Article
Aali, Halil
Article
Abbas, Akeel
Iraqi, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active since 1974 active in France.
Born 12 September 1948, in Shamyah (Mesopotamia).
Painter.
Akeel Abbas has shown his works in a number of group exhibitions, including the 2nd Arab Biennale, Kuwait in 1971; Centre Culturel Irakien, Paris in 1975...
Article
Abboud, Shafic, Chafic, Chafik or Shafik
Lebanese, 20th century, male.
Active from 1947 in France.
Born 22 November 1926, in El Mhaidthe, near Bikfaya; died 9 April 2004, in Paris.
Painter, engraver.
Shafic Abboud set out to become an engineer, but broke off his studies in his third year at the French school of engineering in Beirut in order to study drawing and composition at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in ...
Article
Abdel Kerim, Salah
Egyptian, 20th century, male.
Born 1925; died 1988.
Sculptor, painter. Animals.
Salah Abdel Kerim studied at Cairo's faculty of art, continuing his studies in Italy and in Paris. He was appointed Professor of Decorative Art at the same faculty in Cairo and was later appointed Dean of Fine Arts in the city....
Article
Abdel Méguid, Raouf
Egyptian, 20th century, male.
Born 1932.
Painter.
Raouf Abdel Méguid studied at the arts faculty in Cairo in 1955, continuing his studies in Rome in 1959. He was later appointed Professor at the faculty where he had studied as a young man. His painting incorporates traditional motifs from Arabic architectural design which he reworks, often in a playful manner....
Article
Abdel Mooti, Moustapha
Egyptian, 20th century, male.
Born 1938, in Alexandria.
Painter.
Moustapha Abdel Mooti studied at the fine arts faculty in Alexandria and was later appointed Professor there.
He paints monumental geometric forms, spheres on top of pyramids or pyramids on top of spheres or cubes, for example, which sometimes appear to punctuate dreamlike spaces, as in his work ...
Article
Abdul-Medjid Effendi
Turkish, 19th–20th century, male.
Born 29 May 1868, in Constantinople (now Istanbul); died 23 August 1944, in Paris.
Painter and collector. Portraits, genre scenes, landscapes.
Abdul-Medjid was the son of Sultan Abdülaziz, and later Crown Prince of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph. He was taught painting by Fausto Zonaro, an Italian artist who worked in the Ottoman court ...
Article
Abdul-Wahab, Gilani
Tunisian, 20th century, male.
Active in France.
Born 3 October 1890, in Mehdia, Algeria.
Painter, draughtsman. Nudes, portraits, landscapes.
Gilani Abdul-Wahab worked mainly in France. He began his artistic education in 1921 at the free academies of Montparnasse in Paris and at the Académie Julian....
Article
Abid Ali, Medhi
Iraqi, 20th century, male.
Born 3 July 1943, in Singar.
Painter.
Medhi Abid Ali exhibited in his own country as well as in Europe, including exhibitions in Paris and Malmö. In 1971, he was selected to take part in the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris....
Article
Abidine
Turkish, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1952.
Born 1913, in Istanbul; died 7 December 1993, in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne).
Painter, draughtsman, illustrator.
Group D.
Abidine began his artistic career in Istanbul when he was still extremely young. At the age of 15 he was producing catoons for the Turkish press. In ...
Article
Abner, Raymond
French, 20th century, male.
Active from 1947 active in France.
Born 8 May 1919, in Cairo, Egypt; died December 1999.
Painter. Landscapes.
Raymond Abner studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Cairo from 1941-1943, then at St Martin's School of Art in London. In 1947...
Article
Abou Chadi, Abou El Fath
Egyptian, 20th century, male.
Born 1944, in Menoufia.
Painter. Figures.
Abou Chadi has taken part in a number of local group exhibitions. He was selected to participate in the exhibition entitled Aspects of Contemporary Egyptian Art ( Visages de l'art contemporain égyptien) at the Musée Galliera in Paris in ...
Article
Abramovich, Pinchas or Pinhas
Israeli, 20th century, male.
Born 1909, in Lithuania; died 1986.
Painter (gouache). Urban landscapes, figures, interiors with figures.
New Horizons Group.
