This article is excerpted from my MA thesis research, which examines the trajectories of Syrian plastic arts under Hafez al-Assad between 1970 and 2000. The study traces the themes artists engaged with, the challenges they navigated, and the dialogues they pursued with both the state and their audiences within an exclusionary, repressive system shaped by a dominant politicized cultural discourse. It also examines how artists sought to forge autonomous artistic identities grounded in long-standing Syrian cultural conceptions of art and the artist, and the proper roles attributed to both.
Fateh Moudarres and Abdul Aziz Aloun at the International Modern Art Gallery. Photo from Aloun’s book.
In April 1962, a few months after Syria’s withdrawal from the United Arab Republic (1958-1961), the artists Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999) and Mahmoud Daadouch (1934-2008), together with the critic Abdul Aziz Aloun (1934-2011), published a manifesto for the Syrian plastic arts movement in Sawt al-Arab magazine. They hoped, as Aloun wrote, that it would “serve as a cultural path uniting all those working in the arts here and provide a framework for the artistic movement to follow in the future.”[1]
Modern International Art Gallery, 1960s
The manifesto - later republished by Aloun in his 2003 book The Sixties: A Turning Point in the Development of Contemporary Fine Arts in Syria - emerged from a series of intensive discussions that brought together artists and critics over several days at the International Modern Art Gallery. Participants explored Western artistic approaches from the late nineteenth century, gave lectures on Syrian folk arts, and discussed the history of Syrian art, before dividing into groups of attendees, each tasked with addressing one of the major themes under discussion. In a later letter to the artist and writer Salman Qataya (1930-2004), Abdul Aziz Aloun described the exchanges as sharp and contentious. He noted that the absence of poets, writers, intellectuals, musicians, and architects - along with “the fears of some individuals and their attempts to narrow the scope of discussion” [2] - limited their value. In the end, Aloun met with al-Moudarres and Daadouch at al-Moudarres’s home to draft and sign the final version of the manifesto.
Seeking to make their text, as they put it, “akin to a cultural path” for the emerging plastic arts movement in Syria, the signatories defined art in the first clause as “zero point ten, founded on a magical output, for it is a transparent humanity connected to the fourth dimension of existence.” This “zero point ten” alluded to the Last Futurist Exhibition (0.10), held in 1915 in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) unveiled his iconic Black Square, a symbol of nihilism and anti-form that opened an era in which artists looked past reality into a realm beyond the visible, imbued with the possibility of utopian renewal. No doubt, this metaphor lent the Syrian manifesto, from the outset, a distinctly revolutionary and futurist inflection. It drew on Malevich’s break with artistic tradition while seeking to position Syrian art within a philosophical and elite intellectual frame. More crucially, the signatories sought to place their theoretical attempt within a historical avant-garde lineage and to establish a movement capable of advancing artistic thought in Syria at a moment when the country was redefining its identity and national structures.
