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Suggested title: A History of Ruptures at Sursock Museum
Contributor: Arie Akkermans
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Arie Akkermans

I think your lead graph should pack a wallop and tell us why the Sursock matters, why it is vital as a museum

As a cornerstone of the city’s cultural life for decades, and as a symbol of its rich
architectural heritage, the Sursock Museum is the museum of Beirut in the absence of
public institutions to collect and showcase modern and contemporary art. In its over sixty
years, the museum has not only served as a memory vault for Lebanese art, but also
witnessed the many crises and historical ruptures of the country.

When the Sursock Museum reopened in 1974, after a five-year expansion designed by
Gregoire Serof, its moment of rebirth would coincide with a series of crucial and
interrelated events in Lebanon that would define its image the 20th century: the
construction boom and rich cultural life of the golden 1960s would meet the political
turmoil and violence that would soon materialize into a protracted war. It would be
impossible to ignore the events of that week in 1975, when the exhibition “Treasures of
Ecuador: Pre-Columbian Art” opened at the museum, on April 18th; five days earlier, the
ambush on a bus in Ain el-Remmaneh would signal the beginning of the Lebanese Civil
War.

The Sursock’s showcase of prehistoric art in 1975 would be the last temporary exhibition
at the museum until around 1982, its life interrupted by the intensifying conflict. But it
wouldn’t be the first time that events in the country eclipsed the calendar of the museum,
for such turbulence has been part of its history. When the highest profile exhibition in the
history of the museum, “Picasso et la Famille,” opened in September 2019 with a number
of artworks and photographs on loan from prestigious collections in Europe, the city was
consumed by riots. The geopolitical situation and economic recession at the time had
been exacerbated by an ongoing waste disposal crisis. Only three weeks later, as the
museum previewed another exhibition, the October Revolution began. Massive protests
erupted across the country over draconian tax legislation, but soon enough expanded to
condemn sectarian rule.

Cultural institutions shuttered their doors and mobilized in the streets like everyone else.
And worse was yet to come: the collapse of the Lebanese banking sector later that year
robbed people of their lifetime savings, and rapidly escalating poverty was compounded
by the Covid pandemic. But none of this was a novelty for the Sursock Museum, which
first opened in 1961 after an eight-year struggle between the will of its late founder,
Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock, a Lebanese aristocrat who wanted his private villa in one of the
city’s most upscale streets to be transformed into a museum of modern art, and a
presidential decree that turned the villa into a palace of government. Since then, the
museum has witnessed cycles of closures, reopenings, expansions, and all manner of ups
and downs.

Its growth was anything but organic, often the amalgamation of favorable circumstances
and bad luck: an irregular acquisitions history and donations often by artists themselves
to an institution strengthened at times and restrained at others by changing endowments,
expansions, and an unpredictable political landscape. During the first year of the
pandemic, with the country weary from months of sustained protests and economic
uncertainty, the museum did what many Lebanese institutions regarded as the hallmark of
true resilience — go on with life. Accordingly, in June 2020, Sursock would open an
exhibition with works from the collection of early modern painter Georges Corm,
bequeathed to the museum in 2018. Corm was the son of Lebanon’s most important
classical realist painter, Daoud Corm, and his portraits had influence over a whole
generation of modern artists.

The Corm exhibition would yet again mark the end of another era, now regarded as the
golden age of the museum that began with its third reopening, after a massive expansion
was completed in 2015 by architect Jacques Abou Khaled. During this period, the
museum opened its doors to contemporary art with names such as Ali Cherri, Barıș
Doğrusöz, Danielle Genadry, Hrair Sarkissian, and Gregory Buchakian. Buchakjian, an
art historian and artist, conveyed to me in a conversation in May that the Sursock
Museum is “the only institution that existed in Lebanon before the war but that had a
much more important period after the war. After the war, the museum held very
important exhibitions, such as Jean Khalife or Omar Onsi, but it was in this glorious
period from 2015 to 2019 when the museum was much more sophisticated in every
aspect.”
On the 4th of August 2020, large amounts of ammonium nitrate improperly stored in a
warehouse at the Port of Beirut exploded, causing over 200 deaths, thousands of injuries,
and partially destroying large swaths of the city. Once again, Sursock would close its
doors, but this time it would be different. This wasn’t just another explosion in a city that
has seen it all: it is regarded as one of the largest accidental explosions in history. The
museum was less than a kilometer from the port, and sustained extensive damage. The
iconic facade made of stained glass was completely shattered, century-old wooden floors
were broken apart, and some 60 artworks from the collection were damaged and in need
of restoration; ceilings collapsed and metallic doors were blown away.

