Rather like the proverbial London buses that can keep passengers waiting in the rain for what might seem like hours only to arrive all at the same time, London's Tate Modern, the modern and contemporary branch of the capital's older Tate Gallery, is hosting not one but two retrospective exhibitions of the work of modern Arab artists this summer after having previously largely neglected work from this part of the world. Visitors to the museum can thus take in rewarding exhibitions of the work of the Sudanese artist Ibrahim Al-Salahi and the Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair, the first time that either has been given such a large and prestigious London show. The Tate's decision to stage the exhibitions, the Al-Salahi retrospective being organised with the Museum for African Art in New York, is part of the institution's desire to broaden the scope of its exhibitions policy to take in work from beyond the well-trodden paths of European and American modern and contemporary art. Al-Salahi's work is framed by a discourse of “African modernism”, while Choucair is described as being a pioneer of abstraction in the Middle East. This language, taken from accounts of the development of modern European art, seems to be intended to help London audiences situate the work of these artists within stories already familiar to them. While it begs many questions, it also draws attention to the relationship between the work of these two Arab artists and the European art world and their positioning within their local or national contexts. Of the work of the two artists, that of Al-Salahi may be the more familiar to international audiences. A student at the Slade School in London in the 1950s, Al-Salahi started exhibiting internationally in the 1960s and was swiftly adopted as an important representative of modern African art. This gives his work a certain pedigree, as well as a nigh-on 60-year scope, and the informative catalogue accompanying the London show, edited by Salah M. Hassan of Cornell University in the United States, contains much useful material testifying to the extensive discussion Al-Salahi's work has received since the 1960s and beyond. Readers of Al-Ahram Weekly may even remember seeing the Al-Salahi show at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates, where it was presented in slightly different form early last year. One theme that comes across strongly in the Tate presentation, underlined by the chronological character of this retrospective show, is the relationship between Al-Salahi's work and, broadly speaking, European modernism, with questions being asked about how the artist used his British art training upon his return to Sudan and his role in assisting in the creation of modern Sudanese art. Following an introductory presentation of contemporary work — Al-Salahi, now in his eighties, lives and works in the English university town of Oxford — the exhibition passes swiftly over work produced in the 1950s, only getting into its stride with the paintings the artist produced in the 1960s. According to the framework presented in the catalogue essay by Chika Okeke-Agulu, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, this is because Al-Salahi, dissatisfied with the Western training he had received at the Slade, had by then begun to look for a form of art that would draw more fully on the artistic traditions of his native Sudan and would speak more clearly to Sudanese audiences. “At the Slade, he was exposed to various modernist styles, from the rigorously constructed portraiture and restrained naturalism of William Coldstream to the post-Vorticist styles associated with David Bomberg and various other interpretations of the formal lessons of Cubism,” Okeke-Agulu writes. However, “despite his manifest technical competence, he had clearly not found himself in terms of either formal style or thematic focus,” meaning that Al-Salahi, as the early works in the present exhibition indicate, had shown himself to be an adept pupil of certain Western styles but had not yet found a way of bringing what he had learned into relation with the nascent modern art world of his native Sudan. “Al-Salahi's mature work began with a partial disavowal of his formal training at the Slade, followed by research in and experimentation with indigenous [Sudanese] artistic forms and ideas,” Okeke-Agulu writes. “For the leading artists of the period — including the Nigerians Okeke and Nwoko, the Ghanian Vincent Kofi, the Moroccans Ahmed Cherkaoui and Farid Belkahia, and the Ethiopian [Skunder] Boghossian, as well as Al-Salahi and [Ahmed] Shibrain — for the most part, though to varying extents, the process began with a disavowal of aspects of that academic experience, followed by a search deep within themselves or their native cultures for ways to invent a new aesthetic that meaningfully reflected their new identities as radically self-aware postcolonial African artists.” According to the catalogue, this radical self-awareness did not dawn upon Al-Salahi gradually, and instead there was an insight-gathering primal scene when he exhibited his work at the Grand Hotel in Khartoum. According to the artist's own account, reproduced in a translated piece in the catalogue, art institutions in Sudan at this time were such that no other gallery space was available, and though “the viewers I had in mind were my Sudanese compatriots… only two Sudanese citizens were interested in buying any of the works I showed” at the Grand Hotel exhibition. “I repeated the exhibition twice, but no one came. In trying to understand why, I was astounded to find that the artistic tastes and concepts entrenched in the Sudanese personality offered no possibility of really appreciating the expertise I had acquired abroad and was so proud to show off. I stopped painting for two years, during which I travelled all over the country, sometimes with my students from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum. My only purpose on these trips was to see what kinds of art were shown, and therefore appreciated, in typical Sudanese homes and public places.” Al-Salahi subsequently became a leading figure in the SudaneseKhartoum