divide between the poles of abstraction and

humanism.14

13 I gratefully acknowledge Tammer El-Sheikh for summarizing my argument this way.

14 I thank my third anonymous reviewer for suggesting these pairings. By humanism, I

refer to both a cultural practice built around the proposition that “man” is the origin and

source of meaning, action, and history, and a relationship to art in which art provides an

affirmation of the meaningfulness of action and history.

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Rallying to inteRnationalist expeRtise

Syrian artists not only called for a certain kind of activated plasticity

after June 5, 1967, they also occasionally enacted it as a visual argu-

ment. One such instance is Nabaa’s graphic design for the 1971 Fatah

poster The Bitter Condition. Nabaa’s multiple-plate print presents an

image of consuming terror in which seven naked bodies hang sus-

pended in a startled, antagonistic conflict with the black corrosiveness

of exploitation and domination—what the poster’s slogan has dubbed

the “bitter condition.” As if in an eerie choreography, an overprinted

texture of black ink asserts itself upon the line of figures, enveloping

some in blinding sheets while momentarily sparing others. Nabaa has

Nazir Nabaa. The Bitter Condition, 1971. Poster produced by Fatah.

Courtesy of the artist and the Palestine Poster Project Archive.

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closely attended to the bodies below, rendering certain details to mark

them as the primary sites of bitter experience, and others to preserve

them as source material for its eventual reversal: fingers point in a

pose of electrified surrender, but the heavy semicircular muscles of

forearms and calves indicate a vestige of proud proletarian labor.

Ultimately, however, the density of the black pigment of the monoprint

surface tissue provides an optical offset to any quantity of these finer

details. As a single textural field that has been brought into view by

means of haphazard overhead pressure, the resulting blackness pro-

vides a second embodiment of a protean condition that does not

entirely resolve into the first. If read in juxtaposition with the bodies, it

suggests several possible wartime elements: napalm, a shroud, and/or

flayed skin. Yet if recognized as an intact surface of material texture, it

remains pure plastic form. The intended function of the poster seems

clear enough; it alerts its viewers to the bitterness of the current situa-

tion, and invites them to recognize the validity of the Fatah-led struggle

to change it. The seven figures represent an image of human vulnera-

bility in conjunction with heroic fortitude, thus embodying the key

amalgamated emotion that initially motivated the Palestinian freedom

fighter but that would also, eventually, be surpassed in battle. This

same tension is then transposed into the parallel realm of plastic art by

means of the deployment of textured blackness on the poster surface,

with the resulting abstract presence embodying the tension between

forming and being formed that the avant-garde artist experiences.

The literal malleability of a folded and printed fabric—its plasticity—

offers a sign of the reconfigured requirements of artistic practice after

the defeat.

As Nabaa would later attest, he first commenced this precise kind

of experimentation with printed surfaces in response to an ongoing

local debate over the use value and appropriate users for the methods of

fully abstract art as an international phenomenon.15 These debates war-

rant more attention than they have yet been given in studies of Arab

art. For one, they have an internationalist dimension that would cease

to be possible under the later authoritarian and protectionist policies of

the Syrian state. The event that first sparked and then subsequently

sustained these debates in the press was the arrival of an Italian painter

named Guido La Regina as a technical expert on the painting staff of

15 Yusuf Abdelke, “Introduction,” in Nazeer Nab‘aa, 8.

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the new Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, and his

continued efforts to institute a program of pure painterly production at

the school. Recruited to the arts faculty in late 1964, La Regina spent

his three-year tenure in Syria exhorting artists to recognize the suprem-

acy of abstraction. Now recalled as a kind of “Mafioso,” he and his

unrelenting insistence that artists get in step with tendances mondiales

proved hugely influential as a model of methodological integrity in the

arts.16 La Regina’s favored method of composition in particular, a pro-

cess involving dipping pieces of canvas surfaces into paint and printing

them onto a second picture plane, resulting in layered geometries of

textured relief in a muted color palette, became the marquee signifier

of abstract art in Syria. In the extensive coverage the Syrian press

devoted to questioning the form-driven painting method of La Regina

16 Ghayas al-Akhras, interview by author, Damascus, Syria, March 30, 2010; Aisha Arnaout,

interview by author, Paris, France, June 3, 2011; Mamdouh Kashlan, interviews by author,

Damascus, Syria, May 29 and June 9, 2010. I take the phrase tendances mondiales from

Kashlan’s mocking impersonation of La Regina and the Francophonic aspect of the art-

ist’s presence at the school (there was no single lingua franca in the program; students

and faculty translated for each other across French, Arabic, and Italian).

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and other European artists, the term abstract art (al-fann al-tajridi)

functioned as if a shorthand declaration of internationalist ideals, as

distinguished from academicism and overt nationalism. According to

Nabaa, he was one of the few Syrian artists who successfully resisted

the zeitgeist of La Regina.17 Yet if Nabaa did only warily regard the

Italian artist’s method, judging the method “outstanding but cold,”

he did not reject its printing techniques as techniques. To the contrary,

he readily drew on these techniques’ plastic capabilities. In one of the

many instances of a reconfigured and recuperative relationship to form

that followed from June 5, 1967, Nabaa picked up La Regina’s authored

methods as a suite of effective delivery devices for the sloganeering

content of political posters and mixed media graphics.18 In fact, these

elements made the newness of Nabaa’s project plain. The cold silence

of La Regina’s signature forms provided the foil for the humanistic con-

cerns of Syrian practice. Now serving as a kind of author function, the

Italian artist’s name offers a recognizable point within a historical tran-

sition that is otherwise not well mapped. “La Regina” marks a buried

body of misguided Eurocentric ambition and alienated Syrian labor.

