George Daoud Corm

Abstract

Georges D. Corm was a prominent Lebanese painter and writer who trained in Paris. A key figure in Lebanon's cultural development, he was renowned for portraits, nudes, and landscapes. Evolving from his father's academic style, his work later featured "spiritual landscapes." In both his artwork and writings, Corm expressed a dedication to the classical tradition of European humanism and Christian ethics.

Biography

The son of painter Daoud Corm, Georges D. Corm was born into an artistic family and expressed an equal interest in painting and writing. Although he published his first poem in 1915, Corm eventually chose to train as a professional visual artist, attending the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1919 to 1921. Upon his return to Beirut, Corm received immediate recognition for his paintings, having been honored with the Gold Medal at the 1921 Beirut International Fair. A year later, he won a competition for his proposal for the Lebanese Order of Merit given by the government.

Devoted to Lebanon and its cultural enrichment as a nascent nation, Corm worked diligently to promote the arts. Between 1922 and 1928, he served as a founding member of the committee for the Museum of Antiquities, which would eventually become the National Museum of Beirut in 1942. Corm also served as a jury member for both the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music and Committee for the Lebanese National Anthem, and as secretary for the 1926 International Archeological Congress in Beirut.

In 1929, with his marriage to Marie Bekhyt, Corm left Beirut to live for a while in Egypt, first in Alexandria and later in Cairo. The married couple returned in 1956 to Beirut, by which time recognition of Corm’s artistic accomplishment was both local and international. Corm had become an officer of the Academy of France in 1936 and was elected as an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1955. He became an Officer of the Lebanese National Order of the Cedar in 1958 and received numerous awards and honors throughout his lifetime.

Corm's paintings, predominantly oil on canvas and pastel on paper, document the importance of portraiture in Lebanon throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a market which his father, painter Daoud Corm, had worked to establish. The subjects of George Corm's portraits range from royalty and figures in high society who commissioned his work to everyday people, including several fellaheen (peasants). He also completed a significant number of self-portraits, the most interesting of which capture Corm in his position as a painter and document an increasing awareness of the social status of the artist in twentieth-century Lebanon.

In many ways, Corm's academic style recalls the work of his father, particularly in those pieces in which the artist sets the figure against a simple, darkly shaded background. However, Corm's formal language also moves away from the conventions of the previous generation, as witnessed in his use of a lighter palette and looser brushwork. Such aesthetic shifts are most evident in Corm's still life and landscapes. Moreover, Corm's oeuvre includes a substantial number of nudes, a staple of European academic painting and a genre favored by this generation of Lebanese artists, including Corm's great contemporary, the painter César Gemayel (1898 - 1958). Corm's most distinctive work is in the genre of landscape. In addition to a series of more conventional landscapes of Lebanon's mountain ranges and coastline, Corm began during the early fifties to experiment with landscapes infused with spirituality, otherworldliness, and hidden symbolism.

Throughout his career as a painter, Corm continued to write and publish poetry, essays, and criticism. In 1966, he published his most well-known piece, Essai sur l'art et la civilization de ce temps, in which Corm articulates an aesthetic position during a radically divided Cold War culture. Critical of both American consumerism and Marxist Communism, Corm advocates a return to a classical European tradition of humanism, rooted in Christian ethics. Corm's deep commitment to humanism and Christianity is evident in his paintings, which consistently feature the human figure as well as what critics have termed "paysages d'âme" (spiritual landscapes).

Corm exhibited extensively in Beirut and Europe and participated in the 1966 Spring Salon in Paris. He died in Beirut on December 13, 1971. He was honored with a retrospective of his work in 1981 at the

Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture in Beirut, and in 2013, with the exhibition, Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm at the American University of Beirut Art Gallery.

Bibliography

Fani, Michel. "Corm, Georges," Dictionnaire de la Peinture au Liban (Paris: Editions de L'Escalier), 81-83.
Octavian Esanu, Curatorial Statement for "Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm." Accessed January 8, 2014. http://www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/current/Pages/humanism.aspx.
"George Corm," in Lebanon-The Artist's View, 200 Years of Lebanese Painting (London: British Lebanese Association, 1989), 105-106.
"George Corm." Accessed January 2, 2014. http://www.onefineart.com/en/artists/georgesdcorm/index_en.shtml.
"Profiles: Collecting in Lebanon—Georges Corm." Accessed January 2, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ4LmiXtfw4.

Further Reading

Corm, Georges D. Essai sur l'art et la civilization de ce temps. Beirut, 1966.
Corm, Georges G. ed. Georges Daoud Corm, Peintre et Portraitiste Libanais, 1893-1971. Beirut, 1981.
Chahine, Richard. One Hundred Years of Plastic Arts in Lebanon, 1880-1980, vols. I&II. (Beirut: Chahine Gallery, 1980), 7.
Naef, Silvia. A la recherche d'une modernité arabe: l'évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak. Genève: Slatkine, 1996.