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.

The prominence of the Iraqi Communist Party during the 1950s, and thus the greater susceptibility of Iraqis to the “dangers of Soviet imperialism”, made Iraq a target of CIA intervention. One face of that intervention was a cultural organization, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a group of purportedly private citizens who sought to nurture a species of cultural “Arabism” in the arts. The AFME supported Iraqi artists by exhibiting and purchasing their work. Thus, in 1954, Iraq’s most famous artist, Jawad Salim, was exhibited at a space run by the AFME on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. This paper attempts to understand the relationship between modern art in Iraq and the politics of the Cold War by looking at one painting acquired by the AFME, a 1955 painting by the Communist artist Mahmud Sabri entitled Sarifa Dwellers. The paper shows that the painting supported by the AFME functioned precisely as the mode of radical social critique that the AFME aimed to curtail. Sarifa Dwellers brought to visibility the economic issues that comprised the political agenda of the Communist Party; however composed in paint, in bright colors, the political content of the painting was veiled as ‘art’. The artwork could equivocate between its aesthetic and intelligible natures; it was by dissimulating as ‘art’ that it could intervene in politics. Thus was the modern art then developing in Iraq interpellated by the cultural politics of the Cold War, and thus did it exceed those politics, drawing nourishment from a form of support that was neither market-based nor state-sponsored, but without falling into the hands of one side or the other.

The conceptual orientation of Safia Farhat’s monumental tapestries, produced in her private atelier in Radès, began to shift as international efforts to revitalize tapestry spurred a category of fiber art known as "la nouvelle tapisserie" in the late 1960s. Challenging tapestry’s traditional relationship to the wall, the artists driving this movement explored the textural and sculptural possibilities of unusual fibers and designed three-dimensional fibrous constructions. As an artist, Farhat followed the attendant debates regarding materiality, form, structure, and process, creating sculptural weavings intended for international exhibition in Lausanne. Established in 1962 by cultural brokers Jean Lurçat and Pierre Pauli, the International Tapestry Biennales of Lausanne created a global forum of exchange connecting artists in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America. While Lurçat visited Tunisia in 1961 to consult the Office National de l’Artisanat in its modernization of weaving in collaboration with the Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Tunis, Pauli traveled to Poland in 1963 in search of artistic developments, as authorities attempted to halt cultural exchange with Western Europe. There Pauli “discovered” artists Maria ?Laskiewicz and Magdalena Abakanowicz, who had taken up monumental fiber projects during a period in which weaving received far less scrutiny and censorship than abstract painting. Sharing a studio in ?Laskiewicz’s basement, these two women launched the Atelier Experimental de l’Union des Artistes Polonaise. They, along with other artists from the Eastern Bloc, notably Jagoda Buic from Yugoslavia, quickly surfaced as the biennale “stars,” steering the aesthetic and conceptual domain of tapestry into the realm of three-dimensional emotive abstraction. From her base as director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Farhat engaged with lively debates emanating from Lausanne concerning the evolution of tapestry, exchanging letters with Pauli and other members of the biennale commission. Based on primary research conducted in 2010 at the Fondation Toms Pauli (the biennale research center) and the Archives de la Ville de Lausanne, as well as Tunis (2009-2010) this paper introduces remarkable artistic exchange around a medium that lent itself well to a variety of political contexts, including authoritarian and communist regimes and apartheid South Africa. While interrogating the Lausanne Biennales and the conceptual framework for fiber art that emerged, my focus remains on Farhat, and in particular four tapestries that both demonstrate her contributions to "la nouvelle tapisserie," as well as the mutability of the medium for several significant women artists.