Reviving cosmopolitan Beirut : a case study of three modernist art spaces

Abstract

Prior to the Lebanese Civil War, Beirut boasted a vibrant art scene. The war took its toll on the city's infrastructure, leading to the relocation and shutdown of the existing galleries and art institutions. Since the war, art in Beirut is being revived along different tracks, in tandem with its complex geopolitical identity. My thesis argues that artists, gallerists, and architects collaboratively assert a specific message and image of Lebanon, by creating a nostalgia appealing to certain moments in Beirut's past (or the prospective future). I track the architecture of the different art galleries and institutions and supplement it with the kind of art they exhibit, to create preliminary categories, each vying for its own identity of Lebanon. In the thesis, I choose the modernist architecture category as the emblematic postcard image of prewar Beirut, featuring the modernist architecture that endured the war and came to represent Beirut's cultural Renaissance.

I chose to focus primarily on the following three representative examples of modernist art spaces in Ras Beirut: Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Saleh Barakat Gallery, and Dar El Nimer. The self-funded art spaces are located in Ras Beirut, an area ingrained in the Lebanese national memory as the site of mutual coexistence between Christians and Muslims. I contextualize the physical qualities of each gallery within the concurrent local and regional sociopolitical conditions to examine the role they may be playing or the political agenda they may be pushing. I analyze the image projected by the institution through the archival material, texts, catalogues, interviews with the directors of the spaces, the curators, and the architects who renovated/designed them, as well as their general reception by the public through newspaper clippings and occasional art reviews.

With their focus on Lebanese and Arab artists, a sentimentality towards the area's history, and a disdain with the city's postwar development, these galleries mobilize modernist buildings to resurrect the cosmopolitan Beirut, the modernist cultural hub of the Arab left intellectuals in the 1960's and early 1970's.