I knew Salwa Rawda before she set out for Paris, when she would look at the nature around her and render it now in line, now in color — a rendering that spoke of a deft hand, a strong power of observation, and feelings running deep. During that time I watched her gift develop through study and self-training, and I glimpsed in her eyes promises and hopes. Then she came back from Paris after an absence of years, and behold, in a single leap she had crossed the bounds of classicism and impressionism to give all her powers to this new manner, steeped in its own newness, because she found herself driven to it by an impulse not to be resisted.
The leap was not surprising. She had been prepared for it by a vehement nature and a passion for invention, inclined to disregard rules and restraints and to cut a personal path — whether in art or in life itself. And abstract art happened to answer a longing in her soul, for it is a liberation from nature and from exactitude and imitation. It is a reaction against disciplined classicism and a return to instinctive, spontaneous art — to the freedom of inspiration and the sudden flash of vision. If you observe the arrangement of the exhibition, you will see that it points to this gradual liberation, which begins with abbreviated drawings bearing some resemblance to nature, intimating atmosphere and subject by sign and suggestion, and ends with the untrammeled art that confines drawing to geometric lines, threaded through with colors in harmony, in contrast, or in discord.
This modern philosophy of art is not confined to painting but extends to the other fine arts. It is the philosophy which says that art is the expression of a state in the artist's soul, the conveying of an inner feeling bound neither to the outward world nor to reality. This modern school does not deny the classical definition of art — "the depiction of nature through a temperament" — but it insists that every artist has his own temperament and his own selfhood, which imitation must not be allowed to drown; and accordingly the artist must press to bring out his feeling and be faithful in depicting what he senses, be it clear or obscure, calm and still or confused and turbulent.
Salwa Rawda found in herself a strong feeling for color and line, and she was drawn to expression through canvases she composes of lines and colors, without assigning them subjects or fixing their meanings. Yet they create in their maker a contentment, and in the souls of those who view them an emotional understanding and a spiritual accord, without the subject being understood in the conventionally agreed way. Hence the
names of some of the canvases were words that mean nothing, since they leave the beholder an absolute freedom of interpretation.
These thoughts passed through my mind when I visited the exhibition. In setting them down I have no wish to thrust myself into the company of the critics of painting, least of all of abstract painting. But I cannot refrain from saying, in closing, that Salwa Rawda's exhibition was strange in Paris and stranger still in Beirut, and that her attempt showed a boldness singular of its kind.
We live in a country whose people have not yet come so far as to appreciate the beauty of the nature around them: we see them going on disfiguring it by every means, in the city and in the village, on the coast and in the mountain. How, then, should they be asked to appreciate art — above all when it goes so deep into strangeness that it leaves the viewer perplexed, or compels him to contemplation and thought?
And yet, for all this, I find myself obliged to go back on what I said, and to recall that we live in a country that gathers up the contradictions: the extreme modern, and the old that reaches back to the Middle Ages or to the ages of primal simplicity. It gathers the cultivated, who profess the views of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Bergson, and the ignorant, who live in the primitive stage, and the petrified minds that drive the people down into the pits of error, imbecility, and blind reaction.
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