Buchakjian recounts in detail a visit to the museum on the 6th of August, the third day
after the explosion:

I remember we were quite a large group of people, including many from the art
scene; Camille Tarazi, Akram Zaatari, Vartan Avakian, among others, and the
director, Zeina Arida, who gave us a tour. A part of the initial destruction had
already been cleared, and it was then that I took that famous picture with the
sculpture of Saloua Raouda Choucair, which was the only artwork remaining in
the upper gallery. Then we went to the basement floor and it was truly
spectacular, because the damage was as great as upstairs. Zeina Arida showed us
a fireproof vault door that the blast blew off its hinges and impaled on the ceiling.

It was a catastrophe like no other in Lebanese history. If even this couldn’t unseat the
corrupt sectarian rule and the amnesties granted to warlords in the 1990s, it is entirely
possible that the unlikely and almost fantastical history of the Lebanese Republic would
witness yet an even more cruel chapter. But some light shone at the end of the tunnel for
the Sursock Museum once again, when a combination of international grants, fundraising
efforts, and in-kind donations would make it possible for the museum to reopen this year
at the end of May, with a full program of five exhibitions and thousands of visitors who
showed up to the grand reopening — by now the museum’s fourth, and definitely the
most difficult and unexpected.

In the words of Karina Helou, the museum’s new director, “more than 4,000 people
visited the museum on the opening night, especially young people, and it was clear that
the return of the museum was crucial, at a time when people are in need of access to
culture more than ever.” But the enormous task of bringing a museum back to life after
such a catastrophe cannot be underestimated; more stakeholders were involved in the
effort than can be accounted for here. Grants from the International Alliance for the
Protection of Heritage in Conflict (ALIPH), the French Ministry of Culture, UNESCO,
and the Italian Agency for Development and Cooperation, among others, enabled the
museum to stabilize the building structurally, restore its historical elements, and make it
functional.

The stained glass façade was restored by Maya Hussein, who also worked on the
previous renovation, using hand-blown glass sheets donated from France’s last traditional
atelier, and based on archival photographs from the time when Nicolas Sursock was still
living in the palace. The famous Salon Arabe, where Nicolas Sursock welcomed guests,
an exquisite Oriental interior preserved from the original house and of which there are
very few examples today (a number of them were collected by Western museums), was
restored with the precision of an archaeological reconstruction by Camille Tarazi and the
Maison Tarazi atelier, founded in 1962 and specialized in traditional woodwork. As for
the Sursock Palace, the grand private residence across the street, it is still being restored,
a much more complex undertaking, given that every element in the building is a piece of
art.

One of the exhibitions, “Beyond Ruptures, a Tentative Chronology,” curated by Helou, is

a tripartite historical chronology, juxtaposing different accounts of Lebanese history —
the history of the museum and its exhibitions, the political events in the country, and the
artistic production of artists in Lebanon. Based on pieces mostly on loan from the Saradar
Collection, Sursock’s extensive archives (in 1977, when the exhibitions came to a halt,
the museum set up a department for archives of Lebanese artists), and newspapers from
the period, the exhibition maps out a territory that is not simply a historiography of art,
but a testimony of interruption as continuity.

Helou spoke with The Markaz Review about the process of the exhibition: “The
museum’s history is intertwined with the history of the country, therefore its collection
and the artistic production reflects these ruptures within, the absences, the moments of
hope and destruction.” Although “Beyond Ruptures” is relatively small for an exhibition
dealing with historical archives, here and there captures the essence of pivotal moments
of transition, transformation and elision, and reveals traces left behind by the events, from
Aref El Rayess’ “The Day of the Lebanese University” (1968), depicting the violent
events after a student demonstration, through “Oh Beirut” (2020), a large drawing by
Laure Ghorayeb, a much-respected artist and art critic who died recently, and whose
collages were damaged during the explosion, as they were being exhibited at the
museum. She produced this drawing for the museum after 2020.

