Within the history of Lebanese art, an American institutional presence dates to the 1953 launch of the fine arts department at the American University of Beirut. Based in an American liberal arts tradition, the department was nestled within the larger scholastic life of AUB. Because of this, the department encouraged all students to register for studio courses as electives. Importantly, this inclusiveness was strategically cited as an example of AUB’s supposedly democratic approach to art; one that encouraged the American cold war ideals of individualism and freedom of expression. But to understand this historical case study as strictly an American cold war intervention in Lebanon would be to read the encounter as one-dimensional, losing sight of its complexities. Drawing on Bauhaus ideals, AUB’s fine art department sought to impart a way of seeing rather than to teach a set of technical skills. From this perspective, we can also understand AUB’s departmental philosophy as further situated in relation to their primary competition, the francophone Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (est. 1937). AUB’s purported progressive approach to the fine arts thus distinguished itself against ALBA’s European traditionalism. Based on archival research and individual interviews, this paper tracks the institutional history of AUB’s fine art department, setting it against the backdrop of both the local artistic scene and the international politics of the cold war. In doing so, I consider how institutional pedagogy, despite its nationalist rhetoric, potentially transforms conventional definitions of the artist, often in ways that move beyond tightly framed national boundaries.