Biography
Marwan Kassab-Bachi was born in Damascus to a Lebanese mother and a Syrian father. His father was a tradesman and enabled his six children a sheltered, comfortable upbringing. Marwan enrolled in Arabic literature at the University of Damascus in 1955 while taking private lessons in painting and drawing. He was a politically active student and was involved in the students’ organisation of the (then-oppositional) Ba‘ath party. Even after relocating to Berlin in 1957, he remained the delegate of the Ba‘athist students for the German-speaking countries until 1962.
The intellectual and artistic scene that Marwan was a part of in Syria was lively and dynamic, despite a politically instable environment, and artists were negotiating artistic identities, whether modern, national and more broadly Arab. He participated in a couple of group exhibitions in Damascus, such as the Third Exhibition of Fine Art at Damascus National Museum in 1952 and the Spring exhibition in 1955, where he won an award for the sculpture Al-ju‘ (Hunger). Among his friends were the brothers Adham and Naim Ismail, fellow artists and activists with whom he exhibited in 1957 at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut.
However, while Marwan was taking actively part in the cultural life in Syria both as an artist and activist, he dreamt of studying art in Paris. In 1957, he travelled to Berlin via Genoa and Munich, planning to continue his journey to Paris. But he became attracted to the city of Berlin and enrolled at the HdK (Hochschule der Künste), where he was accepted into the class of Professor Hann Trier, a leading figure in the German Informel movement. Gestural painting had largely come to dominate the international art world since the end of the Second World War, but for Marwan, it was a new encounter, having hitherto mostly been influenced by the European schools of Impressionism and Expressionism. Trier was highly influential during Marwan’s early years in Germany and encouraged him to find his own visual language. The few works from this period that still exist show a clear affinity to informal painting, but, like other young artists of the time, Marwan soon felt dissatisfied with this approach. The German artists, Eugen Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz, fellow students of Marwan, published their Pandemonium Manifesto in 1961 and 1962, in which they called for a new kind of art, that should be “aggressive, ugly and dirty”. In this artistic climate, Marwan also began to experiment with new forms, often giving his paintings the title Figuration, a title that emphasises the experimental aspect as something not yet finished. He finished his studies in 1962 and went on to pursue his career as an artist. To earn a living, he worked as a furrier’s assistant during the day and painted at night and on weekends. His works of this period bear witness to the hardship, to feelings of loneliness, of longing—both in the emotional and erotic sense—and of worries faced with the deteriorating political situation in the Arab world. His concern with the upheavals in his home region is witnessed by paintings and drawings from the 1960s of Arab political activists and intellectuals, such as Badr Shakir al-Sayab and Munif al-Razzaz as well as a series of works depicting Palestinian fidayeen dating from the early 1970s. His paintings of the fidayeen differ from other painters’ treatment of the motif by focusing on the human aspect of the figures, highlighting their youth and vulnerability and refraining from common accessories such as the gun or the kufiya. In most cases, Marwan’s fidayeen are only recognisable as such from the title of the works and in the German titles of the works, even such a hint can be missing.
Marwan’s first exhibition in Germany took place in 1967 at Galerie Springer in Berlin and from then on, he exhibited on a regular basis at various galleries and art institutions. In 1973, he received a scholarship at Cité des arts in Paris for one year and was finally able to immerse himself in studies of French painting. He became a guest professor at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1977–1979 and was appointed full professor at the same institution in 1980. In 1994 he was elected to the Akademie der Künste Berlin, an institution whose members of international artists are elected by a directing board. He died on 22 October 2016 in Berlin.
