UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Adham Isma'il's Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56v6p5g5 Journal Muqarnas, 34(1) ISSN 0732-2992 Author Lenssen, A Publication Date 2017 DOI 10.1163/22118993_03401P009 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56v6p5g5 https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ LEIDEN | BOSTON 2017 Muqarnas An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World Editor Gülru Necipoğlu Managing Editor Maria J. Metzler volume 34 Sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV CONTENTS Heba Mostafa, From the Dome of the Chain to Miḥrāb Dāʾūd: The Transformation of an Umayyad Commemorative Site at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .       1 Julio Navarro, Fidel Garrido, and Íñigo Almel, The Agdal of Marrakesh (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries): An Agricultural Space for Caliphs and Sultans. Part I: History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        23 Ana Marija Grbanovic, The Ilkhanid Revetment Aesthetic in the Buqʿa Pir-i Bakran: Chaotic Exuberance or a Cunningly Planned Architectural Revetment Repertoire? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        43 Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, An Italian Renaissance Gate for the Khan: Visual Culture in Early Modern Crimea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        85 Michele Lamprakos, Life in the Khans: The Venetians in Early Ottoman Aleppo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        125 Muzaffer Özgüleş, A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space: The Galata New Mosque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        157 Cristelle Baskins, Writing the Dead: Pietro della Valle and the Tombs of Shirazi Poets . . . . . . . . . . . .        197 Anneka Lenssen, Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria . . . . . . . .        223 NOTES AND SOURCES Bernhard Schirg, (Re)writing the Early Biography of the Alhambra’s Fountain of Lions: New Evidence from a Neo-Latin Poem (1497) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        259 Yui Kanda, Kashan Revisited: A Luster-Painted Ceramic Tombstone Inscribed with a Chronogram Poem by Muhtasham Kashani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        273 Guy Burak, Between Istanbul and Gujarat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        287 For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 223 AnnekA Lenssen AdhAm IsmAʿIL’s ArAbesque: The mAkIng of rAdIcAL ArAb PAInTIng In syrIA Muqarnas Online 34-1 (2017) 223-258 An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World DOI: 10.1163/22118993_03401P009 ISSN 0732-2992 (print version) ISSN 2211-8993 (online version) MUQJ This article was the winner of the 2014 Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize, awarded by the Historians of Islamic Art Association. In the final days of 1951, the painter Adham Ismaʿil (1922–63), a quiet but ambitious artist in syria’s nascent national art world, sat down to compose a letter to an Iraqi colleague, the artist Jamil hamoudi (1924–2003), who was then studying in Paris.1 Ismaʿil had been follow- ing hamoudi’s frequent dispatches to beirut’s al-Adīb, a leading Arabic-language cultural journal, which gave detailed reports on the main players in postwar Paris and the city’s ascendant trends in abstract art.2 ham- oudi, who claimed the role of both patriotic participant- observer and promoter of Arab artists in the metropole, had even issued a call to artists of the Arab countries requesting that they send him reports and photographs of their work for compilation into a survey text.3 Ismaʿil, meanwhile, as he wrote to hamoudi that december, had just weathered a distressing national salon in damascus, the country’s second annual. he had exhibited the large and startling painting The Porter as the public debut of his new method of composition in “unending, spontane- ous line” and “inspired” colors (fig. 1).4 but despite the fact that the work thrilled the more avant-garde ranks of intellectuals who, like Ismaʿil, yearned for a transforma- tion of the syrian cultural order, it had failed to move the exhibition jury, which awarded all prizes to academ- ic genre works. This outcome, Ismaʿil notes in his letter, confirmed the unfortunate truth of the salon’s bourgeois character: it was functioning to procure decorations for ministerial offices, not to cultivate meaningful modern art.5 Ismaʿil’s letter testifies to the ongoing struggle to pro- duce a modern art appropriate to an Arab region of newly independent states, and to do so by some mea- sure of collective, interlinked effort. but it also takes a second step, namely outlining a programmatic approach to this desired collectivity—and this step, a crucial one for the international formation of an idea of Arab mod- ernism, is my focus here. As Ismaʿil relates in the open- ing paragraph of his missive from damascus to Paris, he and his cohort of “cultured youth” had committed to pursuing meaning in a realm apart from that of the state and its materialistic concerns, industrial conditions, and reactionary fears of change.6 They had come to perceive that “the genius latent in the people,” which had per- sisted in a potential state for years and years, was begin- ning to vanish and die. And against that suffocation, they called for a turn towards an encompassing, creative Arab life as a reservoir of energy, containing not only the means to reclaim and reshape the status quo, but also the fountainhead of meaningful art. As Ismaʿil puts it to hamoudi, We want to resurrect this originary genius, setting it forth within the currents of international art, coloring them with its spirit, and making the Arab east into a source for abiding, vital art.7 This particular confession of commitment to a living dynamism in resistance to the deadening effects of mechanization resonates in numerous ways with the influential vitalist thought of the french philosopher henri bergson, which helped to shift critical artistic dis- course, in the early twentieth century, to matters of bodily and affective experience.8 yet in proposing his collective artistic program in this way, and in speaking For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen224 fig. 1. Adham Ismaʿil, The Porter (al-Ḥammāl), 1951, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. national museum, damascus. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 225 of a resurrection of collective genius, Ismaʿil also insists on a specificity of cultural access to immanence and ex- perience. he and his cohort recognized the Arab east (rather than spirit in general, or god, or the nation- state) as the procreative source of their living art; this specificity regarding the basis of unity mattered dearly during the region’s first decades of independence.9 What follows in this article is an exploration of the im- plications of Ismaʿil’s artistic and political recourse to the Arab collective. my reading of his theory and prac- tice highlights the radical charge it holds for the syrian context in particular, since Ismaʿil desired not only to bring about change through his painting, but also to ef- fect a structural transformation in relations and values.10 In aiming to disidentify his art from the ordered repre- sentational categories of syria’s ministries and wealthy officials, Ismaʿil organized it instead as an interaction with, and even an extension of, an unbounded reservoir of Arab popular energies. In point of fact, the syrian state held no monopoly on national culture in these years. Political conditions were highly unstable; in 1949 alone, citizens witnessed a suc- cession of three military coups d’état, which removed the civilian president shukri al-quwatli and installed colonel Adib shishakli at the head of the army and in shadow control of other government functions. further- more, most new cultural discourses emanated from the ideological opposition parties that had emerged as for- ces in syrian politics—including the communist Party, the baʿth Party, the syrian social nationalist Party, and the muslim brotherhood—and were organized against the corruption and narrow-mindedness of the national bloc, the party of the land-owning elite.11 These opposi- tion parties drew the bulk of their membership from a new generation of upwardly mobile youth educated in the french brevet system, who read both the Arabic and francophone press avidly, debated the current ideas about society and civilization, and demanded more comprehensive social change as a basis for a trans- formed national future.12 They also represented a sig- nificant audience for the country’s young, self-identified artists. These artists, many of whom maintained affilia- tions with the parties, had organized into cultural circles and civic organizations in support of their work.13 In these forums for cultural debate, the government’s au- thority was not necessarily taken as a given, nor was the syrian nation-state reified.14 In Ismaʿil’s case, it was the cultural arm of the baʿth Party, which included his brother sidqi Ismaʿil (1924–72) as well as Wahib al- ghanim, sulayman al-ʿIsa, and youssef shaqra, that pro- vided the crucible for his politically engaged practice.15 Their movement espoused pan-Arab unity and socialist property reform while contesting the authority of the national bloc.16 The syrian ministry of education and directorate of Antiquities had organized the first national art salon, held in december 1950, under the uncertain circum- stances of colonel shishakli’s new regime.17 The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to present a fully cohesive view of the national arts. Though sympathetic damas- cus newspapers had heralded it as a step toward “our modern artistic resurgence,”18 no sooner had the exhibi- tion opened than journalists and citizens raised spirited critiques of the jury’s decisions and the government’s motivations. To observers attuned to world prestige politics, syria’s adoption of a version of a modern euro- pean salon model—looking to Paris’s salon d’Automne, among others—signaled a welcome commitment to in- ternational norms.19 yet the same group also worried about the failure of the event to uphold those norms, most notably within the expansive “exhibition of hand Painting” structure the organizers adopted, which fea- tured calligraphy, carving, and textiles alongside beaux- arts painting and sculpture.20 As the cosmopolitan critic for al-Naṣr lamented, event organizers had focused on quantity, not quality.21 Very few of the pieces would have been competitive in Paris, he asserted, and some, such as drawing exercises from an old schoolbook and copies of postcards, even failed to qualify as art at all.22 Artists on the other side of the divide voiced concerns as well, with calligraphers and craftsmen critiquing the jury’s preference for oil paintings, which they decried as a bias toward the “individualistic” format of european art over works of an “oriental spiritual” character.23 no one yet felt that the question of the nature of syria’s modern art had been settled. furthermore, the execu- tion of the exhibition raised questions about leadership: Who should be entrusted with the responsibility for cul- tivating taste, spiritual health, cultural development, international recognition, and other imperative but elu- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen226 sive outcomes accorded to the modern art object? These questions are reflected in Ismaʿil’s contribution to the inaugural salon as well, for he took the event as a forum in which to wage a critique of the state’s failure to fulfill its obligation to its citizens. his Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street called visitors to witness an allegoriz- ing depiction of the titular refugee family, left to huddle in a park in damascus’s new, upscale Abu rummana neighborhood (figs. 2, 3). When the second salon was held, in november 1951, opening as an elevated “exhibition of Painting and sculpture” and a society affair, Ismaʿil was ready to use its space to stage a counter-demonstration of the na- tional self, bringing the full force of his aesthetic convic- tions to bear in The Porter as a public work.24 In his selection of content for The Porter, he expounded on the theme of social neglect he had raised the previous year by inflecting it into an economic register as well. The work’s titular porter is a day laborer, engaged in a si- syphean effort to haul materials for new villas in the urban milieu and climbing over the broken bodies of his own family members in order to do so. similar themes had appeared in the work of other leftist syrian artists, including subhi shouaib’s A Mistake in Distribution, which also used a porter as a central figuration of class antagonism (fig. 4). At the level of its compositional mode, however, Ismaʿil’s painting asserts its exception- ality by undermining its own representational status and calling forth impulses of liveliness and animation. To make The Porter, Ismaʿil began by tracing the outlines of the porter’s body and the city background in a con- tinuous line. having thereby flattened the relationship between figure and ground into an armature of side-by- side shapes, he then filled the spaces with oscillating, non-illusionistic color. employed thus within what might otherwise be illusionistic space, the mode works to disperse the original structure into attenuated color patterns—with surreal, even anti-artistic results. one sees melting, biomorphic forms. A clutch of fingers and cloth, when filled with candy-red pigment, becomes a beating heart. The dull gray façade of the city eats into a child’s face like acid. syrian critics later settled upon the term “arabesque” to describe the technique Ismaʿil employed in The Por- ter, thereby invoking both a heritage-oriented commit- fig. 2. Adham Ismaʿil, Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street (Usra min al-Lājīʾīn fī Shāriʿ Abū Rummāna), 1950, oil on canvas, 65 × 85 cm. samawi collection, dubai. (Photo: provided by the Ayyam gallery) fig. 3. Abu rummana street, 1940s, photographic view through new suburbs toward qasiyun mountain. (Photo: courtesy of syrianhistory.com) ment to Arab-Islamic modes of ornamental expression based on twisting, doubling, and mirroring lines and, at the same time, the modern prestige of the technique in the world’s canon of formal devices.25 In the moment of its 1951 debut, however, descriptive responses varied widely as newspapers reported that it grabbed attention, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 227 astonishing onlookers with its vivid content and unclas- sifiable style.26 The elitist critic at al-Naṣr, for example, lauded the modern conceptualism of Ismaʿil’s approach, writing that the literalism of preceding efforts had fi- nally been overcome with a mode of distillation in ac- cordance with the “rational scientific age.”27 meanwhile, the newspaper al-Ishtirākiyya, the mouthpiece of the Arab socialist Party, celebrated Ismaʿil’s apparently populist mode of address: the use of bright points of color (such as the red sparks in the porter’s head, thigh, and foot and the yellow in his face and spinal cord) to convey the “shining” physical and mental effort of his struggle directly to viewers, including those who were not “well-studied.”28 In the main, syria’s newspaper crit- ics were fully engaged in emphasizing Ismaʿil’s break with academicism and stressing his commitment to an underlying concept or theory. Very few, however, went so far as to articulate the parameters or stakes of said theory. This hesitancy of articulation mattered to its meaning, I would like to suggest. As Ismaʿil conveys to hamoudi as well as (in more coded fashion) to his da- mascus audiences, his guiding concept is the totality of the Arab east, as a nonrational, timeless vitality.29 As such, it necessarily evades verbalization or other con- ventional representation, manifesting instead in the matching of moving color to moving forces and acting upon a realm of apperception. furthermore, its mecha- nism of manifestation, as we shall see, parallels the col- lective political mechanisms embraced by the baʿth movement intellectuals. As the artist’s brother, sidqi Ismaʿil, who was then the cultural editor of al-Baʿth newspaper, liked to assert, they saw their political pro- gram as a lived resistance bearing little relation to elec- toral representation in parliament.30 To put Ismaʿil’s “arabesque” painting within a broad- er art-historical perspective, the artist, like many other painters in the penumbra of the francophone art world after the second World War, conceptualized his paint- ing as a site of potentially free experience—including the artistic freedom of separating the joy of artistic means from service to a representational end.31 As I shall explore in the final section of this article, the many influences and sources engaged by Ismaʿil form a dense intertextual matrix of associations with the ara- besque, including european studies of Islamic art, the modern art of the early twentieth century, drawing ped- agogy, and comparative cultural analysis. Within this intellectual field, the phenomenon of abstract composi- tion in unending line and inspired color could be recog- nized as a transhistorical phenomenon at work in medieval Arab-Islamic ornamentation as well as in the pictorial inventions of the fauves. Accordingly, we see Ismaʿil playing with capricious twists of line in ways that rework the relationships among multiple civilizational inheritances. In the late 1940s, his drawings sometimes betray an interest in Picasso, forming faces from the overlay of red and green tracery, but others emphasize the eastern spirituality of the dancing line (figs. 5, 6). The caprice of his lines can even exert an anti-artistic effect on his pictures, mapping processes that evade fig. 4. subhi shouaib, A Mistake in Distribution (Khaṭāʾ fī-l- tawzīʿ), 1951, ink and watercolor on paper, 32 × 24 cm. (re- printed from Said Tahseen, Soubhi Shouaib, syrian Plastic Arts series 2 [damascus: salhini Printing and Publishing, 1989], 21.