Beirut in the 60s: An Enticing Locale for U.S. Cultural Diplomacy

By Emma Andersson

During the Cold War, the United States deployed cultural diplomacy interventions to augment its influence vis-à-vis its political opponent, the Soviet Union. American government officials targeted nations associated with the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement, a forum of mostly developing countries that refused to cooperate with pro-Soviet Eastern or American-led Western geopolitical blocs during the Cold War, and advocated a non-polarizing course of action based on mutual respect and non-aggression. Though American officials initially curated and circulated art exhibits in these nations, they opted for a new form of “soft power propaganda” when they sent American John Ferren to Beirut, Lebanon as an artist in residence. While the American perspective argues that Ferren introduced abstraction to the region during his exchange, contemporaneous Lebanese paintings and mapping data suggest that the city boasted strong cultural foundations prior to the American’s arrival. Rather than attribute Ferren with sparking Beirut’s artistic development, I propose that Beirut’s existing status as a cultural hub within the Middle East rendered it attractive to American diplomatic efforts and shaped Ferren creatively, as revealed by the evolution of his oeuvre following his time abroad.

 Government officials specifically selected the contemporary painter John Ferren to represent the United States and its diplomatic endeavors because of his tendency towards abstraction. A shift from pictorial representation in favor of colorful expressiveness characterized abstract art produced in the 60s,[1] and the U.S. State Department identified its free-form gesturalism as an embodiment of two American values: freedom and individualism.[2][3] Officials anticipated that Ferren would disseminate abstract painting, and by proxy an appreciation for American ideals, via a lecture series and a cumulative exhibition. The Americo-centric perspective, set forth by the art historian Marshall Price, establishes that Ferren "played a significant role in bringing contemporary abstract painting to Beirut”[4] and stimulated the city’s creative atmosphere, allowing its status to grow thereafter by virtue of his intervention. However, an analysis of Beirut’s art scene throughout the 1950s and 60s suggests that the city held regional prestige prior to Ferren’s arrival, and the emergent counter argument posits that the city’s pre-existing status drew the American government to it in the first place.

 Sarah Rogers, a scholar of modern and contemporary art in the Arab world, claims that Ferren was “deployed only to assert Beirut’s cosmopolitan status,”[5] a legacy of French colonialism that manifested itself in liberal economic policies, a multi-sectarian political composition, and connections to Lebanese Christian elites in Europe. Newspapers like L’Orient corroborated Beirut’s presence as the intellectual epicenter of the Middle East at this time, even surpassing the status of Cairo.[6] Against that backdrop, a vibrant art milieu blossomed. Lebanese artists, many educated in France, seized the opportunity to integrate their native traditions with inspiration drawn from the West, forging an urban identity not wholly Eastern nor Western. Unlike their counterparts residing in Syria and Lebanon, where pan-Arabism dominated as the national visual identity, artists in Lebanon resisted the temptation to link their art to nationalism or religion. The absence of a “vernacular visual language”[7] granted Lebanese creators the freedom to explore contemporary art without the restrictions imposed by political or social expectations, allowing diverse forms to come forth and yielding a “fragmented” form of distinctly Lebanese modernism.[8] So, rather than reading Ferren’s residency as the catalyst of city's eminence, it seems instead that officials named Beirut to be the American artist’s site owing to its esteemed position as a “nexus of transnational Arab artistic encounter, aesthetic experimentation, intellectual debate and political contestation”[9] with liberal political leanings and greater stability relative to its neighbors in the Middle East. Although many individuals worked in the Lebanese capital during its Golden Age, this paper highlights two of its most influential contributors, Shafic Abboud and Aref el Rayess, to elucidate the existence of modern abstract art in Beirut predating Ferren’s coming.

 To disprove the claim that Ferren brought abstraction to Beirut via an evaluation of earlier Lebanese creations, a dissection of Ferren’s style and its idea of “abstraction” proves necessary. Ferren abided by the guidelines of abstract art, and Blue Green Ground (1961) encapsulates his pre-Beirut visual language, which the United States government viewed as the epitome of American modernity. Ferren strays away from strict form, using marks of different colors – pinks, blues, greens, and other tones present themselves – and sizes – some thin, others thick – that he positions randomly in the foreground. He colors outside of the lines; some strokes overlap, and others extend beyond the red box in the background, emanating rebellious limitlessness. The “dense tangle of frenetic strokes” evokes a sense of disorder, as the streaks run in all directions and fail to construct a single image.[10] The pronounced “gestural brushwork” of Blue Green Ground (1961), produced before his stint in Beirut, repeats throughout Ferren’s composition. If wild brushstrokes and vivid colors communicate abstraction, then the Lebanese artists under review likewise deserve that same categorization. Analyses of two works, one by Abboud and the other by el Rayess, draw attention to their formal similarities with Ferren, proving that Lebanese nationals engaged in abstract creation prior to American intervention during the Cold War.

