Biography
Marcel Salinas, or Laurent Marcel Salinas as he was known while a young man in Egypt, was a key member of the Art et Liberté Art in Egypt and an active member of the Atelier d’Alexandrie: Groupement d’Artistes et d’Ecrivains, or “l’Atelier” Alexandria Atelier in the 1940s and early 1950s. Remembered today in part for his success translating original works of art by figures such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec into lithographic prints, Salinas was a prolific painter in his own right. Following his early attraction to Surrealism in the 1940s and a short-lived period in the 1950s when he experimented with abstraction, Salinas became a staunch defender of André Lhote’s (1885– 1962) theory of the existence of eternal universal aesthetic laws to which all artists and works of art are beholden. According to Lhote, this approach did not represent a return to the model of academic art dominant in 18th-century France but rather an “academy without academicism”: a sentiment that resonated powerfully with Salinas’s interest in positioning himself within the horizon of French avant-garde movements of the period, as well as the long durée of art history.
Raised in a monied milieu that released him from the pressures of making a living, Salinas found himself penniless in Paris in 1955, following his family’s sudden loss of fortunes after the 1952 Free Officers coup, or Revolution. In 1958, Salinas worked as a lithographer in some of Paris’s best-known workshops, eventually earning a reputation as an expert printmaker and winning prestigious commissions. Born in a country that ultimately rejected him because he was seen as a member of a foreign, colonial-era elite, he led a peripatetic life moving between Alexandria, Cairo, Brussels, Paris, New York City, and St. Louis, Missouri. Salinas was a beloved member of artistic circles in these cities, and he was admired for his careful eye and his support of friends’ work. Twice, significant caches of his work disappeared or were partially destroyed. The first time was when his mother moved homes in Alexandria, and the second in 1993 when a gallery in Missouri that had been storing his work was flooded.
Salinas was born an only child in Alexandria on April 9, 1913, to a French-born mother (Julia Simone) and an Italian father (Marcel Salinas-Agostini), a trial lawyer. In 1932, his parents divorced, and his mother remarried a lawyer named Abramino Hazan; in doing so, she converted from Catholicism to Judaism. Salinas grew up in the culturally vibrant milieu of well-to-do expatriate interwar Alexandria. He spoke English and French fluently and, to a lesser extent, Italian, Greek, and Arabic. His polyglotism reflected the rich linguistic diversity of a city with large populations of Italian, French, British, and Greek residents, as well as attesting to the marginalisation of Arabs amongst the social elite. In the late 1920s, he attended high school at the French Catholic Académie du Collège Sainte Catherine, and his interest in literature defined his first forays into the cultural scene. Between 1927 and 1929, he participated in publishing his high school literary journal Le Lotus. In the early 1930s, he connected with the literary and cultural group “Les Essayistes,” contributing to the group’s publication, Un Effort. In a remarkable text published in the journal in 1932, Salinas anticipated the agenda behind the Art et Liberté group established seven years later. In it, he argued for the need to make a clean break from the past and embrace a new set of values; he identified Nietzsche and Freud as the guiding lights of this movement.
After graduating from secondary school in Alexandria, Salinas left to study law at the Université d’Aix-Marseille (University of Aix-Marseille) in France and subsequently returned to Alexandria to work at his stepfather’s law firm. However, by 1937, Salinas had decided to abandon law and focus solely on his art despite not having received a formal education in the subject. He enrolled in André Lhote’s famous Parisian Atelier—Académie André Lhote, studying with the artist on and off from 1937 to 1939 in Paris and Mirmande, a village in the Drôme, southeast of France, in which Lhote had established a field academy for his students in 1926.
While few works from this period survive, the artist’s extant sketchbooks from the late 1930s suggest he was experimenting with a style of Cubism influenced by Lhote and applied to subjects and scenes he encountered in Egypt. In a review of a 1945 exhibition of artists associated with the School of Paris, Salinas outlined his understanding of Cubism as a movement that privileged the “plastic” qualities of the work of art over its relationship to representation. Salinas’s reading echoed Lhote’s teachings in which a unified composition determined form and colour. Lhote linked this sense of unity and monumentality—the signs of a successful composition—to the arabesque: a rhythmic combination of straight and curved lines that established the foundations of the work. These principles continued to guide much of Salinas’s work for the remainder of his career, and continued to refine the landscapes, nudes, and still-life paintings to which he returned.