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen228 closure as picture—as if to signal their allegiance to a different force (fig. 7). As such, Ismaʿil’s body of work invites closer exploration of the tensions implicit in the eurocentrism of the postwar historiography of modern painterly arts, which placed Paris-based modernists such as henri matisse at the head of a single continuous development into ever more perfect abstraction.32 finally, given the complexity of Ismaʿil’s negotiations with art-historical genealogies, constructions of Arab- ness, and state cultural policy (with the latter two in frequent conflict), his work must also be taken as a chal- lenge to the nation-state framing that has hitherto struc- tured the literature on the region’s modernism. In seeking to forge a coherent narrative arc, many of the foundational studies of modern art in the Arab coun- tries place it squarely within a notion of a vertically in- tegrated state, with the result that individual artworks have been analyzed as affirmative contributions to na- tion-building projects.33 These readings resonate at the broad interpretative level of world political and eco- nomic history, particularly given the authoritarian cast of the military regimes that seized power in the region in the 1960s. In the 1970s, for example, when the legacy of The Porter was consolidated in syria, the leading crit- ics emphasized its early deployment of Arab heritage and an ethos of Arab resistance, which were the cul- tural mantras of that era’s baʿth Party state.34 As Tariq al-sharif puts it in a 1972 study, Ismaʿil first “spoke” the word “arabesque” in The Porter and thereby linked a modern idiom to national culture and shared social con- cerns.35 such readings do not, however, allow for con- siderations of painting practice in syria as contingent, dissonant, and even oppositional. I do not, in the main, disagree with al-sharif’s suggestion that the artist aimed to forge a newly activated visual language as a means to a populist goal; however, I propose a shift in focus. Let us consider the arabesque in these paintings not as a nativist motif but, rather, as the project of activation that Ismaʿil proposed in his own testimony. I return to the archival record of personal letters, writings, and journalism to uncover a concept of Arab painting that is at once more pointed and more ambitious than subsequent discussions have allowed: Arab painting as a means to address and enact an uncoerced political unity.36 fig. 5. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1948, gouache on paper. Private collection, damascus. (Photo: provided by Issam darwish) fig. 6. Adham Ismaʿil, Warm Breeze (Nasama Ḥārra), 1948, watercolor on paper. Private collection, nicosia. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 229 fig. 7. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1952, gouache on paper. Agial gallery, beirut. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen230 AbsTrAcTIng The ArAb homeLAnd Ismaʿil formed an intellectual bond with his party cohort long before the inauguration of the baʿth movement in the early 1940s. The group hailed from the same neigh- borhood in Antioch, a city in the administrative district of Alexandretta (present-day hatay Province).37 This natural port region located between french mandate syria and republican Turkey formed part of a strategic trade route to Aleppo and beyond, into british Imperial south Asia. for most of the duration of the french man- date, the district was administered as part of syria. be- ginning in the 1930s, however, Alexandretta became the subject of a Turkish irredentist campaign that culmi- nated in its annexation in January 1939.38 As Turkish and Arab groups made competing claims to Alexandretta, the crisis of sovereignty broke along highly ethnicized lines, which—among other sociopolitical effects— raised the concept of Arabness to a meta-category meant to establish a shared basis for territorial rights. The Ismaʿil family, who were native Arabic speakers and ʿAlawites (lit. “followers of ʿAli,” a syncretic branch of Twelver shiʿism), volunteered for the politicized Arab cause with great dedication.39 When it became clear in 1938 that Turkish claims would prevail, however, Ismaʿil’s Antioch group left for syria proper, going first to Aleppo, then hama, and eventually damascus. They brought the bitter experience of having lost the battle with them, which gave lasting shape to their political subjectivities.40 many continued to draw on the memo- ry of the Arab cause for years, making Arabism a source of identity and community as well as a basis for progres- sive politics and a framework for creative activity. In damascus, they banded together to form the first nucle- us of a political movement that went on to grow, diver- sify, and incorporate as the Arab baʿth Party in 1947.41 As the Iraqi historian hana batatu notes in his examination of the class origins of the baʿth, the Alexandretta stream contributed the distinctive ardor of “injured people” to the movement.42 bearing in mind Ismaʿil’s personal experience of dis- placement, his first contribution to the national salon in 1950, Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street, takes on a heightened poignancy (fig. 2). The painting pres- ents destitution as if it were a holy virtue, showing its human subjects within the compositional schema of the christian holy family. made both timeless and timely, the family stands in for the entire series of tragic losses of homeland suffered by Arabs, which by 1950 included not only Alexandretta but also Palestine after the 1948 creation of the state of Israel and the wars that followed it, uprooting nearly a million people and sparking an ongoing international quarrel over obligations to pro- vide for such stateless persons.43 At the same time, Ismaʿil’s scrupulous attention to detail adds a strong class dimension to his depiction of Arab loss, highlight- ing the wealthy, hostile environment: the manicured shrubbery of the new al-madfa park, the interior warmth of the expensive villas, and the u-shaped string of elec- tric streetcar lights extending up the foothills of qasiyun mountain. In The Porter, the very same Abu rummana backdrop once again provides the frame for a commen- tary on acute class divisions in damascus, but the details of place are transposed into a condensed plane of color oscillation, with a transformative effect. The city façades become a pattern of splicing tones that not only cross the central figure but also strip him of matter, making him unreal as a body. The political charge of the work manifests in its compositional dissolution via the inter- nal life of its component line and color. so as to better understand the political stakes of this artistic pivot from objects to rhythms and from syrian stasis to Arab immanence, it is necessary to consider the Alexandretta crisis of 1936–39 in more detail. under the ottoman empire at the turn of the century, the district had been a remarkably diverse one in terms of linguistic, religious, and racial difference, home as it was to com- munities of muslims, ʿAlawites, Arab christians, Arme- nian christians, kurds, circassians, and others, most of whom spoke several languages each.44 following the first World War and the defeat of the ottomans, how- ever, a new rubric of national self-determination came to bear in international disputes over territorial sover- eignty, and with it the corollary concern of extending sufficient protection to the minority cultures within these new nation-states.45 The Treaty of Versailles, for example, created states for certain aggrieved nationalist groups and revised european borders to accommodate the demands of others.46 In the case of france’s admin- istration of its “mandate” over syria, as granted by the For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 231 League of nations, a colonial version of ethnic territo- rial determination was applied: Lebanon was separated from syria on religious grounds and within syria itself, there were further communal and religious subdivisions into druze, ʿAlawite, and Arab regions. Alexandretta presented a particular challenge to this dispensation, however. faced with a complex population of intermar- ried ethnic and linguistic groups with no apparent “na- tional” majority in the district, authorities treated Alexandretta as an exception. It was designated a semi- autonomous entity within the state of syria, with its own appointed government and tariff system and special provisions for the schooling and cultural protection of its Turkish residents.47 At the time, this hedged solution to an administrative problem was recognized as provi- sional, with a renegotiation of the territorial terms of trade anticipated in the eventual independence of a “mature” syrian nation-state. france’s administrative vision of an intact syria was not the only one promulgated as rightful under the prin- ciples of the League of nations, however. As the Turkish state agitated for control of the district during Ismaʿil’s adolescence in Antioch, it did so on the basis of the same legal concerns for self-determination and minority rights.48 This point proved particularly salient to the eventual shape of Ismaʿil’s commitments. on the ground in the Alexandretta of the 1930s, as the Turkish irreden- tist cause worked to render racial identity into the determinant of self-rule, the obverse characterization— Arabness—was reinforced, and also operated as a per- formative cultural framework. both the Turkish and Arab identities became supra-religious categories that contained any number of other subgroups within them, and both entailed a more complex commitment than the simple ascription of national affiliation.49 A turning point came in 1936, when the Popular front rose to elected power in france, which returned the question of syrian independence to the diplomatic table and brought a syrian delegation to Paris to draft a franco- syrian independence treaty.50 When politicians in An- kara saw how the treaty presumed to keep Alexandretta as a territory of the future syrian nation-state, they moved quickly to contest it. Initially focusing their cam- paign on the cause of the Turkish residents, they argued to the League of nations that those residents would be left vulnerable to Arab persecution. The ante was upped over the course of the following year, as some began to advocate for a vote to determine popular will, with the cause reaching a fever pitch in november 1936, when mustafa kemal Atatürk gave a speech claiming that the district’s population was “purely Turkish.”51 by then, ac- tivists on both sides had brought the dispute to organi- zations on the ground, seeking to code the citizens who belonged to various minority communities into the mas- ter categories of Turkish or Arab. As the social order in Alexandretta deteriorated under the stress of these de- velopments, the League of nations entered the fray. It dispatched a five-person commission to the district on January 1, 1937, which precipitated large-scale demon- strations by both Turkish and Arab syrian nationalists, each trying to assert majority status (fig. 8), which in turn spurred violent clashes and gunfights. In Antioch, the Ismaʿil family—which included a fa- ther, ʿAli; mother, Amina; four brothers (Adham, sidqi, naʿim, and ʿAziz); and one sister, rafiqa—actively em- braced Arab identity as the rubric for their future self- determination and got involved in pamphleteering. Their choice was informed by everyday experience: Ad- ham and sidqi, for example, felt their Arabness acutely during the walk to their french preparatory school on the other side of town, passing through increasingly hos- tile and predominantly Turkish neighborhoods.52 but their self-recognition was equally driven by an already existing aspiration to renew the cultural collective. Their middle-class ʿAlawite neighborhood in Antioch, ʿAfan, had lobbied successfully to establish an Arabic-language primary school. And at the city’s french high school, Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899–1968)—a nationalist leader, a Par- is-educated teacher of ʿAlawite origins, and a future co- founder of the baʿth Party—had also launched an Arab renaissance club soon after his return from studies in Paris in 1930.53 This club, which reinvented a former christian-run fine Arts club as an Arabist platform, was an act of radical incorporation. It posed a mirrored re- sponse to the Turkish youth clubs that had sprung up in the region, while also aiming to foster unity against french sectarianism.54 such initiatives laid the ground- work upon which the Ismaʿil brothers (as well as many other students in their neighborhood) were mobilized for the Arab cause. In the early days of the crisis, they For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen232 joined the youth brigades of the League of national Ac- tion, a pan-Arab movement that syria’s more activist Arab nationalists had formed out of frustration with the national bloc, and which al-Arsuzi, a founding member, used in Alexandretta as a network for material sup- port.55 Ismaʿil’s work as a scout included helping to or- ganize strikes and rallies, to which he contributed his calligraphic skill and ideas for stage décor.56 Al-Arsuzi also launched the newspaper al-ʿUrūba and created an Arabism club as a community rallying point, which of- fered evening lectures and Arab plays in the squares and sports clubs. When the commission from the League of nations began to issue its recommendations for managing the crisis of representation it had witnessed in Alexandretta, the idea that ethnic identity ought to determine nation- al status became reified. In late January 1937, the com- mission proposed to maintain the autonomous status of the district and to treat it separately from the rest of syr- ian territory. four months later, the League ratified a new statute and fundamental Law for Alexandretta, which was intended to make communal differences more distinct and legible through a system of parliamen- tary representation based upon the relative size of each recognized community (Turkish, ʿAlawite, Arab, Arme- nian, greek orthodox, kurdish, and “other”).57 so as to implement this distribution of legislative power, the fundamental Law in turn called for a comprehensive registration of adult men. In march 1938, the registration policy was clarified, so that it was now based upon per- sonal disclosure: each man in the district would be re- quired to appear before a board and declare his affiliation with one community to the exclusion of the others.58 These developments intensified the work of the youth brigades, who traveled the countryside as foot soldiers in a campaign to promote the racial abstraction of “Arab” over “Turk,” imploring peasant communities to think and feel like Arabs.59 one tactic was to make un- lettered Arab persons “whole” as political subjects by teaching them to read and write Arabic, a strategy whereby the shape and sound of the common language was first incorporated in individual bodies and then mapped onto territory and rights. The students ventured into the villages and used elementary reading and writ- ing exercises as an occasion to present their philosophy of Arabism.60 The project was not unlike the alphabet modernization efforts in Turkey that had recently con- cluded, but with the distinction that the Arabic language could be claimed as a natural symbolic product of Arab life rather than a break with historical modes. As others have shown in detail, the communal regis- tration process proved singularly useless as a mecha- nism for due process in Alexandretta, with collusion and coercion being the standard practice at registration fig. 8. Photograph of protests staged in Antioch for the January visit of the League of nations commission. The cap- tions read “Protests of Arab Antioch” and “syrians depend on the League of nations.” (reprinted from committee for the defense of Alexandretta, Irādat al-ʿArab Taḍmanu Ḥuqūqahum: al-Iskandarūna ʿArabiyya Raghma Kull Quwwa [damascus: Ibn Zaydun Printers, 1937].) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 233 stations.61 moreover, the outward display of the vote had already been undermined, for Turkey had struck a secret agreement with france to ensure that the results would clear the way for annexation. by the time Alexandretta was incorporated as the Turkish province of hatay in January 1939, some fifty thousand people, including Ismaʿil’s group, had already left the district to resettle elsewhere in syria.62 The students among these mi- grants hoped to complete their degrees in the syrian Arabic system, yet Ismaʿil’s group found itself bouncing from school to school, for the french authorities viewed their politicized status as a threat to the administrative order (a fear that was buttressed by french intelligence reports about ongoing student protests against the co- lonial presence, many of which noted that Alexandret- tans played leadership roles).63 At the end of the year, Ismaʿil and his group tried to return to Antioch but were turned back at the border, after which time they made their way to damascus (while others went to Iraq). In syrian parlance, the Alexandrettans were called the liwāʾiyyūn, or “people from the liwāʾ”—with liwāʾ being an Arabic term used in ottoman administration, mean- ing a part or subdivision (i.e., Liwāʾ Iskandarūna). fit- tingly, the term gave recognition to their status as citizens of a detached territory—a place that had once been part of syria but was no longer legally so—and as a bracketed populace consisting of persons who were of syria but not completely within it. In damascus, the liwāʾiyyūn from Ismaʿil’s neighbor- hood reunited with a similarly uprooted al-Arsuzi, and the group spent the difficult war years of 1940 to 1944 together, with many sharing an unheated house in the neighborhood of shaʿlan while the students among them tried to complete their preparatory and university studies.64 organizing their life collectively, they main- tained a keen sense of the alterity of the Arab ontolo- gy—its difference from the indignities of their daily grind, and its principled separation from the hegemonic syrian state. The group followed a regular schedule that included preparing shared meals, completing school les- sons, passing time in nearby cafés, and then listening to al-Arsuzi deliver an evening lecture, followed by debate into the night.65 The themes of these evening gatherings tended to be either historical or metaphysical, with al- Arsuzi speaking to the past strengths of Arabic and the Arabs, mechanisms of revolution and nationalism in the world, and the genius of the Arab umma.66 one early witness to their brotherhood described the group as a kind of “sufi order” in recognition of their organization around a search for internal, immanent knowledge.67 This collectivism also foregrounded the capacity of Ara- bism to be an animating force, buttressed by