The young Lebanese artist Asaad Khalil Renno returned recently from Spain after spending three years touring its capitals. He obtained the diploma of professor of oil painting and sculpture from the Royal Fernando University in Madrid, together with the gilded Order of Practical Merit.
At the Autumn Exhibition in the year 1954 he presented to the Sultan of Morocco an oil painting which won the first prize and eased his way to an audience before His Majesty on two occasions.
Mr. Renno returned to his homeland Lebanon and held the first exhibition of his canvases in the hall of the UNESCO Palace, under the supervision of the arts department of the Ministry of National Education; His Excellency the President of the Republic opened it on Tuesday, the first of last November.
Great crowds poured in to view Mr. Renno's production. This is a happy sign, showing that art has become for us one of the pleasures of modern life — enriching it, beautifying it, and completing it — after having been a luxury enjoyed by the few among the elect of the educated.
Mr. Renno is a gifted artist who has raised his country's name in Spain, the land of art and creation.
His Excellency the President listens to the artist's explanation of one of his paintings; around the two of them appear the artist's brothers Saad, Masoud, and Antoine
The Soviet Embassy in Beirut issued invitations for Thursday, the tenth of November, to the opening of the exhibition of Soviet arts in the UNESCO Palace, in the presence of a large gathering of diplomats and prominent guests.
The Soviet artist Bornyaev, director of the exhibition, delivered a speech in Russian, which one of the officials of the legation undertook to translate into Arabic; the Minister of Education answered him with a word in which he welcomed the exhibition,
considering that it would lead to the strengthening of relations and friendship between the Lebanese and Soviet peoples.
The exhibition comprised about 130 paintings and drawings by forty of the most famous Soviet painters of various generations, and there was manifest in it a technique that has attained the highest ranks of perfection. Most of the Soviet artists belong to the classical realist and expressive schools.
... At last the friends of Layla Lababidi have been able to register upon her lips and in her eyes the smile of happiness and settled contentment: she has found the prince of her dreams, and with him she has left — contented — the soil of her girlhood and her kinfolk, to make her home in Egypt!
Layla's bridegroom is Dr. Hamed Ammar, who holds a doctorate in sociology from the Egyptian universities, and who works as head of the training sec
Mr. Salah Lababidi in the midst of the bride and groom and the members of his honored family