School of modern art, he and his fellow artists in the school wanting to find ways, in Okeke-Agulu's words, of exemplifying “a rigorous and progressive modern art combining a deep reflection on African art forms and a mastery of the techniques of European modernists”. This seems to have meant allying Sudanese subject matter with European techniques, substituting Sudanese imagery for European in easel painting, for example, and the work presented in the third room of the Tate exhibition, entitled “Meditation and Mastery, 1957-1972,” may show Al-Salahi exploring the question of Sudanese identity in art. By so doing, Al-Salahi arguably subordinated his work to the needs of Sudanese nationalism and the tastes of the Sudanese elite, the latter being drawn to a story of modern Sudanese nation-building while at the same time being sentimentally attached to the traditions of folk art and popular expression. Hassan puts the dangers of this kind of thing well in his catalogue essay, seeing it as effectively mortgaging the artist to the articulation of modern national identity while at the same time expecting him to use the imagery of pre-modern authenticity in doing so. Post-colonial African artists of the 1950s and 60s, Hassan writes, could find themselves “squeezed between, on the one hand, the masses of the rural and urban workers whose culture and identity were intact and hardly assimilated, and, on the other, their own modernist aspirations, embedded in a colonial system and process of acculturation typical of the colonial condition.” This resulting work aimed to be both modern and authentically Sudanese, but at the same time it could lead to a “nationalist romanticisation of the past”. In “responding to the aesthetic demands of a Westernised gaze by borrowing from traditional Sudanese arts and crafts, it [could] perpetuate an exotic image of Sudanese culture”. Identity questions of this sort, evoked by Al-Salahi's work in the context of 1950s and 60s Sudan, receive an intriguingly contrasting treatment to the work of the Lebanese artist Choucair, the subject of a small but intensely interesting parallel exhibition at the Tate. Born in 1916 some years before Al-Salahi, and studying, like him, in the colonial art schools of her country before seeking further training in Europe, this time in France, Choucair made dramatically different decisions regarding her identity as an artist and her developing art practice upon her return to Lebanon after three years spent, among other places, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Whereas Al-Salahi sat at the feet of William Coldstream, the long-term principal of the Slade, in London, his early paintings being amply influenced, if the present exhibition is to be believed, by the latter's painstaking realism, Choucair sought out the French cubist painter and designer Fernand Léger, with results that can be just as clearly seen in her own early paintings and drawings. Yet, rather than attempt a fusion of western technique with Lebanese imagery in her work in Beirut, Choucair followed a path of seemingly affect-less and quasi-mathematical abstraction. In the words of her most sophisticated commentator, Kirsten Scheid, who supplies an illuminating catalogue essay, Choucair's work suggested that “Lebanese-ness” need not be separate from internationalism, but could in fact be “a step towards it.” “Contrary to the idea of art [as] somehow appropriate to a certain nation or culture, the notion of art brought to life [in the work of Choucair] suggests a universal, borderless entity defined by its relation to a widely acknowledged [French] pedigree that recently produced Picasso and Matisse. The other [nationalist] idea of art was certainly familiar enough to the audience of this time, but it was deliberately displaced by this strategy… In opposition to a subjugated colonial identity, a discredited Ottoman-Turkish affiliation, or, most importantly, a self-limiting sectarian identity, Arab nationalists [like Choucair] exploited as an asset the veneration of Paris-based ‘alami (worldwide or universal) art” as a pathway towards modernity. According to Scheid, Choucair generated her abstract designs, or “modules” as she called them, using mathematical techniques, and this emphasis on modularity, units that can be built up to produce larger structures, also informs her sculpture. Here Choucair talked of “emboitement,” something like “boxing in,” or, possibly, “stacking up,” the idea being to create large-scale structures using aggregated modular units, this time in a process recalling architectural design and particularly the modular housing pioneered after World War II by Le Corbusier. Once again, Lebanese-ness, in Choucair's work, could be a step towards internationalism, the essential reference point being Paris. “The paradox of potentially infinite sequences of highly contained elements is at play within much of the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s,” curator Anne Coxon comments in her catalogue essay, with Choucair's work in Lebanon paralleling this international development. Few people would deliberately set out to compare the work of Al-Salahi and Choucair, and the Tate does its best to keep the two exhibitions separate. However, many people visiting the museum this summer will want to look at both, and doing so inevitably raises comparative questions. Both artists, of similar generation, but contrasting backgrounds, sought ways of using what they had learned at school in Europe in their local art environments, and both have enjoyed exceptionally long working careers, producing a variety of possible solutions. Both have the status of being at once the pioneers of modern art in their respective countries and leading contemporary figures, Al-Salahi at least still producing work in his Oxford studio. Anyone wanting to understand the choices facing Arab artists in the post-independence decades and beyond and the solutions proposed by two important figures over the course of long careers will learn a lot from these two exhibitions.
Ibrahim Al-Salahi and Saloua Raouda Choucair, both at Tate Modern, London, until 22 September and 20 October, respectively.
