Bibi Zoghbi, an Artist from Lebanon

When I was told that a Lebanese woman from Argentina was to exhibit her canvases to the children of her first homeland, I felt my imagination bolt suddenly toward the women artists whose works history has recorded: I remembered Madame Vigée-Lebrun, and I remembered Rosa Bonheur, and I remembered Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt and Marie Laurencin. But I did not once remember — nor did there cross my imagination the memory of — a single one of the men artists who have filled the books of history with their names and crammed the museums and exhibitions with their works. I did not know the reason for that omission, but I tried to grasp it, and I found that my neglect of them was unintentional; for I believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the gap between men artists and women artists is too wide for a woman to cross with ease, so as to link her name with theirs and her works with theirs, or to summon one of them to my imagination.

Then it happened that Omar Onsi invited us; so I met her and made her acquaintance, and I found that despite the twenty-five years she has spent far from the East she still keeps her Eastern nature in her talk, her habits, her hopes, and her opinions... as though she had come down with all this from one of the villages perched on the shoulders of Lebanon's hills, and had not brought it across the vast ocean.

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Mrs. Bibi Zoghbi is Lebanese by birth, Lebanese in constitution, Lebanese in mind and soul.

Like all the girls of Lebanon, she was born in Lebanon, of Lebanese parents; yet she did not live the life of her fellows, but created for herself, and by herself, a life of her own...

She was born in a small village on the quiet northern shore, a village whose name perhaps only a small handful of Lebanese now remember; she told me its name was "Sahel Alma."

She remained in Lebanon receiving her first schooling until she reached fifteen. Of her childhood she remembers nothing at all — except one sweet picture, blurred at the same time, which she carried away with her, like the shadow of a dim phantom, of Lebanon and its people, of its society and the customs of its sons.

Like many Lebanese, Mrs. Zoghbi set out for Argentina and made of it a second homeland; she grew up in its regions and was reared among its people, and she loved it and loved them, and her spirit loved their flowers; and she felt art creeping slowly into her nerves. She looked about her and found her hand fell short — yet she did not take fright, and did not retreat... A short time passed in which she found herself and knew her goal; she took up her brush in her right hand and her palette in her left; and a few years went by, and behold, Bibi Zoghbi was an artist in whom Argentina took pride before the sons of "Sahel Alma" knew her...

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Her artistic culture rested on her own effort more than on lessons received from masters of painting. That shows plainly in her canvases, for she has been able to cut a path all her own — even though now and again we find slight traces showing us that she walks with the kit of certain earlier artists such as Gauguin and Rousseau... I do not mean by this that she was influenced by them or borrowed from them — she herself denies it, and says she did not know them until someone told her of the resemblance between them... I mean rather that with her inner being and her artistic gifts she understood nature and grasped it, independent and alone, as those two understood and grasped it before her.

Mrs. Zoghbi's first exhibition was in Argentina in 1934, and the approval and patronage she won there encouraged her to persevere and press on; so she made for Paris, where she held her second exhibition in 1935, and she spent some time in the city of the Louvre, gathering memories she treasures and loves. Then she returned to South America and toured its countries, painting and exhibiting her pictures, until the war broke out; then she withdrew into Argentina until last summer, when she gathered her canvases and crossed once more to the city of the Louvre. Last June (1947) the artist opened her second exhibition in Paris and gained from it what she had hoped to gain; and she sold enough of her canvases to venture a grave financial gamble — for she gathered up her remaining canvases and brought them to Beirut, to show us the fruit of her delicate, tranquil brush, although some people told her she would sell nothing in Lebanon, and would find none of its sons who value such things. Yet she assures me today that she found in Lebanon everything an artist might dream of, even if in miniature: in it there are people who buy pictures at their price; in it there are people who care for the fine arts and value them; in it there are gifted artists, "masters among them" in their art; and in it, above all this, there is a nature brimming with splendor, full of life, steeped in colors, that stirs in the soul the artist's latent spirit. But she did not find in Lebanon (alas!) a single museum to preserve for us the fruits of the fine arts... And what harm, I wonder! Is it not enough for the responsible authorities that Lebanon has a huge, handsome building of firm, smooth stone, preserving for us the remains of pieces of pottery... the traces of a jug or vessel that some Phoenician used, to quench his own thirst or the thirst of his cattle... or for some other purpose!...

Is there not in Lebanon a museum of towering columns, holding within it puny models with which people amuse themselves, and by which they help themselves to conceive works still alive at Baalbek and at Beiteddine!... And who knows — the Lebanese may yet find a museum devoted to painting, on the day when as much time has passed over our art canvases, and over us, as has passed over those people who drank from a pottery vessel... and buried their dead in coffins of lead... Then, my dear reader, people will come to gaze at the "skeletons" of our canvases, whole or fragmentary... or at plaster casts of them... just as we go today to gaze at pieces of bone from some extinct animal they took for a man!..

Or at a piece of stone they took for a relic of value!...

I shall not dwell at length on Mrs. Zoghbi's art, but I will note quickly that it is for the most part an art of ornament and embellishment (Decorative): she recasts the whole scene to suit her feeling for delicacy and precision of arrangement, and for that reason we find her enamored of painting flowers — indeed we might say she is a specialist in that kind of painting... For a few years now she has been studying the Negroes and their forms, and to that end she settled for a time in North Africa and in Dakar, studying them at first hand; the results appeared in some of the canvases she has shown us.

In this kind of painting — the decorative — she is strong and truly masterly... precise in composition and harmony, with living, affecting renderings.

Mrs. Zoghbi will leave us for New York, where she will hold her next exhibition at the invitation of some friends of hers there. After that she does not quite know where her mount will set her down, except that she wishes to return to Paris. And she will spend most of her time in Argentina, as I believe, where the days may settle her at last to live out her long life — in which we pray God to fulfill for her her hopes and her desires.

And if I remember Mrs. Zoghbi in the future — and remember her I doubtless shall — I shall remember along with her, instead of women artists, men artists such as Gauguin and Rousseau... indeed I may remember no one at all along with her... and most probably — rather, more rightly — I shall remember no one at her side!...