The specific contours of these responses to La Regina, 1964–67,

therefore prove extraordinarily instructive for parsing subsequent

avant-garde activity in Syria. Prior to the 1967 defeat, his name gath-

ered together a set of largely positive qualities. For artists like

Mahmoud Hammad, the head of the painting department at the

Faculty of Fine Arts, La Regina’s presence in their midst represented a

first concrete step toward building up the seriousness of the national

art scene. Hammad had obtained a four-year art degree from the

Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in 1956, and he and his faculty were

seeking to replicate a rigorous, academic setting on home turf. The

Syrian art school had been established only five years earlier during the

union with Egypt, originally as a technical training program offering

drawing classes from a live model and other skill-based coursework.

After September 1961, when a group of junior Syrian officers calling

themselves the Supreme Arab Revolutionary Command of the Armed

17 Nazeer Nab‘aa, 21.

18 Examples of these fabric imprints abound in Nabaa’s oeuvre in the period, including in

his fine art paintings. Examples of similar techniques in Nabaa’s graphic works include

another 1971 poster in the Palestine Poster Project digital archive and a drawing repro-

duced on the back cover of the November 22, 1969, issue of the al-Tali‘a supplement to

al-Ba‘th.

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Forces staged a coup d’état that dissolved the union, its character

changed significantly. The exodus of Egyptian faculty from Syria left

numerous teaching spots suddenly vacant, and when the school’s

remaining administration attempted to fill them, it cast a net outside

the country, recruiting foreign teachers via international organizations

and bilateral technical exchange agreements.19 By the end of 1963, a

year that brought another military coup on March 8 and the Arab

Socialist Ba‘th Party into power, a Polish artist was teaching design,

a Bulgarian artist was teaching sculpture, and at least three different

French artists had also joined the staff.20 The school soon managed

to obtain a status within the regular university structure, officially

becoming a degree-granting faculty in 1964. The students who

enrolled in the program—there were 220 in 1964—understood that

they were involved in a crucial period of transition. Art no longer

represented a trade, nor would it comprise a set of mere technical

tasks. Increasingly, the school’s faculty saw art as an integrated mecha-

nism for creating what Hammad described as a fully contemporary

Arab civilization.21 Concomitantly, he and his colleagues also recog-

nized art as a means to advertise the achievements of their civilization,

including its capacity to capitalize upon the expertise of foreign

practitioners.22

La Regina’s efforts were more than merely a process-oriented

approach to artistry. He also brought an articulated theoretical plat-

form to support the privileged status of formal experimentation and its

end point in total abstraction. The artist had forged his method within

the Italian abstractionist tendencies of the 1950s, as defined in distinc-

19 Correspondence between Minister of Education and Instruction, Damascus, and

the Director General of UNESCO, between December 30, 1961, and July 25, 1962,

X07.21(569.1)AMS—Participation Programme in Syria—part II, UNESCO Archives,

Paris, France. The Syrians (unsuccessfully) requested funding for five faculty mem-

bers—painting, architecture, décor, design, and sculpture. The job description specified

that the candidates must speak French or Italian.

20 Elias Zayyat, interview by author, Damascus, Syria, March 23, 2010; Le Ministère d’Etat

Chargé des Affaires culturelles, “Plan de réforme de l’enseignement artistique en Syrie,

dressé par MM Jacques Ehrmann, Claude Gilbert, et Jacques PASCAL,” May 8, 1964,

carton 11, 19780692, Archives nationales, Fontainebleau, France.

21 Hammad’s comments from the article “Fi Kuliyyat al-Funun al-Jamila,” al-Ba‘th,

November 30, 1965, 6. The integration of specific technical tasks into a project-based cur-

riculum was realized by legislative decree in May 1965. See the chronology given on the

faculty website, http://damascusuniversity.edu.sy/faculties/finearts/.

22 “Fi Kuliyyat al-Funun al-Jamila.”

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tion from the figurative “realist” camp.23 Like many of the postwar

Italian painters, his sense of his artistic lineage commenced from pre-

war cubo-futurist origins, with Kandinsky and Mondrian providing

him auxiliary models of a formal generative process. La Regina’s actual

career developed by means of postwar opportunities and friendships.

After moving to Rome from Naples after the Second World War, he

managed to secure free studio space at the Villa Massimo, a former

German art academy that Italy’s postwar Ministry of Public Instruction

had claimed as enemy property and repurposed for use by a commu-

nity of artists. There he met a wide swathe of the Italian scene and

threw his hat in with the liberals. In 1952 he added his name to a text

scripted by Lucio Fontana and intended for broadcast on Italy’s nascent

television network, the “Manifesto of the Spatial Movement for

Television,” proclaiming that technological advances had freed art from

bodily supports and rendered space itself into a plastic material.24

Subsequently, La Regina worked through a number of different

abstract modes of varying radicality. In 1959, he won the national

Michetti Prize for Spazio Blu, one of a series of canvases he produced

through looping drips of paint atop colorful misty grounds, each

acknowledging the attraction of Art Informel while nonetheless project-

ing a controlled environment by means of closed rather than open com-

positions. Throughout his career, his engagement with form was

primarily constructivist or “concrete-abstractionist,” bolstered by per-

sonal experimentation with open-ended marking in multiple types of

pigment and media. In 1963, La Regina espoused what seems to have

been a characteristically universalized formulation of artistic endeavor

as a series of form-driven challenges, asserting, “Abstraction is an

international event. It poses the same problems to all peoples.”25 In

the classroom, he followed a similar ethos, leading students through a

23 This was the defining ideological split among artists in postwar Italy, typically argued as

a question of how best to depict “Italy’s changing realities.” See the texts compiled for

The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim

Museum, 1995).

