Taking Time: Fateh Moudarres’ Works on Paper and Syrian Chronology between Modernity and Contemporaneity

“What a contradiction, though man will not admit it, that there is something called time. It is not in his interest to admit it for, compared to the age of the universe, time is a second, less than a small fraction of a second. He does not like time, time is his enemy, the enemy of the mind, and he succeeded many a time to eradicate it, to cancel time, he succeeded, he managed to take a second—either in pleasure or in thought—take the second and stretch it into a month; more than that he could not do. I personally think there is no other way to explain immortality…man must reinvent time, domesticate it […] the true artist lives it; he can stop time whenever he wants, in the sound analysis of shapes, and the contrast of colors, he can control time as he works. Sometimes he stretches it, even though it is only a fraction of a second, other times he works uselessly for days.”[1]

1. To dilate it, by experimenting with Surrealist techniques of automatic drawing in the 1950s and 1960s, and negotiating exchanges with Euro-American art and techniques in a way that made room for original reformulation, rather than blind emulation.[9]

2. To capture it, as he engaged with issues of national authenticity, representation and contemporaneity between the fall of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1961 and the naksa[10] in a context of sustained dialogues with foreign art forms.

Controlling time, in this case, becomes a metaphor for negotiating the civic positionality of the artist as a member of society, vis-a-vis their role in the international discourse of artistic production internationally, where multiple chronologies converge at multiple points of collision. The chronology of Syrian art, through this case study, appears comparative, porous, and unruly.[11]

Against Time

Speaking to Syrian filmmakers Omar Amiralay, Muhammad Malas and Oussama Muhammad in 1995, Fateh Moudarres described the 1946 Syrian Independence as “a huge, mythical, iron door on a mountain, and out came a multitude of people”.[12] This provides an insight of Moudarres’ native Aleppo in the 1940s and 50s, which was, despite the city’s reputation as a provincial outpost, a space of cultural and visual abundance.[13]Before the dissolution of the Empire, local bureaucrats in Aleppo had enjoyed relative political and administrative independence from the centralized Ottoman government.[14] The city was also at the center of commercial and intellectual trade: it lay on the road of the hajj, the Muslim sacred pilgrimage towards Mecca, and provided a key economic route for commercial exchanges.[15] By 1946, the city offered a bustling café life: artists and writers could sit in public to have coffee, write and sketch, see and be seen. Book shops, on whose walls artists could exhibit their latest works, were stocked with the latest texts of local writers and the European avant-garde: Moudarres and Adonis recalled being able to purchase volumes of poetry by René Char, Max Jacob and the Comte de Lautréamont in the bookshops on Baron Street,[16] which, Moudarres proffered, was “a replica of the Champs-Élysées”.[17] Surrealism, the artistic and literary movement whose origins are traditionally associated with André Breton’s publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 Paris, was one of the visual and poetic languages with which artists and intellectuals in Aleppo were engaging at the time; from Adonis’ and Moudarres’ recollections, Surrealism was more than just a passing influence, and had a veritable feel on the fabric of the city.

Syrian poet Orkhan Myassar (1912–1965) was one of the first to turn the reception of Surrealism into creative action. Myassar, a polyglot and polymath who had trained in medicine, physics and literature in Istanbul, Beirut and Chicago and was from an ancient family of notables[18], began to organize soirees in his flat in Aleppo in the mid-1940s.[19] The events, held almost daily, started around seven in the evening and went on late into the night; some of the attendees from the Aleppine intelligentsia were the poets Omar Abu Risha (1910–1990) and Ali Al-Nasir (1890–1970), Moudarres and the painter Adnan Myassar (1921–1979), Orkhan’s brother. Recitals of new poetry were accompanied by general discussions on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, the works of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the texts of André Breton and the works of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso.[20] In March 1947, Myassar delivered a lecture on Surrealism in Aleppo, likely at the British Cultural Centre, which was well received by its international audience.[21] This lecture documented Myassar’s role as the primary agent of transmission of Surrealism in Aleppo, through translation, interpretation and his own Surrealist production.

