Syria’s golden age of art at risk of being forgotten, experts say

Country’s modern artists were already under-represented during Al Assad family's long rule

Syrian artists frequently travelled abroad in the 1960s. Leila Sneir is pictured here during her studies in Cairo. Photo: Atassi Foundation

Since the Assad regime fell after more than 50 years in power, the extent of Syria’s cultural isolation is becoming clear. Over the past two decades, as the art market engaged in earnest with Arab modernism, works by Syrian modern artists have become increasingly under-represented.

Of the major Middle East modern and contemporary auctions in the past two years at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, for example, only 3 per cent of the artworks sold – 23 lots out of 706 – were by Syrian artists and eight of those were by one, the Berlin-based Marwan.

Contemporary exhibitions focus on themes of conflict and migration, obscuring the image of a prosperous and connected Syria in which major modern artists such as Louay Kayyali, Fateh Moudarres and Mahmoud Hammad emerged.

In academic conferences and publications, work on Syria is often absent.

“The impact of the Baath party has been incredible in terms of isolating Syria on every level – culturally, artistically, economically, politically, even socially,” says Shireen Atassi, who runs the Atassi Foundation. Based in Dubai since 2012, the Atassi Foundation is the major collection and repository of Syrian art and artistic archives. They commission scholarship and exhibitions, contesting the growing sense that Syrian art is separate to the rest of the region.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Syrian art was at the forefront of pan-Arabism, and Syrian artists showed and collaborated with Lebanese, Egyptian and Iraqi counterparts. The first First Arab Conference of Fine Arts was held in Damascus in 1971 and it was artists from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon who founded the Union of Arab Plastic Artists that same year. Painters such as Mahmoud Hammad developed calligraphic works known as hurufiyya, alongside similar experiments in Lebanon and Iraq. Moudarres used his work after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War to support the Palestinian cause and called Beirut his second home.

Mahmoud Hammad (centre, coat on arm) and other Syrian artists visiting Rome. Photo: Atassi Foundation

“There would be no Lebanese modernism without Syrian modernism,” says the curator and researcher Maymanah Farhat. “In the modern Lebanese history that's being written and documented in books and exhibitions, there isn't enough attention paid to the symbiotic relationship that Damascus and Beirut had in the 1950s and '60s. You had someone like Fateh Moudarres, who's so important to Damascus, but also to Beirut. Or someone like Marwan, who is absolutely crucial to the development of art in Lebanon, as much as he is at the development of art in Damascus. Historians right now are blindsided by these borders.”

After Hafez Al Assad took power in 1971, he began a project of retrenchment that slowly drew Syrian artists away from international collaboration. Starting in the 1980s, Syrians required a permit merely to travel abroad and the number of foreign exhibitions plummeted. While there was a brief opening of restrictions in the 2000s – which coincided with the internet making information more freely available to artists – since the civil war started, Syria’s seclusion became only more entrenched.

The contemporary art scene suffered and most artists moved abroad. But modern artists, many of whom were older or who lived on through their archives, were less mobile. For reasons no one can pinpoint, each individually surmountable but adding up to a blockade, Syrian modernism receded from view.

Then What?? by the Syrian modernist painter Louay Kayyali is among those going on sale at Sotheby's first auction in Saudi Arabia on February 8. Photo: Sotheby's

There was little institutional support in Syria during its modern heyday, compared to countries such as Iraq or Egypt. Artists’ works entered private collections but there was no public repository responsible for supporting the cultural scene. While there was a prolific amount of writing on art from within Syria, it was generally in Arabic – and many current art historians, even of Arab art, do not read the language.

Archives became difficult to access, making it hard to research artists or to establish the provenance of a painting. As a result, fakes frequently circulated, spooking potential collectors and driving prices down. While works by Kayyali and Marwan led sales in the first wave of market interest in Middle Eastern art, particularly at the Christie’s auctions in Dubai in the 2000s, today their numbers have dwindled.

The decline at market had a ripple effect. It is an open secret in the art world that the market drives scholarship, as auction houses need to verify the provenance and veracity of the artworks they sell. They regularly consult academics and can be some of the first to commission research on a subject.

Study of Three Palestinian Boys (1970) by Marwan. Photo: Osama Hafiry

In the worst-case scenario, artworks can enter a doom spiral, where museums worry about the authenticity of a certain set of paintings, keeping them out of major narratives and therefore further reducing the amount of scholarship and public knowledge about them.

And modern Syrian art has had no vocal international champion nor major show. Atassi highlights the transformative power of an exhibition such as Art et Liberte, organised by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath in 2016 and 2017, which brought international attention to the previously little-known movement of Surrealism in Egypt.

“These are all little things,” she says. “But they all come together.”

What’s next?

The recession of Syria from Arab art history is not total. The scholar Anneka Lenssen, who teaches at UC-Berkeley, published an acclaimed study of Syrian modernism in 2020 called Beautiful Agitation. The Syrian artist and scholar Nagham Hodaifa, who wrote her doctorate on Syrian art, says she is increasingly receiving inquiries from potential students. But it is an important reminder of the effects of war and conflict on the supposedly objective histories laid out in museums.

It is too much to say that with the regime change in Syria, its art history will begin to be reconsidered – most notably because no one knows what the government of Ahmad Al Shara will bring.

And much is already being done. In the period since the revolution, a shadow civil society has developed in the diaspora, with many individual-led projects taking responsibility for the country’s history – from Mnemonic, which records human rights abuse, to the Syrian Cassette Archive, which documents a period of popular music.

Late last year, the Atassi Foundation launched the Modern Art of Syria Archive, an online, searchable archive of thousands that will be entirely publicly available. They comprise the records of the Atassi Gallery, which Shireen’s mother Mona ran from the 1980s to 2010 in Homs and later Damascus. They contain, among other gems, recorded discussions between Moudarres and the poet Adonis at the Galerie Atassi, for which the lines stretched around the block. The archive also includes the records of Hammad and Leila Nseir, and they are hoping to set up a digital preservation studio in Damascus.

Increased access to material will, ideally, allow for further research into the full breadth of Syrian art history.

It’s not going to be a sharp change, Atassi points out. “It's just going to be a curve and there's going to be more traffic coming in," she says. "But we need multiple voices. History needs different perspectives.”