NOW AND TEN

PROPERTY FROM
A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK
*12
SALIBA DOUAIHY
(LEBANESE, 1912-1994)
Untitled
signed and dated ‘Douaihy 1972’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
63æ x 39æ in. x (161.9 x 100.9cm.)
Painted in 1972
US$100,000-150,000
AED370,000-550,000
PROVENANCE:
A gift from the artist to the present owner in 1973 in New York City.
‘I saw the colours, warm and vivacious, as far
from reality as possible: a symbolic, fctional
picture of the real world. Colours themselves
had new meanings; lines became straighter
and kept rising. Depth of feld evolved shape
and size and the background became closer
to the foreground, solidifying the painting into
a more tightly knit amalgamation of lines and
colours. The fuf and details, the nuanced
motifs and gradients that were once part of
my work, slowly eroded and made say for
more solid, defned and minimalist elements.’
(P. Jean Sader, The Art of Saliba Douaihy, Beirut 2015, p. 84).
Christie’s is delighted to ofer the present work
by Saliba Douaihy that perfectly captures the
signature abstraction and colouration of the
legendary Lebanese Modern artist. Saliba Douaihy
has a way with colour and form. His bright canvases
famously feature vivid blues, reds, yellows, oranges
and greens; a dominant broad area of colour is
typically punctuated with narrow, angular passages
of colour, which at once separate each colour as
well as unite them. Douaihy’s work demonstrates
the artist’s deep understanding of the minimalist
aesthetic as well as abstract expressionism. His
oeuvre can be divided into three periods of artistry
– landscapes, followed by stained glass windows
and canonical works and, lastly, vibrant abstract
expressionistic works like the present composition.
The most striking of Douaihy’s works come from
the latter period where he developed his own visual
lexicon, allowing himself to exaggerate colours on
his canvases.
Born in 1912 in the town of Ehden in the mountains
of Northern Lebanon, Douaihy spent much of
his early childhood copying pictures from his
schoolbooks. As a young child, Douaihy was
mesmerised by the natural and scenic landscapes
of his native land. Inspired by the quaint villages,
churches and pastel architecture of rural Lebanon,
Saliba Douaihy, Regeneration, 1974.
(Christie’s Dubai, April 2012; price realised: US$278,500)
© Christie’s Images Ltd. 2012
the artist began painting at an early age. A young
Douaihy moved to Beirut in 1928 and fourished
under the apprenticeship of the well-known painter
Habib Srour.
Later, Douaihy went to study in France after
he received a scholarship from the Lebanese
government to attend the School of Decorative
Arts in Paris from 1932 to 1936. His initial works
were a combination of fgurative art, classical
scenes and landscapes. After fnishing his art
education, Douaihy returned to Ehden to paint its
four seasons, the coast as well as the life of farmers
and labourers in the mountains. In 1950, Douaihy
moved to the United States where he participated
in group exhibitions at the New York International
Fair, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and
also at the renowned Guggenheim. Furthermore,
the Lebanese artist presented solo exhibitions of
his works at the Art and Science Centre of New
Hampshire, the Contemporary Gallery of New York
and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Two works
that were on display in the latter institution’s 1978
exhibition called The Art of Saliba Douaihy which
are now held in important collections.
Charged by the energy of the exploding art
scene and discovering the works of his American
contemporaries while in New York, including
Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Hans
Hofman and Ad Reinhardt, Douaihy moved away
from his earlier academic style and began his
much sought-after series of minimalist abstract
paintings. By the end of the 1950s, the artist’s
works encompassed of fat monochromatic forms,
fne lines and sharp edges, anticipating the more
successful half of his illustrious career. Until his
death in 1994, Douaihy continued to paint his
minimalist canvases, which remained the epitome
of artistic simplicity in both colour and form.
Douaihy’s third artistic phase, from which this
present work belongs, is when his canvases
featured a non-naturalistic use of colour. Colours
vary ‘from primary to secondary, from harmonising to
contrasting and from brilliant to subdued and varying
in contours from large to small and from angular
to curved, the canvas always integrates and guides
the eye easily from the dominant focal colour to the
outer edge and back’ (P. Jean Sader, ibid., p. 178).
The underlying purpose was to exaggerate colour
to the point where it did not reference the natural
world or reality.
The colour passages in his works are oriented
vertically, as if extended towards infnity. The
precision of line and colour is derived not from
geometric exactitude but rather from balancing
diferent intensities of colour that makes the
passages and colour planes seem perfectly defned.
Moreover, slivers of colour appear dynamic as
if pushing and pulling other planes of colour.
The present work showcases Douaihy’s unique
interlinking of planes and shafts, each one flled
in with a distinctive colour, appearing to extend
beyond the boundaries of the picture. The painting
is dominated by an expanse of blue-green,
intersected by an olive-green asymmetrical plane
and red, yellow and green passages. The beauty in
the painting, with its strong and opposing colours,
resides in the overall harmony and coherence – a
harmony that references nature in that, despite
its myriad colours, there is an overarching unity in
the natural world. In true Douaihy form, the use
of these fat colours in the present work imparts
a sense of two-dimensionality to the paintings,
yet the verticality suggests depth. He believed
that harmony of colours was more important in
a painting than the accurate representation of a
scene. The present work, signifcantly larger in
scale than most of his abstract works to appear
at auction, is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that
comprises of the very best of Douaihy’s skilful
techniques and inspirations, a signature style that
has been widely celebrated and acclaimed since
the 1960s and have placed him at the forefront of
Modern Abstraction in the Middle East.