At the time of its Parisian inception, and in Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Surrealism declared itself as a new way of life: privileging dream states and irrationality over conscious thought after Freud’s theory of the “unconscious”. The movement engendered not only literary and artistic production, but also political activism and social disobedience, allowing its members to test “the possibility and consequences of communal action”.[22] In his Surrealist activities, Myassar intended to hone in on this revolutionary and transformative potential of Surrealism as a tool of cultural, societal and political change. In 1947, together with Ali Al-Nasir, Myassar published Suryal (Surreal), a collection of experimental poetry.[23] In August 1951, Myassar published an article on Surrealism in the Lebanese literary revue al-Adib (The Writer), and, responding to an earlier article by the Aleppine Khalil Al-Handawi, Myassar attributed to Surrealism the universal ability to dislodge the foundations of human knowledge and perception:

“Surrealism is not an expression of chaos and doom that results from a total adherence to a rational, or traditional, system of thought, as it was interpreted by my friend Al-Handawi. Surrealism is a step further, a special world of broad horizons and deep-seated truths […] that unsettles the shadows of man from the cradle, the cave, the laboratory and the skyscrapers.”[24]

In the late 1940s and early 50s, his period of most intense engagement with Surrealism, Myassar was also an active member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded in Beirut in 1932 by Lebanese intellectual Antun Sa’adeh (1904–1949).[25] Together with his brother Adnan, Orkhan was imprisoned in Damascus in 1955 for a few months, in connection to the murder of officer Adnan Al-Malky by a party member, and loudly recited Surrealist poems of resistance from his cell with other incarcerated intellectuals.[26]

When they published Suryal in 1947, Myassar and Ali Al-Nasir had their finger on the pulse of the contemporary Syrian poetry scene, which they sought to revitalize and renew—although Myassar feared their readers would not appreciate its extreme methods, due to their minds being accustomed to rational and familiar poetic narratives.[27] The volume, including contributions by both poets, aimed to provide a break with the traditional forms of Arab poetry; it featured a foreword and a postface penned by Myassar, which de facto functioned as a manifesto of Syrian Surrealist intents and refused to uncritically adhere to Surrealism as an appendix of the Parisian group.[28] In the text, Myassar criticized contemporary Arabic poetry as excessively diluted, verbose and laden with rhetoric: through a vocabulary that owed much to Myassar’s training in physics and medicine, he advocated instead for a looser prose poetry reduced to its bare essence.[29] The first principle was poetic condensation, which Myassar likened to that of making Vitamin C tablets out of oranges.[30] The second principle was poetic and artistic crystallization: evoking the natural process of solidification of matter from a gas or liquid state into crystal structure, Myassar explained how the unconscious could be represented physically through poems and artworks. As he put it, the unconscious was like a liquid and superabundant repository, whose manifestations through nebulous and quivering visions could only be partially recorded by the artist before their disappearance.[31] Representation of the unconscious in the external world, therefore, was a time-sensitive process: Khalida Said recalled asking Myassar whether he wrote notes down when inspiration struck, to which he replied that “writing takes time and destroys the head of discovery, and its promptness”.[32] The representation of the unconscious, therefore, had to take place through a concentration of simultaneously encompassing and fragmented images – a quick generation of images which the artist could not behold fully, and only partially experience.[33]