The new beginning announced in the 1962 manifesto called, in its second clause, for art to enrich human heritage through creative intimations, “for art is the addition of new sensations to the human legacy.” This ontological definition of artistic creation affirmed that “authentic art” is not merely an imitation of the surrounding world but “an entry into and participation in the creation of existence.” The manifesto also ascribes to art a “contemporary mysticism” that urges the restoration of a sacred relationship with matter and the recognition of its immortality and perpetual motion, qualities it argues have eroded in the age of industrialization. It further maintains that, in the “moment of creation,” the artist becomes a unified being freed from the bondage of matter, because matter, once joined to an artwork, “acquires the sanctity of living flesh.” The signatories rejected symbolism or lyricism, since art to them is “felt sensitivity to the material with which the artist creates.” Yet, they ascribe to art “the capacity to generate new commitments that link the depths of human experience to the cosmic void.” This points to a tension between the tangible, material realm and the possibility of a cosmic dimension that can only be understood symbolically. According to the manifesto, the artist need not explicitly seek integration into the collective, for it already inheres within them. On the other hand, they remain responsible for reflecting the collective perception of their material environment, i.e. a civilizational duty to express “both the physical and the communal colors that the sun reflects upon the soil of a particular place on which they live. For in this expression lies the enrichment of human heritage.” The signatories appear keen to situate artistic practice on Syrian soil as a contribution to a broader humanistic art. In a later clause, the “Arab artist” is assigned a particular mission: to act from their own position in order to transmit values and ideals that serve humanity as a whole. Accordingly, the manifesto affirms the “sanctity of human freedom, and of the artist’s freedom in particular, since freedom is the natural environment in which art takes root.”[3]
The manifesto’s summary illustrates the signatories’ intention to articulate a new point of departure for defining Syrian art and Syrian artists. It seeks to consider art in terms of its qualities and function, bringing the aesthetic and the political into dialogue. Yet it ultimately revisits debates and contradictions that long predated it, attempting to refine and clarify them. Its portrait of “the Arab artist,” who is expected to combine artistic autonomy with national responsibility, may initially appear paradoxical. How can an artist be free in their creativity and responsible at the same time? The idea sits uneasily with the modern Western conception of artistic freedom and independence that took shape in the twentieth century.
Yet this vision had already established a durable model of the artist’s role during the French Mandate and the post-independence years after 1946, and not only in Syria. As the Nigerian curator and writer Okwui Enwezor notes, the two decades between 1945 and 1965 marked a global moment of cultural transformation. This shift was driven by the retreat of many colonial powers and the rapid expansion of mass media. Artists outside Central Europe and North America became deeply engaged in exploring the arts of their own cultures. They also developed new vocabularies, materials, and methods that distanced their work from that of the colonizer. These shifts, Enwezor argues, amounted to forms of “alternative modernities.” One cannot, for example, understand twentieth-century Middle Eastern art through the lens of European modernism. With the onset of the Cold War, and amid intensifying struggles for cultural dominance and ideological alignment, artists increasingly found themselves drawn into debates over the cultural identity appropriate for their newly emerging nations.[4]
This was also the case in Syria. As the art historian Silvia Naef observes, debates in the region largely revolved around the concepts of modernity and authenticity.[5] In Syria, they centered particularly on the competing currents of abstraction and realism. This dynamic has been examined in depth by Anneka Lenssen, a scholar of modern painting and contemporary visual arts in the Middle East, most notably in her dissertation The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syria’s Twentieth Century. Lenssen shows that pioneering artists in Syria worked within modest cultural infrastructures and outside the tripartite cultural system familiar in the West (private galleries, public museums, and independent press criticism). [6] In Syria, artists as cultural actors often belonged to associations affiliated with political blocs or parties aligned with Arabism or Syrian nationalism. Leaders of these parties believed that a strong nation must cultivate and value the arts.
For example, the members of Studio Veronese - an artistic collective founded by artists, some of whom had studied abroad - debated the art of painting and its social responsibility. In 1943 they established the Arab Society of Fine Arts (ASFA), headed by Said Tahsin with Mahmoud Jalal as his deputy. In the final years of the French Mandate, ASFA offered free courses in painting and in local crafts such as carpet weaving, glassblowing, and Arabic calligraphy. They promoted these crafts as national arts rather than as export commodities, as the Mandate institutes had intended.[7] They also devoted their talents to commissions for emerging government institutions and administrative buildings, producing murals and historical paintings that depicted national symbols.[8] Such politically committed imagery, Lenssen notes, served an agitating, propagandistic function aimed at making the artist’s social responsibility visible and concrete, and, more importantly, at encouraging participation in political life.[9] Thus artistic modernism in Syria became tied to two factors: political liberation from foreign rule and creative liberation at the personal level. As Lenssen explains, “At these points of intersection, the concept of artistic autonomy - which constitutes the fundamental defining value of the modern global art institution - was repeatedly deployed as a politics of liberation and principled resistance.”[10]
In her dissertation, Lenssen examines how artists in the nascent Syrian state sought to forge a new Syrian art rooted in both the spiritual depth of local audiences and their social reality. Artists such as Adham Ismail (1922-1963) and Mahmoud Hammad (1923-1988) experimented with forms and materials, looking to ornamentation and Arabic calligraphy as ways to reactivate a collective memory made visually present in their work. The modernization of the arabesque, and the incorporation of formal written Arabic into the canvas, revealed that Syrian artists were searching for a local formal repertoire that was both authentic and open to global artistic currents.
