by Jon Lackman | 17 December 2010 | Books, Islamic, Modern, Museums
Qatar has just opened Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. Before its opening Meris Lutz wrote in The Los Angeles Times:
It will also serve as a research center, an exciting prospect for the regional arts community … The inaugural exhibition, titled, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art,” will include works culled from Mathaf’s permanent collection of over 6,000 pieces, all of which were donated from Sheik Hassan’s private collection. “We are not trying to present some sort of new canon,” Wassan al-Khudairi, acting director and chief curator of Mathaf, told Babylon & Beyond. “This is why we stress multiple modernities and multiple narratives.” … Mathaf is one of several major art institutions that have opened or will open in the next few years in Qatar and the neighboring United Arab Emirates.
A number of recent books attempt to survey modern and contemporary art in the Middle East. Hossein Amirsadeghi, Salwa Mikdadi, Nada M. Shabout have edited New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. Jérôme Sans has written The Arab World … Now. I haven’t yet had a chance to peruse those two, alas. Also, businessman and “patron of the arts” Saab Eigner, an adviser to the British Museum’s 2006 show Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East, has just published Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran. In his preface, Eigner writes:
Art and artists need benefactors, and it is encouraging to see such a relationship developing in the Middle East … There remains, however, a lack of sufficent expertise, courses and research about modern art of the Arab world and Iran, reflecting the absence of this subject from the curricula of history of art departments in many of the leading universities around the world … [This book] is intended as a tribute to the many artists of the region, who have kept alive an avant-garde culture, even when this has sadly required personal sacrifices, including persecution and exile … In a world filled with misunderstanding, there can be nothing more fulfilling than to engage – even in a small way – in dispelling some of the stereotypes and prejudices that cloud people’s judgement.
Each chapter bears a short introduction followed by a plethora of illustrations, each image receiving a paragraph of explication. The chapters are “Sacred Scripture,” “Literature,” “Music and Performance,” “Politics, Conflict and War,” “History and Identity,” “Portraiture and the Body,” and “Nature and the Land.” Eigner writes, “The book’s thematic approach will, it is hoped, show how modern and contemporary art has reflected the strong cultural and religious ties that link these various countries.”
