Sunday's Read: Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics

Shabout, Nada. Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics. (University Press of Florida, 2007)



In Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007), Nada Shabout takes on the question of whether the contemporary (twentieth century) art under review is “Arab art” or that deeply nebulous category “Islamic art.” She contends that “Arab art” – and here she is referring to easel painting – is quintessentially modern, the result of the political reorderings of the twentieth century. This twentieth century art, produced during the rise of nationalisms by artists trained in the artistic traditions of both the Ottomans and the Western schools was, Shabout argues, consciously innovative. Artists felt free to borrow from Islamic, Western, or national themes and forms to create a new Arab aesthetic, an expression of burgeoning, independent identities. Thus, for example, the abstraction that characterized the 1950s and 1960s was an expression of pan-Arabism. Shabout then does a sustained analysis of hurufiyya, or the use by contemporary artists of Arabic letters in their work. She distinguishes this trend from traditional Islamic calligraphy, though she does (very briefly) sketch its historical connections with medieval mystic Fadlallah Astarabadi’s Sufi concept of ilm al-huruf (the ability to discern the letters of the Arabic alphabet in forms and sounds, thus “reading” the work of God anywhere and everywhere). (As an aside, I had wondered about the possible relationship between ilm al-huruf and calligraphy in the work of some Tunisian installation art with explicit Sufi references to the power of letters, though this is clearly more directly related to contemporary Hurufism than much of the art Shabout analyzes.)