With the Artist Mounh al-Rassi

Mr. Mounh al-Rassi is rich in his many-sided personality: he is the linguist, he is the man of letters, and he is the quiet artist who would gladly devote himself, did his time permit, to art alone.

From this last angle, it pleases us that Mr. Mounh al-Rassi should answer this set of questions — together with some drawings by his brush.

Q — When did you begin painting, and has your activity in producing it varied from one time to another?

A — I began painting before I learned my letters, and in that I did not depart from the rule of instinct in most children, who are drawn to expressing themselves by drawing. But the extent of my inclination toward art began to show itself in my resistance to the will of those in charge of my education, for they used to scold me for being distracted from my lessons by drawing; I would steal opportunities to decorate my books, my papers, and the walls of the house in which I was born and raised in the village of Ebel el-Saqi. The traces of my childhood are still on those walls and in some of those books that have survived to this day.

As for my activity in artistic production, it would leave me for a time and then return, as the circumstances of toiling for a livelihood required. No sooner do I lay the brush aside for a spell than an insistent longing draws me back to it, and I take it up anew with a keener zeal and a more profitable understanding.

Q — Did you study painting at a school or under a master of art, and do you belong to a particular school of art?

A — At twenty I traveled to England, and I seized the opportunity of my presence there and entered the evening art school in the city of Manchester, where I remained nine years, spending my evenings in study at the hands of well-known masters, among them Dawson, Dodd, Wheelock, and others. I kept company with a number of professional artists and passed no small share of my leisure in their studios — which reminds me now of my friend Moussa Ayoub, of Syrian origin, who enjoys in London a wide fame and a distinguished standing in artistic circles. I confined most of my reading to the books and magazines devoted to art, which are plentiful in English, and so I followed its developments over thirty years; and during my stay in the land of the English, and during my journeys to the various countries of Europe, I let no opportunity pass without seizing it to visit art collections of every kind.

Perhaps the variety of my study and observation was the reason for my not belonging to any particular school of art, for I have attempted every kind of painting, the old and the new; but I incline to the moderate impressionist manner, which I consider a universal language understood by the elect and the common folk alike, and which is in my view the noblest thing art has attained to this very day.

Q — How do your occupations allow you to devote yourself to art?

A — I watch for hours of leisure as devotees of the hunt watch for holidays, especially in the summer season, whose long days and warmth allow me to go out to the shores and the countryside. And I hold it a duty every man owes himself to have a hobby to which he can resort and take refuge in his hours of leisure, spending them with pleasure and profit and renewing his energy, so that he returns to his work with resolve and serenity. I do not know boredom, and all that I wish is that my occupations allowed me more time to spend in painting.

Q — Which subjects attract your brush more than others?

A — My brush is attracted, as I have already indicated, by all manner of subjects; I am like a ravenous, hungry man who sees before him a table laden with everything delicious and good, and stretches out his hand to all of it and is never sated. Yet if my time were ample, I would devote myself to painting the ideas that visit me now and then from the reality of life; but these demand a labor I cannot afford in my particular circumstances, so I turn to such portrait painting as comes within reach, or to what is easier still — the painting of landscapes and still life.

Q — What is your opinion of the schools of modern art?

A — Would that I could do this question justice in a brief phrase; but it is a fascinating, thorny subject with rugged paths, which I hope to plunge into on the pages of this magazine in a special piece. All that occurs to me now is that there is nothing new under the sun. Let not him who lays his colors on his canvas with the butt of his brush, or who sees red as green, or who imagines a man's eye in his belly, or who conceives things as lines and squares and circles — let him not think he has invented gunpowder. These are all old experiments that have accompanied every stage of pictorial art or decorative art. And what they call modern art, with all its whims of novelty and imitation, its steps of guidance and of error, its qualities of ugliness and of beauty, is no more than one of the roads of development, which must one day issue in the establishment of a richer art; it has no value except in the measure that it serves a loftier civilization, for whatever in it is corrupt and founded on impotence and charlatanry will wither away by the roadside, and whatever in it is sound and founded on honesty of endeavor and direction will endure — and on this none but time will pronounce the decisive word. In the span of my artistic life I have watched schools — if it is right to call them schools — be born and die, like Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Concavism, and others, just as we now see some of what is current in its death throes. Our hope is that all this will not go to waste, but will serve as streams that run their course and pour at last into the river of immortal art.

Q — What is your opinion of contemporary Lebanese artists and others, since you have accompanied this movement, and what are their merits?

A — Contemporary Lebanese artists have, in my view, great merit in awakening the artistic consciousness we perceive in Lebanon, however its tendencies differ and its paths branch. When we speak of art in Lebanon we cannot but mention in the vanguard Daoud Corm, Khalil Saleeby, Habib Srour, and Gibran Khalil Gibran, and name among the living Youssef Howayek, Moustafa Farroukh, Omar Onsi, Cesar Gemayel, Saliba Douaihy, and Rachid Wehbi — each of whom has taught, guided, and worked, not in the measure of the ambition and aptitude within him, but in the measure allowed him by the anomalous circumstances that dominate every intellectual movement in Lebanon. Fairness requires that we not forget, among those who shared in awakening the spirit of art in this country, Georges Cyr, Novikoff, and Lecoche. But we still await in this beloved homeland the artist who will reach a world summit in the field of art, to be pointed to as one points to Cézanne, for example, or to Henry Moore or Augustus John or Epstein or Picasso or others. And before I close my talk, I warn the beginner in Lebanon against the paths of error which have their advocates — some hired, some deluded, some conceited — who seek fame by the nearest roads and the easiest means. True glory rests on no foundations but those of toil, sacrifice, knowledge, and sincerity.