Upon his return to Egypt, Salinas became active in two of Egypt’s most important artistic groups of the period: the Alexandria Atelier (Atelier d’Alexandrie: Groupement d’Artistes et d’Ecrivains) (est. January 1935) and the Art and Liberty group (Art et Liberté, or Jama’at al-Fann wa-l-Hurriya) (est. January 1939). A small but influential group of artists and writers coalesced around the Alexandria Atelier, including the artist Mohammed Naghi (1888–1956), who had met and befriended Lhote in Paris in 1927. Lhote’s significance to the group and his close relationship with Naghi likely informed Salinas’s interest in studying with the artist. Salinas participated in the life of the Atelier until he emigrated to Paris in 1955. The Atelier held his first solo exhibition in 1946. The same year, he designed costumes for an Atelier production of Jean Racine’s Le Manteau d’Arlequin Esther at the Theatre Alhambra, Alexandria. The year he left for Paris, Salinas served on the organising committee for the exhibition titled Le Portrait à Alexandrie dans les collections particulières hosted by the Alexandria Atelier and the group Amitiés Francaises d’Alexandrie. The latter, established before the Atelier, was an important cultural hub for Francophone Alexandrians. The group hosted exhibitions and talks by French and Egyptian artists and intellectuals in the early twentieth century. It facilitated visits to the city by some well-known figures in the arts, such as Lhote. Salinas served as the group’s Secretary in the early 1950s.
However, it was the Essayistes and the Art and Liberty group that Salinas first reconnected with upon his return from studying with Lhote in France. He signed the December 1938 manifesto titled Long Live Degenerate Art, which laid out the group’s vision for an “independent art” free of the dictates of political ideology or academic tradition. The group was formally founded in January 1939 and would publish a series of journals and bulletins in French and Arabic; Salinas contributed to the group’s Francophone Don Quichotte (1939–40). While the group included artists working in various styles, the influence of Bretonian Surrealism was traceable in many of the artists’ works and their approach to exhibition-making. In 1941, Salinas collaborated with the group’s founder, Georges Henein, to organise the second exhibition of Independent Art in Cairo. The exhibition stunned visitors with its intentionally disorienting design resembling a maze, its performative elements, and works that challenged most visitors’ understandings of art. It was understood as a class critique or as “anti-bourgeois” by many of its reviewers. Salinas’s contributions to the exhibition included Surrealist paintings and what one reviewer referred to as “collages, papier collés, montages [assemblages].” Despite his intensive engagement with the group, Salinas seems to have largely discounted this relatively brief period of artistic experimentation, omitting most mentions of his Surrealist phase in later accounts of his career.
After relocating to Paris, Salinas began working at the lithography workshop Imprimerie Mourlot in 1958. He also created editions for Artès, Jean de Bonnot, and Arnaud de Vesgre in France. In the United States, he worked as a lithographer for Associated American Artists, Art of All Nations, Collectors Guild, John Murray Barton Associates, and Ed Weston Graphics. In 1974, he began collaborating with Jack and Carolyne Solomon of Circle Fine Art Galleries in an advisory capacity, recommending artists for exhibition at the galleries. He would continue in this role for decades.
Some of the highlights of Salinas’s career involved his collaborations with two of the best-known artists of the twentieth century. In 1969, the French publisher Editions Cercle d’Art and New York publisher Harry Abrams approached him to produce lithographs of Picasso’s series of 29 oil paintings on corrugated cardboard. The work took three years to complete and was warmly received by Picasso, whose heirs later chose Salinas to supervise the creation of dozens of additional lithographs. From 1976 to 1978, Salinas worked with Dalí to create limited-edition lithographs based on a set of designs for tarot cards that Dalí had been commissioned to produce for the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die.
Salinas’s talents as a printmaker also attracted the attention of the estate of Henri Toulouse Lautrec. In 1974, J. Robert LeShufy—co-founder of the Collector’s Guild in New York—commissioned Salinas to create lithographs of three paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec in the collection of the Musee d’Albi. In 1992, the artist’s estate commissioned Salinas to produce another two lithographs of paintings by the artist, including At The Moulin Rouge, The Dance (1889–90) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Clown Cha-U-Kao (1895) from the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur, Switzerland.
In 1985, Salinas received a commission from Jack Scharr, Director of Fine Art Limited, Chesterfield, Missouri, to create a body of work commemorating the centennial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. He produced a series of paintings of immigrants at Ellis Island, each representing a distinct nationality. In 1993, much of his work that had been stored with the gallery in Chesterfield was partially destroyed by flooding. He moved to St. Louis in 1995 to work on conserving those works that could be salvaged, ultimately passing away there in 2010.
Salinas spent most of his life living and working outside of Egypt and was a passionate and prolific painter in his own right. Today, however, he is best remembered for his involvement with the Art and Liberty Group in Cairo and for his skills in recreating unique works of art in the reproducible medium of lithography.