al-Arsuzi’s readings of german romantic philosophy and bergson’s theories of creative élan, which al-Arsuzi had studied during his time in Paris from 1927 to 1930.68 Theirs was a powerfully allusive version of vitalism, one that brought notions of religious illumination into alignment with a belief in the latent popular energy of the Arabs as a people. At times, the project also took on a secularized messianic cast, as al-Arsuzi reminded the group that their suffering carried the responsibility for liberating seventy million Arabs.69 finally, in 1941, at the end of that year’s extraordinarily cold winter, al-Arsuzi called for the formation of a political movement, one that would give a new organizational structure to their soli- darity in dispossession. members went out into the city and scrawled an inaugural declaration of existence in chalk on an urban wall, writing: “We are here living un- der a great Arab socialist state” and “We are here under a single Arab homeland.”70 With these declarations, they not only enunciated their existence as a solidarity movement (understood as a “state” responding to a unity of cultural and class interests), but also located the movement in a “here” that transgressed territorial boundaries. Their space of politics, in other words, would manifest as a recuperation or renaissance (liter- ally al-baʿth) of an Arab self, correlated to an encompass- ing Arab nationalism. over the next few years, the movement pursued out- reach via a person-to-person system of networked en- lightenment, bringing awareness of their version of Arabism to new elements of the community. The move- ment expanded significantly in 1942 through a merger with a student movement directed by michel Aflaq and salah al-din al-bitar. In these years, their imagination of Arab political change became integrated, to a certain extent, with other registers of civic agitation for inde- pendence. Prior to 1946, baʿth members attended dis- cussions held at the café moulin rouge on tactics for ousting the french, and also joined a volunteer gendar- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen234 merie to counter france’s monopoly on military force.71 nevertheless, the liwāʾiyyūn intellectuals remained ever conscious of the difference between their version of pa- triotism and that of their national politicians. In sidqi Ismaʿil’s voluminous correspondence with friends and comrades, he expresses his alienation with moving ar- dor. one letter, dated July 1944, describes his feeling that dictatorship had persisted in the world in spite of Allied successes, with oppression simply moving from indi- vidual rulers to entire governmental systems.72 Another, from 1945, expresses ambivalence regarding his instru- mentalized work for the party’s cultural committee, confessing to feeling nostalgic for the nights they had spent listening to al-Arsuzi teach, eyes “aglow” with the light of Arabism.73 yet another, written on evacuation day in 1946, deems the participation of egyptian, Iraqi, and hijazi troops a hollow display of unity, made mean- ingless by a lack of commitment to Arabism on the part of shukri al-quwatli and other elites.74 even the official party documents to which sidqi Ismaʿil contributed, such as their April 1947 constitution as the Arab resur- rection Party (Ḥizb al-Baʿth al-ʿArabī), acknowledge a current condition of “strife” in the service of a reawaken- ing Arab nationalism.75 The rhetoric is oriented to a fu- ture amelioration of alienation, including a promise that all the “artificial” differences found among the members of the Arab nation will disappear once the Arab con- sciousness is awakened. further, the 1947 party constitu- tion again emphasizes the individual act of electing into the whole without recourse to the state and its mecha- nisms. It defines “Arab” as an identity that can be be- lieved in and performed, extending the status to “anyone whose language is Arabic, who lives in the Arab home- land or aspires to live therein, and who believes in his connection to the Arab people.”76 In his role as an intellectual within a movement pro- fessing creative power, sidqi Ismaʿil frequently directed his attention to artists and artistic theories, and particu- larly so in letters to university colleagues. one of the most telling letters, dated october 5, 1947 (six months after the Party congress), discusses his and his brother’s convictions regarding the role of an animate and ani- mating imagination (khayāl) as a basis for art.77 The let- ter, which is written to a female colleague, discusses the visionary nature of Leonardo da Vinci’s approach to his craft, the achievements of modern french artists, and then finally the greatness of Picasso and his “astonish- ing” recent drawings. The “strongest possible” definition of art, he writes, is the one a critic had formulated in a reading of Leonardo da Vinci’s process: that art is a “mental thing,” une chose mentale.78 The mental aspect is derived from the synthesizing and abstracting work of composition, work that the inspired artist performs in recognition of the underlying, abiding imagination of human existence—making any one work of art a slen- der phantasm of the whole. sidqi Ismaʿil goes on to write about the same liberated understanding of painting in renoir and his glowing version of Impressionism, the genius of corot’s use of light and shade, and cézanne’s capacity to reveal emotional heat even within the white- ness of snow. by his account, the genius of free dyna- mism can also be discerned in true contemporary art, even in movements (such as cubism) that emphasize deformation and incongruity. he describes how he and his brother Adham had devoted two hours of contem- plation to one of Picasso’s recent pictures, a painting of a woman and cat depicted with virtuosic red, green, and white lines (fig. 9).79 The work had come under criticism in europe for its perceived ugliness, they knew, but after immersing themselves in the whole, they came to per- ceive its underlying harmony of color and flowing lines, and its “eternal plastic value” in such passages as the white linear variegation (raqsh) on the woman’s breast. ultimately, such a work seemed to sidqi Ismaʿil to dem- onstrate Picasso’s greatness. The artist answered to no god other than the “omnipotent god” of the imagination. his lines, unencumbered by a relationship to material things, work in the realm of internal motivation, there producing eternally resonant form. sidqi Ismaʿil chronicles his brother’s painting, too, most frequently with descriptions of the metaphysical effects of color or the act of deploying it. one letter, from August 15, 1949, describes how Ismaʿil’s use of vivid col- ors effects an inverse condition in his own body: as vola- tile reds appeared in the skies he painted, conveying “revolution, fire, blood, and tragedy,” a pallor seemed to overtake Ismaʿil himself.80 The letter was composed by sidqi Ismaʿil on the day after the second of the three coups d’état of 1949, yet it makes no direct mention of that event. Instead, it seems, he transposes national For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 235 while the government builds glorious things from the people’s money, the people are left to live in pens. fi- nally, in a poem written in 1951, he makes the painter’s struggle to extract art from the world into a struggle for legibility as himself: I have a brother who gave his life to art. neither fame nor a few dirhams beguiled him. Those who saw him, know him but deny it, saying with curiosity: “Is that Adham?” his brush approached exhaustion, painting upon every wall in the streets.82 here, sidqi Ismaʿil’s conception of art fully parallels the movement’s conception of Arabism—its source is a living inspiration that drew from and gave to bodies. We can now consider these attitudes alongside the drawings and paintings Ismaʿil made after 1947, a year that marks not only the normalization of the baʿth Par- ty but also Ismaʿil’s decision to normalize himself as a professional artist by completing the credentials neces- sary for teaching art in syrian high schools.83 much of the work he produced during this time takes the form of exercises in technique and follows two paths of experi- ment. The first path consists of paintings depicting land- scapes, often recollected ones from Alexandretta. In these, Ismaʿil takes an expressive turn, using rough dots and touches of color to make abstract fields (fig. 10). daubs of dark, opaque pigment appear in flat arrays of texture, from which glints a surface pattern of brilliant yellow marks that, by their lack of mediation, claim a garish presence in the eye (fig. 11). In this sense, they manifest vital qualities that are akin to the ones sidqi Ismaʿil recognizes in Vincent van gogh’s paintings, where “living yellow color” seems to manifest the very sense of “greater blessedness” that is also to be found in the music and poetry in the east, in Japan and beyond.84 Insofar as each component mark in the landscapes shows itself to be an illuminating presence, we might describe them as evincing a baʿthist notion of inspira- tion. In the second path Ismaʿil follows in his exercises, he concentrates on faces as the central subject, includ- ing riffs on the styles of other artists. one particularly fascinating gouache sketch from 1948 (already refer- enced earlier) appears to respond to the very composi- tion of the Picasso painting of woman and cat to which he had responded with sidqi Ismaʿil (figs. 5, 9). render- ing it into an elegant visual study in rose and green line, fig. 9. Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Cat (Dora Maar au chat), 1941, oil on canvas, 128.3 cm × 95.3 cm. Private collec- tion. (Artwork: © 2017 estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists rights society (Ars), new york. Photo: courtesy of sotheby’s, Inc. © 2006) uncertainty into a consideration of mortality and im- mortality in painting. When he does write reflectively about the calamities of 1949, in an end-of-the-year poem that he composed for circulation among party com- rades, he folds the life-to-death inversions of Ismaʿil’s painting into a broader account of the syrian govern- ment’s procedural undoing of their natural talents.81 one friend lives without a salary, another is a navigator without a boat, another has been passed over for the military, another gambles in politics for sport, another is a poet who has lost his voice, and so on, with his “painter brother” (Ismaʿil) left to listen to his own colors “weep” in the lightlessness of their world. In every case, sidqi Ismaʿil writes, the succession of “coups, upturned things, and overturners” has changed very little, for, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen236 such would seem to be Ismaʿil’s personal preoccupa- tions as an artist. but after having taken on teaching work in the schools, which were still a hotbed of ideo- logical activism, he now also faced the new challenge of mobilizing the conjunction of performative Arab iden- tity, creative spirit, and political solidarity that the liwāʾiyyūn had first proposed a decade earlier. In 1950, he landed a coveted teaching position in damascus at the preparatory high school in maydan, a neighborhood where the baʿth Party enjoyed wide support among both educated youth and their middle-class trader fathers.85 from all reports, Ismaʿil took his work as an educator as an opportunity to put egalitarian ideals into practice, and he taught with the spirit of noncoercive self-realiza- tion that the movement pursued elsewhere.86 he even managed, in may 1951, to arrange a counter-exhibition to the national salon, securing permission to install an exhibition of student work in the very same museum hall that had hosted the 1950 event. The party’s al-Baʿth newspaper devoted a page of coverage to the achieve- ment, detailing its demonstration of faith in the poten- tial of the country’s youth against the state’s bourgeois mores and reprinting Ismaʿil’s short speech from the opening, which takes a prophetic tone.87 As “fruits” of Arab talent, the pieces on display give an indication of a great fertility that promises to soon overflow and re- turn them all to the helm of their fate. Their creative forces, he proclaims, would “spread their wings” in the faraway skies, driving them in the direction of immortal- ity.88 he concludes his remarks by emphasizing the need to push onward and to “cover hundreds of years in a few leaps,” but with the assurance that the resources for doing so include the richness of both external and internal material: We have the advantage of the Western art movements lying before us and the flames of individual talents burning within us, ready to burst into fire and light, destroying every obstacle and illuminating every path.89 A vision of almost supernatural rejuvenation, this con- clusion serves to ratify a mode of political change that relies on the capacity of art to tap into and mobilize a living Arab culture. In light of Ismaʿil’s invocation of the abstract power of Arabism as a pre-representational force, we can re- turn to consider what he may have understood to be at fig. 10. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1940s, acrylic on paper, mounted in an album. Private collection, nicosia. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) fig. 11. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1940s, oil on canvas. Private collection, damascus. (Photo: provided by Issam darwish) Ismaʿil retains the ambiguous internal relationships be- tween facial profile and full-face rendering that make eyes, nose, and lips into floating signifiers. yet he em- phasizes the movement of the line over any sense of hu- man personality, attenuating its twists and turns into a trace of movement or music. heightening the impres- sion of its self-contained suspension in space, Ismaʿil uses only washed tones of cream and pink beneath the painted lines and adds a hint of biomorphic energies in the final curling of the line into a shell or breast. If Pi- casso’s woman suggests animal presence, then Ismaʿil’s is an immaterial entity: curtains that flutter in the breeze, color that twists into dance, and a body that in- dexes a creativity that extends beyond either thing or self. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 237 stake in his submission of The Porter to the 1951 salon, coming as it did only five months after the maydan counter-exhibition. In the previous year, his Family of Refugees had offered visitors a mournful genre scene, showing the uprooted families who haunted daily nor- malcy in syria. It had also tendered a view on class an- tagonisms, showing the luxury façades of the new homes aglow with the light of inaccessible comfort. In The Por- ter, these impulses assume a different appearance, as Ismaʿil isolates line and color in ways that dissolve its subject rather than preserving it in paint. As we have seen, in 1951 the critics developed various interpreta- tions of this visual difference: al-Ishtirākiyya gave a par- ticularly socialist-realist value to the mechanism of such a transfer, suggesting that The Porter reconfigured the academic devices of painting so as to reach the every- man.90 The critic from Al-Naṣr was more concerned with the need to keep step with the times, praising Ismaʿil’s abandonment of literary illustration and his use of painting as a plane of inquiry. but by Ismaʿil’s own assessment, as I shall now explore through a closer study of his engagement with the art movements of the Pari- sian metropole, it was insufficient simply to put form forward as an autonomous event. If we place Ismaʿil at the center of the catalytic creation of Arab feeling that he forecasts in his may 1951 speech, we can understand his desire to transcode the arabesque from a formal ele- ment to an active entity, which is to say into a means to instantiate a natural unity. nATurALIZIng ArAb unITy At the same time that Ismaʿil was carving out the role of a quiet activist amid his more obstreperous comrades in the baʿth movement, he was also working to cultivate his skills and recognition in the painterly arts.91 he un- dertook these latter tasks in the company of artist friends outside the party circles, many of whom possessed greater social capital in damascus than did the displaced Alexandrettans. soon after his arrival in damascus at the age of seventeen, he had gotten to know mahmoud hammad (1923–88) and nasir shoura (1920–92) in the arts room of the damascus national club near marja square.92 Through hammad, Ismaʿil sometimes also at- tended studio Veronese, which had been established by damascus artists in 1941 as the first dedicated painters’ circle in syria and which featured figure-drawing ses- sions as well as theoretical debates.93 In its earliest days, the group’s approach to training also involved an effort to compensate for a lack of museum access by collecting color reproductions of paintings from journals. for this endeavor, the french mass-circulation picture maga- zine L’Illustration served as a particularly reliable source.94 In this section, I examine Ismaʿil’s readings of different modalities of modern painting and their use of arabesque line for greater insight into the radical aspects he developed in his work. for the artists of Ismail’s generation in syria, Leba- non, and Iraq, the outbreak of war in europe in 1939 had the effect of bringing heightened visibility and impor- tance to the artistic craft. As the Iraqi artist Jewad selim later put it, “Paris and europe stopped producing beau- tiful work, but baghdad did not,” and meanwhile its art- ists labored to “prepare the public to appreciate and understand art.”95 buttressing the local efforts to boost artistic activities, there was a flood of Allied cultural pro- paganda following the July 1941 victory in the middle east theater. The free french established radio offices in the near east and north Africa from which they broadcast texts celebrating the spirit of youth, courage, cheer, and hope as the living forces of the country.96 They entered the field of art criticism as well. In its first year of operation, 1942, beirut’s al-Adīb published essays on french art and values by Jacques Lassaigne—a critic who was working for the free french in the near east— which detailed the liberal values for which Paris had once stood as a kind of civilizational currency.97 And Allied networks even brought foreign artists into the re- gion, including a contingent of Polish painters attached to the Polish II corps, who were stationed in baghdad.98 These artists—several of them Paris-trained—joined