NOW AND TEN

Café Hajj Daoud, Beirut, 1972
© Dieter Kloessing.
Detail of the present work Café Palestine.
Franck Salameh, in his biography of Charles Corm,
wrote that ‘the famous Glass Café with its towering
iconic glass windows would come to represent a
symbolic and actual ‘looking-glass’ through which
pivotal events of modern Lebanon’s history would
play out, get witnessed and recorded’ (F. Salameh,
Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a
Twentieth-Century Lebanese ‘Young Phoenician’,
Lanham 2015, p. 150). Salameh further described
Charles Corm ‘as an ambulant Glass Café in his own
right’ (ibid.) because he frst-handedly witnessed
Beirut’s turbulent times, just as Abboud was an
‘ambulent Glass Café’ transcribing his emotions
and reactions to the war raging through his country
into these wonderfully intimate temperas, that he
painted in Paris. Although he had moved to France
in 1947 and adopted French nationality in 1969,
he frequently visited Lebanon, usually teaching in
Beirut for three months every year, except during
the tense years of Civil War from 1976 to 1991.
The fact that these ‘cafés engloutis’ surrounded
him in his modest Parisian home not only soothed
his nostalgia and homesickness, but they were
also a reminder of the sad reality looming over his
country, the pain of which was remedied by the
lively atmosphere of these traditional Beiruti cafés.
history and captured the intrinsic nature of Beiruti
culture. Abboud’s wide variety of pigments,
textures and designs that animate each individual
tempera echoes the liveliness, cultural richness
and hope embedded in the Lebanese people, that
have resisted decades of war and terror and still
permeate through the city today. Whereas he
gave shape and colour to his ‘inspirations’ in the
ensemble of 1989, he transcribed his impressions
and emotions in Café de Verre, Café Hajj Daoud,
Café Palestine, Café el Bahrain. There is no doubt
that these ‘vanished cafés’ impregnated not
only Abboud’s memory, but also his fve senses,
enabling him to grasp and to communicate with
his palette of pigments the sight, smell, sound,
touch and taste of these legendary places that had
been his own refuge so many times.
In 1989-1991, Abboud also painted four single
large-scale canvases bearing the title Les cafés
engloutis, in which he further explored the sensorial
impact that a particular café had on him. At the
same time, he worked on the present ensemble
whilst carefully putting together a photo album of
images of these temperas, classifying them by the
names of the four diferent cafés. Later in 1998, the
same series inspired him for a ffth monumental
work, Les cafés engloutis: La collection, which
presents a medley of the present work’s temperas.
The ensemble of 130 small panels allows the
viewer to have a more comprehensive vision of
an important and profound aspect of Abboud’s
life. Despite their melancholic connotation, they
provoke an explosion of colours and emanate a
transcendental light that brought memories, hope
and a certain gaiety to the Lebanese artist in his
bedroom in Paris, just as they constitute a mosaic
of joyful colours and emotions to the viewer today
and celebrate a precious fragment of Beirut’s
vanishing café-culture, transformed by the Civil
War and threatened by globalisation.
Within Abboud’s oeuvre, Café de Verre, Café Hajj
Daoud, Café Palestine, Café el Bahrain, form the
continuity to a similar ensemble he had produced
a year earlier in 1989, entitled Les Inspirations,
described as ‘a sort of inventory of matrix forms;
in them, one fnds all his themes: the seasons,
windows, studios, rooms, women, nudes, nights,
childhood memories, landscapes, etc.’ in the artist’s
most recent monograph (P. Le Thorel, Shafc
Abboud, Milan 2014, p. 166). In Les Inspirations,
Abboud told a story through colourful snapshots
of his childhood memories transcribed onto 91
temperas on panel. In the present ensemble of
130 temperas, Abboud revived his lively moments,
this time from his adulthood, spent in these ‘cafés
engloutis’ that he frequented with his friends,
but he also paid tribute to an aspect of Beirut’s
Shafc Abboud, Les Cafés Engloutis : La Collection, 1998.
Private Collection, Lebanon. © Succession Shafc Abboud.