Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920—1960
Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in the City of New York
October 6, 2023–January 14, 2024
by Miray Eroglu
Upon entering Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, curated by Kirsten Scheid, visitors are greeted with Omar Onsi’s painting À L’Exposition (fig. 1). The painting depicts a group of fashionably veiled Sunni women in an art gallery gathered around a nude painting, perhaps mirroring visitors’ own viewing responses. As such, the nude’s power infiltrates Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery. The exhibition features works by twentieth century modernist painters, including Beirut-based Moustapha Farroukh (1901–57), Jewad Selim (1921–61), working in Bagdad, and Amy Nimr (1898–1974), working in Cairo, Paris, and London. The works by these artists, amongst others, shed light on an emergent nude genre that flourished between 1920 and 1960 in post-Ottoman Arab society, from the art salons of Tunis to Cairo and Beirut. Over fifty paintings and twenty drawings are exhibited alongside books, pamphlets, and videos celebrating the nude form, including film stills from Le Marché au Soleil (1930) shown in Beirut. As opposed to being rendered taboo, painted nudes were a source of artistic inspiration both in the studio and in society writ large. In fact, they were thought to represent modernity, increase visibility of women in the social sphere, and emblematize the “modern” repertoire of modernist painters.1 Although painted nudes may have been absent in past painting traditions in the Arab world, nudes became a popular subject matter for Arab artists depicting their present while looking towards a liberated future.
Partisans of the Nude is structured around the overarching themes of art professionalization and gender, identity, visibility, eroticism, and nudity as vehicles of socio-cultural activism (figs. 2-3). In the exhibition, the nude body is rendered in myriad ways, ranging from abstracted and surrealist depictions to aesthetic ideals in line with Western Beaux-Arts traditions, such as Venus pudica figures or women in odalisque poses. The exhibition looks at the various ways in which Arab painters co-opted the European classical nude as a form of artistic activism and self-definition via their participation in the global “Modernist” movement in their respective cities. The painted female nude was important to the burgeoning art scene in newly formed Arab capitals under a Mandate system after the end of the Ottoman Sultanate: the naked–often female–body is placed in dialogue with new fashions, largely progressive social movements, and contemporary modernizing projects worldwide (al-mu’asara).
By including important works by female artists such as Amy Nimr, Sophia Halaby, Saloua Raoda Chocair, Fêla Kefi Leroux, Juliana Seraphim, Munira al-Kazi, Simone Baltaxé Martayan, and Helen Khal, the exhibition explores how artistic identity impacts representations of the nude figure. Paintings of female nudes by women artists consider personal agency, identity, and the female experience as opposed to hetero-masculine viewpoints that objectify the female body to incite desire.
The exhibition features multiple nude figures depicted in interiors and intimate spaces, such as bedrooms and artists’ studios. The nudes inhabit a multitude of coastlines, and the paintings embrace uncertainty, vagueness, and transition across cultural thresholds inspired by the liminality of the shore. Water is featured within many of the compositions, especially in scenes of women bathing in the bathhouse (hamam)—a popular subject which references European Orientalist paintings (fig. 4). Scheid notes in the exhibition text: “Some nudes take cover in bathing or prostitution, others imitate sheer erotic experience.”2 Unclothed figures can thus move between public and private worlds, their nakedness performing a practical aspect of bathing, or representative of their social roles. The display of the naked body, while at times erotically charged, is also often a site of the subject’s personal power.
The nude is also indicative of social worlds. Jewad Selim, working in Baghdad after training at the Slade School of Art in London, expresses anxieties surrounding public sexuality in his painting Women Waiting (fig. 5). Selim localizes and undresses the female form seated on an ottoman in a space recognizable as an interior, therefore offering a glimpse into her private world and her conflicted emotional state. Selim’s painting opposes the belief that a woman’s life is incomplete without marriage. According to Miriam Selim, Jewad Selim’s daughter, her father and other artists in the Baghdad Modern Art Group were “concerned about poverty, illiteracy, and feminist issues” as well as uneducated women who “waited for marriage.”3 Selim’s painting imagines a parallel world for educated and socially involved women, thus transforming the private nude into a collective, social one.
Most of Amy Nimr’s compositions hold personal meaning, often functioning as a way to cope with her grief after the tragic death of her son. Nimr divided her time between Egypt, France, and England, where she received her artistic training, and joined the Surrealist Art and Liberty Group in Egypt in addition to hosting art salons alongside her husband. Nimr’s nymph-like naked female on the beach resembles Moustapha Farrouk’s Au Crépuscule (1929), which is itself modeled on Paul Chabas’ September Morn (1921) (figs. 6-7). While Farrouk, working in Beirut, portrays an idealized and romanticized woman bathing in a pool of water, Nimr visualizes a vulnerable nude woman enveloped in a fisherman’s net. Her eyes are shut, and her body appears lifeless and trapped in contrast to other energetic depictions of the liberated nude body.
The naked body is often hidden from sight. Stripped bare, the nude is also a space to project secrets, desires, narratives, and change. Contemporary viewers of these paintings reported that nude paintings could “enhance awareness of their bodily selves and their deep, libidinal knowledge.”4 Art historian Anneka Lenssen views these paintings as a way of engaging the “imagination of an active, demanding, collective self.”5 In this way, Partisans of the Nude uncovers the concealed worlds of the painted female nudes by spotlighting this often thought to be “hidden” genre of Modernist Arab Art in the early to mid-twentieth-century.6 Viewed together in the gallery space, the nude figures compose a collective body-scape, a sequence in multiple women’s lives—or fantasies—offering opportunities to relate, empathize, and engage with our own physicality.
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Miray Eroglu is a first-year PhD student in Art History at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture concentrating on Ottoman Art. Miray holds an MA from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a BA Honors in Art History from McGill University.
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1. Kirsten Scheid, “Necessary Nudes: Hadatha and Mu‘asara in the Lives of Modern Lebanese,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (May 2010), 203-230.
2. Kirsten Scheid, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, exhibition wall text, Wallach Gallery.
3. Kristen Scheid, Jewad Selim, Nisa Fi Al–Intidar (Women Waiting), 1944, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, exhibition wall text, Wallach Gallery.
4. Anneka Lenssen and Kirsten Scheid, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, exhibition wall text, Wallach Gallery.
5. Anneka Lenssen and Kirsten Scheid, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, exhibition wall text, Wallach Gallery.
6. Kirsten Scheid, “Necessary Nudes: Hadatha and Mu‘asara in the Lives of Modern Lebanese,” 203.