An Article by A. V. (898 words, 5 min. read)
The Sursock Museum opens its doors to a stirring tribute: a retrospective dedicated to the late Abdel Hamid Baalbaki (1940–2013), a painter whose art carried the soul of South Lebanon, the heartbreak of war, and the persistence of memory. This exhibition is a reconstruction of a life, a voice, and a home that resisted disappearance.
A Life Between Hamra and Odeisseh
For over three decades, Baalbaki lived in Beirut before returning to his native village of Odeisseh in South Lebanon, where he began building a house he dreamt would become an artistic sanctuary. That home now lies heavily damaged. It remains a painful symbol of how fragile memory and heritage remain in Lebanon. This intimate rupture sets the tone of the exhibition’s opening section: the idea of home as a place of both refuge and loss.
The museum revives this dream, displaying Baalbaki’s personal library, architectural sketches, and lost designs as if piecing together the remnants of his vision. These aren’t just artifacts; they are fragments of a man’s lifelong commitment to making art a living, breathing part of his surroundings. His house may be damaged, but here, it is spiritually rebuilt.
Faces of a City: The Pulse of Hamra and Beyond
Baalbaki’s brush captured the beating heart of Beirut, particularly in Hamra, where daily life unfolded in cafés, alleyways, and family gatherings. His portraits are not grand statements; they are human. They are lived-in. His refusal to label his work as “popular art” is telling; for him, these scenes weren’t stylized nostalgia, but a reality worth remembering. The war disrupted his rhythm, but it also gave him the time to see the faces, the gestures, the small but weighty moments of existence. His canvases are archives of emotion, painted not for spectacle but for remembrance.
Art and Arab Identity: A Quest for Authenticity
Early in his career, Baalbaki’s work engaged deeply with the question of Arab modernity. In paintings such as Ashura and Al-Hajj, he drew inspiration from Islamic aesthetics, the poetry of the Abbasid era, and medieval artists like Al-Wasiti. His figures and calligraphic elements echo a longing to reimagine what modern Arab art could look like rooted in history, yet unmistakably contemporary. His dialogues with artists like Aref El Rayess, and his participation in Arab congresses for plastic arts, revealed a shared yearning among his generation to define authenticity not as imitation of the West, but as a return to meaningful origins.
Like Yvette Achkar’s abstract lyricism, or Helen Khal’s introspective self-portraits, Baalbaki’s work emerged from a belief that identity is not a fixed image, but a lifelong artistic pursuit.
The War Within: Painting the Unbearable
Although Baalbaki’s work seldom directly addressed the violence that surrounded him, there are exceptions that cannot be overlooked. His mural The War (1977) stands as one of the most powerful artistic responses to the Lebanese Civil War. Painted after witnessing the beginning of the Damour Massacre, Baalbaki didn’t depict the event in literal terms. Instead, he gave us symbols; terrifying and surreal. Rats, owls, monsters, and broken tablets echo the disintegration of civilization. The warriors in the center are caught in a nightmarish stillness. This isn’t a painting about sides or ideologies; it’s about victims. As Baalbaki once said: “My work was about the victims… and the victims were ordinary people.”
His mural was first shown in 1979, at the “Warm Injury” exhibition after the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon. Decades later, it returned to public view at the Beirut Art Center in 2009, still speaking truths many struggle to articulate.
Palestine in the Heart: Deir Yassin Remembered
In another deeply haunting work, Baalbaki painted the Massacre of Deir Yassin (c. 1972), memorializing the 1948 tragedy during the Nakba. Deir Yassin, once a quiet village, became a symbol of what was lost. This painting was not a response to a breaking news headline—it came decades later, out of the persistence of memory. Like Rafic Charaf’s allegorical evocations of resistance and Nadia Saikali’s emotive abstraction, Baalbaki turned history into a canvas of conscience. These works are not frozen in time, they are reactivated each time we look at them.
The Trees That Remember: Nature as Witness
From the 1980s onwards, Baalbaki turned his attention to nature, especially the wounded kind. Dead and uprooted trees dominate his drawings and paintings, echoing the pain of displacement and contested lands. His sanguine sketches are delicate and meditative, yet filled with grief. In works like Al-Hattab (The Woodcutter), a monumental late painting, Baalbaki channels all the loss, endurance, and silent strength he carried. The tree becomes more than a subject: it is a mirror to his own spirit, resilient despite the storms.
A Legacy Reclaimed
This exhibition at the Sursock Museum is not just a retrospective; it is a reclamation. Abdel Hamid Baalbaki stood apart in his time, often unrecognized amid the louder voices of the Beirut art world. But like Paul Guiragossian, whose empathy colored his every brushstroke, Baalbaki painted from the core of human experience; loss, longing, and quiet hope. He never painted to impress. He painted to witness.
Now, as his works hang in the halls of the Sursock, his voice is no longer quiet. It echoes, tender and urgent, calling us to look—closely, compassionately—and to never forget what art can hold when history tries to erase it.