24 For the English translation of the text of the manifesto, see Italian Metamorphosis, 716–

17. The artist’s involvement with the movement is documented in Guido La Regina:

Mostra antologica (Rome: De Luca Edizioni d’Arte, 1989), and mentioned in “Al-Fannan

al-Itali Guido La Regina Yatahadath ‘an al-Fann,” al-Ba‘th, July 7, 1965, 6.

25 Victor Hakim, “La vie artistique: Guido La Regina,” La Revue du Liban, October 19, 1963,

in La Regina file, historical archives, Galeria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea,

Rome (hereafter GNAM).

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sequence of experiments based upon the use of color to convey sensa-

tion and playing music as an aid to then further transition from visible

inputs to an elevated realm of beyond-visible sensation.26

The Syrian faculty at the school duly placed their ideas regarding

the best pedagogical practice under rigorous review, working to rein-

vent the idea of art education appropriate to a nascent self-sovereign

Syria. La Regina, a foreign transplant who proffered apparently univer-

salized artistic expertise, seemed to force a choice between two possible

missions, each with real and immediate implications in terms of

course offerings and curriculum: the attainment of a recognized, inter-

national standard of abstract experimentation, or the trade-based prac-

tical guarantees of traditional arts training.27 Ultimately, the school’s

faculty came to rally behind the bold proposition that their school

should not waste time setting up a pedagogical apparatus that required

students to advance through several centuries of academic methods.

They jettisoned the strictly academic curriculum in favor of shaping

the program into an experimental field for all styles, approaches, and

visions. In 1965, Hammad gave an interview to the al-Ba‘th newspaper

in which he described the school’s aim to “open doors to the future” for

its students while loosening them from the bonds of tradition that

“blinded” them to what was around them.28 Hammad also argued that

by embracing Syria’s zero-point beginning, they could gain an advan-

tage in the international arena. Whereas Italy bore the burden of its

long-standing academic traditions, he suggested, “We have begun from

a new plan in step with the spirit of new thought, new outlook, and

new Arab man.”29 In other words, the Damascus curricular project

could be seen as more than a mere equal to the Italian art schools; by

its willingness to leap into the void of anti-illusionistic creation, it could

be considered more modern.

Soon, the intensity of the pedagogical negotiations within the

school came to visibly affect the practice of professional Syrian artists

as well, as the brief consensuses reached among faculty members car-

ried over into studio work. Almost all artists with ties to the school

began to experiment with geometric shapes of color that closely resem-

26 Asma Fayoumi, interview, March 6, 2011.

27 Elias Zayyat, interview, March 23, 2010; “Fi Kuliyyat al-Funun al-Jamila.”

28 “Fi Kuliyyat al-Funun al-Jamila.”

29 Ibid.

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bled La Regina’s paintings. Hammad, for example, produced several

different series of paintings exploring Arabic letterforms as carriers for

formal values. Some canvases offered up pseudo-calligraphic forms—

maze-like cutout shapes against contrasting color blocks—in the place

of the titular Arabic Writing. Others, like the tempera painting titled

Alif, Lam, Meem in reference to three disjointed letters that can be

found at the start of several Koranic suras but carry no exegetical

meaning, treated the letterforms as a single continuous surface of tex-

tured paint. In 1965, Hammad even banded with two other faculty

members, Nassir Shoura and Elias Zayyat, to show as the short-lived

collective Group D at a gallery run by Mouna Estwani. At the time, all

three artists had begun working with processes of superimposing

layers of colors in different shapes and of different transparencies.

Shoura’s conversion to a form-driven modus operandi had been the

most dramatic; during the union with Egypt, he had won prizes for his

high-key color paintings of rural Syrian types and landscapes. By the

time of the Group D exhibition, he was producing compositions of only

color, shape, and texture.

In response to these apparently dramatic conversions to the

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abstractionist method, newspaper columnists who covered the arts