For Moudarres, who was closely connected to Myassar’s circle in the 1940s and 50s, the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing—the unbridled hand recording the outpourings of the imagination—proved a serviceable tool for capturing the images of the unconscious. The artist would sit in the same spot at Café Brazil to practice automatic drawing, write stories and Surrealist poetry and smoke, the ashes mixing with the ink.[34] In some of his first attempts at automatic artworks, Moudarres experimented with wax, capitalizing on the suggestiveness of the medium in his race against the fleeting time of the unconscious: he would spread the wax on the surface in thick, viscous layers, allowing it to form shapes in chance encounters of oily clumping. In one work from 1953, Hala, Moudarres used black wax, forming a harrowing picture: the shape of a woman with a long neck, her features and anatomy distorted and not yet fully formed, is suggested through a harrowing modulation of quick, sharp, thick lines and larger, suffused swatches of waxy material. The figure, sightless but for two dark gashes where eyes should be, emerges from the mist as a dark, threatening icon spewing and oozing shadows, only partially formulated and perhaps not fully physical. A black brooding orb to the left takes the place of the eye, functioning as an ominous reminder of the limits and potentials of human vision. Yet time and its passing were essential to Moudarres’ automatic drawing: Selim Abdul-Hak, the Director of Antiquities at the National Museum of Damascus and an active art critic, recorded that the artist used to meditate continuously for several hours or days before his imagination could generate the Surrealist image, with a mental effort “equivalent to that of Jupiter when he gave birth to Minerva from his head”, so that Moudarres could “support his conscious mind with his subconscious and release creativity”.[35] Two stages followed: first, the artist would sketch multiple subjects of the images he conjured, and second, he would spend a long time looking at them, eventually casting them all aside, and starting again.[36]

In the drawings that he published in the 1960s, Moudarres insisted on complicating the relationship between word and image, which was also perceived by his audience. In 1963, the artist Elias Awad published an article in the Lebanese literary journal Adab,[46] where he used the experience of visiting Moudarres solo exhibition at Gallery One in Beirut to formulate a new understanding of the aesthetic experience of looking at paintings by Moudarres through a mathematical equation.[47] Though the article focused on painting, it was accompanied by reproductions of two drawings by Moudarres in which ink stains, nudged by the artist’s pen, created semi-formed human figures, unfinished and reduced to essential lines. In Awad’s article, Moudarres’ artworks became textual repositories of emotional data which the artist passed on to the viewer, albeit through non-verbal communication.[48] Similar figures appeared in drawings Moudarres created to accompany four poems in a 1964 edition of Shi’r, the poetry magazine originally founded by Yusuf Al-Khal in 1957. Again, the figures are born of a bleeding stain onto which the artist, later, intervened.[49] The giant eye which ominously lurks in the background of the drawing of a mother and child, fused into a single ovoid shape by the holding gesture of the mother’s oversized hands, refers back to the tension between inner vision and outer representation: the eye, its lashes extending outwards like rays of the sun, “sees” the figures into existence. A similarly stylized figure appears in one of the Atassi Foundation’s works on paper: on a background of green, grainy paper, watercolor is applied with broad, quick brush strokes and allowed to pool and thin out. At the bottom, Moudarres seems to have applied sand to the pigment as well, heightening the sense of a multi-dimensional field. The stains simultaneously generate and hinder vision: from behind them we see a foot appear in the bottom left corner, and a face timidly peer out on the right, yet in the middle, a single eye or breast emerges from the swirling pigment, coming into existence. On the top left, drawn with just a handful of strokes, a hanging body seems to miserably swing from one side to the other. In a work from 1978, Moudarres did away with the body altogether, leaving only a large, sweeping brushstroke which he contoured with lines of automatic poetry, fragmentary images of oneiric visions that read “I see on your chest, oh nighttime, stars” and “I recount for you dreams that are full of bread and women”.

Surrealism remained a valid source of visual and literary inspiration for Moudarres beyond his first encounter with it in the 1940s; the technique of automatic drawing and writing offered, perhaps, a generative and serviceable practice to arrest—or dilate—time and to capture images from the artist’s—and society’s—unconscious. In one of his very last works, a Self Portrait, prophetically executed just one year before his death, Moudarres still deployed techniques of automatism: framing his hastily sketched features with stains of pigment dropped onto the paper and allowed to run, akin to neurons or synapses. They intimately connect the artist’s self-representation with his experience and mediation of Surrealism.