their Iraqi colleagues in café debates and even exhibi- tions, with one, Józef Jarema (1900–1974), also coming to damascus to install a goodwill exhibition of work at the orient club.99 Jarema visited the studio Veronese, engaging its members in discussion about the tenets of post-Impressionism as well as new problems of com- parative national aesthetics. These exchanges, which were intensified by the uncertainties of wartime, contin- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen238 ued to echo after the Liberation. once Lassaigne re- turned to Paris, he acted as a conduit for Arab artists into the city’s reopening circles of exhibition and criticism. he introduced hamoudi to the abstractionists of the salon des réalités nouvelles, the preeminent interna- tional forum for concrete, nonfigurative, and abstract artists.100 As for Jarema, after he shipped out through Palestine and egypt to Italy in 1944, he converted the aspirational commitment to life and hope of the war years into the institutional form of an international as- sociation of Art clubs, which he dedicated to facilitating direct contact between artists without regard for na- tional borders and toward the goal of renewing universal culture in the shared language of “shapes and colors.”101 settling in rome, he and his Art club provided an exhi- bition home for a new Italian avant-garde of young geo- metric abstractionists, with Jarema himself also “converting” to abstraction in 1948.102 club branches were even established in egypt and Turkey, but not in syria, which was still fighting for independence and lib- eration.103 In this way, one kind of international threshold ma- terialized for Ismaʿil in his understanding of his mission as a modern Arab artist. by dint of the mandate occupa- tion, the immediate modernist legacy in syria was mark- edly french and was also universalized as an open and cosmopolitan platform (characteristics that were the opposite of those of the Vichy years) in defense against the catastrophic racialized regionalism of the second World War.104 crucially, as we have observed, although Ismaʿil developed his work in the 1940s from the very conceptual heart of the baʿth party’s cultural programs, he never acted as a party artist in the strict sense of de- pending on its patronage for a living or upholding any prescribed style (such as socialist realism). Indeed, his comrades would never have expected him to do so. Like many other thinkers in the aftermath of the war, they privileged a model of creation that was free, auto- nomous, and essentially unmotivated. These points of discursive affinity make it all the more important to con- sider the expanding field of international modernism in the postwar years of decolonization as a basis for under- standing the ambitions of Ismaʿil’s local group, which endeavored to create a movement and to push their world forward. As the art historian natalie Adamson carefully shows, while critics in Paris were announcing the “return” of modern art after the Liberation, they also set about reinventing the memory of the city’s dynamic and heterogeneous art world as an École de Paris.105 rené huyghe, a curator for the Louvre and consultant to the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco), for example, mobilized a con- fected memory of how all artists—whether foreign-born or not—had contributed to the universal heritage of this École, making openness and assimilation the very defi- nition of the french modern tradition.106 These promotional schemata directly affected the re- ception of Arab artists in Paris, where critics had begun to invoke a “nouvelle École de Paris” for the postwar era. As the anthropologist kirsten scheid writes regarding the reception of the Lebanese abstract painter saloua raouda choucair, who studied and exhibited in Paris from 1948 to 1951, Parisian commentators took the work of Arab aspirants in the city as proof of the renewed vi- ability of the École de Paris. In choucair’s case, positive reviews highlighted the presence of an eastern genius, tradition, and “magnanimous spirit” even in her hard abstractionist paintings.107 Lassaigne, the critic who had formerly contributed free french content to al-Adīb, actively promoted the “nouvelle École de Paris,” writing exhibition essays in 1950 on young artists from Iran, Tur- key, and egypt who found the city of Paris to be condu- cive to “their national genius.”108 hamoudi, too, upheld this position in his narratives about modern Iraqi and Arab art, describing a dynamic rapprochement between the natural resources of bright color and evocative po- etry and the “new” preoccupation with abstraction at the Parisian center.109 In 1950, hamoudi wrote a guest article for the french journal Arts that described how a select few artists in the country—his colleagues selim, fahrelnissa Zeid, and faiq hassan—had undertaken to recover tradition as a basis for their contributions to the world’s modern art, doing so with the knowledge that their traditions included a lineage of accomplished ab- stract elaboration in baghdad and Andalusia, where Arab artisans had applied their minds and hands to con- structing dazzling monuments.110 hamoudi’s own ap- plication of these convictions in painting manifested in compositions of zigzagging black lines derived from Arabic letterforms, punctuated by bright, flat color, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 239 which he exhibited in the 1950 salon des réalités nou- velles (fig. 12). he also enthusiastically championed the work of Zeid, the Turkish-born painter who had become an Iraqi princess through her marriage to Iraq’s Prince raʿd bin Zeid (of the hashemite dynasty). reporting to his countrymen about Zeid’s 1949 solo exhibition at Paris’s renowned galerie colette Allendy, he describes how her oil paintings and assemblages of stones pro- duce a “forest garden” experience that impressed fa- mous abstract artists such as francis Picabia, while transporting other viewers (fig. 13).111 In Zeid’s case, he writes, the lines and color of the works seem to float on a ground of eastern sensibilities. here is where the term “arabesque” enters, the mode or “structure” of surface design that Islamic art scholar- ship has long upheld as exemplary of the Islamic religio- cultural system, but which also plays a role in the historiography of the École de Paris and romantic lit- erature and music (though I will not address that here).112 from the viewpoint of the first centuries of Is- fig. 12. Jamil hamoudi, Don Quichotte, 1950, oil on canvas. Private collection, baghdad. (Photo: provided by Ishtar hamoudi) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen240 lamic art, as oleg grabar notes in his landmark study The Formation of Islamic Art, the arabesque might best be understood not as an innovation per se but rather as a way of treating forms syntactically and of producing ornament through the endless repetition and modifica- tion of shapes. As grabar also notes, the ambiguity of the arabesque creates a fundamental challenge for interpre- tation: as it seems to present both iconographic and or- namental meaning simultaneously, it is experienced as a “parallelism of contradictory sorts of meanings.”113 Whereas grabar offers his description of this parallelism in a cautionary way, the artists of the nouvelle École de Paris milieu often courted the ambiguity of arabesque as a sign of artistic progress, wherein a representational motif might be distilled into pattern and vice versa. We see this in hamoudi’s commentaries on work in france, certainly, in which the term “arabesque” signals a re- vival of native resources and a rapprochement with Pa- risian modernism.114 And we also see it in his selection of self-promotional texts, such as the two essays he so- licited for his solo debut at ga lerie Voyelles in April 1950: a french-language introduction from Lassaigne and an Arabic one from bishr farès (1906–63), the Lebanese- egyptian scholar and historian of Islamic art who lived and worked between cairo and Paris.115 Lassaigne’s text invokes the already recognized “superior expressive value of the arabesque line” as evidence of a shared af- finity for abstract synthesis among modern artists of both eastern and Western origin and goes so far as to invoke as evidence scholars’ “most recent discoveries” of how the Arab tradition of nonfigurative art emerged from a long process of synthesis rather than a prohibi- tion on human representation.116 farès’s notes, by con- trast, position the origins of abstracted Arab ornament in a religious episteme, making the Islamic art of bagh- dad “an art that expresses the transience of the object in the path of an understanding of eternity.”117 Taken to- gether, this pair of texts enacts the parallelism of contra- dictory interpretations associated with the arabesque, thereby keeping open the possibility of affinities be- tween Iraq and france without actually resolving them—and rendering hamoudi’s abstractions into an ambivalent project of neither solely formal nor fully con- ceptual aims. In these mid-century oscillations, we also see reflect- ed elements of a longer and more varied history of the arabesque as a keyword in cultural analysis. The word “arabesque” itself, as the art historian roger benjamin has shown, seems to derive from Italian rather than Arabic origins. It first came into use in the Italian renais- sance as rabesco, a description of the scrolling ornamen- tal frames in ancient roman wall painting, which reminded contemporary viewers of Islamic designs.118 but the heyday of the term “arabesque” as a movable descriptor for a particular mode of decorative composi- tion came in the nineteenth century. This usage of the word was buoyed by a proliferation of research in orna- ment studies, which in turn was supported by a concern for the modular analysis of applied arts and industrial design. As early as 1850, the term “arabesque” had come to be mobilized in discussions of such varied instances of ornament as renaissance scrollwork, the “moorish” style of decorative program at the Alhambra, and even fig. 13. Photograph of fahrelnissa Zeid’s home studio, 1949 or 1950. (reprinted from Jamīl Ḥamūdī, “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” al-Adīb 9, no. 3 [march 1950]: 9–12.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 241 the characteristic ornament of the gothic period, with its scroll-cut forms that burgeon forth from the architec- tural masses themselves, fusing together animal figures and foliage.119 As gülru necipoğlu demonstrates, this wide-ranging engagement with ornament took shape around a search for universal design principles in eu- rope, which overlapped with an equally ahistorical ori- entalist discourse.120 one outcome of the intersection of formal and civilizational studies for the emerging field of the history of Islamic art, then, was a kind of interpre- tive narrowing, with scholars seeking to match a char- acteristic form to a particular cultural tendency or spirit. most influential in this regard is the Austrian art historian Alois riegl’s pioneering comparative orna- ment study, Stilfragen, published in 1893. riegl identifies the “full-fledged Islamic arabesque” by its characteristics of infinite planar correspondence and denaturalized, intertwining ornament, linking it to the locomotive force of the oriental spirit.121 A half century later, when ernst kühnel published his definitive pamphlet-length study Die Arabeske (1949), he maintained a similar civi- lizational remit for the arabesque’s impetus. kühnel presents the arabesque as an expression of Arab charac- ter and analyzes its reciprocal reflection and unbroken interlacing (with its subsidiary effects of eschewing the individual ego and avoiding three-dimensional illusion- ism) as an index of the abiding monotheism of Islam.122 In the 1970s, syria’s cultural critics started from a similar take on the arabesque as symbolic form and developed it into a postcolonial call for an authentic Arab art based on natural faith and unity. As the syrian critic and arts administrator Afif bahnassi formulated it in 1974, the Arab artist employing the arabesque places neither worldly men nor things at the center of art, and never resorts to trompe l’oeil. The impetus for his arabesque lies in “creating a beautiful subject rather than express- ing the beauty of the object itself.”123 for other art critics, however, the civilizational va- lences of the arabesque as a compositional element are decidedly different. concurrent with the specialized in- quiry of the Islamic art historian, a second discourse on the arabesque developed from the nineteenth century’s considerations of ornament and decoration—and it took form within an art-historical model based on indi- vidual volition and sensation, on the opposite side of bahnassi in terms of schemata of intent. This is the ara- besque of french modernist painting, which, as roger benjamin has shown, arose from the new modes of land- scape painting adopted by fauvist artists and other ad- vanced painters in the first decade of the twentieth century. These painters, who rejected the Impressionist practice of transcribing the fleeting feeling of a land- scape, turned instead to the task of elaborating a fully decorative composition by means of determined, ab- stracting devices. for their purposes, the “insistently artificial twist” of the arabesque s-curve served to main- tain a new space of rhythmic relations between figure and ground.124 In this context, the term “arabesque” works to bundle already existing concerns for the figura serpentinata and other pleasing arrangements of the curve, and to anchor them in the two-dimensional con- cerns of modern painting, including excessive outlining and exaggerated elaboration.125 Thus, for the quasi-mys- tical band of french painters known as nabis, who were active from 1888 to 1900 and followed gauguin in seek- ing to establish a symbolic idiom of decorative painting, the arabesque offered a tool for treating wall painting as a decorative object, refashioning space altogether.126 And for the fauves who followed after them, the ara- besque twist provided a device for pure composition, as in matisse’s celebrated Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life, 1905–6), with its tree-branch arabesques that work to establish a dance-like visual rhythm. In these instances of the arabesque as a decorative structure in painting, importantly, the arabesque is brought to bear within a French tradition of pictorial improvement. certainly, its sinuous curve can deliver a frisson of alterity, particularly in the context of a grow- ing commercial trade in Islamic art and the occasional high-profile exhibition.127 yet, as the art historian Alastair Wright points out in the case of matisse’s overt- ly eastern modes of composition in his morocco paint- ings of 1912, much critical writing worked to characterize even those works as an exclusively french enterprise.128 Wright shows that a wide swath of critics viewed ma- tisse’s morocco paintings as discomfiting precisely be- cause they seem to slip too fully into actual eastern abstraction.129 What the slippage threatens is not a purely formal sensibility regarding the best way to put a picture together; rather, the propriety of racial standards For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen242 is at stake as well. Indeed, rightwing french commenta- tors had already matched the foreign characteristics of Arab art to the purported characteristics of Arab people: the arabesque’s “gentle glare of raw colors” and “undu- lating lines” were construed as the product of an Arab desire to rest and prolong pleasure.130 finally, and perhaps ironically, given the turn-of-the- century fear of the dilatory effects of Arab pattern, a third component of the contradictory and parallel meanings of the arabesque in syria arises from its per- ceived disciplining function as a process of synthesis. We know that Ismaʿil made use of Arab designs in the drawing classes he taught at maydan high school, where such designs would have held a nationalist charge as object lessons in cultural history.131 (he likely assigned patterns such as the one shown in fig. 14.) And further, we know that the lessons in Arab ornament in the syrian national curriculum followed a long-established french precedent of using world ornament in instruction. As the art historian molly nesbit shows, practical ornament studies had been introduced to france’s primary school curriculum at the start of the twentieth century in re- sponse to an anxiety about industrial readiness.132 This was a single, systematic curriculum that moved pupils forward from classes on line and geometry, through or- nament and perspectival renderings of things, to ideal- ized leaves, and so on.133 furthermore, as nesbit demonstrates, these abstracting exercises in design also occupied the crux of the modern project to construct a universal subject: a single, standardized french child- subject at every point of the educational and industrial system, whether in marseille or Paris or—adding in the colonial expansion of the mandates in 1920—beirut, Antioch, or deir ez-Zor. concomitantly, in syria the fig. 14. Page from the fifth-level Workbook for Boy and Girl Students (Ashghālī li-l-Talāmīdh wa-Tilmīdhāt) (damascus, late 1940s). The instructions say, “Arab engraving. for boys: Transfer and carve it on wood, then color it, or use it to decorate a piece of cardboard for a book cover. for girls: decorate a book cover, border of a tablecloth, or china.” For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 243 mandate administration included steps to codify local crafts, with the intention of stimulating commodity pro- duction, taking a page from colonial administration in north Africa.134 This included the establishment of a short-lived school of modern Arab Arts attached to the french Institute in damascus from 1926 to 1930, over- seen by the orientalist scholar eustache de Lorey, who was then the director of the Institute. The school admit- ted a handful of local students to help with the tasks of tracing and distilling six types of replicable Arab pat- terns, running the gamut from Nour-eddin (inspired by the ornamentation in the maristan of nur al-din in damascus and on the minbar of nur al-din in hama) to Comnenus (created by de Lorey from byzantine sources).135 In pairing ornamental studies with produc- tivist goals, the project upheld a comprehensive french approach to artistic education that, as nesbit notes, devoted its lessons to the production of objects and yet at the same