began to imagine scenarios in which every Syrian artist might suc-

cumb to the conceptual hegemony of abstraction. This provocative pos-

sibility animated the art scene, with individuals staking their positions

in relation to their perception of its desirability. As the internationalist

form of abstraction for which La Regina stood came to be treated as a

kind of contagion, what had been a primarily pedagogical debate

accrued the potential to undermine national interests. The specter of

total abstraction arising from the art school circa 1965 in fact seems to

have prompted the Directorate of Plastic Arts, a subsidiary office within

the Ministry of Culture, to attempt to exert “direction” on professional

artists. That year, the office announced a revision to the purview of the

Autumn Exhibition, specifying the theme of national art in the place of

an open field of national competition. The move proved controversial,

to the extent that the Director of Plastic Arts offered an explanation of

his office’s rationale. In his remarks, he denied that the change exerted

undue pressure on artists. On the contrary, he argued, the decision

actually freed artists from undue influence by the fleeting market

whims of galleries, such that the decision to begin purchasing works

from socialist realists and those who worked with “Arab art” was meant

as a counterbalance to the preferences of private galleries for abstrac-

tion.30 If it had been sustained as a lasting policy, this move would have

leveraged the juried exhibition as a means to maintain a corporatist

system of affiliation to the state and, possibly, neutralized the momen-

tum of the internationalist tendencies.31

The idea that going abstract might pose a threat to existing patron-

age systems of course also carries strong overtones of the cultural poli-

tics of the Cold War, in which certain preferred artistic styles act as

harbingers of a country’s predisposition to adopt one economic system

or military alliance over another, and the blocking of a style becomes

tantamount to resisting political influence. Indeed, several different

“soft” diplomacy efforts facilitated La Regina’s arrival in the country,

and these ultimately conjoined to overdetermine the reception of the

form-driven abstraction he advocated. In 1951, Italy had begun offering

30 “Al-Nass al-Kamil li-Munaqishat Nadwat Ma‘rad al-Kharif al-Sabi‘,” al-Ba‘th, November

16, 1965, 6.

31 The 1966 Autumn Exhibition does not seem to have retained the guideline stipulating

national content. Instead, the Directorate switched tacks and began promoting abstrac-

tion as a national specialty. I discuss this initiative later in the article.

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fellowships to promising Syrian students for study in its art academies

as a piece of its foreign policy in the Middle East region.32 Scores of

Syrian artists had traveled to study in Rome in the late 1950s, and some

may have already made La Regina’s acquaintance there.33 When the

Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs added a program of exhibition

exchanges with those countries for which it hoped to act as cultural

patron in the 1960s, La Regina figured in its rolls of exemplary practi-

tioners. Two La Regina paintings appeared in a 1963–64 showcase

planned expressly for display in Middle Eastern capital cities, including

Beirut (mid-December 1963) and Damascus (January 1964).34 Finally,

in an unlikely instance of synchronicity that seems best explained

as an outcome of political prerogatives, the Lebanese Ministry of

Education also featured La Regina in 1963, granting him an entire solo

exhibition at the Sursock Museum in Beirut. The Sursock framed its

celebration of La Regina with significantly more ambition than the dip-

lomatic messages of friendship and exchange that guided the group

showcases. It conceived the exhibition as a display of its enlightened

appreciation of radical abstraction at a moment when nonobjective

painters had come under attack in Italy itself.35 Here, art provides a

platform for drawing a series of national characterizations in which the

intellectuals of liberal Lebanon demonstrate an even more cultured

attitude than the Italian cultural ministry, while, if not stated directly,

the socialist leadership of Syria is understood to embody an ideological

resistance to refined, form-driven art.

Such monolithic characterizations are neither useful nor, as I

have been detailing, entirely true. Nevertheless, to many who observed

developments at the College of Fine Arts in these years, the formalist

compositional methods of La Regina in particular appeared danger-

ously opportunistic. There was a nagging feeling that the practice of

up-to-date abstraction might represent a “problem” of self-representation,

32 Notice D.G.A.P.-3, September 3, 1951, folder 852, Syria 1951–1952, Affari Politico 1950–

1957, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, Rome, Italy.

33 Syrian artist Mahmoud Daadouch even mentions La Regina’s name in a 1961 interview

with a Lebanese newspaper. Cherif Khaznadar, “Enfin, ‘Un Abstrait’ de talent en Syria:

Mahmoud Daadouch,” L’Orient Littéraire 46 (September 9, 1961).

34 Italian Painters Today, organized by the Ministries of Public Instruction and Foreign

Affairs through the Quadriennale Authority and sent to Damascus, Beirut, Tehran,

Ankara, and Tunis. Already-existing Italian Institutes of Culture hosted the exhibition

in Beirut, Tehran, and Tunis. In Damascus it was installed in the National Museum.

35 “Un Italiano a Beirut,” Vita, October 17, 1963, 52–53, in La Regina file, GNAM.

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an absenting of the located self. This finally came to a head in March

1966, in the context of an effort by the Ministry of Culture and Na-

tional Orientation to promote Syrian artists in Beirut.36 The Ministry

had hoped to court warmer relations with Lebanon by presenting a

showcase of excellent Syrian paintings to an audience that it consid-

ered key: the Lebanese intellectual classes.37 The resulting exhibition,

Contemporary Syrian Painting, installed at the Sursock Museum in

March 1966, conformed to the same lightly propagandistic model as

the Italian exhibition of 1963–64 or the La Regina retrospective. The

Syrian planners intended it to project an image of “Syria abstract”

rather than “Syria backward,” and to that end they selected a majority

of the works from the “abstract” side of the equation.38 They seem also

to have been keen to demonstrate to their audience that the bias of the

Lebanese elite against socialism would prove misguided. According to

coverage of the exhibition in the Syrian press, the Lebanese critics who

attended indeed had trouble reconciling the abstract quality of much of

the artwork on display with the professed social goals of the Syrian

state. By emphasizing the display value of abstraction as a national

product, the Syrian Ministry of Culture played to its audience’s liberal

supposition that the advanced status of a nation could be proved only by

artwork devoid of exceptionalist narrative content.

