Untold histories and witty geometry in vital exhibit
Block Museum’s must-see ‘Abstraction from the Arab World’ proves modern art wasn’t just a Western thing
“Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” at the Block Museum offers so much more than what its subtitle describes. Anyone who loves, studies or makes nonrepresentational paintings ought to see this traveling exhibition, and not just for the sheer joy of a gorgeous show full of surprises. It is the nature of those surprises that renders “Taking Shape” vital viewing: new artists, new forms, new arguments, new histories. New to me at least, and maybe new to you if, like me, your understanding of modern art history is based primarily on the narrative told by American and European scholars and museums.
In that tale, abstract art was invented in the early 20th century by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, and nearly all modern art evolved from that point onward. Cue Picasso and Braque, Pollock and de Kooning, Rothko and Still, Judd and Turrell. But that’s neither the whole story nor the most interesting story, and it never really was.
“Taking Shape” doesn’t so much set the record straight as reveal just how many more records there are — indeed, more than can be fully represented in an exhibition of nearly 90 works drawn from a single private collection, in this case, the Barjeel Art Foundation of Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates. As evidenced in the show’s illuminating catalog, edited by curators Lynn Gumpert of New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, where the show originated, and the Barjeel’s Suheyla Takesh, there are myriad modernisms to consider here.
Abstraction in the Arab world can be tied to the legacy of Islamic geometry, the forms of Arabic calligraphy and the Tifinagh alphabet, the decolonization projects of newly independent countries, the particularities of the Mediterranean landscape,
or the spiritual practices of Sufism. Some examples emerged out of locally specific combinations of factors, like the bright linear abstraction of the Casablanca School, created in a quest to free Moroccan visual culture from the Orientalist realism imposed on it under French rule, and also as an extension of the historical geometricity of Islamic and Amazigh arts and crafts. Others manifested idiosyncratically, none more so than the funny, sensuous designs of Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, who in the 1970s
painted female body parts as rich expanses of color. Don’t miss the sunburned buttocks on view here, plopped right down on the bottom edge of the canvas.
As in any good highlights show, what you will be drawn to is mostly based on personal preferences. Mine include unexpected color palettes, comedic touches, witty geometry and luminescent anything.
And sure, it’s plenty pleasurable to just stop there, to revel in the tricky optics of a 1983 silk-screen by Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, where lines of olive, forest and ultramarine interweave dizzyingly; the rough graffiti scrawls of Shakir Hassan Al Said, looking as if he’d cut them right out of a patched concrete wall in Baghdad; the dusky interlocking forms built up by Tunisian painter Néjib Belkhodja; the oddly colored shapes of two 1960s canvases by Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy, clever in their slight curves, angles and slivers; the shock of the flat white cube hovering centrally in Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s otherwise very brown and three-dimensional 1969 picture. Or revel in the whirlwind of dancing black strokes filling the entirety of Egyptian artist Omar El-Nagdi’s large untitled panel; the striking autumnal colors and textures of Lebanese American artistpoet Etel Adnan’s blocky study of the Yosemite Valley; the lush mint cloud figures tousling in her partner Simone Fattal’s 1973 picture, “Celestial Forms”; the subtle hilarity of Kuwaiti painter Jafar Islah’s “The Void,” an all-black canvas that isn’t actually all black and features a simple white rectangle with a pair of cartoonish little bumps.
I’d love to go on, but the greater importance of “Taking Shape” will be found by the viewer who is also willing to make a different kind of effort, an art historical one — though not the kind of comparative viewing that looks at a Boullata and thinks Op Art; that sees the Casablanca School and says Hard-Edge Abstraction; that considers a Douaihy and goes Color
Field Painting. It’s worth trying very hard not to do that at all.
What to do instead? I’m not usually a big fan of didactic wall text, and who has time to do more than skim hefty catalogs, but when something is totally new to me, I read up on it. Do so here, and you will find out that Boullata’s source code is sampled from both Christian and Islamic sacred texts and mathematical grids, and that Belkhodja’s puzzle-like shapes are linked to the structures of the Tunis medina. You’ll read that Douaihy is the scion of an old Maronite family and that he immigrated to New York in the 1950s, where he met some of the great Color Field painters, but that his work is more firmly grounded in the lines and colors of the Lebanese landscape than anything else. You’ll learn that El-Nagdi’s marks resemble the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, the first letter in “Allah” and the Eastern Arabic numeral one. You’ll become aware that Kuwait, under threat of annexation by Iraq in the early 1960s, turned to culture — including young artists like Islah — to assert its independent identity.
You’ll discover all this, and a whole lot more.
“Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” runs through Dec. 4 at the Block Museum, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston. More information at 847-491-4000, and block museum.northwestern.edu