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Lot Essay
Christie’s is proud to offer a stunning sculpture by the Lebanese artist Michel Basbous, a delicate and graceful statue from the collection of Martin Giesen. For over thirty years, Giesen has made the Middle East his home. Originally from Germany, he relocated to teach in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut from 1973 to 1985, followed by Saudi Arabia, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, where he is was founding dean of the College of Art, Architecture and Design at the American University of Sharjah.
As Giesen recollects ‘My first academic job took me to Beirut in October 1973. It was probably not the best time to start a career, because 5 days after my arrival, the October War commenced. The American University in Beirut was my academic home. I taught art history courses and some studio courses in drawing and printmaking, which connected me to the Lebanese art scene at the beginning of a difficult period impacted by the Lebanese civil war that would last for 15 years.’
The early 1970s was a time of an extraordinary flourishing in art prints. Limited editions of lithographs, etchings and serigraphs appeared in many of the western art centers, reaching new enthusiasts, who entered into collecting art at an affordable price level. Amal Traboulsi, one of Giesen’s students in a printmaking workshop, expressed interest in starting the first gallery in Beirut that was dedicated to graphic arts, particularly contemporary prints. Lebanon had not yet participated in this trend and Amal started Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste in 1979, the first to recognize this gap in the range of commercial galleries in Beirut.
As the war intensified, the feasibility of survival was threatened by the division of Beirut into opposing sectarian factions. Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste was forced to relocate five times as a result of the vicissitudes of civil war. Artists who remained in Lebanon when the war started, played an important role in the growth of the gallery. Predominant expressions were shaped by European styles, especially post-impressionist, cubist and surrealist adaptations. It is here that Giesen found himself exhibiting his descriptive watercolors alongside artists such as Amine el Bacha, Aref el Rayess, Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui and Samir Tabet. Eventually Helen Khal and Hussein Madi returned from abroad and some of Giesen's students, such as Ayman Baalbaki and Mona Trad Dabaji matured into exhibiting artists themselves. Giesen partnered as art history consultant with Amal Traboulsi and inherited Untitled (Standing Woman) when the gallery restructured in the late 1980s. Since then the sculpture has been in Giesen's possession.
The sculptural profile of the art of Lebanon was shaped by modernist explorations along the lines of Giacometti, Brancusi, and Henry Moore. Mona Saudi worked mainly in marble, Nicole Bouldoukian created imaginatively posed figures in bronze. The best known of Lebanon's sculptors hail from the Basbous family with roots in Rachana, in the mainly Christian mountains of Lebanon, north of Beirut. The scion of the family was Michel Basbous, followed by his brother, Alfred. The family established a veritable quarry and outdoor exhibition space for stone sculpture and indoor exhibition of wooden carvings. Michel Basbous, among the many directions of his stylistic development, experimented in different genres, styles, sizes, with a wide ranging media from the classical marble, stone, wood, bronze, alloys to the more experimental fiber glass, resin and cement. Yet Michel always referred back to the focal point of the classical depiction of the human figure, enlivened by modernist stylization, exaggeration, elongation, and the carving appearing in the present lot.
Born in Rachana in 1921, a small village overlooking the Mediterranean in Northern Lebanon, Michel was one of the first to enroll at the newly founded “Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts”(ALBA) in 1945. He left for Paris in 1950, joining the atelier of Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine at the Grande Ecole de la Chaumiere between 1945 to 1955. His master there, Gaumont, asked him the purpose of his stay in Paris, and Basbous answered, ‘To learn sculpture.’ Gaumont replied: ‘Lebanon, the Mediterranean, Phoenicia, Assyria, Babel, Egypt… You have them all. What are you doing here? Go back to your country.’ (As quoted in Anachar Basbous' website). Basbous then returned to Lebanon in 1956, taking up a teaching position at the American University in Beirut that next year. He was persistent in promoting the local art scene in Rachana, and between 1959 and 1960, Michel created a festival that infused arts and theatre activities, holding lectures and international symposia to the local public, while exhibiting his sculptures in open air. Famous attendees included figures like César, Jack Lang, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hasan Fathi and Adonis, among others.
Michel introduced modern abstraction in sculpture during a time in the Middle East that privileged classical portraits. Untitled (Standing Woman) is a very elegant and at the same time, modest nude, mahogany carving, dating back approximately to the 1950s, documented in a leaflet of 1959. This evocative statue, in scale somewhere between a figurine and a life-size sculpture, has a finely textured surface, exhibiting the carver's chisel marks throughout the work mirroring the sloping hills of the Lebanese mountains, reminiscent of the artist's ancestral landscape.
The present lot can be related to work from to the mid-fifties, a period when Michel worked on variations of a number of classically feminine poses, single figures in meditation or embracing lovers in intertwining intimacy.
Belonging to the first generation of post World War Two artists, Michel Basbous' work traces an arc from the origins of Phoenician statuary of his home country to the neoclassical tradition and the modernism of the École de Paris. The standing nude of this lot is unique and exemplary of the artist's personal journey toward a 20th Century idiom.