Whether or not the exhibition managed to impress Lebanese intel-

lectuals with the accomplishments of Syrian artists, it did produce one

significant negative effect. By aggregating the efforts of the legion of

abstractionists, it highlighted an element of derivativeness among

some of the artists. Onlookers were said to have congregated around

the works of Shoura and Hammad in particular, whispering derisively.

Art critic Tarek al-Sharif, whose coverage of the event for al-Ba‘th

makes a withering critique of the ministry’s preference for emptied-out

abstraction over humanist social content, gathered testimony at the

scene of the “crime” from a Sursock Museum director. Al-Sharif’s

36 The exhibition was installed from March 17 to April 3, 1966. Notably, it opened just one

month after an internal countercoup brought another faction of the Ba‘th Party into

power. I have not been able to confirm whether this coup disrupted the schedule or con-

tents of the exhibition in any way.

37 Tarek al-Sharif, “Qadiyyat Ma‘radina fi Lubnan,” al-Ba‘th, March 22, 1966, 6.

38 Ibid. Al-Sharif gives the count of forty abstract works out of seventy-five total, a percent-

age that he suggests is inconsistent with that of the exhibitions staged in Syria. A similar

policy was followed for the São Paulo biennial the previous year as well, for which “three

abstractionist artists” were selected.

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interlocutor explained that Beirutis had already seen the originals,

namely when they themselves had given La Regina a solo exhibition in

the museum’s galleries.39 Al-Sharif used this embarrassing incidence

of national derivativeness as an opportunity to throw not only the

abstract style but also the overall character of the Syrian abstraction-

ists into question. His article added the charge of elitism, writing

that such abstract work “addressed people from above.” In an al-Ba‘th

interview published the following week, artists Hammad, Zayyat, and

Fateh al-Moudarres defended the abstractionist trend against claims

that it failed to connect to Syrian needs.40 Hammad took the opportu-

nity to directly respond to al-Sharif’s criticism, asking him, “Why

do you want us positioned below? Rise, my brother, along with the

intellectuals.”41

a RecupeRating FoRm

After June 5, 1967, the debate over the abstractionists’ success or failure

in contributing to national goals was rendered moot. The war and its

fallout literally silenced most of the voices. After fleeing Syria for Italy

by car, La Regina fell into a three-year depression in Rome. Shoura

soon stopped exhibiting, starting again in earnest only several years

later. Writing from within a sense of crisis conditions, critics reclassi-

fied playful experimentation as an embarrassing dalliance, as suspect

uselessness. Obvious and legible content irrupted into the national pic-

ture plane, and the well-honed formal techniques of the preceding

years were put to use as means to express a tortured existential

response to defeat. Indeed, on June 5, 1967, itself, artists are said to

have held a spontaneous protest against Israeli aggression, bringing

posters and drawings down into the street as the rough equivalent of

screams.42 Largely abandoning previous ambitions to lead “from above”

as paragons of advanced or innovative technique, artists sought appro-

priate means to apply their techniques in direct communication with

the people. Artist Asma Fayoumi eventually described Syrian abstrac-

39 Ibid.

40 “Nadwa Thalathiyya: Yunaqish fiha: Fateh al-Moudarres, Mahmoud Hammad, Elias

Zayyat,” al-Ba‘th, March 28, 1966, 6.

41 Ibid., 7. He added, “Trust, ya ‘azizi, that we are not trying to address you from above . . .

rather [the intent is] to enrich our artistic experience, and the art of our country!”

42 Ghazi al-Khaldi, “Al-Fannanun al-Suriyyun Yashhiduna al-‘Udwan,” Al-Fannanun al-

Suriyyun Yashhiduna al-‘Udwan (1970), n.p., NM-D.

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tion as a “bubble in the sixties,” one that the national art scene soon

abandoned.43

With Syrian government offices sponsoring at least five special

exhibitions organized in response to the war in just two years, there

were myriad displays of artistic reversal in Damascus.44 When the

Autumn Exhibition opened on November 11 as regularly scheduled, five

months after the defeat, it already featured scores of new-style com-

memorative paintings in an emotionally expressive mode, including

Nazir Nabaa’s painting of a stricken martyr seen in the first figure in

this article. The brief text that the Ministry of Culture composed for

the occasion praised artists’ efforts to produce a fitting record of the

“most serious events to have befallen the Arab community (umma).”

It also affirmed the historicity of these new efforts. Referencing the

“black date of June 5, 1967,” the ministry commended the artists’

desire to convert their painful suffering into a word of warning to the

world’s conscience. Indeed, a bureaucratic logic of benchmarks runs

strongly through these authenticating ministry texts; the exhibition

catalogue not only (positively) assessed the outcome of artistic efforts to

date, it went on to forecast that artists would continue to play a positive

role in every future stage of national action, occupying the “front lines

in realms of effort, work, and production.”45 Even the euphemism for

the defeat that ministerial texts preferred—Naksa, or Setback—served

as an expression of the national need to expend all energies in the

name of recovery and continued advance.

This national rhetoric of effort, work, and production produced a

hostile climate for artistic activity that lacked apparent purpose or mes-

sage, even retroactively so. For example, when al-Ba‘th published a

43 Rashed Issa, “’Arsam Ruh al-Ashyaʾ wa ‘Itraha,” in Asma Fayoumi (Damascus: Ayyam

Gallery, 2008), 22.