This article was followed by another in 1975 in the same journal, titled “Analysis of the Meaning of Modern Art”, in which Al-Sharif distinguished between the temporal meaning of modern art as the production of a particular historical age, with its normative quality denoting a moment of artistic paradigm change – lamenting, in the process, that Arab artists should be forced to follow the imposed chronology of modernity set by the European historical avant-gardes of the 20th century.[52] He drew a chronology of Arab art which, nevertheless, followed a similar principle of progressive development: after a period of Arab Renaissance, in which artists went beyond their indigenous art forms to learn from European art how to create modern art, he argued, Arab artists should shed these foreign influences to reflect once more on their inherited, local art forms.[53] Only then, as he put it, could artists maintain a “connection to their core” and deploy it for contemporary expression.[54] Al-Sharif’s articles promoted a view of artistic present and future that was heavily invested in the promise of Arab authenticity as promulgated by the Ba’ath governance of Hafez Al-Assad: the region would be able to find an artistic expression that moved at its own pace, according to its own chronology, moving in time and owning its time.[55]

The idea of Arab Renaissance as deployed by Bahnassi and Al-Sharif pinpointed a period concomitant with the late 1930s and early 1940s, when artists had the possibility to study art abroad and, upon their return, integrate what they had learned with local forms and techniques. Similarly, Kirstin Scheid has uncovered the history of Lebanese artists’ practice of painting nudes between the 1920s and 40s as part of a systematic investigation of what terms like modern and contemporary (hadatha and mu’asira) meant for artistic production;[60] this history provides evidence of the tension involved in making room for local, original production amidst learned techniques. Lebanese artists such as César Gemayel (1898–1958), Daoud Corm (1852–1930), Omar Onsi (1901–1969), Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957) and Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) all painted and drew nudes, both with the aid of local models and from fantasy. Even the Lebanese author Amin Al-Rihani (1876–1940) left a number of drawings of nudes, including sketches of naked ballerinas and Orientalist fantasies that were quickly jotted with awkward technique, reflecting erotic fancies rather than a serious commitment to anatomical exactness. Images of nudes were also available in popular press in advertisements and cartoons, forming part of Beirut’s visual imagery.[61] Rather than something to be concealed, they functioned as a necessary step in the participation of artists in a rapidly evolving society: instead of being merely products of their times, art and artists were agents of their own emergence, as vindicated by Gemayel in 1943 in a text he published in the Lebanese journal al-Adib, where he described the painter as an essential instrument of the nation’s advancement.[62]

Through his education, Moudarres was exposed to the Lebanese artistic milieu. In an anecdote recalled by the artist, his Lebanese teacher and writer at the Aley Preparatory School, Maroun Abboud (1886–1962), took him to Beirut to introduce him to teachers of drawing and to visit César Gemayel. Upon returning to Aley, Abboud allegedly put his hand on Moudarres’ shoulder and prophetically asked “painter, or writer?”, to which Moudarres replied, “from the writer, the painter is born”.[63] The possibility that Moudarres met Gemayel in the late 1930s allows us to see him as a porous spectator of the history of nude painting in Lebanon, which turned, at a later date, into active practice. Moudarres’ depictions of nudes in the Atassi Foundation collection, so quickly traced with heavy strokes of the pen, are nevertheless removed from the Lebanese academic approach to nude painting in their extreme distortion, even mangling, of the human figure. In one of these works, the self-pleasuring of a dehumanized, hollow-eyed model can stand for either a violent or a generative act: her fingers brandish a needle that repeatedly stabs her formless sex. Alternately, the needle can be read as the pen originating the artistic action. An episode relayed by Moudarres in conversation with Salman Qataya describes his first experiences with drawing as a small child, while under the care of his paternal aunts. He recounted it as a subversive and even blasphemous practice: he drew a naked body from an anatomical picture in the Larousse Dictionary, which his aunt, donning a prayer veil, tore up.[64] “Then”, Moudarres chuckled, “I knew I had won and that I should draw more”.[65]

