By Linda Ajam | Staff Writer

Whenever the subject of Lebanese art history pops up, what first springs to mind (and you might relate) is the mystical illustrations of Gibran Khalil Gibran, the brightly-colored religious iconography that adorns our churches, and the idyllic landscape paintings of green terraces dotted with the archetypal Lebanese houses with red-tiled roofs and latticed windows. 

For most of us carrying this intellectual baggage, the AUB Art Gallery and Collection’s latest exhibition is a page-turner. Framed as The Marine School of Beirut – A Repressed Art History, the exhibition showcases the works of painters living in the late 19th to early 20th centuries in Ottoman Lebanon and Syria who associated with what the exhibition clearly attempted to distinguish as a distinct artistic tradition that had been ignored and relegated to the margins of the established narrative of Lebanese art history. 

In essence, this narrative is that of the master Christian artists who studied in Western academies and emulated European artistic conventions, including the great artists Daoud Corm, Habib Serour, Philippe Mourani, and Gibran Khalil Gibran, among others. The Marine School of Beirut stood as their predominantly Sunni artistic counterpart that adhered to emerging Ottoman pictorial traditions. The Sultanate’s westernization reforms brought to Beirut naval military schools where cadets were taught the principles of painting not for aesthetic purposes but for technical ones, focusing primarily on capturing aspects of seascapes. 

This technical realism is at once apparent in the paintings of Beiruti painter Ibrahim Serbai (1865-1931), the main representative of this school. Serbai’s seas carried the ships of war, the ships of change and, almost hauntingly, his opaque waters carried the tides of obscurity, foretelling the upheavals that were to change his world as he knew it. Painted with stunning precision, his warships do not sail amid glorious sunsets, but are suffocated by clouds of smoke, as seen in his (assumed authorship of) Arrival of Two Warships from the Ottoman Navy in the Port of Beirut.

ANONYMOUS (Attributed to IBRAHIM SERBAI), Arrival of Two Warships from the Ottoman Navy in the Port of Beirut, Undated, Oil on canvas, 74 x 85 cm (Collection Saleh Barakat)

Partaking in the excitements of the city, he captured with meticulous detail the ambience at the Port of Beirut at the arrival of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, showing the banners and flags lining the port and groups of excited city folk arriving in their best attire on horse-drawn carriages. 

He was to then follow the Kaiser’s team of archaeologists on the first excavations of the Roman remains of Baalbek where he would paint Baalbek based on his own vision of it: Unromanticized, devoid of locals in Oriental clothing stretching amid the ruins and instead showing the stillness of the temples, the subject of the conversation between the local guide and the German archaeologist. 

IBRAHIM SERBAI, The Reception of Guillaume II at the Port of Beirut, 1898, Oil on paint, 147 x 80 cm (Collection Saleh Barakat)

IBRAHIM SERBAI, Baalbek, Undated, Oil on canvas, 156 x 95cm (Collection Eddy Sfeir)

Thanks to the Marine School’s artists’ dedication to precision, those scenes of excitement in a city still sparsely occupied by buildings portray a rapidly changing world that Serbai depicted in his well-known landscape paintings. His Panorama of Zeytoune and of Minet el-Hosn, although based on a photograph, insistently represented the structures by the sea with similar detail, portraying the particularities of the neighborhoods he called home and capturing the religious, secular, and leisure institutions that shaped his contemporary realities. 

Beirut, already then a city whose heritage and architecture was hanging along two fronts, boasted structures with European facades as a result of the Sultanate’s westernization reforms and that would later confer it the romantic nickname “Paris of the Middle East”. These structures included the luxurious Bassoul hotel depicted in this painting, which was itself hung in its lobby before the hotel got demolished by the anarchic urbanization following the Lebanese Civil War. 

ANONYMOUS (also attributed to IBRAHIM SERBAI), Panorama of Zeytoune and of Minet el-Hosn, (alternative title Hotel Bassoul), 1890, Oil on canvas, 84 x 214 cm (Collection Philippe Jabre)

The maritime cultural essence portrayed in this painting did not withstand the tides of change, and several of his paintings would then be lost in the madness of a war that was to rend the city he loved. 

Art, like many artifacts, inevitably speaks different voices to its beholders across time and space – to some, it is personal creation or national treasure, to others, it turns into a collectible, luxury, or enterprise. When it concerns these paintings, they are part and parcel of Beirut’s maritime culture and are not only being continually recontextualized in our postmodern world but are being continually reworked up to this very day – modern corruption has not spared these paintings and has managed to leave its mark on Serbai’s (again, assumed authorship of) Panoramic View of Beirut from Horsh el Snaubar that the Beirut Port Blast slashed across, leaving a missing piece that is hanging right next to it in the exhibition.

ALBERT, Panoramic View of Beirut from Horsh El Snaubar, 1867, Oil on canvas, 180 x 123 cm (Collection Camille and Leyla Ziadé)

The exhibition is not as much about the artistic style of Lebanese artists in the 19th century than it is about something that hits closer to our present-day – from the decades of conflict and corruption that hid, absorbed, and cut across Serbai’s works and sucked the neighborhoods he so lovingly portrayed, to the unattainable artworks housed in foreign institutions that couldn’t be borrowed. 

These last artworks have been digitally reproduced in a section of the exhibition that displays what “lies at the bottom”, the artworks that could not make it to the exhibition or that could not be found, distinguishable from the artworks “at the surface”. Indeed, these paintings float on the brink of national collapse, the heritage they represent long since sunken (often, quite literally). 

Reference:

https://www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/Pages/Marine-School-Beirut.aspx