Producing the Local: The Visual Arts in Beirut

Abstract

In a 2002 lecture at Home Works, Beirut’s contemporary art festival, writer and cultural critic Abbas Beydoun claimed that Lebanon’s internationalism had led to derivative cultural production. The well known critic’s comments evoked an angry outburst from members of his predominantly Lebanese audience of young artists and cultural workers. To varying degrees, however, this characterization of Beiruti culture repeats and prefigures descriptions of the city as a meeting point between East and West. Indeed, Beirut’s reputation as a multi-linguistic and cross-cultural Mediterranean port is traced to the latter half of the nineteenth century when the city became the capital of an Ottoman province and followed as a regional center for missionary, political, and cultural activities. Moreover, Beydoun’s characterization did not always carry such a negative connotation. This paper begins to trace the ways in which the visual arts is a field for producing, rather than reflecting, Beirut’s cosmopolitanism. To do so, I look at two historical moments pivotal in the institutionalization of the visual arts. The first is that of Daoud Corm (1852-1930), the city’s first professional easel painter whose career ran from the Ottoman period through the French Mandate (1920-1943). The second is the decades of the 1960s and 70s, the city’s heyday as a regional cultural capital when a number of artists and activists established a gallery system, further expanding the private sector’s consumption of painting and sculpture.