The art movements of the 20th-century saw a progressive withdrawal from realistic portrayals of people and things—through Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and so on—towards a more expressive and impressionistic style of painting. This experimentation came mostly in reaction to a world at war. “It was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello,” the American artist Barnett Newman said in 1967. “So we actually began... as if painting were not only dead but had never existed.”
Early adopters of total abstraction—in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays little or no part—who went on to become well known include Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Robert Delaunay and pioneering art groups championing the principles of abstraction include the de Stijl group in the Netherlands and the Dada group in Zürich, Switzerland. Post-World War Two, the Abstract Expressionists—an American school of loosely affiliated artists mostly in New York City—emerged and had an enormous impact on the global art scene. The practice of abstract art became widely accepted within European and American painting and sculpture from the 1950s onwards.
The Middle Eastern perspective
Undoubtedly, some of the experimentations with abstraction within the Middle East were influenced by artists in the West. Many of the region’s leading artists travelled to Europe, America and Russia to study art and were inspired by the artworks they saw there. But there are several elements that make abstract art from the Arab world distinct. “Medieval Arabic art, which art historians often regard as ornamental, has never been analysed formally. But it is a language of visual abstraction,” says Halaby. “You’ll notice a tendency of most Arab artists to want to put things together like a mosaic.”
Innovations in painting and the move towards abstraction in the Middle East lay less in the despair of war and more in the act of decolonisation and assertion of new national and regional identities. Arab artists’ rejection of representations of real life was bound up in an idea of freedom from Western aesthetic “rules” and a new impetus to express one’s individuality in a socially and politically more-open environment. According to the curator Suheyla Takesh in the Taking Shape catalogue, “[Arab artists] split their attention among the prevailing and competing modernisms of the Cold War while mining Mesopotamian, ancient Egyptian, and Islamic histories and heritage for site-specific modernisms.” Below are some of the local aesthetics that inspired Middle Eastern abstract art and examples of the artists who were part of this experimentation.
Craft and ancient traditions
Many artists and newly founded artist groups across the region in the mid-20th century looked to the historic and traditional art of their nations for inspiration in their abstract works. Artists from Iraq (see, for example and ) and Syria (such as ) drew on pre-Islamic aesthetics in their work, including Mesopotamian-inspired crescent moons and simple geometric shapes used in ancient cuneiform scripts. Artists in Morocco (see Mohamed Melehi’s Untitled, 1975 ) and Algeria (such as ) used symbols from local Amazigh heritage in their art, while artists in Egypt drew on Sufi philosophy and Ancient Egyptian motifs (see, for example, Mostafa Abdel Moity’s Untitled, 2004 ).
Mostafa Abdel Moity, Untitled, 2004, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Collection
In 1967, several artists in Algeria issued a manifesto declaring the formation of the Aouchem group (meaning “tattoo” in Arabic). According to Takesh, “They argued that magical signs were an element of popular culture that—despite enduring transformations under foreign influence—had been at the centre of local artists’ and artisans’ creative efforts ‘since the Roman period.’”
The use of Arabic letters in modern art, rather than as traditional calligraphic texts, proliferated in the Middle East in the 1950s, known as the Hurufiyya movement. When these forms were used in abstract compositions, the focus was on line, shape and colour rather than the meaning of words (see, for example, the Algerian artist and the Iraqi artist ), making it possible for non-Arabic speakers to easily appreciate the works. One of the pioneers of this style was the Syrian-Iraqi artist Madiha Umar who, in 1949, exhibited paintings inspired by the Arabic alphabet in Georgetown, USA, and wrote the text Arabic Calligraphy: An Inspiring Element in Abstract Art.
Mathematical and geometric pattern and design are deep-rooted in Middle Eastern aesthetics because of their use in Islamic art and architecture, where the imagery was used as a way to symbolically represent heaven and God. Many artists working in the 20th century across the region have cited Islamic geometry as an inspiration for their abstract works. Some of these include the Lebanese artists Saloua Raouda Choucair, and ; the Palestinian artists and ; and Sudan’s Ibrahim El-Salahi.
The principals and processes of abstraction continue to inspire many artists around the world and the teachings of such styles are now accepted at schools internationally. While the themes above remain as sources of inspiration for Middle Eastern artists practising abstraction, universal inspirations such as light and landscapes, among many others, have also proliferated in abstract works from the region (see and for example).
As technology has developed, this too has influenced abstraction in art. Increased access to materials such as plastics and mechanisms to create light have led to even greater experimentation in abstraction, particularly sculpturally, as can be seen in works by artists such as and . The concept of computing and systems has also influenced practice. Taher Jaoui is one such artist, who is inspired by computer science and engineering studies, building compositions from single elements and using mathematical signs and formulas. And computers have completely changed the way art can be made. Since the early days of personal computers in the 1980s, Samia Halaby has used computer programmes to reinterpret her abstract aesthetic into digital works. As she once said: “Why am I doing oil painting in the new century when there is this technology?”