This artist studied at the academy in Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania) in 1925; he emigrated to Palestine in 1929 and took up a teaching post that same year at the Beit Zera kibbutz, going on to work in the kibbutz seminary from 1952 to 1972. Abramovich lived in Paris in 1935 and 1936, working at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. In 1986, he was elected honorary president of the association of Israeli painters and sculptors....
Article
Abu-Shakra, Asim
Israeli, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 11 November 1961, in Umm el Fahm.
Painter (including mixed media), draughtsman. Military subjects, figures, still-lifes, animals.
Asim Abu-Shakra was educated at the college of fine arts in Tel Aviv, where he worked as a teacher in 1987 and ...
Article
Achkar Hamparstzoumian, Yvette
Lebanese, 20th century, female.
Born 1928, in São Paulo.
Painter.
Yvette Achkar was originally earmarked for a career in music, but enrolled instead at the Lebanese fine arts academy, where she studied from 1947 to 1952. She was influenced by the French painter Georges, who had settled in Lebanon at around this time. A French government scholarship enabled Yvette Achkar to spend time in Paris and to pursue her studies there. She went on to show her work at numerous group exhibitions, including in Belgrade (...
Article
Adly, Suzanne
Egyptian, 20th century, female.
Born in Constantinople.
Painter. Genre scenes.
Suzanne Adly exhibited some genre paintings of the Near East at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1931.
Article
Adnan, Etel
Andrew Weiner
(b Beirut, 1925).
Lebanese painter and writer active in the USA. Daughter of a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Adnan was educated in Lebanon before going on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley. For many years she taught aesthetics at Dominican College, San Rafael, CA; she also lectured and taught at many other colleges and universities. During the 1970s Adnan regularly contributed editorials, essays, and cultural criticism to the Beirut-based publications Al-Safa and L’Orient-Le Jour. In 1978 she published the novel Sitt Marie Rose, which won considerable acclaim for its critical portrayal of cultural and social politics during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War. Adnan published numerous books of poetry, originating in her opposition to the American war in Vietnam and proceeding to encompass topics as diverse as the landscape of Northern California and the geopolitics of the Middle East. Her poetry served as the basis for numerous works of theater and contemporary classical music....
Article
Afnan, Maliheh
Lebanese, 20th century, female.
Born 1935, in Haifa, Palestine.
Active since 1974 in France; since 1997 in London.
Painter.
Of Persian descent, Maliheh Afnan was educated at the Corcoran School of Art at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. While there, she was featured in various group exhibitions beginning in ...
Article
Agam, Yaacov
pseudonym of Yaacov Gibstein
Israeli, 20th century, male.
Active from 1951; also active in Paris, France.
Born 11 May 1928, in Rishon-le-Ziyyon, Palestine (now Israel).
Painter, sculptor, printmaker. Wall decorations, monuments.
Op Art, Kinetic Art.
The son of a rabbi, Yaacov Agam was educated at the Bezalel art college in Jerusalem. He was arrested by the British in 1945 and imprisoned for two years. On his release, he travelled extensively in Europe. He spent time in Switzerland, where he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule under Johannes Itten, the colour theoretician and one of the driving forces behind the preparatory course for admission to the Bauhaus in Dessau. Agam arrived in Paris in 1951 and enrolled at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait presided over by Jean Dewasne and Edgard Pillet. He visited the USA and gave a lecture in Chicago in 1961 on ‘four-dimensional’ painting, a theme that pervades his own work.
In addition to individual paintings of a conventional size, Agam has frequently been commissioned to paint large decorative murals. Examples include his ceiling for the Jerusalem national convention centre; a ...
Article
Agam, Yaacov
D. C. Barrett
(b Rishon-le-Zion, Palestine [now Israel], May 11, 1928).
Israeli painter and sculptor. He studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem under Mordecai Ardon in 1946, and from 1951 in Paris at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The major influences on his early work were Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912), the Bauhaus ideas disseminated by Johannes Itten and Siegfried Giedion, with whom he came into contact in Zurich in 1949, and the work of Max Bill. Between 1951 and 1953 his work consisted of a series of Contrapuntal and Transformable Pictures, such as Transformable Relief (1953; Paris, R. N. Lebel priv. col., see Metken, p. 6). In 1953 he held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Craven in Paris. Although his claims that this was the first exhibition of kinetic art, and that he was the first optical-kinetic artist, have been disputed, he was certainly among the first artists to encourage spectator participation in such a direct way....