In 1956 Moudarres was accepted to a four-year fellowship to study painting at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Rome, a period which offered him further opportunities for unbridled experimentation with drawing and painting.[66] The program of exchange between Italy and Syria had been formalized in 1952, as part of Italy’s efforts to revive its academic tradition and forge new transnational connections after World War II.[67] The opportunity this presented was also taken up by artists such as Mamdouh Kashlan (1929–), Adham Isma’il (1922–1963) and Louay Kayyali (1934–1978). Moudarres studied in the studio of Italian painter Franco Gentilini (1909–1981) in 1955 and remained in Rome as a student until 1960.[68] His years in the city were prolific, allowing him to test a variety of styles, subject matters and materials. Keen to absorb all that Italy had to offer visually, Moudarres visited museums and galleries, cities and the countryside, manically learning, painting and drawing. During his stay in Rome, Moudarres began incorporating sand into his works and resumed practicing with wax as well; Gentilini had been experimenting with the technique of oil on sanded canvas since the early 1950s, which Moudarres would have observed in his workshop. The interactions between Moudarres and Gentilini became the subject of several anecdotes; one version which has not often been told was recorded in an interview that the former gave to the Lebanese newspaper as-Safir. Gentilini asked Moudarres why his work had not been much affected by contemporary Italian artistic movements, to which the artist replied matter-of-factly, “I am an Oriental”:

Gentilini smiled with his wide moustache and remarked “The truth is clear in your work, the truth of color and of the line, and both have a lot of the East”.

“Does this mean that my work is old?”

“No, it is timeless”.[69]

These accounts varied according to when and to whom the artist told them, yet at their core remained the self-affirmation of Syrian identity in a foreign context of artistic exchange: within the pedagogical context of the Accademia, Moudarres found space for opening up his personal practice to the visual and technical elements he saw and learned, turning them into part of his original practice, rather than mere imitations.

In April 1962, Italian abstract painter Remo Remotti (1924–2015)—who would later find fame as an actor for popular Italian and international films—exhibited work at Galerie Harmouche in Beirut, in an environment described as “abstract fever”.[86] At this time, Moudarres, who rarely engaged with non-objective painting, continued to add sand to his canvases, a practice which his contemporaries, nevertheless, perceived to be connected to the artist’s search for authentic expression, in touch with the Syrian land. André Bercoff wrote in 1963 that “upon his return from Italy, Moudarres abandoned the traditional formulas of painting prevalent in Syria and began to create a new language drawn from the primitive and ancient arts of his country”.[87] Though it had probably been composed in Aleppo in the 1940s, in 1963 a poem by Moudarres with the title “Sand” was published in Shi’r, together with three others. The poem offered chance associations of quivering sensations that dipped in and out of consciousness, ending the fragmented sequence of a night’s dream in an expanse of sand.[88] Three works on paper from the Atassi Foundation’s collection dated 1998 show that Moudarres continued to employ sand until the end of his career. In these works, acrylic paint is applied through unformed stains, onto which sand is haphazardly applied, clumped and scraped away, so that the features of human faces become visible. These faces, which were interpreted by journalists as psychological topographies of the Syrian land, appear suffocated, stifled by the material, akin to crumbling impressions on death shrouds.[89]

Conclusion

Towards the end of La Regina’s post in Syria, intellectuals found themselves divided on the value that abstraction held for the development of a national artistic identity.[90] The events of the Six Day War in 1967, which saw Syria’s loss against Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, and the subsequent Civil War that tore Lebanon in the 1970s, forced artists to recalibrate the role of visual expression and of the imagination in their response to the violence and shock of war.[91] Al-Sharif understood 1967 as a threshold which marked a next phase of artistic development. In a roundtable discussion organized by the newspaper al-Ta’lia in 1969, he insisted on the necessity of a clearer definition of “contemporary art”, which, he proffered, must become part of their identity if contemporaneity was to be achieved at all. The contemporary, he argued, was not simply a temporal state of being, of the now, but a normative category which must be willfully entered: “our present”, rather than simply “the present”.[92] In Moudarres’ most violent works on paper, the notion of active participation in the present turns sour: humans turn into bludgeoned monsters, with jarring, contorted grimaces that bare bloody teeth, or gaping holes in place of mouths. Confronted with the physical spoils of war, the viewer is no longer just a passive observer, but is called on to participate in the burning and bleeding, to stand in the seat of the accused.[93]

