Toward a Third Aesthetic: Painting the New Sensibility in Beirut, 1967-82

This doctoral dissertation traces the emergence of a new realism—a new sensibility—in the Arab world following the June 1967 War. Appropriating Edwar al-Kharrat’s retrospective literary term al-hassassiyya al-jadīda (The New Sensibility) from his 1991 book of essays by the same name, the dissertation presents the artistic responses to the 1967 defeat as a unified movement with a coherent program across the plastic arts, theater, literature, film, music, and print culture. A zeitgeist rather than a school, the New Sensibility cohered around Palestine, and the urgency in the aftermath of the defeat to represent reality anew. Aesthetically, the artists of this movement were bound by a shared search for realism as method rather than style. This realism was not mimetic imitation but construction: the conscious subjection of form and technique to social experience and relations. It incorporated rather than opposed modernist techniques such as abstraction. 

Within this region-wide movement, the dissertation focuses on three painters—Rafic Charaf (1932–2003), Aref El Rayess (1928–2005), and Paul Guiragossian (1926–1993) within monographic chapters. These artists were supported and canonized by the Lebanese state during the promising nation-building years between 1943 and 1964, before the onset of what Waddah Sharara identifies as the “civil rift”: the hardening of sectarianism and the intensification of an already existing structural fracture in society, more than a decade before the official start of the Lebanese Wars (1975–1990). At the same time, they were among the most eager to break with the very institutions that had secured their success, in the name of a future non-sectarian Lebanon that linked class struggle to the predicament of the Lebanese South and to the Palestinian Revolution waged from Lebanese soil after the 1969 Cairo Accords granted Palestinian forces autonomy to operate from Lebanese territory. Combining archival research, critical writings, and close visual analysis, the dissertation reconstructs the conditions these three artists negotiated to produce this sensibility, with the aim of cultivating a revolutionary (viewing) subject: The New Arab. 

Natasha Gasparian is an art historian, critic, and curator whose work focuses on modern and contemporary art in the Arab world. Based between Oxford and Beirut, she is pursuing a DPhil in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is the author of Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El Rayess: The Changing of Horses (Anthem Press, 2020), the first in-depth study of the landmark work The 5th of June (The Changing of Horses) and its critical reception. Her criticism has appeared in ASAP Art, Cultural Politics, and ARTMargins. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition Je suis inculte ! The Salon d’Automne and the National Canon with Ziad Kiblawi at the Sursock Museum in Beirut.