time considered the object only in its most highly realized form—that of decorative art.136 (The same easily collapsed line between objects and decora- tive schema would also manifest in de Lorey’s other projects, many of which were promotional rather than scholarly.137 After presiding over the 1928 rediscovery of the mosaics of the umayyad mosque, for example, he employed students to produce full-size color drawings of the mosaics and then sent the drawings on a world tour as fine art objects in themselves.138) Whereas the colonial treatment of the arabesque had raised questions of racial difference in french north Af- rica and problems of educational stewardship in the mandate Arab east, however, the neocolonial treatment of the arabesque in the 1940s tended to limit its scope to a formal and universal (rather than epistemological) de- vice. The Paris offices of unesco (to which syria be- came a signatory in 1946), in particular, disseminated this understanding of the arabesque.139 In 1948, for ex- ample, when unesco worked with huyghe to organize a traveling print exhibition of high-quality color repro- ductions of modern painting from Impressionism to the present day, the exhibition catalog offered a narrative of artistic innovation versus illusion, in which abstracted versions of formal strategies were the primary driver.140 huyghe’s introductory essay enshrines the arabesque as the defining operation in the development of modern painterly art, invoking Toulouse-Lautrec’s use of “boldly stylized arabesques,” followed by the nabis’ use of “ arabesques and splashes of color” to mediate between tradition and innovation, and so on.141 huyghe’s pres- entation of the arabesque as a formal feature drawn from ornament and music limits its function to altering a motif and achieving a more harmonious composition. of course, even this flatly formal version of the ara- besque performed ideological work for the postwar era. It was used to tout the capacity of Paris in particular to incorporate the best insights of others and then, as huyghe claims outright, to “radiate” its modernism back over the whole world.142 considering the show’s exclu- sive focus on european achievements, even huyghe’s brief references to foreign influence, such as his note that “matisse’s feeling for colored arabesque attracted him to the east,” serve to buttress the french center.143 The matisse painting in the exhibition, Woman in White, was a relatively recent composition from 1946 in which matisse had most likely adapted the brilliant color ef- fects of egyptian tent piecework into appliqué-like white gaps between gold skin, violet couch, and violet zigzag lines (fig. 15).144 In the narrative of a continuous french development toward abstraction as set forth by huyghe, however, there is no space for understanding these compositional moves as signifying the kind of in- tercultural play that others recognized in matisse’s oeu- vre.145 unesco intended its exhibition of reproductions to act as a kind of equalizer, providing those citizens of the world who had no easy access to great works of painting with an opportunity to inspect them. In 1950 the exhibi- tion traveled to syria and Iraq as well as to bolivia, co- lumbia, the dominican republic, new Zealand, and Pakistan.146 And when it arrived in damascus, the edu- cational community did by and large receive it as the instructional aid it purported to be. huyghe’s essay was duly translated into Arabic and published in the second- ary school teachers’ bulletin al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī, with badiʿ al-kasim, a scholar of philosophy and member of the baʿth party, completing the translation.147 overall, al-kasim remains quite faithful to huyghe’s prose, save for redacting a few minor art-historical asides. but from al-kasim’s particular treatment of the term “arabesque,” we can glean some insight into the cultural recoding of For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen244 the moment, for he takes liberties with its function as an analytical term and puts greater stress on its significance as a form of Arab identity. for example, he opts not to print the term in roman characters (as the journal did for the artists’ names), nor to transliterate it (as syrian critics would do in the 1960s), nor to make use of the term raqsh, from the verb raqasha, meaning to variegate or make multicolored (the coinage that farès officially proposed in 1953).148 Instead, al-kasim uses the phrase tazayyunāt ʿ arabiyya, which has the very literal meaning of “Arabic decoration.” relating more to the modalities of artisanal work than to those of fine arts, this phrase casts french artists who employ the arabesque—Tou- louse-Lautrec, the nabis, and the like—in the role of compositors working with the codified forms of syrian crafts and design education. Indeed, the only other time al-kasim breaks from his convention of leaving french names in the roman script is with his translation of the group name nabis. here he uses the Arabic word al- anbiyāʾ, the conjugated Arabic plural word meaning “the prophets,” which has the effect of Arabizing the history of modern art and naturalizing its resulting aesthetic forms to the syrian setting.149 In other words, al-kasim casts the nabis’ arabesque as prophetic revelation rath- er than an orientalizing motif. given this matrix of arabesques and varying modes of subjectivity and objective presence, how, then, are we to position the work of Ismaʿil, an artist we know had come to recognize Arabism as a first cause in his creativ- ity? I have endeavored to convey the multitude of inten- tions that the arabesque afforded those artists who used its expansive repetitions of line and color. Ismaʿil knew the practical applications of Arab design from his class- room. he had engaged the Arab line as a symbol of spir- itual subjectivity, if not through the analysis of riegl and kühnel then through the art-historical and critical stud- ies of bishr farès. he had read and viewed the french painterly take on the arabesque as a compositional twist as well, and may even have discussed the problem of its translation with al-kasim. The record shows that, not long after the unesco exhibition opened in damascus, Ismaʿil wrote about matisse’s work for al-Baʿth newspa- per, upholding the notion of pure composition as the central concern of the paintings.150 Ismaʿil’s article pro- poses a pan-cultural basis for matisse’s insights, attribut- ing the strong, unadulterated colors in the paintings to eastern inspiration; he also highlights the synesthetic aspect of the interplay of colors and spontaneous line, calling it the “artist’s music.”151 yet Ismaʿil does not use the word “arabesque” in his article, nor in any of his other published works from 1950.152 rather, his reading of the legacy of the fauves and other french moderns would seem to recognize their success in reminding the world of the power of repeated, sinuous line and bright color. This is not to suggest that they had definitively established the origin of that power, however. for Ismaʿil, there remained the question of the underlying source of meaningful artistic experience. In order to interpret the conceptual (and non-visible) aspect of Ismaʿil’s practice, it is crucial to recall that his fig. 15. henri matisse, Woman in White (Dame à la robe blanche), 1946, oil on canvas, 96.5 × 60.3 cm. (Photo: rich sanders, courtesy of des moines Art center) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 245 first formal training in the use of decorative line came as a colonial subject in Alexandretta and not as a student of the fine painterly arts. In such a setting, academic di- visions between ornament, design, and art could easily be collapsed into a practice of free drawing. These les- sons, as I have discussed, were meant to instill a sense of separation between line and things and to produce a kind of industrial subject. To Ismaʿil’s childhood psyche, however, the same separation also opened up vistas for the expression of anti-rational feeling—of mystical sub- jectivity over tangible object. even while still a school- boy, he began to activate the line’s more automatic or pre-aesthetic qualities as a means to free other truths. his Antioch friends later recollected how he liked to use the schoolroom’s portable blackboard as a site for re- leasing his imagination, running his chalk into “every corner,” producing images of “marvelous energy.”153 he was also remembered for sometimes manipulating his dancing lines in ways that contested french authority. When, for example, he played drawing guessing games with cousins, he would draw a line or two and then ask them to guess what image he intended (for example “duck” or “sheep”), asking again after he had drawn an- other line or two (“house”) and so on, until a correct guess was made—and the lines sometimes channeled latent anti-colonial feeling into image.154 one day, his cousin reports, Ismaʿil’s drawing coalesced into the im- age of an arrow, and then the arrow came to pierce a french soldier. The resulting image became a talisman for the group, and they used “piercing arrow” as a secret password phrase at their school. notably, in these ac- tivities, the lines themselves (and not Ismaʿil per se) are made agents of unfurling a truth about the collective condition. giving expression to the latent desire of lines to form eternal shapes could also serve to solidify an op- positional community. once Ismaʿil came to damascus and got to know other young intellectuals there, his work with instinc- tual line intersected with literary efforts to convey a ro- mantic notion of transformative natural experience, producing another phase of drawing. In 1942, for exam- ple, he worked with his damascus friend badiʿ haqqi, a law student and eventual baʿth adherent, to create im- ages to accompany haqqi’s free-verse evocation of a wintertime snow flurry in the city.155 haqqi wrote “snowfall” as an account of synesthetic impressions: jag- ged pieces freezing against the blue sky; jasmine explod- ing in a heavenly smell; and the twice-repeated phrase “from the whiteness of snow, dreams of a bride scatter, shadows scatter.”156 As a gift to his friend, and as a testa- ment to the inspirational force of snow, Ismaʿil respond- ed to the bridal tropes of the poem in an ink drawing of anthropomorphized snowflakes: the white silhouette of a dancer set within a dark ground, spiraling in a fractal- like recursive sequence of inversion and reflection (fig. 16).157 elements of this drawing, such as the cinched waist, bouffant hair, and tapering limbs of the dancer, recall the motifs of french graphic design in L’Illustration, including popular advertising for perfumes (fig. 17). but any cultural specificity of the referent is ultimately en- compassed by the suffusing impression of flowing, fe- brile femininity achieved by the floating twists of outline, arranged in an exploding pattern of optical whiteness. Another of Ismaʿil’s drawings from this early period, the colored-pencil work Solitude, reveals a complemen- tary interest in those compositional models Ismaʿil iden- tified as eastern (fig. 18). The drawing shows a woman clad in a black dress beneath a single, twisting tree branch amid a landscape suffused by colored mist and golden sky. It would seem to enfold the romantic pan- Asian visual lexicon that the Indian artist Abanindra- nath Tagore devised in the first decades of the twentieth fig. 16. Adham Ismaʿil, Snowfall (Thulūj), 1942, originally ink, here shown in surviving reproduction. (reprinted from badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “Thulūj,” al-Maʿrifa 134 [April 1973]: 80–82, at 80.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen246 would return to such linear distillation, too, in composi- tions less explicitly related to any eastern source. In the 1948 watercolor Warm Breeze, for example, Ismaʿil works directly with the theme of nature as a source of the spir- its embodied in the arabesque line; a surface pattern of reeds, birds, and pure graphic marks appears to breathe out elegant loops that hint at an entrelac or other Arab- Islamic motif but do not finally resolve as such (fig. 6). for Ismaʿil, the ultimate reconciliation of the ara- besque’s multiple possibilities comes not by electing one or the other side of its parallel genealogies, eastern or Western, but rather through the populist element of the baʿth cultural equation and its claim to the creative genius of an uncoerced, natural collective. recall how, during the registration drives in Alexandretta in 1938, the Arabic mother tongue had provided the basis for a transcendent unity. To physically practice Arab identity in speech and writing in that context was to embody this unity. After syrian independence in 1946, and the chal- lenges to the representational authority of the national bloc mounted by the ideological parties, Ismaʿil’s work sought out additional pathways to the greater imagina- tion of Arabism. In his arabesque experiments, he plays with models of Arab embodiment in culture, associating its visual form with other poetic and musical forms. The 1947 painting Syrian Zajal, for example, takes its title from a form of colloquial poetry performance associated with feast days, often involving percussion and song (fig. 20).160 Ismaʿil’s evocation of its extended, temporal form moves several vectors of energy into visual overlay: a sky containing both day and night; a vision of ancient trees with foliage that dissolves into clouds; a central cruci- form shape that appears to conduct electricity into curl- ing forms of genie-like life; and a skein of colored arabesque lines that, in the far right corner, appear to outline a fawn, a woman’s eye, and other hallucinatory beings. Another painting in this vein, Dabke (1950), takes its title from the Arab folk dance that is customary at weddings and celebrations, where whole communities perform its syncopated foot movements in rhythmic co- ordination. In this case, the experience is evoked by short flecks of contour lines in atmospheric space, which hint at (female) bodily form as if it were a distillate of the fertile atmosphere of the eastern landscape (fig. 21). Although all these works include clear markers of an century, distinguished by the watercolor wash tech- niques that imbue the spare compositions with atmo- spheric luminescence.158 one 1902 Tagore watercolor, which depicts the mughal king shah Jahan in solitary reflection in his garden, where he sits beneath a tree branch gathering a cloud of delicate mist, circulated widely in europe in the 1920s as an illustration of V. c. scott o’connor’s exotic travelogue The Charm of Kash- mir (fig. 19).159 Ismaʿil’s Solitude drawing employs a modal composition of person and atmospheric blank- ness that is akin to Tagore’s image of noble ascesis, al- beit with the further stylization of its elements into a rounded s-curve of the branch against bright striations of color in pink, green, blue, and gold. Amid such fugitive visual qualities and their suggestion of eastern meta- physics, this s-curve becomes more an abstraction of ephemeral energies than a depiction of things. The artist fig. 17. Print advertisement for Lancôme perfume, “con- quête,” in L’Illustration, november 15, 1941. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 247 fig. 18. Adham Ismaʿil, Solitude (al-Waḥda), 1945, colored pencil on paper. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Adham Ismāʿīl: Ḥarqat Lawn wa-Khaṭṭ Lā-Nihāʾī [damascus: al-Jumhuriyya Press, 1965].) fig. 19. Abanindranath Tagore, Nasim Bagh, 1902, watercolor. (reprinted from “Les Jardins du kashmir,” L’Illustration no. 4103 [october 22, 1921]: 382–84.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen248 Arab cultural identity, they are not ethnographic in pur- pose. Instead, each manages the relationship between idealized form and folk practices by means of (imag- ined) rhythm, letting rhythm act as a mediating pres- ence as well. That relationship, established across nested realms of being, is at once natural, replicative through the body, protean, and transcendent. by the time Ismaʿil debuted The Porter, then, his own assessment of the possibilities of the “arabesque” hinged upon his recognition of the timeless metaphysical as- pects it held in common across its many instantiations, and its internal coherence as energy. for his extended circle, the term “arabesque” itself came to describe “the permanent movement” within any work of art, its con- stitutive animating force.161 some of the drawings Ismaʿil made after The Porter produced beautiful results from the search for this kind of plenitude. We can, for in- stance, consider the 1953 watercolor drawing shown in fig. 22. As an image, it is the result of a single physical interaction by the artist on his paper support, involving Ismaʿil pushing a single continuous line through a se- quence of loops and points so as to articulate the inter- nal and external forms of a face in profile, not unlike the method employed in The Porter. The resulting enclo- sures have been filled in with flat hues of local color: bright, acidic hues oscillate with naturalistic skin and hair tones as well as neutral mauves. but a difference here is the open surface of the paper, which allows the image so produced to register as a being in active trans- formation. As Ismaʿil traced the outlines, he exploited the capacity of his line to elicit different states of living, and even to produce other beings. In the areas where Ismaʿil’s lines accrue around the particularly detailed passages of the human visage, the color variations be- come so dense that a transubstantiating effect is achieved: flowers sprout and a hummingbird appears at the crown. here in its final resting form, the arabesque expresses an internal propensity to Islamic ornament. To use the categorical terms of the history of Islamic art, we can say that the extremities of this drawing have be- come “floriated.”162 Again, the impetus is not to conform to a determined heritage motif, but rather to set a col- lective energy free into new, fecund forms. In other drawings, by contrast, the push and pull of Ismaʿil’s slicing line against the brightness of the color produces such defamiliarizing effects that the images verge on ugliness. These images are particularly telling of the conceptual process, for they leave no sense of the pleasures of play, instead making the moment of repre- sentation into a subject of dark reflection. one gouache, dated 1952 (discussed above), allows the tracing of ob- jects to transport the image into a space of unstable color relationships (fig. 7). beginning from one draw- ing—probably again the drawing of a head—Ismaʿil fig. 20. Adham Ismaʿil, Syrian Zajal (al-Zajal al-Sūrī), 1947(?), oil on unknown surface. