Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Omar Kholeif reviews Modern Art in the Arab World

Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, eds. Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018. 464 pp.

Review by Omar Kholeif

19 September 2018

To say that Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents is a boon to the research of any historian looking into art of the Arab world is an understatement. I only wish such a field guide had been available to me when I was pursuing my doctoral studies. Actual “primary” material on modern Arab art in English has for years been virtually impossible to find (and thus unavailable to my supervisors who, unable to read Arabic, had trouble independently assessing much of my research). Modern Art in the Arab World is something of an unusual introduction to the limited market of books on Arab art. It might function as an introduction, but this is also a textured and layered work that will offer textual gems and open up entirely new routes of thinking for even the most studied researcher.

Ussama Makdisi, professor at Rice University, contributes a fine short discussion of the formation of the “Arab world” and the “Arab imagination,” a term encountered repeatedly throughout the book. One wonders what this “world” is and how it came to be. A shared consciousness created by language, religion, and conflict? What this book posits through its multiplicity of voices is the heterogeneity of the region, the contradictory politics that framed its art, and the often-confused ideology that emerged from the region after the Ottoman Period through to the 1980s. In an early text in the book, a Muslim cleric discusses the ills of “representational art,” while seemingly still somehow admiring its qualities. Did this religious context frame the abstraction of the early modernist period or was abstraction a form of political resistance? How do we differentiate resistance from pure representational art? How do we understand—indeed, unfold—a genealogy of modern Arab art?

This selection of primary documents does not draw a clear genealogical timeline—something urgently needed, but beyond the scope of the present investigation. Rather, what this book offers us is a deep snapshot of the ideology that constituted the so-called modernist period of the Arab world. I say “so-called” in that many of the artists featured or discussed in the book oscillate between the modern and the contemporary periods of time as we know it. Certainly, clear delineations between these periods do not truly exist in the popular Arab imagination as I understand it.

This is a book to relish and dig into time and time again. Each article takes on a different meaning on further reading. As an Arabic reader, I would have loved to see the original translated texts side by side with the English; however, that would have made for an unwieldy book, and after all, as many of us are aware, these books function in large part to capture the imagination of Western researchers who have for far too long marginalized Arab art histories in the broader canon of art as we know it. The rationale behind the choice of images used to illustrate this period is unclear and may have been determined by the ability to obtain rights of reproduction. But this is not a book of images. It is a collective text that opens a door for further debate, research, and love—for it is love that we need most in the Arab world. This book inspires a love for Arabic art history and should encourage further historical and contextual illustration that will illustrate the subject and render it more accessible.