44 In August, the Directorate of Fine Arts oversaw an exhibition titled Aggression; in late

November, officials mounted a second special exhibition titled Mobilization. The roster

of special exhibitions continued into 1968 with two: Steadfastness and Armed Struggle,

and In Support of the Work of the Fedayeen. The museum carried on with its program of

temporary exhibits as well, hosting shows of Chinese painting, Yugoslavian art, and

Soviet art in the autumn of 1967; an internal memo emphasized the importance of con-

tinuing operations in spite of the state of emergency in the country. National Museum

Conservator Muhammed Abu al-Farraj al-Ash to the General Directorate of Antiquities

and Museums, December 21, 1967, NM-D.

45 Untitled text signed “The Ministry,” Autumn Exhibition 1967 (handbill), n.p., NM-D. Also

see al-Ba‘th’s coverage of the same exhibition, “Ma‘rad al-Kharif,” al-Ba‘th, November 17,

1967, 3. Its subheadline informs readers that the 132-piece exhibition of works by sixty

artists included thirty-five paintings on “the Naksa and the Battle.”

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series of assessments of the adequacy of the artistic response to the

Naksa on the occasion of the 1968 Autumn Exhibition, most of the

authors singled out the abstractionist trend of the preceding years for

derision. Nabaa’s review article, which bore the subheadline “our plas-

tic life,” hit especially hard against the decadence of the abstraction-

ists.46 He characterized the movement as a flimsy promotional effort

that had blindly tried to “move into Western abstraction without any

development or additions,” belittling its curricula as a hollow attempt

to chart a shortcut into the “classes of the avant-garde,” and its pre-

tenses as “buffoonery.” By the time of the 1969 Autumn Exhibition,

the art scene’s wholesale rejection of this kind of form-driven art could

be expressed in statistical shorthand alone. At a roundtable of leading

artists and critics conveyed for the occasion by al-Tali‘a, the weekly

political-cultural supplement to the al-Ba‘th newspaper, Tarek al-Sharif

cited numerical data on its waning fortunes as an argument for the

inappropriateness of abstraction to the Arab experience.47 By his quick

summary, in 1966, 50 percent of the paintings shown in Syria’s na-

tional exhibition had been abstract. In 1969, not a single one was. For

al-Sharif, the disappearance of the abstractionists was a laudable devel-

opment. An “abyss of shapes,” he argued, could not offer Syrian artists

sufficient means to contend with the events that had come upon their

community. By 1972, the critic had added another stage to his narrative

of the Syrian artistic coming of age. In nearly each of the ten essays he

authored on the country’s most prominent artists, the events of 1967

served as a threshold for the featured artist’s entry into the next “expe-

rience” or “stage” in an ongoing process of integrating the contents of

the self with the needs of humankind. For example, according to al-

Sharif, the events prompted Zayyat to reconsider his role as an artist,

recognize his responsibility to express the crisis lived by the sons of his

country, and accordingly take up human forms as the source for that

expression.48

As the need for more representative forms of cultural expression

gained in recognition, the idea of “expressive realism” became a kind of

byword, particularly among the progressive artist-critics with ties to

46 Nazir Nabaa, “Ma‘rad al-Kharif al-‘Ashir,” al-Ba‘th, November 17, 1968, 6.

47 Al-Tali‘a Arts Editor, “Nadwat al-Tali‘a: Ma‘rad al-Kharif al-Hadi ‘Ashr,” al-Tali‘a,

November 22, 1969, 41.

48 Tarek al-Sharif, ‘Ishrun Fannanan min Suria (Damascus: Ministry of Culture, 1972),

46.

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communist organizations.49 The guiding ethos of expressive realism in

this period can be squarely positioned within the cultural discourse of

the Third World liberation movements of the Organization of Solidarity

of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (established in Cuba

in 1967). The artists and artworks associated with expressive realism

all endeavored to use the psychological reality of images to go beyond

represented phenomena, generating existential allegories from a basis

in experience rather than imagination or depiction.50 When the idea of

the expressive realist artwork was introduced within the stagist rhetoric

of much of the official art criticism produced in Syria after 1967, it was

construed as a transitional phase in a longer process of cultural recov-

ery. Taking the great wells of tragic experience in its originating cir-

cumstances as raw material, this artwork involved fashioning raw

feeling into a compellingly structured expression of those real, felt

conditions.

Nabaa’s writing about expressive realism in al-Ba‘th is explicit that

this approach offered artists the only appropriate means of contribut-

ing to the Arab struggle after June 5, 1967. In a 1968 review of an exhi-

bition of paintings by Palestinian-Jordanian artist Ahmad Nawash at

the Arab Cultural Center in Damascus, Nabaa proclaims a new set of

conditions for artistic creation, writing that the “latest events that

occurred on the land of the Arab nation” now compel artists to seek

a comprehensive means to treat the experience of the community

(umma).51 Nawash’s paintings, which depict dystopic landscapes peo-

pled by wraith-like figures merging into dirtied grounds, do not imme-

diately present themselves as constructive or agentive works, and Nabaa

devotes the majority of the review to establishing the advanced nature

of the artistry on display. After warning the reader that the paintings

might at first appear “abstract,” Nabaa argues that they actually work

49 Artists with close connections to revolutionary organizations gave it the most emphasis,

including Nabaa and Burhan Karkutly. Ghazi al-Khaldi, a leftist who had become more

fully aligned with the Ba‘th Party, was another exponent.

