In the field of the visual arts, particularly painting, Waheeb Bteddini, born at Kfarnabrakh, Lebanon, in 1929, was one of the first to take a serious interest in painting, one which was shared by Shafeeq Fakeeh and Aref Rayess. He had several points in common with Rayess, but seized his subject immediately and with immediate comprehension. On the other hand Rayess with his more critically cautious nature feared to let impulsiveness lead him into traps and when he submitted to forms it was only to better understand them and to draw from them a lesson.

After having spent the six years between 1961 and 1966 studying in the Soviet Union at the Sorikov Art Academy on a scholarship, Bteddini returned to Lebanon only to discover that there was no interest in painting as he had learned it. This way of painting was inseparable from the choice of the subject and therefore historically and culturally divorced, as it was marked in the eyes of Lebanese society by a thoroughly outdated realism. In fact this society may not be generally so highly sophisticated and sensitive as that in some other countries, but nevertheless lets itself be influenced by European standards.

Insofar as Bteddini was concerned, this divorce presented a problem that was cultural so much as sociological, finally less bound up with painting as such than with his way of apprehending his own perception of it. This situation provoked a crisis for him which he dealt with by a series of canvases which, by copy, questioned the subject and its appropriateness more than the style. He did canvases where his pictorial rhetoric had more effect than the actual painting. It set out the variations in comprehension of realism that the Russians had had in the nineteenth century, with heroic and political themes. He came to understand that didactics had little place in the pictorial situation in Lebanon. He produced a series of portraits of Lebanese personalities, ranging from Kamal Junblatt to Saïd Akl, and also some portraits of peasants which were by no means lacking in force.

Unlike Rayess, who lived in Beirut, Bteddini remained withdrawn, attached to the weaker current of representational art from which Abu Ajram was to draw conclusions by insisting that fashion should catch up with him rather than that he should be forced to change. Bteddini passed through a period of hesitation and of being marginalized from the pictorial scene, despite three exhibitions whose viewers it must be said were mostly friends and political and other public personalities.

This absence from the artistic scene raises the question in the history of art concerning the validity of representation following its norms and possible means. Is the whole of Bteddine lost in this absence or is it something that merely appears to us as such?

For Bteddine the question for representation was for a long time raised only insofar as technical validity was concerned. Behind his ambition to be a painter there was the element of a challenge thrown down by his predecessors that it was necessary to imitate. This was a technical challenge confronting the procedures for reproducing used by these painters, but one that was not necessarily accompanied by any understanding of what the procedures contributed to the placing of the construction of the canvas. In front of Bteddine the whole story was like a swing door, and he had to reproduce the view of the countryside in front of his house, the village square, or the face of some person of political importance. This could only be by a portrayal drawn from the history of art, brought in and adapted.

But, to put it briefly, what could this painter really be or do in his village? What could his ambition be without the question being presented in a more individual way? What did he himself represent before raising the question of what he wished to represent? In fact in the middle of the nineteen-fifties copying details of the blue or rose periods of Picasso did not mean shutting oneself off but simply asking oneself about the possibilities of painting. Cutting oneself off would be to find neither an answer nor a following-up to the copies. This does not depend only of making a link in a simplistic fashion between the painter and the society in which he lives. In Bteddine’s case, it should be borne in mind, it was that of his village, meaning a society with an established order perpetuating clear structures. Here the painter was unmistakably the product of a social culture defined by its social elements and functions. Also there was certainly an explication to be found in the difficulties and cultural shocks affecting Lebanese society. All these problems would be made less acute by simply stating them and by listening to the different echoes that each branch of Lebanese society reflected as a result of its relations with the West. However, these were silent for not having any way of expressing themselves.

Faced with questions within Druze society, the art of painting could not find answers through Bteddini alone. To do that it would have to wait for the development of new elements in the following generation, those of Molaeb and Abu Ajram.