Figure 1. John Ferren, Blue Green Ground, 1961, oil on canvas, 114.3 x 127 cm.

Born in Lebanon in 1926, Shafic Abboud took up painting around the age of fifteen and moved to Paris in 1947 in pursuit of a career in art. France remained his permanent residence, but he maintained a connection with his native Lebanon as he traveled back and forth between Paris and Beirut for exhibitions and salons throughout the 1950s and 60s. An assessment of his oeuvre shows that Abboud transitioned towards abstraction as early as the late 1940s, well before any encounter with Ferren, and that his familiarity with the form continued to develop as he engaged with art circles in both locales.[11] He conveys modernity in his oil-on-canvas paintings via the amalgamation of colors, textures, and shapes. His untitled 1960s piece employs multiple colors of diverse shades, though without any clear scheme relating them or any finer lines preventing them from bleeding into one another. Like Ferren, Abboud lets his brushstrokes interfere with one another, creating incoherence. His choice to craft two separate perimeters that do not align showcases an additional commonality with Ferren’s notion of contemporaneity. Inspired by the Lebanese topography, the loosely formed structures reference a modern approach to landscape painting.[12] The central blue blob represents a sun, and a horizon line spans the canvas to separate the sky from the land. Abboud propels his brush in all directions, creating textural chaos that covers certain spots incompletely. Inconsistency results, communicating dynamism that resurfaces throughout his oils.[13] Free-flowing with hues from across the rainbow and a mix of circular and linear elements, Abboud’s untitled oil-on-canvas (1961) speaks to one mode of abstraction, confirming its early presence in Beirut.

Figure 2. Shafic Abboud, Untitled, 1960, oil on canvas mounted cardboard, 26 x 34 cm.

Like Abboud, Aref el Rayess was born in Lebanon in the 1920s and relocated to Paris in the 1950s to deepen his artistic practice. He officially moved back to Beirut in 1967, but his influence on the city’s art scene began in the 50s, during which he held several local showings. El Rayess further demonstrates the avant-garde tendencies of Lebanese artists working earlier than Ferren’s post, suggesting that its lifespan predated American diplomacy efforts. His untitled oil-on-hardboard (1961) captures the abstract essence of his portfolio, which earned him several awards from the Lebanese government. The painting uses a bright color palette, akin to pieces produced by Ferren and Abboud, though the varying hues of orange, yellow, and blue better relate to one another. He incorporates more linearity than Abboud, crafting geometric shapes of distinct brush textures. Black outlines delineate certain figures while others stand alone, casting shadows and portraying depth in select locations. The mess of individual attributes relays a break from tradition and perhaps alludes to the Beirut cityscape, implying that el Rayess also found inspiration in his environment. Though el Rayess focuses on urban motifs, while Abboud attends to natural landscapes, both illustrate modernity through these obscure portrayals of their surroundings. Considered together, the creations of Abboud and el Rayess not only highlight Beirut’s characteristic modernity, but their differences reflect the citywide artistic diversity allowed by the flourishing cosmopolitanism of Beirut during the Lebanese Golden Age. Abboud and el Rayess serve as just two painters residing in Beirut at this time, but their abstract pieces, produced prior to Ferren’s residency, disprove the claim that the American artist introduced the style to the region and instead indicate that its transformation occurred independently of American diplomacy.

Figure 3. Aref el Rayess, Untitled, 1961, oil on hardboard, 24.8 x 20.3 cm.

More concretely, city maps tracking Beirut’s institutions and exhibitions show that its artistic progression commenced before any American intervention. Ferren’s residency, the primary form of American cultural involvement in Beirut, did not commence until 1963, well into Beirut’s Golden Age spanning from 1955 to 1975. A mapping database for this twenty-year period created by the Saradar Collection[14], a private collection devoted to preserving and sharing Lebanese art, records eleven art spaces and two artists in 1955 Beirut. 1957 witnessed the birth of the Lebanese Artists Association and domestic exhibitions proliferated from there, including el Rayess’s showing at Beirut’s Galeri Alecco Saab in 1958. By 1958, eleven spaces had developed into fifteen and five artists called Beirut home as a result of the migratory trend away from Europe and back to the up-and-coming capital. Beirut contained eighteen spaces and had reportedly hosted twenty-one cumulative exhibitions as of 1962, less than ten years into its Golden Age and still predating Ferren’s entrance. Specifically, the advent of Lebanese-owned and operated Gallery One, Beirut’s first commercial gallery, in the year of Ferren’s arrival speaks to the strength of the city's art scene, as Lebanese people themselves invested in local cultural initiatives. Ferren remained in Beirut for just one year, leaving another ten years of Lebanese cultural maturation in which he did not actively participate. In the decade following Ferren’s departure, tens more galleries like Gallery One opened, indicating the autonomy of the city’s artistic expansion through 1975. These maps tracking the trajectory of Beirut’s creative advancement from 1955, nearly ten years before Ferren’s coming, through 1975, nearly ten years after his exit, evince that the American did not spur its onset, but rather that it actualized independently.