Mahmoud Hammad, Arabic Script, 1965, oil on canvas, 75 × 75 cm. Photo from Mahmoud Hammad’s Facebook page
The painter Mahmoud Hammad’s 1965 work, for example, illustrates these attempts. He drew inspiration from the seventh-century verse, “I taught him archery every day… and when his arm grew strong, he shot me.”[11] Hammad used the line as a visual element, transforming its letters into interlocking geometric forms that float in an abstract space. He sought to affirm the relationship between the Arabic language and abstraction and to link it to modern artistic movements. At the same time, language has long served as the primary common bond among the peoples of the “Arab world.” Artists such as Hammad, through their use and modernization of Arabic script, seem to have aimed at opening horizons for a shared cultural future across a broader Arab homeland. The presence of Arabic within a painting evokes in the Arab viewer a sense of cultural intimacy, for it is a defining feature of an ancient culture that remains alive and evolving. This brings us back to the 1962 manifesto and its discussion of the artist’s responsibility toward the collective: “The artist need not explicitly seek integration into the community, for it already resides within him; but he bears the responsibility of reflecting the community’s material perception of its environment.”
Lenssen also shows how the renowned Syrian artist Fateh Moudarres addressed the vast heritage of creative continuity in his paintings. He sought to evoke metaphysical dimensions without allowing his work to be folded into any political agenda. In this period, Syrian art was not concerned solely with commenting on the present; it also undertook an excavation of memory - sometimes in an affirmative mode, at other times in a critical one.
A year after the manifesto, in 1963, the Ba’ath Party seized power in a military coup. Seven years later, the army officer Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president following yet another coup. Under Hafez al-Assad, the arts within official cultural discourse came to be judged by their usefulness, their ability to communicate directly with “the people,” and their presumed moral “soundness.” As a result, forms such as abstraction and surrealism were pushed to the margins. This was not merely censorship but a form of organized selection: art controlled internally and deployed externally for strategic representation.
After twenty-five years of Assad’s rule, Tarek al-Sharif (1935-2013), editor-in-chief of the country’s sole official arts journal, al-Hayat al-Tashkiliyya, wrote in the opening editorial of the March 1995 issue:
“Contemporary plastic art in Syria is developing. Our artistic movement is growing in ways that allow each artist to achieve personal creativity and independent development. This growth affirms the deep bond between the artist and the existential issues confronting our Arab nation… Each of our artists has now attained a distinctive artistic identity. This shows that the artistic movement has entered a mature phase and moved beyond imitation to genuine creation. It has become strong and well established, with major artistic figures who have gained notable international recognition and an enviable reputation (...). This is because they live in a country of which artists are proud, for they are from (Syria… of Hafez al-Assad). Thanks to his historic leadership, everything artists dream of has been made available to them. They enjoy security and stability that aid production, encourage creativity and artistic practice, facilitate exhibitions, cultivate and protect talent, and provide spaces for study, training, and professional development at all levels…” [12]
Al-Sharif’s testimonial portrays Syrian art of the 1990s as a mature field that had realized its aspirations to independence and authenticity. His language draws heavily on the vocabulary of official cultural discourse and national propaganda of the time. Terms such as “artistic autonomy” (understood as distance from Western aesthetic values) and “Arab authenticity” had long shaped debates on the visual arts since the rise of nationalist movements. Yet the assertion that artists in Assad’s Syria enjoyed autonomy and creative freedom is highly contentious. Under Ba’athist rule, art was frequently subject to ideological directives, and what the regime described as cultural “stability” and “security” was viewed by critics as stagnation rooted in repression and fear.
