Biography
Cesar Gemayel is recognised as one of the pioneers of Lebanese modernism. Considered a member of the second generation of modern Lebanese painters, Gemayel marks a transition from the commissioned academic portraits of his predecessors to the portrayal of landscapes, nudes, and still life in oil, watercolour, and pastel. His work is characterised by experimentation with the light, colour, and loose brushstrokes associated with French impressionism.
Born in the village of 'Ain al-Touffaha, near Bikfaya, Gemayel initially sought to continue the family business by studying pharmacology at the American University of Beirut. While a student, Gemayel apprenticed in the atelier of the Lebanese painter Khalil Saleeby (1870–1928), who was well known for his portraits and nudes painted with an impressionist focus on light. In 1927, Gemayel travelled to Paris, where he lived for three years, to continue his artistic development at the Académie Julien. During this period, Gemayel developed an admiration for the work of the impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919).
In 1930, Gemayel returned to Beirut and dedicated himself to his art. In addition to a prolific body of work on paper, Gemayel made substantial contributions to the development in Lebanon of infrastructure for the visual arts as a founding member of the Committee of Friends of the National Museums and Archaeological Sites (est. 1923) and through his teaching at L'Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts’ Department of Art and Architecture, which he co-founded with Alexis Boutros (1915-1979) in 1943, five years after the establishment of the institution by Boutros in 1937.
The early influence of Khalil Saleeby on Gemayel is evident throughout the younger artist's body of work—from his choice of subject matter to the light colours of his palette and visible, loose brushstroke. Himself a student of both the American impressionist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and Renoir, Saleeby earned a reputation as a social portraitist who worked in the manner of the impressionists: the application of paint directly onto the canvas in short, thick brushstrokes. Like Renoir and Saleeby, Gemayel was fascinated with the depiction of the female nude, an essential foundation of academic training. Similarly, Gemayel's own extraordinary body of nudes in oil, pastel, and watercolour documents a sustained experimentation with the effects of light-infused and rhythmic brushstrokes.
A substantial body of landscapes accompanies Gemayel's figural work and still lives that document the artist's creativity and technical versatility. Painting in various degrees of abstraction, Gemayel captured Lebanon's horizons, agriculture, and architecture. Equally modernist in their abstraction are Gemayel's still-life paintings. In particular, a series of vases overflowing with vibrant flowers set against a background built up through layered brushstrokes. In certain canvases, the petals and leaves of the flowers themselves dissolve into a dynamic array of patterned brushstrokes. Stretching out to the edge of the canvas, Gemayel's flowers hover between a three-dimensional painted reality and a two-dimensional patterned surface.
Throughout his career, Gemayel has exhibited abroad and in Lebanon, regularly showing at the Lebanese Parliament and the UNESCO building in Beirut. He received first prize at the Exposition Coloniale in Paris in 1931 and was later presented with the Lebanese National Order of the Cedar. After his premature death due to a heart attack in 1958, the Sursock Museum in Beirut honoured Gemayel's memory at the 1964 Salon d'Automne.