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Ad- ham Ismāʿīl, 14.) fig. 21. Adham Ismaʿil, Dabke, 1950, oil on unknown surface. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Adham Ismāʿīl, 27.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 249 fig. 22. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1953, gouache on paper. samawi collection, dubai. (Photo: provided by the Ayyam gallery) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen250 adds an overlay of what may be a standing figure, filling in the resulting structure with color. by doubling the scenes depicted, and then suturing them again into a field of shifting colors that hint at living beings but do not show them, the image breaks not only with repre- sentation but also with formal satisfaction. second and third heads sprout in the place where a nose might once have been, while the eyes have become flowers and the forehead a swamp. The drawing as a whole would seem to offer a disturbing image of stripped human features. but more properly, we might say that it succeeds in dis- turbing the presumed purpose of drawing. rather than offering a satisfying composition in which relations be- tween signifier and signified are roughly coherent, the meandering line and punctuating color work to disclose an underlying flux. Vision comes to feel nearly impos- sible; one cannot look at the drawing and see any one thing. quite unlike either hamoudi’s or Zeid’s paintings in Paris, both of which traced abstract entities with a heavy black line, Ismaʿil’s drawing uses line as a means to disperse appearances. his “arabesque” here manifests in a refusal of objects or their permanence. having now thoroughly tracked the range of Ismaʿil’s use of sinuous and unending line, it becomes possible, finally, to clarify the goal of resurrected unity that the baʿth movement pursued at the same time, a unity that they located somewhere between the “purely” cultural and the “naturally” political. beginning in the 1940s, the artist used the apparently autonomous energy of the dancing line to invoke the natural synthesis of Arab na- tional feeling, in which form and identity are equivalent. It is not by accident that Ismaʿil’s turn to Arab vitality took place precisely as political conditions in syria seemed to move in a conservative direction, under the consolidating power of the national bloc, in the years 1946 to 1949. his opposing version of an ideal national artistry—one that is vivifying in its location in the un- adulterated self—came to wield a contestatory power. but the radicalism of Ismaʿil’s arabesque did not lie merely in its capacity to undercut appearance. rather, the liwāʾiyyūn intellectuals conceived of the Arab total- ity as a perfect congruence between the imagined future and the communal past, which politicized their creative claims in the present and set the activated line to the task of revealing rhythmic, felt arrangements of refract- ed, distributed color. Thus, Ismaʿil’s method renders the urban poverty of the present, along with other daily de- tails, as mere historical anecdote. Interior outlines of things are made to dissolve their own exterior boundar- ies; façades become provisional. The red flashes on the painting’s surface communicate feeling, but they also serve as visual punctuation in the meandering line of a boundless arabesque—a conceptual total that may be sensed, but not seen. As an abstracting force, such paint- ing remained antagonistic toward the visual illusions proposed by the parochial syrian state, whether parlia- ment assemblies or bourgeois neighborhood planning. Linking the experience of a dissolving picture plane to the active production of a restorative unity, and linking the consciousness of the audience to the “here” of an alternative Arab totality, Ismaʿil and the baʿth move- ment located modern Arab painting in a future-oriented socialist Arabism. Their arabesque performed a funda- mentally anti-mimetic demonstration of the cultural awareness that the Arab people already contained with- in themselves. ePILogue The dissonant qualities of Ismaʿil’s work did not achieve the radical ends they might have seemed to promise in this uncertain period of struggle for sovereignty. At the end of 1952, Ismaʿil received the first syrian state fellow- ship to study in Italy at the Academy of fine Arts in rome, an opportunity secured by a bilateral agreement with an Italy eager to present itself as a cultural sponsor of Arab rebirth in a mediterranean mold.163 The fact that Ismaʿil received the honor is itself an index of changing politics, for it was likely the result of special arrangements by the politician Akram al-hawrani, a fiery advocate of property and agrarian reform who had managed to forge alliances with colonel shishakli as well as the baʿth Party.164 once Ismaʿil arrived in rome, he studied fresco painting and developed a more sche- matic use of arabesque lines as a mode of graphic testi- mony to the political plight of the Arab people. The students who had witnessed the debut of The Porter did not forget its powerful call to a new integrity of inner national vision, however. on the occasion of a 2008 For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 251 retro spective of the syrian modern art movement, as part of damascus’s designation as the Arab capital of culture, the syrian artist and critic elias Zayyat com- posed a semi-fictional vignette about the 1951 salon that captures the mixture of self-effacement and visionary assertion in Ismaʿil’s painting practice and articulates its political stakes. for Zayyat, The Porter announced the end of the era of a deadening european vision. Adopting the perspective of one of the maydan students who would have attended the opening, he writes: We four in the maydan secondary school who loved draw- ing followed our teacher Adham to the damascus museum to see the painting The Porter, which he had created espe- cially for the Autumn exhibition. beside it, we saw our teachers’ paintings decorating qaṣr al-Ḥayr, and were drowned in the light of color. And in the museum’s garden stood a painter, of foreign appearance and language, who was drawing the ancient garden with the minarets of the Takiyya al-sulaymāniyya in paints of gray.165 In Zayyat’s staging of the momentous turn toward sov- ereignty enacted in 1951, it is Ismaʿil who leads the way to terminating a long tradition of orientalist “views” of syrian antiquity. The tables have been turned against the stifling academic model, and it is the foreign visitor whose painting becomes colorless and drained. History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley noTes Author’s note: This article is drawn from a book in progress tenta- tively entitled Beautiful Agitation: The Mobilizing Arts of Painting in Syria and the Arab East, 1920–1967 and is based on research undertaken in damascus, beirut, cairo, rome, and Paris as part of my doctoral dissertation (made possible by support from the u.s. fulbright commission and the social science research council, International dissertation research fellowship). The argument took form first as a paper for the 2013 college Art Association panel “Abstraction and Totality,” chaired by Ara h. merjian and Anthony White; it was further developed as a lecture at the university of california-berkeley in december 2013; and was workshopped at the menA colloquium at the American university in cairo, may 2014. I thank robin greeley, caroline A. Jones, ellen kenney, gülru necipoğlu, stefania Pandolfo, nasser rabbat, nada shabout, Adam Talib, Lisa Wedeen, and especially the anonymous Muqarnas reviewer for their questions and sug- gestions. finally, I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the families of the artists here discussed—including in particular Alma Ismaʿil, Lubna hammad, and Ishtar hamoudi—in giving time and care to this project of recuperation. 1. Adham Ismaʿil to Jamil hamoudi, december 27, 1951, pri- vate archive of Ishtar hamoudi, baghdad, Iraq. consulted via photographic scan. All translations from Arabic by the author, unless otherwise noted. 2. Articles by Jamil hamoudi include “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” al-Adīb 9, no. 3 (march 1950): 9–12; “Ṣālūn al-Ḥaqāʾiq al-Jadīda li-sanat 1950,” al-Adīb 9, no. 9 (september 1950): 25–32; and “al-fannān al-Ḥamūdī,” al-Adīb 10, no. 1 (January 1951): 66–67. for a relevant dis- cussion of the immediate postwar abstractionist trends, see Tom mcdonough, “The mercurial monochrome, or the nihilation of geometric Abstraction,” in Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015, ed. Iwona blazwick et al. (new york: Prestel, 2015), 243–51; nancy Jachec, Politics and Paintings at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64 (new york: manchester university Press, 2007); and marcia e. Vetrocq, “Painting and beyond: recovery and regenera- tion, 1943–1952,” in The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. germano celant (new york: guggenheim museum, 1994), 20–31. 3. Jamīl Ḥamūdī, “Ilā Jamīʿ al-fannānīn fī al-bilād al-ʿArabiyya,” al-Adīb 9, no. 1 (January 1951): 63. 4. These descriptions appear in nāqid al-Ishtirākiyya al-fannī (Ishtirākiyya’s Art critic), “al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla,” al-Ishtirākiyya, november 3, 1951. The Arabic title of the painting is al-Ḥammāl. In later studies of Ismaʿil’s work, the title is sometimes given as al-ʿAttāl, which is synonymous with al-Ḥammāl, but with a more colloquial tone. 5. Ismaʿil to hamoudi, december 27, 1951. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. As we will see later in this article, Ismaʿil’s cohort stud- ied bergsonian notions of the creative spirit in the early 1940s with their philosophical mentor Zaki al-Arsuzi. for discussions of bergson’s impact on modern movements and modern artists, see mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1993); Jonathan crary, Sus- pensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Cul- ture (cambridge, mA: mIT Press, 1999); and Todd cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota Press, 2013). for a consideration of these ideas in a postcolonial literary context, see donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (new york: columbia university Press, 2010). 9. on competing schemes of unity in this era, see Patrick seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Poli- tics, 1945–1958 (London: oxford university Press, 1965). 10. my definition of “radical” here draws on Ilham khuri-mak- disi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen252 Radicalism, 1860–1914 (berkeley, cA: university of california Press, 2010). 11. Philip shukry khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, nJ: Princ- eton university Press, 1987); and elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (new york: columbia university Press, 2000). 12. khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 423. Patrick seale gives additional details on the charged atmosphere within the schools in Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (berkeley, cA: university of california Press, 1990), 25–26. 13. for a discussion of such groups as constitutive of the middle class of the Arab east, see keith david Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colo- nialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2006). discussions of the nongovernmen- tal art associations in particular may be found in ghāzī al-khāldī, “al-Jamʿiyyāt al-fanniyya fī sūriyā mundhu ʿĀm 1925 ḥattā al-yawm,” al-Baʿth, december 11, 1968; and elias Zay[y]at, preface to Revival of Plastic Art Memory in Syria, 4 vols. (damascus: capital of Arab culture, 2008–9), 1:n.p. 14. for a model analysis of artists’ negotiations with a similar slippage between nation and state in Pakistan, see Iftikhar dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina Press, 2010). 15. The intellectual atmosphere of the group is best described in sulaymān al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth al-ʿArabī fī Ḥayāt al-shāʿir sulaymān al-ʿĪsā wa-dhākiratihu,” pt. 1, al-Munāḍil 84 (April 1976): 52–73. 16. details about the baʿth Party’s opposition to the national bloc are given in fāʾiz Ismāʿīl, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” in Adham Ismāʿīl: Qirāʾa fī Thalāthat Abʿād, ed. khalīl Ṣafiyya (damascus: ministry of culture, 1991), 143–55, at 151. see also the letter of sidqi Ismaʿil to a friend, novem- ber 14, 1945, in Ṣidqī Ismāʿīl, Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, ed. ʿAbd al-nabī Aṣṭīf (damascus: ministry of culture, 2009), 102–3. 17. my account of this exhibition is informed by the follow- ing sources: journalistic coverage in al-Nuqqād, al-Naṣr, al-Baʿth, al-Fayḥāʾ, al-Iṣlāḥ, and al-Inshāʾ; organizational memos contained in the uncataloged archive of the mod- ern art wing of the national museum, damascus (hereafter nm-d modern); and a report in the national teachers’ jour- nal, al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī. 18. “nahḍatunā al-fanniyya al-ḥadītha.” see [no author] “Iqāmat maʿraḍ kabīr li-l-rasm wa-l-funūn al-Jamīla,” al-Inshāʾ, december 4, 1950. 19. The salon d’Automne is mentioned in the french diplo- matic correspondence gathered in “Échanges culturels 166 (1948–53),” direction générale des relations culturelles, ministère des Affaires Étrangères, at Paris-La courneuve. A letter from the french ambassador in damascus dated Jan- uary 15, 1951 relays a request received from the syrian gov- ernment to examine the statutes for the salon d’Automne. 20. Maʿraḍ al-Rasm al-Yadawī. The phrase connotes a gen- eral notion of dexterous artistry and is not limited to two- dimensional painting. The inclusion of decorative objects in exhibitions appears to have been relatively common at least since the 1930s, perhaps as a colonial inheritance from the universal exhibition of the nineteenth century. design specimens also appeared in an exhibition of the Women’s cultural forum held in damascus in may 1950. 21. Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-dahanī, “Jawla fī maʿrad al-rasm li-l- maʿārif,” al-Naṣr, november 25, 1950. 22. Ibid. similar criticisms were also leveled by sulaymān al- khish in “al-fann fī maʿraḍ al-rasm al-yadawī,” a two-part article published in al-Nuqqād, december 25, 1950, and January 1, 1951. 23. “kalima munṣifa li-Wizārat al-maʿārif,” al-Naṣr, January 1, 1951. 24. The organizing committee even put together a tea party for the opening (memo from the President of the exhibition organizing committee and general director of Antiqui- ties to the council of ministers, october 23, 1951, nm-d modern). The coverage in both al-Naṣr and al-Ishtirākiyya makes explicit mention of the fact that Ismaʿil’s friends and sympathizers had eagerly anticipated his submission, which suggests to me that he had shared in advance his inten- tion to make a shockingly new work. see “al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla”; and “dunyā al-fann,” al-Naṣr, november 4–5, 1951. 25. The earliest instance I have found of the term “arabesque” being applied to Ismaʿil’s technique is in the 1964 volume his brother naʿim Ismaʿil published after the artist’s prema- ture death in 1963, Adham Ismāʿīl: Ḥarqat Lawn wa-Khaṭṭ Lā-Nihāʾī (damascus: al-Jumhuriyya Press, s.n., 1964), 22–25. As naʿim Ismaʿil notes in that discussion, “arabesque” was more a european term than a native one. he writes that numerous painters, from Tintoretto to Paul klee, had made use of it, but that Ismaʿil’s work, by contrast, emerged from within it. Later in this article I discuss the many different pathways by which the idea of an Arab-inflected european modernism circulated to syria in the 1940s and 1950s and bore upon Ismaʿil’s conception of his practice. (because I discuss several members of the Ismaʿil family in this article, sometimes even in the same paragraph, I have opted to differentiate them by using the family name Ismaʿil to refer to Adham Ismaʿil and using both first and family names for his brother sidqi Ismaʿil, brother naʿim Ismaʿil, and cousin fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil.) 26. “Al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla” and “dunyā al-fann.” 27. “dunyā al-fann.” 28. “Al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla.” 29. Ismaʿil’s one published statement on the subject seems to have been a short speech he delivered in 1951 that was reprinted in al-nāqid al-fannī (The Art critic), “Jawla fī al-maʿraḍ al-fannī li-Thānawiyyat al-maydān,” al-Baʿth, may 26, 1951, 5 and 8. (I discuss this later in the present article.) 30. sidqi Ismaʿil, letter to a friend, march 12, 1951, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 159–60. see also sidqi Ismaʿil’s letter to a For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 253 friend from march 28, 1950, identifying the presence of life as “deeper and stronger than struggle”; ibid., 156–57. of the brothers, it was sidqi Ismaʿil who was most publicly involved in the party, contributing to both its political and cultural arms. 31. see the periodized institutional accounts in natalie Adam- son, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 (burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); and Jachec, Poli- tics and Paintings at the Venice Biennale. 32. This attitude is exemplified by rené huyghe, introduction to UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition: From Impressionism till Today (Paris: unesco, 1949), 5–10, which was designed for dissemination to the developing world, and which I discuss later in this article. 33. foundational studies that preserve the nation-state con- tainer, to varying degrees, include ʿAfīf bahnassī, al-Fann al-Ḥadīth fī al-Bilād al-ʿArabiyya (Tunis: unesco, 1980); silvia naef, À la recherche d’une modernité arabe: L’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak (geneva: slatkine, 1996); and Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Devel- opment and Continuity (gainesville, fL: university Press of florida, 1997). These all build on the art scenes’ own telling of their national histories, as beginning with inde- pendence as states and continuing through staged attempts to recover artistic authenticity. 34. on the consolidation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Anneka Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the syrian Avant-garde, 1964–1970,” ARTMargins 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 43–70. 