From the 1999 exhibition catalogue of the Intermediate Institute of Applied Arts.
Later, on the first page of the catalogue for the 1999 exhibition of the Institute of Applied Arts in Damascus, one finds a message from “Comrade-Leader Hafez al-Assad”: “The value of a human being lies in what he offers to his homeland.”[13] In this context, an artist’s value - and perhaps the value of their creative work - is determined, in Assad’s view, by their service to the homeland. But in Assad’s Syria, “homeland” was synonymous with the state, and the state, as al-Sharif’s quotation made clear, was synonymous with Assad himself. A person’s value therefore rested first on what they contributed to serving Assad. Syrian cultural discourse similarly defined the worth of artistic work in terms of its commitment. No art was considered worthy of respect or discussion unless it was committed.
Yet “artistic commitment” was invoked in Syrian discourse in many different ways: to signal commitment to authentic Islamic culture, to the ideal of a unified Arab nation, to local or historical cultures, to traditional social or moral values, or, often, to rejecting the commodification of art and affirming its socialist value. In practice, however, the decisive criterion for recognizing an artwork - or allowing it to be exhibited - was its adherence to the Ministry of Culture’s censorship guidelines, which were often opaque. The Assad regime treated culture as an instrument for shaping public opinion, exploiting and refashioning it whenever possible to legitimize its rule.
The artist Mahmoud Daadouch, one of the manifesto’s signatories, opened the Gallery of International Modern Art in 1960 with his brother Mohammad. It was the same year the first Faculty of Fine Arts was established in Damascus, and two years after the creation of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance. The gallery’s opening marked a decisive turning point in the Syrian art scene. As the first private exhibition space, it held exhibitions more frequently than state-run venues, offered a more diverse program, and helped foster a more active art market. It also exposed artists - and a wider public - to contemporary art. Through evening lectures and regular gatherings, the gallery created broader spaces for discussions on art, literature, and culture, their relationship to society and politics, and the question of their independence from both.
Under Assad’s rule, however, the Gallery of International Modern Art shifted between several locations and operated under different names in Damascus before closing permanently in 1976. In 1985, its founder, Mahmoud Daadouch, moved to Italy and opened the Ornina Gallery of Modern Art.[14] Two other private galleries - Espas and Sawwan - had been established in 1962, but both closed by 1965.[15] After 1970, only a handful of galleries opened in Syria. The most notable was Atassi Gallery, founded in Homs in 1986 and relocated to Damascus in 1993, followed by Ebla, Rawaq, and Ishtar.[16] These latter spaces, however, remained modest in their activity until the early 2000s. Major exhibitions were largely organized by government ministries, the Syndicate of Fine Arts, and public museums, with the exception of events hosted in foreign cultural centers such as the German Goethe Institute and the French Cultural Center in Damascus.
Announcement of a symposium at the International Modern Art Gallery by Abdelkader Arnaout, 1961
This brief survey shows that Syrian art developed along a complex trajectory shaped by both avant-garde ambitions and the ideological demands of the state. Early on, artists expressed a genuine desire to build a local modernism that remained open to the wider world. Gradually, however, this aspiration collided with the state’s emergence as the exclusive patron of cultural life and with the rise of an official value system that redefined art according to political and moral usefulness. The discussion therefore shifted, little by little, from the question of artistic creation to that of utility, and from an inquiry into artistic language to an inquiry into loyalty.