It is with these accomplishments that Michel, along with his brother, Alfred, another acclaimed sculptor, left their legacy in Rachana, making the city into an artistic and cultural centre, nominated by UNESCO as Global Village of Outdoor Sculptures’ for its open-air museum run today by the sons of the artists, Anachar and Fadi.
As Giesen recollects ‘My first academic job took me to Beirut in October 1973. It was probably not the best time to start a career, because 5 days after my arrival, the October War commenced. The American University in Beirut was my academic home. I taught art history courses and some studio courses in drawing and printmaking, which connected me to the Lebanese art scene at the beginning of a difficult period impacted by the Lebanese civil war that would last for 15 years.’
The early 1970s was a time of an extraordinary flourishing in art prints. Limited editions of lithographs, etchings and serigraphs appeared in many of the western art centers, reaching new enthusiasts, who entered into collecting art at an affordable price level. Amal Traboulsi, one of Giesen’s students in a printmaking workshop, expressed interest in starting the first gallery in Beirut that was dedicated to graphic arts, particularly contemporary prints. Lebanon had not yet participated in this trend and Amal started Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste in 1979, the first to recognize this gap in the range of commercial galleries in Beirut.
As the war intensified, the feasibility of survival was threatened by the division of Beirut into opposing sectarian factions. Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste was forced to relocate five times as a result of the vicissitudes of civil war. Artists who remained in Lebanon when the war started, played an important role in the growth of the gallery. Predominant expressions were shaped by European styles, especially post-impressionist, cubist and surrealist adaptations. It is here that Giesen found himself exhibiting his descriptive watercolors alongside artists such as Amine el Bacha, Aref el Rayess, Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui and Samir Tabet. Eventually Helen Khal and Hussein Madi returned from abroad and some of Giesen's students, such as Ayman Baalbaki and Mona Trad Dabaji matured into exhibiting artists themselves. Giesen partnered as art history consultant with Amal Traboulsi and inherited Untitled (Standing Woman) when the gallery restructured in the late 1980s. Since then the sculpture has been in Giesen's possession.
The sculptural profile of the art of Lebanon was shaped by modernist explorations along the lines of Giacometti, Brancusi, and Henry Moore. Mona Saudi worked mainly in marble, Nicole Bouldoukian created imaginatively posed figures in bronze. The best known of Lebanon's sculptors hail from the Basbous family with roots in Rachana, in the mainly Christian mountains of Lebanon, north of Beirut. The scion of the family was Michel Basbous, followed by his brother, Alfred. The family established a veritable quarry and outdoor exhibition space for stone sculpture and indoor exhibition of wooden carvings. Michel Basbous, among the many directions of his stylistic development, experimented in different genres, styles, sizes, with a wide ranging media from the classical marble, stone, wood, bronze, alloys to the more experimental fiber glass, resin and cement. Yet Michel always referred back to the focal point of the classical depiction of the human figure, enlivened by modernist stylization, exaggeration, elongation, and the carving appearing in the present lot.
Born in Rachana in 1921, a small village overlooking the Mediterranean in Northern Lebanon, Michel was one of the first to enroll at the newly founded “Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts”(ALBA) in 1945. He left for Paris in 1950, joining the atelier of Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine at the Grande Ecole de la Chaumiere between 1945 to 1955. His master there, Gaumont, asked him the purpose of his stay in Paris, and Basbous answered, ‘To learn sculpture.’ Gaumont replied: ‘Lebanon, the Mediterranean, Phoenicia, Assyria, Babel, Egypt… You have them all. What are you doing here? Go back to your country.’ (As quoted in Anachar Basbous' website). Basbous then returned to Lebanon in 1956, taking up a teaching position at the American University in Beirut that next year. He was persistent in promoting the local art scene in Rachana, and between 1959 and 1960, Michel created a festival that infused arts and theatre activities, holding lectures and international symposia to the local public, while exhibiting his sculptures in open air. Famous attendees included figures like César, Jack Lang, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hasan Fathi and Adonis, among others.
Michel introduced modern abstraction in sculpture during a time in the Middle East that privileged classical portraits. Untitled (Standing Woman) is a very elegant and at the same time, modest nude, mahogany carving, dating back approximately to the 1950s, documented in a leaflet of 1959. This evocative statue, in scale somewhere between a figurine and a life-size sculpture, has a finely textured surface, exhibiting the carver's chisel marks throughout the work mirroring the sloping hills of the Lebanese mountains, reminiscent of the artist's ancestral landscape.
The present lot can be related to work from to the mid-fifties, a period when Michel worked on variations of a number of classically feminine poses, single figures in meditation or embracing lovers in intertwining intimacy.
Belonging to the first generation of post World War Two artists, Michel Basbous' work traces an arc from the origins of Phoenician statuary of his home country to the neoclassical tradition and the modernism of the École de Paris. The standing nude of this lot is unique and exemplary of the artist's personal journey toward a 20th Century idiom.
It is with these accomplishments that Michel, along with his brother, Alfred, another acclaimed sculptor, left their legacy in Rachana, making the city into an artistic and cultural centre, nominated by UNESCO as Global Village of Outdoor Sculptures’ for its open-air museum run today by the sons of the artists, Anachar and Fadi.