Biography
Early Life and Artistic Career Debut
Marie Chiha Hadad was born in 1889 in Bmekkine, Lebanon, into a family from the Levantine financial-mercantile elite. Her father, Antoine Chiha, a Chaldean Catholic of Iraqi origin, had established one of Beirut’s leading banks, in partnership with her mother’s relatives, the influential Pharaons, who hailed from Syria. Hadad grew up in Beirut, where she attended the exclusive, all-girls, French-language Catholic school Collège Notre-Dame des Sœurs de Nazareth, graduating in 1908. She married Georges Hadad, whose surname she would adopt professionally, in 1916.
Hadad began painting independently in the mid-1920s, following the early years of raising three daughters. She subsequently trained under Polish painter Jan Kober (1890– c. 1980), a graduate of Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts active in the Levant between approximately 1925 and 1935, where he painted landscapes and society portraits. During his visits to Beirut, Kober gave art lessons to women from the Lebanese elite and the French Mandate authorities' circles. Several of them participated in public exhibitions as amateurs, but few became professional artists, as prevailing social attitudes considered such a path too unconventional or incompatible with traditional gender roles. However, these perceptions were gradually changing among the Lebanese urban elite to whom Hadad belonged. Around 1930, several women from this milieu started entering traditionally male-dominated fields such as medicine, law, and the arts. Hadad, alongside a few other female painters, such as Blanche Lohéac Ammoun (1912–2011), established successful professional artistic careers. Hadad, in fact, not only enjoyed the support of her milieu, but her husband also secured her exhibition opportunities and supervised their logistics.
Hadad was among the first artists to stage a widely reported personal exhibition in Beirut, following only a few comparable precedents by the likes of Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957) and Omar Onsi (1901–1969). Her December 1933 debut took place in the ballroom of the luxury Saint Georges Hotel, under the patronage of French High Commissioner Damien de Martel. While it was then not unusual for artists to exhibit in non-specialised locations—since the city lacked commercial galleries and art museums—Hadad's access to such a high-profile venue and official endorsement reflects the connections afforded by her family's social standing.
Artistic Approach and Subject Matter
Hadad's body of work is distinguished by a focus on portraiture and scenes of the daily life of individuals who lived outside the mainstream of Lebanese urban society, such as bedouins, highlanders, and Mount Lebanon villagers, whom she depicted with an approach informed by early 20th-century European Modernism. Eschewing ethnographical detail, Hadad emphasised the character traits of the individuals she painted by framing them in ways that heighten intimacy, using strong outlines to give them a sculptural presence, and drawing attention to their direct, often unflinching, gazes. Instead of adhering to academic exactitude in detail and perspective, she simplified shapes, giving them rounded contours with no sharp angles, and compressed spatial depth, yet without entirely abandoning modelling. Hadad furthermore moved away from a descriptive treatment of colour: she usually built her compositions with dominant earthy and dark tones, which she contrasted with accents of non-naturalistic colours, such as saturated reds, blues, and purples, used as an expressive device in a manner that echoes the Fauves.
This approach carries to the more occasional themes of Hadad's oeuvre, which include portraits of her relatives and friends, still lifes, and female nudes —an unprecedented subject for a woman painter in Beirut. She also painted several landscapes of Mount Lebanon villages, depicting them as a land suspended in time and unaffected by modernity. In addition to her artistic practice, Hadad published a collection of short stories, Les Heures libanaises (The Lebanese Hours), in 1937, which she illustrated with reproductions of her paintings.
Exhibitions and Critical Reception
Hadad continued exhibiting in Beirut throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, notably participating in collective exhibitions modelled after the Salon de Paris, organised by the Association des Amis des Arts in 1939 and 1940. She was among the two dozen artists selected to represent Lebanon at the New York World's Fair in 1939, as part of the national pavilion curated by poet and entrepreneur Charles Corm (1894–1963). There, she showed a scene with two Lebanese women making bread, a painting commissioned to illustrate traditional rural activities.
Hadad's visibility extended to Paris, where she gained a reputation that few of her Lebanese peers attained. Influential French critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943), a supporter of Modernist art known for coining the term 'Fauves,' became a personal friend of Hadad's; he wrote the prefaces to the pamphlets of her exhibitions in Paris and Beirut, and made sure all her showings in the French capital were mentioned in the press. Between 1933 and 1939, she had several solo shows in high-profile galleries, such as the highly respected Galerie Bernheim. She regularly exhibited her paintings at the Salon d'Automne, at the Grand Palais. The Musée du Jeu de Paume acquired one of her works, a portrait of a Lebanese man, in 1934.
Hadad’s critical success in France echoed the praise for her works in Beirut. During the French Mandate period, the city’s art scene was dominated by figurative painting inspired by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as exemplified by the landscapes of artists such as Farroukh, Onsi, and César Gemayel (1898–1958). Hadad’s works, which diverged from these prevalent themes and styles, were nevertheless consistently met with laudatory reviews. The local press considered her one of the leading painters of the time and commended her ability to balance her responsibilities as a wife and mother with her demanding creative professional activity.
Reviews of Hadad's exhibitions frequently focused on her paintings of bedouins, which they discussed with words loaded with prejudice. Critics expressed simultaneous fascination and disdain towards Hadad’s subjects, whose semi-nomadic mode of living, attire, and customs did not conform to the social norms of the art-going public in Paris and Beirut. The bedouin women that Hadad painted were, in particular, construed as dangerously seductive and a threat to morality. Unlike affluent women from Paris and Beirut who followed European fashion, bedouin women wore embroidered long-sleeved dresses, braided their hair, tattooed their hands and faces with henna, lined their eyes with kohl, and adorned their faces with gold jewellery. Moreover, their freedom of movement between rural areas such as the Beqaa valley and Beirut, where they would go door-to-door selling culinary and medicinal herbs, went against social conventions of female behaviour.
Later Life and Retirement from Art
Hadad was a dedicated follower of Daheshism, a spiritual movement founded in 1942 by writer and mystic Dr. Dahesh (1909–1984). Born Salim Moussa Achi, he developed a doctrine that included a belief in reincarnation, claimed to perform miracles, and managed to sway several figures of the Lebanese mercantile elite. His influence, along with his publications that denounced political corruption, alarmed Lebanon's religious and political establishment.
This created a rift between the Hadads, on the one hand, and Lebanese President Bechara el-Khoury (1890–1964), who was Hadad's brother-in-law, and his éminence grise, Hadad's brother, political thinker and banker Michel Chiha (1891–1954), on the other.
In 1944, Dahesh was imprisoned, stripped of his Lebanese nationality, and exiled. Although she was socially ostracised and faced legal issues in connection with his arrest, Hadad remained loyal to Dahesh and continued to defend him in interviews and letters to the United Nations.
Hadad retired from public life in 1945, after the death of her daughter, Magda, and passed away in 1973 in Beirut.