35. Ṭāriq al-sharīf, ʿIshrūn Fannānan min Sūriya (damascus: ministry of culture, 1972), 19. 36. for sidqi Ismaʿil’s explicitly political discussion of this mode of Arab unity, see “al-ʿArab wa-Ittijāh al-ʿAṣr al-Ḥāḍir,” al-Baʿth, August 3–4, 1946, reprinted in sidqi Ismaʿil, al-Muʾallafāt al-Kāmila, 5 vols. (damascus: ministry of culture, 1977– 81), 1:69–73. 37. due to the multilingual population of the administrative district of Alexandretta (al-Iskandarūna in Arabic and İskenderun in Turkish), place names are often multiple and contested. for the sake of simplicity, I here use the place names favored by the french mandate administration in syria (1920–46), the period corresponding with Ismaʿil’s childhood years. 38. for an archival account of the crisis, using french and Turkish sources, see sarah d. shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (oxford: oxford university Press, 2011). The Arabist politics of the conflict are carefully ana- lyzed in keith d. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms’: Zaki al-Arsuzi, the Alexandretta crisis, and the formation of modern Arab nationalism in syria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 3 (1996): 363–89. 39. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148; and naʿim Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl, unpaginated biographical summary. 40. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; and al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth.” for an invaluable summary of the life of Zaki al-Arsuzi, which details the Alexandretta struggle and the youth movements it sustained, see hiroyuki Aoyama, “A biography of Zakī al-Arsūzī,” revised by malek salman, in hiroyuki Aoyama, Wafiq khansa, and maher al-charif, Spiritual Father of the Baʿth: The Ideological and Political Sig- nificance of Zakī al-Arsūzī in Arab Nationalist Movements, trans. and revised by mujab al-Imam and malek salman, middle east studies series 49 (Tokyo: Institute of develop- ing economies, Jetro, 2000), 1–35. 41. This group joined forces with another group, led by the teachers michel Aflaq and salah al-din al-bitar, in the mid- 1940s. I return to this merger later on in the article. for a variety of reasons, this early history of the party was later contested, with some voices emphasizing the contributions of the group from Alexandretta and others emphasizing Aflaq and al-bitar. The most comprehensive account of the Alexandretta “stream” of the party may be found in Aoyama, “A biography of Zakī al-Arsūzī.” 42. hanna batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolution- ary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1978), 723. 43. The two fateful decisions, the one surrendering Alexan- dretta in 1937 and the one surrendering Palestine in 1947, shared the single calendar date of november 29. In 1950, large student demonstrations against this double surren- der were staged in damascus. see “Taẓāhurat al-Ṭullāb bi-dhikrā al-Taqsīm wa-salkh al-Liwāʾ,” al-Inshāʾ, novem- ber 30, 1950. In 1949, the united nations’s count of Palestin- ian refugees outside Israel was 726,000. The syrian press closely covered the creation of the united nations relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the near east in 1949, as well as its operations in beirut. 44. According to figures collected by the french high commis- sion in 1936, the district held a population of two hundred and twenty thousand, with 39 percent consisting of ethnic Turks, 28 percent ʿAlawite, 11 percent Armenian, 10 per- cent sunni Arabs, 8 percent christians, and the remainder divided among kurds, circassians, and Jews (khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 495). 45. shields, Fezzes in the River, 59. 46. Ibid., 242–47. 47. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 266. 48. Ibid., 370; shields, Fezzes in the River, 59. 49. for a discussion of a comparable instance of performative nationalism in Pakistan, see dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, 30. 50. shields, Fezzes in the River, 28. 51. from the address by Turkish President mustafa kemal to the grand national Assembly in Ankara. see “Turks cheer demand for rights in syria,” The New York Times, novem- ber 2, 1936, 12. 52. details from naʿim Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl; and fa⁠ʾ iz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 143–55. both of these accounts, written long after the fact, use the meta-cate- gories established in the struggle, designating the hostile For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen254 neighborhood as Turkish without reference to a particular religious or communal composition. 53. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 366. Al-Arsuzi, too, was an ʿAlawite with ties to the Ismaʿils’ neighborhood of ʿAfan. 54. Watenpaugh demonstrates how the Arab clubs established by al-Arsuzi in many ways mirrored Turkish initiatives to foster national affiliation in the same period, such as the Turkish sports club Gençspor Kulübü established in Antioch in 1926. 55. dalal Arsuzi-elamir, “Zakī al-Arsūzī and syrian-Arab nationalism in the Periphery: The Alexandretta crisis of 1936–1939,” in From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon, ed. Thomas Philipp and christoph schumann (beirut: ergon Verlag in kommission, 2004), 307–27. 56. details of the scouting initiatives come from Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms’”; Arsuzi-elamir, “Zakī al-Arsūzī”; fa⁠ʾ iz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth”; and muḥammad ʿAlī Zarqa, Qaḍiyyat Liwāʾ al-Iskandarūna: Wathāʾiq wa-Shurūḥ (beirut: dār al-ʿurūba, 1994). 57. As Watenpaugh points out (“‘creating Phantoms,’” 369), these community designations were highly idiosyncratic. They divided Arabic speakers on the basis of religious affiliation while maintaining the “Turkish community” as a single voting group. moreover, sunni muslims would have comprised the majority in either the “Turkish community” or the “Arab community” if religious affiliation had been made the sole determinant. nor does a linguistic basis for the separation hold across categories, as many Armenians in the district spoke Turkish dialects rather than Armenian. 58. shields, Fezzes in the River, 172. 59. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148. 60. Ibid. shields cites french surveillance reports that corrobo- rate these initiatives (Fezzes in the River, 123, 151). 61. shields, Fezzes in the River, 204–31. 62. Ibid., 235; and khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 513. The elder Ismaʿil brothers opted to take advantage of an agreement france had made with Turkey allowing non- Turkish inhabitants of Alexandretta to acquire syrian or Lebanese passports and to emigrate over the newly policed border. see Watenpaugh’s description of citizenship options in “‘creating Phantoms,’” 377. 63. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl.” reports include direction de la sûreté générale, beirut, Infor- mation no. 223, 10 Jan 1939, and Information no. 1982, 20 march 1939, folder cabinet Politique no. 873, 2nd verse- ment, Instruction Publique, fonds beyrouth, mAe-nantes. 64. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth”; and ʿAbd al-khāliq al-naqshbandī, “al-bidāyāt fī dhākirat al-duktūr al-rafīq ʿAbd al-khāliq al-naqshbandī,” pt. 2, al-Munāḍil 100 (August 1977): 6–16, at 8. The artist himself did not sleep in this house, but his brother sidqi did stay there from time to time. 65. Ismaʿil marwa, “sulaymān al-ʿĪsā: Ḥulm ʿArabī damuhu wa-nabḍuhu wa-fikruhu al-ʿurūba,” Bayt Filasṭīn li-l-Shiʿr, April 2012, http://www.ppbait.org/ . 66. A critical discussion of the gist of the lectures may be found in sāmī al-Jundī, al-Baʿth (beirut: dār al-nahār, 1969). I also draw from fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil’s list of the topics the group published in their handwritten newsletter, in “al-bidāyāt fī dhākirat fāʾiz Ismāʿīl,” pt. 2, al-Munāḍil 102 (october 1977): 37–57, at 39. 67. designation in al-Jundī, al-Baʿth, 27. The term “sufi” was used to designate not membership in an institutionalized ṭarīqa, or way, but rather a practice of seeking internal knowledge. Tellingly, al-Arsuzi considered henri berg- son to be a sufi. see salīm barakāt, “al-fikr al-qawmī wa- ususuhu al-falsafīya ʿinda Zakī al-Arsūzī” (master’s thesis, damascus university, 1979), 79. 68. Al-Arsuzi often mentioned his debt to bergson; he is said to have quoted passages from L’évolution créatrice from memory. many historians have cited this bergsonian influence, alongside other borrowings from european thin- kers. see Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 365; barakāt, “al-fikr al-qawmī,” 31; eric rouleau, “The syrian enigma: What Is the baath?” New Left Review, 1st ser., 45 (septem- ber–october 1967): 53–65, at 56; and Antoine Audo, Zakī al-Arsouzī: Un arabe face à la modernité (beirut: dar al- machreq, 1988), 20–21. 69. al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth,” 68–69. 70. “naḥnu hunā naʿīsh fī ẓill al-dawla al-ʿarabiyya al-ishti- rākiyya al-kubrā” and “naḥnu hunā fī ẓill al-waṭan al-ʿarabī al-waḥīd.” see al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth,” 72. 71. seale, Struggle for Syria, 41; and al-naqshbandī, “al-bidāyāt fī dhākira,” pt. 1, al-Munāḍil 99 (July 1977): 5–18, at 14. Vol- unteer gendarmes from the group included sidqi Ismaʿil, youssef shaqra, and masʿud al-ghanim. 72. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, July 14, 1944, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 95–96. 73. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, november 14, 1945, in ibid., 102–3. 74. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, April 17, 1946, in ibid., 106–7. 75. Leonard binder, trans. and commentary, “The constitution of the Arab resurrection (baʿth) socialist Party of syria,” Middle East Journal 13, no. 2 (spring 1959): 195–200. most likely Ismaʿil attended the congress that ratified this docu- ment. 76. Ibid. 77. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, october 5, 1947, in Rasāʾil Lam Tun- shar, 116–18. 78. Ibid. he writes the sentence in french in the letter, “L’art est une chose mentale.” sidqi Ismaʿil does not indicate the source of the quote, but I suspect that it was henri berg- son’s 1904 essay, “notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de m. félix ravaisson-mollien,” which had been reprinted in La pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences (Paris: félix Alcan, 1934). The essay considers a passage from Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, which states that art must endeavor to capture the “undulous or serpentine line” within each living being. ravaisson’s summary of the practice is that “la peinture est chose mentale.” sidqi Ismaʿil seems to have all of this in mind in his letter, for he also mentions the artistic production of “living pictures of our souls.” For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 255 79. It is not entirely clear to which Picasso painting sidqi Ismaʿil refers. his description of the placement of the eyes in the face, red tinged with black at the woman’s seat, and the pattern of white-in-green on the breast would seem to match the painting now known as Dora Maar with Cat (1941), which was auctioned in 2006 and is in a private col- lection. I have not been able to confirm that a color repro- duction of the painting was circulating in 1947, however. 80. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, August 15, 1949, in Rasāʾil Lam Tun- shar, 145–46. 81. sidqi Ismaʿil, “al-shallāl,” in al-Kalb: Jarīdat Siḍqī Ismāʿīl (damascus: al-Idāra al-siyāsiyya, 1983), 422–24. 82. sidqi Ismaʿil, “malḥamat al-ʿĀm li-sanat 1951,” in ibid., 438– 39. 83. naʿīm Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl, 109. 84. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, november 8, 1944, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 97–98. 85. The best description of the atmosphere in maydan in these years, including a reference to the Ismaʿils, may be found in ʿAbd al-raḥmān munīf, Marwān Qaṣṣāb Bāshī: Riḥlat al-Ḥayā wa-l-Fann ([damascus]: m. q. bāshī, 1996). Prior to this position, Ismaʿil taught at a private elementary school in damascus and at the state preparatory high school in Aleppo from 1948 to 1950. 86. Art critic, “Jawla”; and eid yakoubi (artist and former stu- dent of Ismaʿil), interview by author, Paris, June 13, 2011. 87. Art critic, “Jawla.” 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. This is boris groys’s analysis of the operation that defined both art and politics in stalinist russia, in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. charles rougle (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1992), 43. 91. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil (“Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 151–52) describes the artist as only sporadically attending meet- ings but acting as a “natural” and trusted participant in their underground work. Ismaʿil worked with members to design the party’s first logo (an image of a tiger under a palm tree), for example. 92. maḥmūd Ḥammād, “dhikriyātīmaʿ Adham Ismāʿīl,” in Ṣafiyya, Adham Ismāʿīl, 175–86, at 175. 93. Ibid.; and al-khāldī, “al-Jamʿiyyāt al-fanniyya.” 94. reference to L’Illustration in mamdūḥ qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda,” in Niṣf Qarn min al-Ibdāʿ al-Tashkīlī fī Sūriya (damascus: Īblā li-l-funūn al-Jamīla, 2006), 69–77. They also consulted the british journal The Studio, as mentioned in Ismaʿil’s letter to Jamil hamoudi, december 27, 1951. 95. cited in nada shabout, “A dream We call baghdad,” in Zainab bahrani and nada shabout, Modernism and Iraq (new york: Wallach Art gallery and columbia university, 2009), 23–40, at 34. from quote in shākir Ḥasan Āl saʿīd, Fuṣūl min Tārīkh al-Ḥaraka al-Tashkīliyya fī al-ʿIrāq (bagh- dad: ministry of culture and Information, 1983), 100. 96. bruno Paoli, “Jean gaulmier le syrien,” Les carnets de l’Ifpo (hypotheses.org), April 24, 2012, http://ifpo.hypotheses. org/3334 . 97. I have located five of these essays in total, with four appear- ing between february and october 1942 and the fifth in 1945. The most comprehensive presentation of french modernist art is Jacques Lassaigne’s “al-fann al-fransī fī miʾat ʿĀm,” al-Adīb 1, no. 7 (July 1942): 9–11. This article introduces Lassaigne as the director of publications and radio for the free french in the east and notes that he had organized an exhibition in Palestine on the topic of one hundred years of french art. Lassaigne subsequently moved to Algiers, where he would cofound the literary journal L’Arche in 1944 with the Algerian writer and poet Jean Amrouche, with support from André gide. for a con- temporaneous account of those developments, see hélène bokanowsky, “french Literature in Algiers,” Books Abroad 19, no. 2 (spring 1945): 125–30. 98. The second corps was commanded by general Wladis- law Anders and consisted of the Allied units of the exiled government of Poland. After fighting alongside russia on the eastern front, it had retreated through Persia to british-held baghdad and would subsequently transfer to the Apennine Peninsula to fight against the germans in the battles for monte cassino. The artist contingent is described in detail by Jan Wiktor sienkiewicz in his book, Artyści Andersa: Continuità e novità (Warsaw: oficyna Wydawnicza kucharski, 2013) and his pamphlet, Polish Artists in Beirut 1942–1952, trans. Adam kunysz (beirut: embassy of the republic of Poland, 2013), 7. 99. details about the Polish artists’ intellectual contributions in baghdad can be found in diary entries by the Iraqi artist Jawād salīm, reprinted in Hiwar 2, no. 2 (Jan.–feb. 1964): 99–100. Works of the Polish painters were even collected by the Iraqi directorate general of Antiquities. see Dalīl Qāʿat al-Rusūm al-Waṭanī (baghdad: government Press, 1944). A discussion of the visit to damascus can be found in qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda.” 100. hamoudi details Lassaigne’s help in “al-fannān al-Ḥamūdī,” and describes the importance of the salon des réalités nouvelles in “Ṣālūn al-Ḥaqāʾiq al-Jadīda li-sanat 1950.” Las- saigne had also helped to facilitate introductions for the Lebanese painter shafic Abboud in Paris in 1947. see shafic Abboud, Rétrospective: peintures 1948–2003 (Paris: claude Lemand, 2011). 101. Transcripts of the founding documents may be found in gabriele simongini et al., eds., Art Club, 1945–1964: La Linea Astratta (Parma: galleria d’arte niccoli, 1998), 96–105. “The universal language of forms and colors” is cited in edmond muller, “L’Art club est fondé au caire,” L’Égypte Nouvelle, february 1, 1946, and Ahmed rassim, “Le journal d’un pein- tre raté,” L’Égypte Nouvelle, march 1, 1946. 102. conversion reported by michel seuphor, Dictionary of Abstract Painting, with a History of Abstract Painting, trans. Lionel Izod et al. (new york: Paris book center, 1958), 194. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen256 103. The cairo branch was launched in Alexandria in late 1945 or early 1946. see notice in Valeurs 4 (January 1946): 128. mention of the Turkish national branch of the Art club appears in nurullah berk, La peinture turque, trans. münev- ver berk (Ankara: general directorate of Press and Tour- ism, 1950). The syrian artist hammad indicates knowledge of the club and also mentions that the studio Veronese had exchanged letters with Jarema circa 1945, in qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda.” 104. for a discussion of Vichy’s treatment of modernist move- ments such as fauvism, see michèle c. cone, Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1992), 47–55. 105. Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 73. much art- historical attention has been paid to the ideological rivalry between the french promotion of the École de Paris and the American “new york school” of abstract expression- ism. The classic polemical account is serge guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expression- ism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur goldhammer (chicago: university of chicago Press, 1983). 106. Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 75. The impor- tant interwar history in france of a highly racialized con- struction of the foreign (read Jewish) membership of the École de Paris is detailed in romy golan, “The ‘École fran- çaise’ versus the ‘École de Paris’: The debate over the status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars,” in kenneth e. silver and romy golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 (new york: Jewish museum, 1985), 81–87. 