50 Concetta Carestia Greenfield, “New South American Cinema: From Neo-Realism to

Expressive Realism,” Latin American Literary Review 1, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 111–23. For a

general discussion of the expressive realist formulation of art as a symptom of the still

widely held (and antitheoretical) hope for a centered subject and a homogenized past-

present, see Terry Atkinson, “Phantoms of the Studio,” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1

(1990): 49–62.

51 Nazir Nabaa, “Al-Fannan Huwa Wajh al-Waqi‘ al-Ta‘biri li-l-Mujtama‘,” al-Ba‘th,

September 16, 1968, reprinted and translated into English in Ahmad Nawash (Amman:

Darat al Funun, 2008), 6–9.

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with human material at an almost suprasensible depth. He even nar-

rates a circuit of activated reception in which their purposefully amal-

gamated palette acts directly upon the body, conveying an awareness of

the “hot humidity coursing through the veins of the painting” and all

but interpellating the viewer into a guerrilla revolution. Throughout,

Nabaa marshals detailed formal analysis in support of his dominant

prescriptive point: the events of 1967 had made it incumbent on artists

to express internal reality—including real, unformed emotion, unartic-

ulated sensibilities, and desire and hope—as fully as its external repre-

sentation. Nabaa began to apply the same depth criteria to the earliest

artistic responses to the defeat as well, calling them “bad, hasty, and

immature.”52 In his comments at the al-Tali‘a roundtable, Nabaa de-

scribed the relationship between the country’s artists and form as if it

were a pendulum, suggesting that the group had initially swung too far

in the direction of emotion and away from skillful technique and was

now coming back down to a plastic equilibrium. For Nabaa, those who

were serious about the cause had to show pain but also promise inter-

nal strength.

In column after column of Syrian arts writing, 1968–70, artists

and critics chronicled the dramatic return of content as a motivating

concern. At the same 1969 roundtable at which al-Sharif and Nabaa

spoke out, Ghassan Sibai offered what may have been the more typical ac-

count of the waning fortunes of abstractionism as artists made fum-

bling attempts to adequately respond to the defeat. In his view, the jolt

of June 5, 1967, had simply caught artists short. Whereas they had

already been engaged in the natural and rewarding acquisition of an

abstract language through exploratory formations of color and pure

shapes, the Naksa had forced altogether new thoughts and experiences

upon them, requiring other means to express them that were not yet

ready at hand.53 The shrill displays of wartime atrocities that had first

appeared after the war, he argued, were a simple function of that un-

preparedness and would be easily righted after a period of redirected

plastic experimentation. Another artist, Fateh al-Moudarres, even

spoke out against the attitude of remorse that had taken hold, defend-

ing the validity of nonobjective painting as a pursuit (even though he

rarely practiced it himself). Arguing against the move to isolate content

52 “Nadwat al-Tali‘a,” 42.

53 Ibid.

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as the only valid concern during a time of extreme political “events,”

al-Moudarres suggested that nonobjective abstraction actually com-

prised the most difficult type of expression of all, as it represented the

interface between the greatest rationality and the greatest nonverbal

dumbness.54 After adding that the artist who escapes from the abstract

does not understand the basics of art, as abstraction underlies the

structure of every painting, he called al-Sharif out directly and asked

him to respond.

As the purposefully unresolved nature of this exchange between

these artists suggests, the particular object of the Syrian avant-garde

had found no one stable formation in November 1969. The participants

54 Ibid.

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at the al-Tali‘a roundtable, a discussion that editors had consciously

styled as the face of an intellectually engaged artistic vanguard, seem

to have conducted their negotiations from a recognizably impossible

position, that of a supporting role beside the national and para-national

drives to mobilization. As they debated the relative merits of the 1969

Autumn Exhibition, they proceeded by mining old concepts and terms,

partially recalling their previous value while testing their new and con-

tingent significance to post-1967 practice. Throughout the roundtable

transcript, the meaning of the word form (shakl) remains notably am-

biguous as a coordinate, sometimes suggesting external “shape” or

“feature” while at other times pointing toward essential starting mate-

rial, with a productive oscillation between these two poles appearing

even within the commentary of single artists. The initial comments of

Naim Ismail, for example, seem to ratify a categorical division between

an artwork’s form (al-shakl) and content (al-madmun), which should

provide a basis for a critical analysis of its value.55 Later, however, he

beseeches his colleagues to move their discussion past the categorical

question of whether “art before June was abstract (tajrid), and art after

it plastic (tashkil),” suggesting that the more crucial question must

issue from the problem of connecting the artwork to society.56 In this,

the second statement he makes around a notion of form, Ismail assigns

quite another meaning to the word plastic, that of carefully formed, leg-

ible material for which the playful abstraction of the mid-1960s had

become a foil. Al-Sharif then quickly rebuts Ismail’s refusal to recog-

nize the false antinomy between abstraction and plasticity by respond-

ing, “True, but . . . why does the artist give up form (shakl) when he

wants to express a social issue?” Al-Sharif’s move to return “form” to

its standard oppositional relationship with social responsibility in turn

met with a flip riposte from al-Moudarres, who answered, “because it is

simpler [as a means].” Al-Moudarres’s final charge of lazy incompe-

tence seems to echo Sibai’s recognition of the void that the radically

new events of 1967 had opened within artistic practice. But it also goes

further, drawing a strict line of qualitative judgment by refusing to ever

commend artists for abdicating form, regardless of circumstance or

good intention.