“Beyond Ruptures” overlaps with another historical exhibition on show at the museum,
“Je Suis Inculte! The Salon d’Automne and the National Canon,” curated by Natasha
Gasparian and Ziad Kiblawi. It looks at the legacy of the eponymous annual juried salon
held at the museum since its inauguration in 1961, and the authoritative role it played in
shaping a national artistic canon, since a large number of acquisitions at the museum
were made from winners of the salon: Saloua Raouda Choucair, Shafic Abboud, and Paul
Guiragossian among others. Largely based around the museum’s collections, “Je Suis
Inculte!” includes a number of works that were damaged during the explosion, from a
1939 portrait of Nicolas Sursock by Dutch-French painter Kees Van Dongen, restored at
Centre Pompidou in Paris, to a pair of terracotta sculptures, “War” (2006), by Simone
Fattal that were first considered total losses but then meticulously reassembled. The
exhibition looks at the salon not as a homogenous narrative about national art, but as the
center of an unfinished debate about history, tastes, hegemony and dissent.
Several artworks in “Beyond Ruptures” represent the early years of the war: Samir
Khadaje’s 1978 untitled drawing of daily life during wartime Lebanon, composed as a
three-layered image in motion, Jean Khalife’s two paintings titled “The Fear” (1976,
1977), following his abduction by militiamen, or Saïd Akl’s paintings from the period
after his works were destroyed during the Damour massacre.

[pull quote] What to do when art made about the destruction of the country becomes a part of that destruction

There are also artistic documents from the following decade when the war seemed to
never end: Shafic Abboud, one of the most celebrated Lebanese painters, who moved
early on from formal abstraction to expressionism, never depicted the war, except in the
painting “The Wrecked City” (1985), in reference to Beirut, an Paul Guiragossian’s “The
Struggle of Existence” (1988), in which he portrays faceless characters, perhaps in a state
of silent resignation. When Guiragossian’s studio was bombed in 1989, a self-portrait of
the artist was damaged; it was dated 1948, a year after he became a Palestinian refugee in
Lebanon. His work always carried double traces of destruction and migration. One of
Lebanon’s most prominent contemporary artists, Akram Zaatari, reflects on this re-
destruction in his “Mini-Album, Summer 1982” (2007), where he re-photographs pictures
he made around the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and displays them as
a souvenir photo album from that period.

This sense of double destruction begets the provocative question of what to do when art
made about the destruction of the country becomes a part of that destruction? In the
absence of an official historiography, and therefore of public memory, reparation, and
reconciliation, artists perform the task of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists;
they ask the question not only of what has happened, but also what could have happened
if things were otherwise. It is this sense of counterfactuality, parallel to the event itself,
that permits one to imagine that history could have been different. But the task can only
be completed with the mediation of regulatory institutions of memory such as museums,
with their archiving and displaying what remains of the past in the present.

The destruction and re-destruction paradoxically connect the past and the present in a
context where memory is tenuous. Yet the question here and now isn’t any longer
whether there are ruptures in history, or how to overcome them, but that insofar as the
only continuous and probable fact of history is rupture, this history is not an autonomous
process with a defined arrow of time but a chaotic assemblage of events, objects, and
possibilities, as the multiple narratives in “Beyond Ruptures” suggest. Buchakjian, for
one, doesn’t doubt the future of the museum or whether it will carry itself forward. “It is
a very interesting museum when you think of it, because it has always been a constantly
changing place. It was always different from what it had been before. It was different but
the same.” Helou, the director, agrees, and reflects on the history of the museum as a
process of ongoing adaptability: “Every closure was a rupture for both the museum and
for Lebanese art, but I would say that these ruptures are an opportunity to reflect, to
modernize, and readapt to an ever-changing environment”, she said in a recent interview
with The Markaz Review.
In a conversation between archaeologists, about the contemporaneity of the past, Gavin
Lucas notes that “some objects from the past irrupt into the present, others slip away
forever, others simply wait or pause–they may or may not emerge.” The message here is
that reordering the past of a present that still has not ceased while expecting to find
transparent answers is a futile task. Consequently, any attempt to reorganize a visual
history that was already ruptured as it was taking place and not only when it was being
transmitted archivally, as Helou has done in “Beyond Ruptures”, implies something
beyond simply remembering the past; namely, the unexplained persistence of certain
events and features into the present. This persistence of the fragmentary archive contains
an element of hope: the hope that the future will be different from the past, or rather, that
new possibilities will emerge to finally break the causal chain between past and present,
and restart something anew, as if it had never happened before.
“Beyond Ruptures, A Tentative Chronology,” runs at Sursock Museum, Beirut, May
26th, 2023, through February 11th, 2024.