Taken together, an evaluation of Lebanese production and the supplementary mapping data substantiate Beirut’s reputation as the cosmopolitan “showplace of the Arab world,”[15] a rank that rendered it desirable for American intervention. A comparison of Ferren’s work from before and after his year-long tenure hints that he experienced a greater transformation than he incited, further advancing the case against his role as the stimulant of Beirut’s art scene. As the productions of Abboud (1960) and el Rayess (1961) display, a diverse visual culture existed prior to Ferren’s 1963 appearance. Rogers even classifies his interactions with local art circles as “almost negligible,”[16] and the mapping data illustrates that Beirut’s cultural expansion persisted after he left. On a different note, a study of Ferren’s oeuvre uncovers a stylistic shift immediately following his residency, implying that the Lebanese artistic sphere influenced Ferren more than Ferren influenced it. Prior to his time in Beirut, Ferren strayed away from strict form and employed diverse shapes, color, and textures, as elaborated earlier. However, these elements “gave way to a much more rigorous, hard-edge type of abstraction.”[17] Sidon #3 (1965) encompasses the American’s evolution. The piece diverges from his earlier free-form conception and tends towards the geometric motifs and grid-based symmetries characteristic of Islamic art and architecture.[18] Ferren transitioned away from the chaotic nature of his pre-Beirut work, instead using “sparkling Mediterranean light and colors and a new broad-brushed simplicity” to give greater coherence to his post-Beirut creations.[19] On top of this, the central almond shape repeated throughout the image conjures up the “spherialized decoration of Islamic architecture,”[20] and most plainly, Ferren names this piece after the Lebanese city of Sidon, located twenty-five miles south of Beirut. These changes occurred directly after his return from Beirut, indicating that his overseas exchange influenced his artistic approach to a noticeable extent.

Figure 4. John Ferren, Sidon #3, 1965, oil on canvas, 102.2 x 127 cm.

The decision of American government officials to send Ferren to Lebanon as a resident artist, motivated by Cold War geopolitics, did not instigate Beirut’s artistic development. Rather, American officials selected Beirut for its elevated reputation relative to its regional neighbors. Though Ferren engaged with Beirut’s artistic community during his time there, a comparative assessment of contemporaneous Lebanese painters and complementary mapping data proves that the city boasted a strong abstract art tradition before any American intervention. Because Beirut fostered intimate creative circles earlier than American cultural diplomacy efforts, reviewing other historical conditions presents as essential. Although the tendency to attribute all progress within developing nations to Western engagement prevails, the case of Beirut’s sovereign artistic success emphasizes the need to examine the contributions made by domestic creators. Moving beyond the scope of Beirut’s art scene, development more generally must be understood first in terms of its internal actors, then subsequently in terms of the accompanying external forces, as the Lebanese case exemplifies.

Endnotes

[1] Sarah Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 62.

[2] Marshall N. Price, “John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction,” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2011), 220-21, ProQuest (3469871).

[3] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 67.

[4] Price, “John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction,” 16.

[5] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 114.

[6] Kristin V. Monroe, “Circulation, Modernity, and Urban Space in 1960s Beirut,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 2 (2017): 190-91.

[7] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 19.

[8] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 19.

[9] Zeina Maasri, “Introduction: Beirut in the Global Sixties: Design, Politics and Translocal Visuality,” in Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 12.

[10] Price, “John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction,” 227.

[11] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 93.

[12] Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, “‘Composition’, Shafic Abboud, C. 1957-8,” Tate, 2013, accessed February 15, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abboud-composition-t13976.

[13] Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, “‘Composition’, Shafic Abboud, C. 1957-8,” Tate, 2013, accessed February 15, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abboud-composition-t13976.

[14]Sam Bardaouil and Tim Fellrath, “Perspective #1: Witness to a Golden Age: Mapping Beirut’s Art Scene 1955-1975,” Saradar Collection, 2018, accessed February 15, 2023, http://saradarperspective.com/perspective1/map.

[15] Nadim Dimechkie quoted in Price, “John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction,” 220.

[16] Rogers, Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances, 61.

[17] Price, “John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction,” 222.

[18] Carol Bier, “Geometry in Islamic Art,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (2015), 2, accessed February 15, 2023, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10111-1.

[19] Richard T. Arndt, “The Arts of Vision,” in The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, Inc, 2005), 373.

[20] John Ferren quoted in Rogers, 119.

Author Bio

Emma Andersson

is a third-year undergraduate student at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studies International Studies and Sociology in a dual-major program for global development studies. Her academic interests concern the intersection of gender and environmental issues, and she will further pursue that work when she begins her Masters of Environmental Policy at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) this fall. Emma contributes regularly to The News-Letter at Johns Hopkins and her personal writing has been published in The Blue Marble Review.