The Atassi Foundation’s collection’s works on paper by Moudarres offer an example of the irregularities of the moving of time, as the artist moved with it or against it. As an underbelly of Moudarres’ official production, the drawings permeate his career and index a different, concurrent temporality which complicates narratives of the artist’s career as ideologically tied to Syrian governance and nationalism. Through the spontaneity of their support, these works present the viewer with the moment that precedes the synthesis of biography and history, of inner vision and external representation and of visual learnedness and personal expression – in the works, the seams of these processes come ruefully undone.

[1] Moudarres. Directed by Omar Amiralay, Muhammad Malas and Oussama Muhammad. Produced by A Sayyar and Maram for Cinema and Television Production, Damascus, 1995. 49 minutes, 3 seconds.

[2] The most recent solo exhibition at Doha’s Mathaf, Fateh Moudarres: Colour, Extensity and Sense (October 2018-February 2019), though encompassing a large swathe of the artist’s production from the 1950s to the 1990s, focused predominantly on painting. Anneka Lenssen has provided an analysis of Moudarres’ works from the 1950s and 1960s, see Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria. University of California Press, 2020.

[3] Press coverage of Atassi Gallery opening exhibition: Newspaper clipping 5, “The heralds of Plastic arts at the ‘Atassi Gallery’”; Newspaper clipping 7, Suad Jarus, “From the artist Fateh Moudarres: I was drawn to peasants because they are similar to the earth, how it moves and what is contains”, 10 January 1995; Newspaper clipping 13, “Fateh Moudarres, Mahmoud Hammad, Louay Kayyali: Three pioneering experiences of Syrian plastic art”. Courtesy of the Atassi Foundation archive.

[4] Press coverage of 1996 exhibition Fateh Moudarres at the Atassi Gallery, Damascus. “Malas, Muhammad and Amiralay portray Moudarres: the professional camera portrays the artist and his introspection”, as-Safir, 4 February 1996. Atassi Foundation archive.

[5] “Adonis: As an artist, you work towards the future… you are against memory; Fateh: Memory is now, so the past and the future are a part of now”, as-Safir, 5 June 2009.

[6] Adonis, “On the Mobility of the Word, Not of Books”, in Fateh wa Adonis: Hiwar. Damascus: Atassi Gallery, 2009, p.3.

[7] For example, see: Pioneers: A Profile of Syrian Painters 1900-1960. Damascus: Atassi Gallery, 2010, and A Syrian Chronology. Dubai: Atassi Foundation, 2016.

[8] I am inspired here by Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, 11-14.

[9] Clark, 340.

[10] The displacement of Palestinians as part of Israel’s Six Day War with Egypt, Jordan and Syria between 5–10 June 1967.

[11] Omar Kholeif, “Tracing Routes: Debating Modernism, Mapping the Contemporary”, in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary, Works from the Barjeel Art Foundation. Edited by Omar Kholeif and Candy Stobbs. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015, 23.

[12] Moudarres, dir. Omar Amiralay, 1995.

[13] I am inspired here by Anneka Lenssen, “Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting”, in Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World 1950s-1960s.Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2020, 117-130.

[14] Keith David Watenpaugh. Being Modern in the Middle East. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press: 2006, 181.

[15] Khalil Al-Musa, “khamsa adba’ mu’assisun min Halab al-Shahba’”, Al-Ma’rifa 508, 1 January 2006: 205-219.

[16] Muhammad Yahya Al-Hashimi, “al-Ḥayat al-Adabiyya fī Ḥalab,” Al-Adīb, September 1943: 40-43. Fatih wa Adunis, 57. Tahir Al-Bunni, Tajarib Tashkiliyya Ra’ida. Damascus: Syrian Organisation of Books, 2008, 118.

[17] Moudarres, Omar Amiralay, 1995.

[18] Class of high-ranking individuals who held local power in the Ottoman provinces. See Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 3-5.