107. kirsten scheid, “distinctions that could be drawn: chou- cair’s Paris and beirut,” in Saloua Raouda Choucair, ed. Jes- sica morgan (London: Tate modern, 2013), 41–55, at 53. 108. Jacques Lassaigne, “Il est,” in Jamil Hamoudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad (Paris: Voyelles, 1950), exhibition booklet in pri- vate archive of Ishtar hamoudi, baghdad, Iraq, consulted via photographic scan. “national genius” is also repeated in r. V. gindertael, “hamoudi,” Art d’Aujourd’hui 3, nos. 3–4 (feb.–march 1952): n.p. 109. for example, in his article “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” hamoudi recounts taking pleasure in alert- ing french abstract artists to the fact that Arab artists had already devised the form centuries earlier. 110. Jamil hamoudi, “L’Art en Irak,” Arts: Beaux-Arts, Littérature, Spectacles (April 28, 1950): 8. 111. Ḥamūdī, “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd.” 112. The characterization of arabesque as a structure is from oleg grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (new haven: yale university Press, 1973), 204. but the french postwar milieu also included work in aesthetic philosophy that synthe- sized these strands of artistic history and instantiated the arabesque as a structural feature. see étienne souriau, La correspondance des arts: Éléments d’esthétique comparée (Paris: flammarion, 1947), which uses the term “arabesque” to designate “first-order” arts of nonderivative sense experi- ence, as opposed to “second-order” arts of representation. 113. grabar, Formation of Islamic Art, 190, 204. 114. hamoudi even uses the term in articles dealing only with Paris artists, such as his “Joseph csaky wa-l-naḥt al-bāriz,” al-Adīb 8, no. 12 (december 1949): 26–28, discussing csaky’s work with sinuous line in relief sculpture. Interestingly, hamoudi here includes a footnote giving al-zakhrafa, which means “embellishment” or “ornament,” as the Arabic translation of the french “arabesque.” 115. Lassaigne, “Il est,” and bishr farès, no title, in Jamil Ham- oudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad. This exhibition publication identifies farès as a member of the Institut d’Égypte in cairo; he was also a consultant to unesco, although this is not mentioned in the publication. farès had long been a leading cultural voice in the Arab region, having served as editor-in-chief for the venerable cultural maga- zine al-Muqtaṭaf since 1941, then published in egypt. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil reports (in “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148) that the Ismaʿils read al-Muqtaṭaf in Alexandretta. farès already knew hamoudi and had contributed to at least one issue of al-Fikr al-Ḥadīth, the cultural journal hamoudi had published in baghdad before relocating to Paris. 116. because Lassaigne does not cite any particular scholar, one is left to wonder which recent works he had in mind. more than Lassaigne, it was farès who actively participated in the international community of Islamic art historians. farès had already published the widely read Une miniature reli- gieuse de l’école arabe de Bagdad (cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1948). The german historian of Islamic art ernst kühnel, who published his own study Die Arabeske: Sinn und Wandlung eines Ornaments in 1949 (Wiesbaden: dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1949), reviewed the farès volume for the journal Oriens 4, no. 1 (1951): 171–73. farès also lectured on Islamic ornament in cairo, Paris, and beirut, finally publishing his own study in 1952: Essai sur l’esprit de la décoration islamique (cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1952). 117. farès, no title, in Jamil Hamoudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad. 118. roger benjamin, “The decorative Landscape, fauvism, and the Arabesque of observation,” The Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (June 1993): 295–316, at 297. 119. see, for example, the entry on “arabesque” in “A biographi- cal, Technological, and Topical dictionary of Art (contin- ued),” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 5 (August 1, 1851), 76–78, at 77. citing owen Jones’s Details and Ornaments from the Alhambra (London: Jones, 1845); Wilhelm Zahn’s Ornamente aller klassischen Kunstepochen (berlin: reimer, 1843); and Ludwig grüner and Jacques Ignace hittorff’s Descriptions of the Plates of Fresco Decorations and Stuc- coes of Churches and Palaces in Italy during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (London: J. murray, 1844), the article traces various iterations of the “arabesque style” across time and space. 120. gülru necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll—Geometry and Orna- ment in Islamic Architecture: Topkapı Palace Museum Library MS H. 1956 (santa monica, cA: getty center for the history of Art and the humanities, 1995), 61–71. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 257 121. Ibid., 65; finbarr barry flood, “The flaw in the carpet: dis- junctive continuities and riegl’s Arabesque,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. gülru necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2016), 82–93, at 83. 122. I have relied on the ettinghausen translation: ernst kühnel, The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Orna- ment, trans. richard ettinghausen (graz: Verlag für samm- ler, 1977). 123. Afif bahnassi, “L’Arabesque contemporaine,” in Consul- tation collective sur les problèmes contemporains des arts arabes dans leurs relations socio-culturelles avec le monde arabe (hammamet, Tunisia: unesco, march 1974), 3–4. This text was published again, with minor modifications, in unesco’s 1977 Cultures bulletin. 124. benjamin, “decorative Landscape,” 297. 125. Ibid., 309–10. benjamin notes that gustave moreau’s dis- cussions of the arabesque, for example, usually employ examples from sculpture, and that matisse, too, recognized precedents in statues by michelangelo and giambologna. he also sees evidence of matisse’s “sculptural investigation” in the heavy outlines of The Joy of Life. 126. gloria groom, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bon- nard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (chicago: Art Institute of chicago, 2001), 21. 127. A number of exhibition catalogs have explored points of overlap between Islamic art and european modernism at the level of the object, its display, and its reception. see markus brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction: The Dia- logue between Non-Western, Modern, and Contemporary Art (basel: fondation beyeler, 2001); rémi Labrusse, ed., Purs décors? Arts de l’Islam, regards du XIXe siècle, Collections des Arts Décoratifs (Paris: musée des Arts décoratifs/musée du Louvre, 2007); and chris dercon, León krempel, and Avinoam shalem, eds., The Future of Tradition, The Tradi- tion of Future: 100 Years after the Exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art in Munich (munich: Prestel, 2010). 128. Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2004). 129. Ibid., 201–9. 130. Ibid., 209. 131. details of the curriculum of these drawing courses in the years 1947 to 1950 are available in ghazi al-khaldi, “Abdul- Wahhab Abou al-sououd,” in M. Jalal, A. A. Al Sououd, K. Mouaz, A. A. Arnaout (damascus: salhini Printing and Publishing, 1991), 26–29; and ʿAlī ghālib salīm, “Iṣlāḥ man- haj al-rasm,” al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī 3, no. 5 (march 1950): 526–29. Target skills included a practical understanding of the construction of different ornaments (zakhārif) in both plant and animal forms. 132. molly nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: black dog Pub- lishing, 2000). 133. Ibid., 29–39. 134. for the history of applied art instruction in morocco, see hamid Irbouh, Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco, 1912–1956, rev. ed. (London and new york: I.b. Tauris, 2012). see also the discussion of british colonial applied art pedagogy and commodity production in Arindam dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (new york: routledge, 2007). 135. The school of modern Arab Arts is thoroughly discussed in Loreline simonis, Les relevés des mosaiq̈ues de la grande mosquée de Damas (Paris: musée du Louvre, 2012). for my dates and details, I also draw on archival documents: réunion du comité de rapprochement de la science fran- çaise et de la culture arabe, April 10, 1928; supplemental report sur l’École des Arts Arabes modernes, damascus, April 23, 1928; and Licenciement du personnel du Palais Azem, June 2, 1930, all in Institut d’archéologie et d’art musulman folder, carton 77, Instruction Publique 2nd versement, fonds beyrouth, in ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques-nantes. further information about students at the school comes from renaud Avez, L’Institut français de Damas au Palais Azem (1922–1946): À travers les archives (damascus: L’Institut français de damas, 1993), 35–36; and ʿĀdil Abū-shanab, Ḥayāt al-Fannān ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Abū al-Saʿūd (damascus: al-fann al-Ḥadit̄h al-ʿĀlami,̄ 1963), 37, 103. 136. nesbit, Their Common Sense, 153. 137. complaints about de Lorey’s lack of focus and rigor appear in Jean gaulmier, “La «section des arabisants», 1928–1929, berceau de l’IfeAd,” in Jean Gaulmier, un orientaliste: Recueil des textes publiés dans le Bulletin d’études orientales (1929–1972) (damas: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2006), 10–14, also available at http://books.openedition.org/ifpo/2429 . 138. simonis, Les relevés des mosaiq̈ues, 17–18. The initiative can be compared to the full-size copies of wall frescoes from the ʿAli qapu in Isfahan, which momA exhibited in 1932 (rich- ard meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? [cambridge, mA: mIT Press, 2013], 127–38). In both cases, the press response follows a template of pseudomorphic play, likening the non-modern pieces to the aesthetics of modernist painting. 139. Although there is not enough space to discuss it further here, cultural journals in the Arab east also engaged with the formalist version of global heritage that the french critic André malraux promulgated via unesco’s event and print forums, including his concept of the musée imaginaire (a dematerialized “museum” of black-and-white reproduc- tions that would enable all persons to engage in a com- parative analysis of global heritage). The June 1947 issue of hamoudi’s baghdad cultural journal, al-Fikr al-Ḥadīth, printed translated excerpts from malraux’s 1946 unesco speech, “L’homme et la culture Artistique.” one can also trace the discussion in cairo’s french-language periodicals, including gerald messadié, “notes sur la naissance et le symbolisme de l’arabesque,” La Femme Nouvelle (december 1951): 35–36. 140. UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition: From Impressionism till Today (Paris: unesco, 1949). 141. huyghe, “Introduction,” 7. 142. Ibid., 10. 143. Ibid., 13. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen258 AbsTrAcT The essay explores how the syrian artist Adham Ismaʿil (1922 –63) linked his modernist painting strategies to the activism of the baʿth political movement during syria’s independence decade through a conceptual rework- ing of the “arabesque”—the rhythmic pattern of unending line and pure color that orientalist scholars considered a product of the Arab and muslim episteme and french modernist painters adopted as a fresh composi- tional device. It draws on a new archive of correspondence, writings, and sketches, supplemented by political memoirs detailing Ismaʿil’s experience of displacement after the 1939 transfer of his native Alexandretta to Turkey, to uncover his efforts to forge new aesthetic unities as a mechanism for Arab activation and rebirth. Ismaʿil and his comrades accorded a radical charge to the concept of vital Arab energy in particular; once manifested in the sensory experience of line and color, it promised to assemble audiences in new collectivities and to help topple the syrian status quo. The essay thus analyzes Ismaʿil’s radical Arab painting as evidence of not only the complexity of the intellectual debates in the middle east but also the generative fragmentation of modernist tenets under the (not quite) postwar, postcolonial world order. keyWords Adham Ismaʿil – baʿth Party – syria – damascus – Arabism – abstract painting – arabesque – vitalism – political art – global modernism – comparative modernisms 155. reprinted in badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “Thulūj,” al-Maʿrifa 134 (April 1973): 80–82. I have not been able to determine the chro- nology of haqqi’s connections to the baʿth movement, but note that he dedicated a 1947 poem titled “Arabism” to michel Aflaq. see badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “ʿurūba,” al-Adīb 6, no. 1 (January 1947): 24. 156. see also badīʿ Ḥaqqī, Al-Shajara allatī Gharasathā Ummī: Sīra Dhātiyya (damascus: Ittiḥād al-kuttāb al-ʿArab, 1986). 157. Ḥaqqī, introductory remarks to “Thulūj,” 80. 158. Tapati guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1992), 242–69. 159. V. c. scott o’connor, The Charm of Kashmir (London: Long- mans, green and co., 1920). Two color illustrations and a report on the book appear in L’Illustration in 1921, under the title “Les Jardins du kashmir,” L’Illustration no. 4103 (october 22, 1921): 382–84. It would appear that literature of this type circulated widely in syria in the 1920s, as the Aleppo-born artist fateh al-moudarres mentions reading books about the “maharaja of India” as a child. see samar Ḥamārna, Kayfa Yarā Fātiḥ al-Mudarris? (damascus: s. Ḥamārna, 1999), 10. 160. The context for Ismaʿil’s attempts to bring poetic and other aural structures into the space of his painting warrants more investigative work. It should be mentioned that al-Adīb published several studies of the Lebanese zajal in the 1940s, including a two-part historical study by Adib nakhla in 1945. These likely provided the impetus for Ismaʿil’s painting. 161. As explained by naʿim Ismaʿil in Adham Ismāʿīl, 23. he suggests that the arabesque is daymūma, or continuous and permanent. Ismaʿil’s articles in al-Baʿth advance a similar view about art’s internal drive toward abstraction, including his profile on henri matisse, which describes the artistic process as distilling the heart of the matter (jawhar al-mawḍūʿ). 162. As, for example, in contemporaneous studies of the devel- opment of the floriated variety of kufic calligraphic script in epigraphic inscriptions. I am thinking of the catalog of syrian specimens of this type that the french art historian Janine sourdel-Thomine compiled, as in Les monuments ayyoubides de Damas, vol. 4, Épitaphes coufiques de Bâb Saghîr (Paris: e. de boccard, 1950). 163. direzione generale per gli Affari Politici e di sicurezza, “Appunto,” sept. 3, 1951, buste 1092 (medio oriente), Affari Politico 1950–1957, ministero degli Affari esteri, rome. 164. mamdouh kashlan, interview by author, damascus, february 25, 2010. 165. Zay[y]at, preface to Revival of Plastic Art Memory in Syria, 1:n.p. 144. matisse’s study of these egyptian fabrics is discussed in Avinoam shalem, “Leggere tra le righe: Attraverso i papiers découpés di matisse,” in ester coen, ed., Matisse Arabesque, exhibition catalog (milan: skira, 2015), 55–63. 145. The term “intercultural play” is used in benjamin, “deco- rative Landscape,” 296. Wright proposes a complication of this “play” as an actual, felt risk of the loss of Western clarity. studies that give serious consideration to matisse’s affinity with Islamic composition include rémi Labrusse, Matisse: La condition de l’image (Paris: gallimard, 1999), and catherine bock-Weiss, Henri Matisse: Modernist against the Grain (university Park, PA: Pennsylvania state university Press, 2009), which links Labrusse’s study to the phenomenon of the “byzantine matisse.” 146. List given in united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization, Some Suggestions for Co-Operation between Youth Organizations and UNESCO (Paris: unesco, 17 february 1950), 12. In 1949 it had traveled to Australia, the british colonies in Africa and the far east, ecuador, haiti, India, Iran, mexico, norway, Tunisia, and uruguay. 147. badiʿ al-kasim, trans., “madhāhib al-rasm al-Ḥadīth,” al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī (April 1950): 605–12. 148. In 1947 farès delivered a lecture in cairo, in french, about the spirit of Islamic decoration. The lecture was followed by a bilingual volume on the theme in 1952, including a french-Arabic glossary of specialized vocabulary. There, farès suggests that the art of the arabesque be translated as al-raqsh, and that a single arabesque be rendered as raqsha. A summary of his talk and glossary appeared in the journal of the Arabic Language Academy in damascus as well as bishr fāris (farès), “sirr al-Zakhrafa al-Islāmiyya,” Majallat al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī bi-Dimashq 27, no. 3 (July 1953): 479–83. 149. huyghe’s essay explains the term in the following way: “This was the oriental name (meaning ‘prophets’) which at the end of the century a group of young painters, influ- enced mainly by gauguin, gave themselves” (“Introduc- tion,” 7). 150. Adham Ismaʿil, “henri matisse,” al-Baʿth, July 8, 1950. 151. This would seem to be a reference to matisse’s famous 1947 profession that his colors had “come from the east.” see “Le chemin de la couleur: Propos de henri matisse,” Art Présent 2 (1947): 23. 152. The article was part of a series of introductory columns to the painterly arts as a field, commissioned from Ismaʿil by sidqi Ismaʿil. other artists profiled by Ismaʿil are Picasso, de Vlamnick, chagall, and braque. 153. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 145. 154. Ibid., 146. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV vrw.pdf Contents Heba Mostafa From the Dome of the Chain to Miḥrāb Dāʾūd: The Transformation of an Umayyad Commemorative Site at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem Julio Navarro, Fidel Garrido and Íñigo Almela The Agdal of Marrakesh (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries): An Agricultural Space for Caliphs and Sultans. Part 1: History Ana Marija Grbanovic The Ilkhanid Revetment Aesthetic in the Buqʿa Pir-i Bakran: Chaotic Exuberance or a Cunningly Planned Architectural Revetment Repertoire? 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