Within this shifting landscape, artists seemed to move between two poles: the artistic autonomy envisioned by the early manifesto and the commitment demanded by the first Assad regime, which treated such commitment as a condition for recognition and visibility. This period exposes a central paradox that has long marked Syrian art. Artists sought aesthetic independence rooted in memory, environment, and lived experience, yet they were confronted by an official discourse intent on containing that independence and reinterpreting it within the confines of the state’s narrative. If that narrative was once anchored in the dream of the nation, it is now, inevitably, shaped by memory and by the wound. Studying this earlier period is essential for understanding the evolving relationship between art and power in Syria and for grasping how the field’s major tensions emerged: between freedom and commitment, authenticity and modernity, and collective memory and dominant narratives.
Footnotes:
[1]Abdul Aziz Aloun to Salman Qataya, originally published in Sawt al-Arab, 20 May 1962; republished in The Sixties: A Turning Point in the Development of Contemporary Fine Arts in Syria, by Abdul Aziz Aloun, Damascus: Daadouch Press, 2003, pp. 82-84.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Abdul Aziz Aloun, Fateh Moudarres, and Mahmoud Daadouch, “MANIFEST: A Manifesto for the Syrian Plastic Arts Movement,” in The Sixties: A Turning Point in the Development of Contemporary Fine Arts in Syria, Abdul Aziz Aloun, Damascus, Dar Daadouch, 2003, p. 78.
[4]Okwui Enwezor, “Introduction,” in Postwar: Kunst zwischen Pazifik und Atlantik, 1945-1965, ed. Katy Siegel, Okwui Enwezor, and Ulrich Wilmes (Munich: Prestel, 2016), p. 14.
[5] Silvia Naef, “Reexploring Islamic Art: Modern and Contemporary Creation in the Arab World and Its Relation to the Artistic Past,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (Spring 2003): 167. Accessed 20 May 2025. Available at: “Reexploring Islamic Art: Modern and Contemporary Creation in the Arab World and Its Relation to the Artistic Past” on JSTOR.
[6] Anneka Lenssen, The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syria’s Twentieth Century (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014), p. 20.
[7] Ghazi al-Khalidi, “Art Associations in Syria from 1925 to the Present,” al-Ba’ath (Damascus), 11 December 1968, p. 6. See also: Lenssen 2014, p. 32; and Lubna Hammad, “The History of Art Associations in Damascus During the Twentieth Century: From Their Emergence to the First Arab Fine Arts Conference in Damascus, 1971,” at atassifoundation.com, n.d. Available at: https://www.atassifoundation.com/ar/features/trykh-t-sys-ljm-yt-lfny-bdmshq-fy-lqrn-l-shryn-mndh-bdy-zhw rh-wht-n-qd-lmw-tmr-l-rby-l-wl-llfnwn-ljmyl-bdmshq-m-1971 Accessed 3 May 2025.
[8]Lenssen 2014, p. 35.
[9]Ibid., p. 39.
[10]Ibid.
[11]The verse is attributed to Ma’n ibn Aws (d. ca. 683). See: Ash’ar Ma’n ibn Aws: al-Nass al-’Arabi ma’a Ta’liq / Gedichte des Ma’n ibn Aus: Arabischer Text und Kommentar, ed. Paul Schwarz (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1903), p. 22.
[12]Tarek al-Sharif, “Opening Editorial,” al-Hayat al-Tashkiliyya 57-58 (Damascus: Ministry of Culture, March 1995), pp. 2-3.
[13]Catalogue of the Tenth Exhibition of the Institute of Applied Arts, Damascus: Ministry of Culture Press, 1999, page number unknown.
[14]Lubna Hammad, “The History of Art Associations in Damascus During the Twentieth Century: From Their Emergence to the First Arab Fine Arts Conference in Damascus, 1971.”
[15]Sawwan Gallery (1962-1965) and Espas Gallery (1962-1964). See: Ghazi al-Khalidi, “Arts,” al-Maʿrifa 43 (Damascus: Ministry of Culture, 1 July 1965), pp. 167-174.
[16]Ghazi al-Khalidi, Forty Years of Plastic Art in the Syrian Arab Republic (Damascus: Syndicate of Fine Arts, 1971), p. 6.