Modern Lebanese Painters: A Collector's Introduction

Lebanon has one of the richest modern art histories in the Arab world, and for a long time it was one of the least known outside the region. That has changed. Tate Modern gave Saloua Raouda Choucair her first major museum exhibition in 2013, and the 2024 Venice Biennale hung works by Saliba Douaihy, Huguette Caland and Etel Adnan in its central exhibition. Collectors who once met these names only in Beirut now meet them in museum catalogues and international sales.

This guide introduces the painters a collector is most likely to encounter, in roughly the order they appeared, and closes with the checks that matter when buying their work.

The first generation

Professional studio painting in Lebanon begins with three artists who trained abroad and came home to paint portraits, religious commissions and landscapes:

• Daoud Corm (1852-1930) studied in Rome and became the leading portraitist of his day.
• Habib Srour (c. 1860-1938) also trained in Rome and later taught several of the painters who shaped the next generation.
• Khalil Saleeby (1870-1928) trained in Britain and the United States, and painted portraits and nudes with an impressionist attention to light.

Their importance is partly as teachers. Saleeby's studio trained César Gemayel and encouraged the young Omar Onsi, while Srour took on Saliba Douaihy as an apprentice. A good part of what followed can be traced back to these workshops. The American University of Beirut holds a significant group of Saleeby's paintings in its Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum.

The pioneers of modern Lebanese painting

Born around the turn of the century, the next generation is usually credited with bringing a recognisably modern, recognisably Lebanese painting into being:

• Omar Onsi (1901-1969) is often described as Lebanon's foremost impressionist, admired above all for his luminous landscapes.
• Moustafa Farroukh (1901-1957) graduated from the academy in Rome in 1927, taught at the American University of Beirut, produced more than two thousand paintings and wrote several books on art.
• César Gemayel (1898-1958) worked with loose brushwork and a French-influenced sense of colour, and was a founding teacher at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, known as ALBA, which became one of the country's leading art schools.

These painters anchored their work in Lebanese landscape, village life and history at a time when the country was defining itself, before and after independence in 1943.

Abstraction and the Beirut of the 1960s

After the Second World War, a younger generation looked to Paris and New York, and Beirut became a meeting point for modern art in the region. The Sursock Museum, which opened in 1961, held an annual Salon d'Automne that became the city's principal showcase for new work.

• Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916-2017) was among the first artists from the Arab world to work in a fully abstract, geometric language. She studied in Paris in the late 1940s, spent time in Fernand Léger's studio and showed at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1951. Her sculpture is as important as her painting.
• Shafic Abboud (1926-2004) studied at ALBA, moved to Paris in 1947 and spent most of his life there, developing a lyrical abstraction rooted in memory and colour. He won the Sursock Museum's Salon d'Automne prize in 1964.
• Saliba Douaihy (1915-1994), born in Ehden, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before moving to New York in 1950, where his landscapes of northern Lebanon became the flat, hard-edged abstractions he is best known for.
• Helen Khal (1923-2009), born in Pennsylvania to a Lebanese family, studied at ALBA and in 1963 co-founded Gallery One with the poet Yusuf al-Khal, often described as Beirut's first permanent gallery for contemporary art. She painted luminous fields of colour and was also an influential critic.
• Yvette Achkar (1928-2024), born in São Paulo to Lebanese parents, was one of the leading abstract painters of postwar Lebanon and taught for more than two decades.
• Paul Guiragossian (1926-1993), born in Jerusalem to Armenian parents who had survived the genocide, settled in Beirut and painted crowds, families and exiles in long, vertical strokes of colour that hover between figure and abstraction.
• Huguette Caland (1931-2019), daughter of Bechara El Khoury, Lebanon's first president after independence, worked in Paris and later California, making sensual, line-based paintings and drawings of the body.
• Etel Adnan (1925-2021), poet as well as painter, made small, intensely coloured landscapes that have become some of the best known images of Lebanese modernism.

This is not a complete list. Aref Rayess, Rafic Charaf, Juliana Seraphim, Nadia Saikali and many others are part of the same story, and each is worth researching in their own right.

What to check before you buy

Growing international interest has brought the problems that follow interest everywhere.

Forgeries are a known risk. The Paul Guiragossian Foundation, set up by the artist's family in 2011, told The Art Newspaper in 2018 that it had identified around a hundred fakes. Other sought-after Lebanese modernists face the same problem, so treat any attribution as a claim to be checked rather than a fact.

Find out who is recognised as the authority. For several artists, an estate, family or foundation keeps the archive, examines works and, in some cases, issues certificates. The Guiragossian Foundation fills that role for Paul Guiragossian, and a catalogue raisonné of Shafic Abboud's work is being prepared by his daughter, Christine Abboud. Ask whether the work is known to the relevant body, and treat a certificate as one piece of evidence among several. Our guide to certificates of authenticity explains why.

Expect provenance gaps, and ask about them. The civil war of 1975 to 1990 scattered collections, archives and records, and many genuine works have incomplete histories. A gap is not proof of a problem, but it is a reason to ask where the work has been and what documents survive. See what provenance means in practice.

Look for exhibition history. A work that was shown at the Sursock Museum's Salon d'Automne, at Gallery One or in a museum exhibition, and can be matched to a catalogue or photograph from the time, stands on much firmer ground.

Where to research Lebanese modernism

Some of the best references are free and online. The Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut publishes artist biographies and much of its collection of modern and contemporary Arab art. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha maintains an online encyclopedia of modern art and the Arab world, and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah publishes its collection with notes on each artist. Museum catalogues, particularly Tate's 2013 Choucair catalogue and the Sursock Museum's publications, are worth seeking out.

Lebanese artists on Meridian's

Every listing on Meridian's has a free AI research consultant. For a Lebanese or Arab modernist, you can ask it about the artist's biography and training, their exhibition history, the foundation or estate associated with their work and their publicly documented sale results, and it will cite the sources it uses. It does not authenticate works or give valuations, so for questions of attribution, go to the recognised authority and the seller's documents.