[19] Khalida Said, Yutubiyya al-madina al-muthaqafa. Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2017, 184.

[20] Arturo Monaco, “Ispirazione Romantica e Sperimentalismo Surrealista in Due Raccolte Poetiche del Siriano Ali Al-Nasir (1890-1970): al-Zama’ (1931) e Suryal (1947)”, La Rivista di Arablit vol.5 no.12 (2016): 43.

[21] “min al-adab al-suriyaliyyah”, Al-Qithara 10, April 1947, 21; Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 308.

[22] See André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, 1-49. Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism. London: Phaidon, 1997, 215-255.

[23] Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. Edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 353.

[24] Orkhan Myassar, “Hawl al-Suryaliyya wa difa 'an al-fannan Fateh Moudarres”, Al-Adib 10 (August 1951), 53.

[25] Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, 58.

[26] Labib Nasif, “al-sha’r al-qawmy Urkhan Myassar… ra’id al-shi’r al-suriyaliy al-munfatah ala al-haditha”, al-Bina’, 18 November 2014.

[27] Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 1977, 516. See also: Khalil al-Musa, “nadharrahqa fi Suryal wa qasa’id ukhra”, al-Thawra 5090 (28 September 1979).

[28] Orkhan Myassar, Suryal wa qasa’id ukhra. Damascus: Association of Arab Writers, 1979, 20.

[29] Elsewhere, I provide a more in-depth analysis of this text and its place in the larger history of the Aleppine Surrealists’ deployment of scientific epistemes.

[30] Myassar, Suryal, 107-108.

[31] Myassar, Suryal, 109. Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 306.

[32] Said, yutubiyya, 189-190.

[33] Khalil al-Musa, “khamsa adba’”, 213-214.

[34] Scott C. Davis, The Road from Damascus: A Journey through Syria. Seattle: Cune Press, 2002, 59. Khalil Handawi, “al-fannan Abu al-Hadi As’ad”, al-Adib 7 (July 1951), 21-23. Moudarres’ Surrealist poems were published in the Syrian journal al-Qithara between 1947 and 1948.

[35] Selim Abdul-Hak, “Ma’ al-fannan Fateh Moudarres”, Ahl al-Naft 3 no.34 (May 1954), 40.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Salman Qataya, in Samar Hamarneh, Keyfa Yaraa Fateh Moudarres? Damascus: Hamarnah, 1999, 54.

[38] Fatih wa Adunis, 64-65.

[39] See Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 316.

[40] Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 351.

[41] Myassar, Suryal, 16. “Fateh Moudarres fannan al-suri al-‘ard”, Al-Hayat al-Tashkiliyyah 67, 1 March 2000.

[42] Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 360.

[43] André Bercoff, “Lune Orientale sur le Rivage Ouest”, L’Orient Littéraire, 21 July 1962, 2.

[44] Chérif Khaznadar and Fateh Moudarres, Lune Orientale sur le Rivage Ouest. Damascus: Ayoubieh, 1962.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Founded by Yusuf Al-Khal in 1962.

[47] Elias Awad, “al-sudfa leisat fann: lawhat Fateh Moudarres”, Adab 3, July 1963, 45-52.

[48] Awad, 50.

[49] Fateh Moudarres, “arba’ qasa’id ma’ rusum”, Shi’r 27, Spring 1963, 41.

[50] Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 72-154.

[51] Tarek Al-Sharif, “Azmah al-fann al-tashkili al-‘arabi al-mu’asir”, al-Ma’rifa 139, 1 September 1973, 164-166.

[52] Tarek al-Sharif, “Tahlil li-ma’na al-fann al-hadith”, al-Ma’rifa 160, 1 June 1975, 92-109.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid. In 1980, Al-Sharif became the editor of the magazine al-Hayat al-Tashkiliyyah, the official organ of the Syrian Ministry of Culture. Charlotte Bank, “Art Education in Twentieth Century Syria”, in Drawing Education: Worldwide! Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2019, 316.

[55] Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996, 231-237.

