Blanche Loheac-Ammoun by Helen Khal – The woman in Lebanon

“One day, I wanted to express a pure impression - one which the sun had left upon me. How to interpret an incandescence? Suddenly that same day, I discovered that painting, to achieve this aim, had to be abstract or, at least, not figurative. I have continued in this direction; and it seems to me, with an instinct I have always relied on, that this is the best path into myself.”
In 1931, on the graduating list of the Jesuit Faculty of Law in Beirut were the names of two women: Blanche Ammoun and Nina Trad, the first women in Lebanon to earn law degrees. Nina Trad continued in the profession as the country’s first practicing woman lawyer. In due time, she met and married another lawyer, Charles Helou, and with him eventually achieved prominence as the wife of a president. Blanche Ammoun, however, simply framed her degree, forgot about it, and turned to another, more compelling interest – art.

This kind of unusual decision, of abrupt change, was typical to the temperament of this spirited and diversely talented young woman. All her life, Blanche had been permitted to follow wherever her intellectual curiosity led her. Recognizing early the special qualities of mind and imagination her daughter had been born with, her mother wisely guided the child, anticipated her needs for expression, and provided her with the necessary conditions and facilities to explore whatever gifts she revealed. It was enough that Blanche expresses a desire to paint, to have immediately set before her paints and brushes, easel and canvas… and at her side, of course, a professor. Blanche remembers well the abundantly creative days of her childhood in Alexandria. There was always one adventure after another, and often altogether – music, voice, drama, art, literature.
But why law, then? Blanche replies: “It was a tradition in the family; they were all lawyers, my uncles, my father, my brother. Law was the natural, logical choice for my formal university education. But that doesn’t prevent one from doing other things, does it? My father was not only a lawyer; he was a poet and statesman as well. My brother, a lawyer, was also a UNESCO delegate, and always intensely interested in all the arts, he was, in fact, the one who most encouraged me throughout my career as an artist.”

It was, however, the early influence of her mother that established the future directions of Blanche’s life. Half Italian and with a strong European cultural heritage, Victoria Chiha was, in Blanche’s words, “… a born artist; there was nothing she did, at home, in her life, without a sense of art. I still remember how she put together the many pieces of a broken mirror, turned it into a fascinating mosaic design – still a mirror, but also a work of art.”

Blanche had her first painting lessons at the age of 10. Later, when the family returned from Egypt to live in Lebanon, the painting lessons continued. Law studies or not, there was still time for art, and for writing, which was to become also an important medium of expression for Blanche. She speaks about the journal she kept during her years at law school, the daily entries of events and experiences, many illustrated with small, humorous sketches. She speaks also about her art teachers and the other girls with whom she painted.

There was in Beirut during that time of the early thirties a Polish painter, Jean Kober, to whom a number of mothers entrusted the instruction of their daughters. The painting classes were a fashionable, social activity, and hardly intended to produce serious, professional artists. But to a few of the young women, the experience became more than pleasant afternoons of light gossip and the easy production of pretty pictures; they discovered the adventure of painting, the mysterious magic of transforming color and form into art. Along with Blanche, they participated in the group exhibitions of the day; art critics reviewed their works and wrote about them in glowing terms in the Beirut cultural press. Their lives eventually took other directions, but during those years, as a group, they comprised the first generation of contemporary women artists in Lebanon.

Blanche also spent a brief period of study with the Lebanese painter, Habib Srour. She recalls it as a distressingly boring experience: “How unlike Kober he was in his teaching approach! With Kober we were permitted free expression, each to develop an individual style. But with Srour… how can I forget the week after week after week of painting the same chair, each week the same chair but from a different angle.

No matter how much we protested, he simply pointed to the chair and said, “Paint”

Blanche Ammoun the artist, meanwhile, was also very much Blanche Ammoun the woman. Like any other young, privileged lady of that period, full of an ebullient taste for life, she went to tea parties and dances, sported the latest fashions, and from under her parasol flirted with the young men… until finally, she fell in love with one, an officer in the French Army. In 1944, Blanche Ammoun and Colonel Andrea Loheac were married. Soon after, they went to live in Paris.

Blanche chose her husband well. Andre Loheac, although a man of military discipline, was also a French gentleman of culture and learning. Avant-garde in his thinking, it pleased him that his wife was an artist, and throughout their life together he gave full encouragement to her efforts. With such support (and with her own inexhaustible energy), Blanche was able to do what few women artists can – to combine, with harmony and success, love, marriage, children, and art.
There were three children; to them, Blanche was a devoted, conscientious mother. There was a large household to manage; in it, Blanche was the responsible and efficient mistress. There were social obligations, military and diplomatic; here Blanche was the gracious hostess, the elegant wife of the Colonel. And then there was her own private world – her studio, her study, her salon – where Blanche became the artist and writer, in one moment an intense working artist in paint-spattered coveralls, and in the next the feminine, silk-robed and gold-bungled lady of the salon, where each week she received the writers and artists of Paris.

Her production? Notable by any standards. She has two books to her credit, both illustrated with her drawings, one of which gained her a French Academy award in 1964. In painting, after years of a continuous search for original expression, she finally found her answer in a seemingly unimportant bag of sand and mica she had collected on a holiday. Out of this material, she produced a series of iridescent abstract paintings, which stunned the Parisian public in the early sixties and prompted more than one critic to announce: “A new art is born.” Along with painting, her production in jewelry and ceramics also reveals a characteristic inventiveness. Today, she is working on another approach – that of combining jewelry with painting.

Each summer for as long as she has resided in France, Blanche returns to Lebanon where she also maintains a permanent home. Her love and loyalty to family and country is also proclaimed in the Loheac-Ammoun duality of her name. French and Lebanese, woman and artist, materially secure, protected and encouraged, permitted the freedom to develop as a child and in marriage, she has had the best of two worlds. How did she combine it all? As a friend once remarked about Blanche: “Her secret is that she loves whatever she undertakes… but she only undertakes, it is true, what she loves.”