Modern Masters

Saliba Douaihy started his early art training at the studio of Habib Srour in Beirut. Awarded a grant to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris from 1932 to 1936, he went on to continue his training in Rome. On his return to Lebanon he developed his practice, moving between religious and secular themes and natural and abstract scenes. Douaihy was named Cultural Representative of Lebanon by the country’s president in 1950, who tasked him with travelling to the United States in order to promote Lebanon as a cultural destination. It was in New York that the artist explored new trends in the city's modern art scene, including the emerging abstract expressionist movement. It was at this point that the artist's abstract minimalist style began to appear. From the collection of French Industrialist, Jacques Guérin, Composition Abstraite, painted in circa 1975, is made up of a flat field of olive green, broken up, towards the edges of the composition, by narrow, angled fields of cobalt blue, yellow, white, red and orange.

Celebrated for his pioneering abstract painting, Chafic Abboud was inspired by the colourful landscapes of his youth in Lebanon. Incorporating folkloric themes as well as Byzantine and Orthodox Christian symbolism into his work, the artist developed a rich, visual lexicon that greatly influenced the generation of artists that followed him. Abboud studied art at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Beirut, from 1945 to 1947. In 1947, he travelled to Paris where he worked in the ateliers of a number of artists such as Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote and studied at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts. Permanently settling in Paris, Abboud's work was featured in the first Paris Biennale in 1959.  A retrospective of the artist was held at the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2011. A cacophony of loosely painted, brightly hued, layered colour fields of varying shapes and sizes make up the 1964 work, Une Maison, its 1965 sister painting,Composition Bleue et Orange is held at Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Jewad Selim's untitled 1957 painting depicts a domestic scene featuring a lone, stylised figure staring into the distance. The figure nonchalantly leans on a piece of furniture and is flanked by a traditional coffee pot to one side and a potted plant to the other, with the composition centered by a perfectly square window emphasising the roundness of the subject's daydreaming face. Celebrated for his part in establishing a modern Iraqi aesthetic that combined ancient Iraqi motifs with the modalities of Western artistic movements, the artist's studies in Paris and Rome were disrupted by the outbreak of war. Selim resumed his education at the Slade in London from 1946 to 1948, where his exposure to the work of artists like Henry Moore made a lasting impact on his practice. The artist later went on to establish the Baghdad Modern Art Group along with Shakir Hassan Al Said, in 1951.