55 Ibid., 39.

56 Ibid., 42. He argues that if the latter criteria were emphasized over surface questions of

style, then it would be possible for a fully abstract artist to forge greater ties to society

than a representational artist, or vice versa.

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conclusion

Critical assessments of form-driven artistic practice have long roamed

across the ideological spectrum, from liberal to leftist. “Formalism”

has come to serve as a kind of categorical catchall, suggesting a deroga-

tory “outward show” or the dilettantish “art for art’s sake,” or promis-

ing a more committed engagement with a form as a latent organizing

principle.57 In Syria at the end of the 1960s, an emergent notion of the

essential plasticity of the avant-garde artwork condensed these possibil-

ities along an increasingly unstable division between form as a category

and plastic formation as an avant-garde quality. With the full spectrum

of possible interpretations of the social value of formalist practice find-

ing representation in the art writing produced in these years, the idea

of an avant-garde cultural project gained both urgency and volatility.

The abstractionist debates of the mid-1960s represent the most

resolved precursor formation to these later disputations of the Syrian

avant-garde, and thus the most vulnerable to punitive disassembly.

These debates, which established La Regina’s model of form-driven

painterly composition as a transnational tactic of idealized construction

even while it critiqued it, drew sustenance from the state’s emotional

and monetary investments in technological training as a universally

valid system of progress. The promotional initiatives of the Syrian art

school faculty had the effect of underwriting a version of the social role

for art that made art into a constructive activity with the potential to

enable the processes of collective emancipation. This historical point is

crucial, as the primary intellectual and political coordinates for abstrac-

tion in Syria did not reflect the constitutive individualism of American-

led modernism or its European Informel offshoots. Syrian artists them-

selves ratified the importance of this difference after June 5, 1967, as

in the characteristically evocative explanation that Elias Zayyat began

to provide for the “return of human sources” in his paintings. When

asked about the reason for the new contents of his paintings, Zayyat

explained that after June 5, 1967, he had felt a need to have the voice of

humans present.58 The persuasive power of this otherwise deadpan

statement comes from its appropriation of a well-known and oft-quoted

statement by Pablo Picasso in defense of the right to paint with non-

57 As demonstrated by Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 139.

58 “Nadwat al-Tali‘a,” 42.

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verbal plastic meaning: “Everyone wants to understand painting. Why

not try to understand the songs of a bird?”59 Zayyat’s answer pointedly

revises the equivalent weight that Picasso’s statement had accorded to

the assembly of possible voices, restoring preeminence to humanly sen-

sible speech over merely sensuous birdsong. When painters in Syria

chose to move their paintings into a space of recognizable speech, their

move required not only the refusal of the purely technical language of

inhuman machinery (one type of abstraction) but also a step beyond

the use of preverbal elements like line and color (another type of

abstraction).

The 1967 defeat in itself did not reset the terms for an avant-garde

artistic practice in Syria. The attempts to recover from the defeat that

followed certainly did, however, particularly the national effort to place

the defeat into the future anterior realm of a “setback.” As artists and

critics acted on the impulse to mobilize their artistic production, they

quickly produced the idea of plasticity as a site of artistic resolution

between form and content. Concomitantly, the idea found traction as a

description of the affective power of artistic representation. As a piece

of the unabashed humanism they recovered from the cold silence of

the abstractionist efforts of the 1960s, artists explored a new formula-

tion of the art object as a kind of nascent social sculpture. Nabaa’s 1968

review of the revolutionary atmospheres of Ahmad Nawash’s paint -

ings presented one kind of narrative of a plastic network of effects.

Similarly, as we saw, his 1971 poster design can be engaged as an

attempt at its embodiment. To activate the poster as an endorsement

of the rightness of a named and armed liberation movement, Nabaa

used the fragmented black surface of printed form to convey sensation

to as yet unnamed and unknown audiences. The purity of the formal

presence of that black pigment once served to mark the effort as “art,”

meaning a category defined by innovation, technological advancement,

and expertise. Now, it also stands as a sign of the plasticity of Syria’s

avant-garde and the fleeting promise of an actionable politics.

The Syrian artists who located themselves at the forefront of a new

cultural formation after June 5, 1967, did not understand form and con-

59 From Christian Zervos, “Conversation avec Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 7, no. 10 (Paris 1935):

178. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Syrian artists cited this sentiment in defense of

abstraction. Al-Moudarres had already mentioned it at the roundtable as part of his

defense of the difficulty and nobility of nonobjective painting.

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tent to be permanent antinomies. Instead, form provided them an occa-

sion to demonstrate mastery over internationally regulated formal

techniques, such that the content of an artwork was its testimony to its

own artistic discipline and humanist ethic. The only opposition to

abstract art that Syrian artists maintained consistently was their oppo-

sition to its ostensibly mindless qualities, its status as an inhumane

relic of past rather than future action. In fact, they tended to privilege

the categorical spaces of “abstraction” and “form” over mere emotion or

reportage, recognizing their inalienable value as the substrata of fully

artistic expression. Avant-garde artists in Syria may have given up for-

malism in exchange for social issues, but it was to plastic form that

they returned so as to discipline their testimony and remake it as a

social agent.

n o t e  Research for this article was made possible by support from the Fulbright U.S.

Student Program; a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research

Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and a Wilma

Leonard Turner-Ann Marie Turner Endowed Scholarship from PEO International.