I recently was asked to travel to Beirut, Lebanon to give hands-on training to Middle Eastern print and online journalists on how to add video to their stories.
The invitation by the Global Center for Journalism and Democracy and the Samir Kassir Foundation afforded me the wonderful opportunity to stay in Lebanon for several extra days to shoot videos of my own for Blouin ARTINFO. I was not sure what to expect, but I was excited to check out the thriving, but under-reported art scene in Beirut, a cultural city defined and overshadowed by the legacy of its brutal Civil War that raged from 1975 to 1990, when the neighboring powers of Israel, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization used Lebanon as a battleground for their long-standing conflicts.
Before the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, it looked as though the revival of Lebanon's tourism industry might pave the road to an economic rebound and the return of Beirut to its moniker as the “Paris of the East”. Tourism accounted for an estimated one-fifth of Lebanon's economic output in 2010.
But the huge wave of people fleeing the fighting in neighboring Syria has placed a severe strain on Lebanon’s resources. Syrian refugees are now estimated to make up about one-quarter of Lebanon’s population. With the fighting next door and the resurgence of sectarian tensions that threaten the fragile peace in Lebanon, tourism has stalled, putting a big damper on art purchases by wealth out-of-town buyers.
Nadine Begdache, Owner and Director of Galerie Janine Rubeiz, tells Blouin ARTINFO that the drop in tourism has put a huge damper on her business and her prices. She says “the Syrian crisis affects all kinds of things in Lebanon… we have much less people. We want people at ease to buy art, to have the pleasure to buy art.”
Begdache has her pulse on the art market in Beirut. She runs one of just a couple of art galleries that have kept their doors open since before the start of the Lebanon's Civil War. Her mother started Galerie Janine Rubeiz, an outcrop of a popular and influential cultural center she founded in Beirut in 1967.
The work of so many of Lebanon’s artists is deeply affected by the environment in which they grew up. Painter Joseph Harb, whose works have been sold by Begdache’s gallery for 20 years, choses to show chaos in his works, like the chaos which surrounded him as a child. Harb says he is extending Jackson Pollack’s drip painting one step further, by experimenting with circular swabs of paint he applies with brushes attached to a spinning drill. Harb also commemorates memories of the war, and his possessions lost when forced to move frequently, in a series of glass-framed wooden boxes.
Begdache says she sells Harbs works in the gallery at prices ranging from $6,000 to $15,000 dollars, far less than they deserve considering the quality of art.
Nadine Bagdache is on a personal quest to continue the mission of her mother promoting the artists of Lebanon. “We are not fanatics”, she says, and she does not want the world and art market to jump to conclusions and lump the Lebanese people and artists in “the same bags as all Arabs and Islamists, I don’t believe we are…. The people I know in Beirut and my Beirut is not like this. I want to show everybody that Lebanese artists are really very good artists. I want to show that because of our struggle, Beirut will remain Beirut, Beirut didn’t change”.
Watch other videos in our special series “Art in Beirut”, HERE.
