Article about Philippe Mourani by William Matar

Two pages that he published about a certain Spiridon, forgetting the first name as he was confused between father and son, both painters, say much about Mourani (6th January, 1875-Paris 1870). He threw himself into the character of Spiridon as the artist whose return to his Lebanese homeland signaled perhaps his end. Divided between Lebanon and France he could not avoid a certain ambivalence, even if his training in religious art in Italy seemed to indicate a Lebanese career. But his return to France directed him towards life as a painter. Having obtained his diploma at the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he studied between 1892 and 1895, he spent the years between 1895 and 1901 in Beirut. There he devoted himself to portraiture, put some money aside and accompanied a French archeological mission to Palmyra. During World War I, he was in Cairo and then in 1920 settled in Paris.

His professional activities alone do not explain his frequent travels. There was a wandering, nomad spirit deep inside him which was really a very middle class, for he was in no way a vagabond and liked to consider himself respectable, point of character that comes out in his production. Mourani was a painter of his circumstances, but far from awakening in him creativeness, these were something he leaned on for his work on canvas. He had a taste for the systematic sharpness of wit, inventiveness and hard work, producing art that was rigid and fixed.

There was a time when Mourani was considered by a little circle to be the painter of oriental imagination, and when his work had a better market in the East than in Paris. Corm saw in his work a peasant attention to detail, brilliance, and a sadness provoked by the practice of his art. He painted with deadened sensibility, with a conception of art that reduced everything to one level, in short, he reproduced. It was not painting that moved him but surrounding circumstance and this latter showed itself in his work. However, some canvases opened the door something unexpected, other than mere attention to detail.

Ups and downs in his achievement were inevitable in view of his unusually long life, like that of Corm. The variety of cultural and social setting with which both of them were in contact resulted in a likeness between them the two men. Mourani’s travels in Italy, France, Egypt and Algeria were the result of his trying to be the craftsman of the painter’s art. One feels that his production takes a back seat when he talks about himself, confining himself to a recital of his memories.

For a certain time, Mourani worked at the Lebanese Ministry of National Education on a reorganization of artistic and craft instruction, but he soon tired of this and went back to France. Paris might replace Beirut for him, but Beirut could never replace Paris. When orientalist painting was demanded around 1910, Mourani worked in this style, then in the nineteen-thirties in Lebanon and finally in France as was expected of him. In fact, he worked according to people’s image of him.

From the very beginning, Mourani seemed to have failed to really understand painting, and copied with a mind stopping at small detail. His teacher at the School of Fine Arts, Laurens, regretted that he never had a general view of the whole, and the kind of orientalism he worked at seemed to express itself only in the detail. Indeed, for Mourani painting was above all a matter of copying and producing and he could not understand it in any other way, being unable to synthesize, to balance a canvas, to discriminate between the details that should be stressed and those which should be ignored. The composition was put in its place with the whole receiving uniform treatment.

William MATAR