The Lebanese Ministry of Education has mounted an exhibition of Lebanese artists from Daoud Corm down to the present day. The exhibition was opened on April 15 by His Excellency the President of the Republic, Sheikh Beshara El-Khouri, in the presence of His Excellency the Prime Minister, Mr. Riad al-Solh, and His Excellency the Minister of Education, Dr. Elias El-Khoury, together with a refined elite of society's foremost people.
"The Woman's Voice" delegated the artist Mr. Abd al-Rahman al-Labban to view this splendid exhibition and to write the critique which the reader will find below:
The editorial management reserves its own opinion on what Mr. Labban's pen has treated, leaving judgment to the reader.
"A room full of paintings is a room full of feelings and ideas." Indeed; and a bare wall is much like a witless man — I cannot tell why any sensible woman keeps him!
In the West, the painting is a part of the house whose furnishing is not complete without it, and its mistress's nerves are not at rest until she sees it in its proper place. Few are the Arab women who trouble themselves over it. Most women among us wish, no doubt, to adorn their walls and rooms, but they take no care in choosing the adornment: you see them using things trivial in themselves — an old photograph of an old grandmother, or a photographic print of a country of which they know nothing, not even its name, or one of those pictures that spread so widely in the days of the last war, which it is truly regrettable for one to see on the walls of "free citizens!"
In Lebanon today there is an exhibition of certain Lebanese artists, opened by the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts under the
patronage of the First President. In this exhibition are many paintings by artists who lived among us and whom God then took to Himself, and by others who still contend with
fate and dispute with society their right to survive. They are forgotten by all but a small band of friends and a few foreigners only, and they are neglected by the government — I say this in spite of this very exhibition which the government itself has mounted — neglected by it because it has not yet founded a special house for painting and sculpture, choosing for it each year the best of the paintings and statues exhibited by all the artists of Lebanon, together with such paintings as it could purchase from artists' exhibitions in the Arab countries especially and in the world at large — and let no one object on the financial side, for we know very well where the state's monies go!...
They are neglected, too, by woman herself — woman who is, I believe, the first to bear the responsibility for artistic stagnation, for she is the artists' first muse and, more important, she is their rescuer from the struggle
of life and the contest for survival. If woman does not preside over the selection of paintings, presenting them to her husband and children, adorning her house with them, and cultivating with them everyone who keeps her company and sits with her — who, pray, will do it?
I ask in astonishment: is it truly the case that a huge bouquet of flowers makes a better gift, given on whatever occasion, than a work of art? Does a woman receive a piece of silk with greater and loftier emotion and feeling than she receives a colored painting when it is presented to her? If that is the truth, then I am the first to believe that the women's renaissance in the Arab countries, and in Lebanon in particular, is still missing; that all this clamor raised around the subject is talk upon talk upon talk; that the taste of woman among us, and her feeling, are still as they were in her days of ignorance, and her culture is far removed indeed from the first rung
of the ladder of social and cultural advancement.
The book, the painting, and music — three necessities without which one cannot live and keep his humanity, without which he will be capable of no independence whatever should he lose them, and without which he will never know advancement — they are the very same as goodness, freedom, and beauty.
"We lose the truth of the art of painting and its purpose if we expect of it a complete transcription of things in all their detail — if we take it as nothing but a record of documentary information... What we want of a work of art is that
Dream: by Gibran Khalil Gibran