[56] Anneka Lenssen has achieved much in uncovering this previously uncharted history. Anneka Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde 1964-1970”, ARTMargins 2, 2013, 43-70.

[57] Seale, 72-117.

[58] Afif Bahnassi, “Fann al-rusum fi surya”, al-Adab 1 January 1956, 90.

[59] Giorgio Agamben, “What is Contemporary?”, in What is an Apparatus?. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 56.

[60] Kirsten Scheid, "Necessary Nudes: Hadatha and Mu'asira in the Lives of Modern Lebanese". International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 2010: 210-211.

[61] Scheid, 212.

[62] Cesar Gemayel, “mahnati wa athariha fi bina’ al-amat: al-rassam”, al-Adib 1 February 1943, 3-4. The text is translated in English as “The Painter” in Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. Edited by Anneka Lenssen, Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018, 107-108.

[63] Fateh Moudarres. Damascus and Paris: Atassi Gallery and Institut du Monde Arabe, 1995, 32.

[64] Qataya, in Keyfa Yaraa, 54.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Moudarres, Fatih wa Adunis, 64.

[67] Martina Corgnati, “From the Italian Manner to Fluid Modernity: Artists from Italy and the Mediterranean. From the Arab World and Back”, in Mediterranean Crossroads: Arab Artists Between Italy and the Mediterranean. Rome: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2009: 26, 28.

[68] I am grateful to Dr Barbara de Iudicibus at the Archivio Storico dell’Accademia for sharing the official records with me.

[69] Hada Ibrahim, “al-harb al-lubnania tab’at ‘amali bi-has maswi”, as-Safir, 19 January 1996. Atassi Foundation Archive.

[70] Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 282.

[71] Selim Abdul-Hak in Fateh Moudarres, Galleria Cichi, Roma, 28 November 1959. Roma: Istituto Grafico Tiberino. Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Roma.

[72] Fateh Moudarres, “oud al-na’na’”, al-Thaqafa, 1 October 1962, 36-40.

[73] Established in 1959.

[74] Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde”, 54-56.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Ibid.

[77] “Manifesto of the Plastic Arts Movement in Syria”, in Modern Art in the Arab World, 198-200. “Letter to Salman Qataya”, in Modern Art in the Arab World, 201-202.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Chérif Khaznadar, “Damas découvre l’avant-garde italienne”, L’Orient Littéraire, 28 October 1961. Rosalia Manno Tolu and Maria Grazia Messina, Fiamma Vigo e "Numero". Una vita per l'arte. Edited by Alessia Lenzi. Florence: Centro Di, 2003. Fondo Fiamma Vigo, “Numero” in Archivio di Stato, Firenze.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde”, 59.

[83] Premio nazionale di paesaggio "Autostrada del Sole", Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, novembre 1961-gennaio 1962, Edindustria Editoriale, Roma, 1961, Catalogo della mostra relativa al premio nazionale "Autostrada del Sole", mostra tenutasi a Roma, presso il Palazzo delle Esposizioni, dal 30 novembre 1961 al 7 gennaio 1962. Archivio Storico Quadriennale ASQII.5 b. 3 u. 24. Archivio Luce, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16wxhg

[84] Chérif Khaznadar, “Enfin, un “Abstrait” de Talent en Syrie: Mahmoud Daadouch”, L’Orient Littéraire, 28 October 1961.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Bruno Alfieri and Chérif Khaznadar, “À la Galerie Harmouche: Remo Remotti”, L’Orient Littéraire, 14 April 1962.

[87] André Bercoff, “Moudarres: tout le soleil du desert”, L’Orient Littéraire, 1 June 1963.

[88] Fateh Moudarres, “qars al-dhaw al-aswad, raqs, tujasid fikra, wajah, ramal”, Shi’r 25, 1 January 1963

[89] As’ad Arabi, al-Wasat 27 November 1995. Atassi Gallery Archive.

[90] Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde”, 59-61.

[91] Ibid.

[92] “al-Ta’lia Symposium Roundtable”, in Modern Art in the Arab World, 315-321.

[93] Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation, 367.