Biography
Through a career actively engaged in founding national art institutions, cultural pedagogy, and a civically oriented, domestic aesthetic, Omar Onsi helped to create the iconography of modern Lebanon. His rural landscapes are best known, but he also sketched out the national repertoire of ethnicities and local customs. More importantly, his early work contributed to conceptualizing the socially progressive role of the aesthetically receptive citizen. Onsi was well situated to become a paragon of this new approach to art. His father, Abd al-Rahman al-Unsi, practiced medicine, owned a pharmacy that provided a comfortable living, and dabbled in painting. His mother, Atiqa al-Salam, was also similarly cultured and hailed from one of the city's rising political families, neither beholden to the retreating Ottoman Sultanate nor beguiled by the occupying French. As the progeny of this union, Onsi combined cosmopolitan erudition, nationalist politics, Sufic sensibilities, and affordability in his art. His paintings sold very well during his lifetime. Many of his works were commissioned to represent Lebanon in government-sponsored events and institutions. Many have since become canonised in post-civil war Lebanon by an extensive retrospective in 1997 at the Sursock Museum.
Although he may have been introduced to the rudiments of drawing by his father, Onsi acknowledged Khalil Saleeby (1870-1928), a prominent Beiruti artist, as his first teacher. Saleeby began receiving the college student around 1920 at his atelier, located across the street from the American University of Beirut. Onsi's first published works date from this time. Another component of his training was his trekking with the Muslim Scouts, and early notebooks show how Onsi collected natural views (manathir at-tabiʿa) of the surrounding countryside, inhabitants, and fauna on such trips. From 1923 to 1927, Onsi served at the royal court in Amman as the instructor of Prince Abdallah's son Talal. He used the time to document the indigenous populations visually and ethnographically, reflecting an interest in the peoples and cultures of the region that he would later pursue in the Hula Marsh area (Palestine), Mount Saida (Syria), and among Bedouin populations residing in Beirut. In 1927, Onsi moved to Paris, where he took courses for the next three years at several Left Bank private academies that, unlike the École des Beaux-Arts, accepted non-French and female students, among them the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. During this time, he also became friendly with fellow expatriate artists Youssef al-Huwayyik (1883–1962) and Khalil Gibran (1883-1931). Onsi became well-versed in European art history and embraced it as a universal cultural heritage, remarking on Raphael and Da Vinci's achievements: "That is tradition. It is mine. It is yours. It became part of our life." Stylistically, he valorised naturalism, as represented by the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Although Onsi appreciated what he saw as the courage, liberation, and honesty of Impressionism, he rejected Surrealist, Expressionist, and abstract art alike for being elitist, subjective, and narcissistic.
Onsi's approach to art has often led to considerable misunderstanding. His work, viewed from the perspective of subsequent developments in Euro-American art, appears regressive or, at the very least, anachronistic. Viewing his work with a Eurocentric lens confuses it with Impressionism. Although Onsi shared a predilection for the plein-air picturesque with French Impressionists such as Renoir and Pissarro, he disdained the individualist philosophy motivating their work. He insisted on a "humbler," as he would put it, and ultimately pious (monotheistic, essentially Sufic) basis for his production. Onsi took from Renoir and Impressionism a weariness with convention and an emphasis on the artist's sensitivity to his material. In 1937, he informed one studio visitor: "I am completely in agreement with Renoir that when you approach Nature with theories, Nature will knock all down." The momentary and random worldly appearances that captivated the Impressionists and became their vehicle for emphasising the artist's unique vision were, for Onsi, manifestations of divinity—majestic yet often overlooked—which could reform the very being of the attentive viewer.
Onsi's theory of art gave "natural views" an ethical imperative in the rapidly urbanising, economically precarious, and socially explosive world he inhabited, under the challenges of French colonisation and Lebanese national independence. His artistic calling was "not to rival Creation" but to become "receptive and responsive" to it to render these views in portable, accessible, cherishable form for urban audiences, carving out new public and domestic spaces. Onsi focused on beauty in mundane, mute, remote, or disregarded scenes from the natural world (most notably in the area of Mount Lebanon, where he regularly summered, but also in the details of plant and animal life). He assiduously developed a technique to remove traces of himself as a rationalising being and to react unselfconsciously with sure draughtsmanship, direct brushwork, and heightened sensitivity to optical effects. He described his ideal technique as involving hours of observation before rapidly producing a graphic version. His earliest work always commenced with pencil drawing, but by the 1940s, he was comfortable working straight with colour in rapid juxtapositions that nonetheless insist on profundity and gravity. He also worked occasionally in clay and bronze; a few figurines remain in these media.
In contrast to his peers, Moustafa Farroukh (1901-1957) and Cesar Gemayel 1898-1958), Onsi has entered art history as an apolitical aesthete and a social recluse. Yet, besides his steady production for the modern, middle-class domicile, Onsi's constant contribution to art’s institutionalization and professionalization imprinted his vision of modern art on the new Lebanese republic and tied its reception to the story of Lebanese nationalism. Upon returning to Beirut in 1930, Onsi taught art at several new educational institutions, including the al-Kulliyya al-Shar`iyya Religious College (a branch of al-Azhar), where art education was to be part of "modern" religion. (He also gave private lessons). His artwork was regularly viewed publicly in solo and collective exhibitions in Beirut. He frequently participated in state-sponsored shows, both locally and internationally (for example, at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1937, in the Lebanese stand at the New York World's Fair in 1939, in the “Continental” exhibition in Cairo in 1942, and the “Modern Art in Lebanon” show in Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem in 1943). He also accepted government commissions for allegorical murals to decorate state institutions. In 1934, he helped to establish the Society of the Friends of Arts, which held an annual national salon titled “The Friends of the Arts Salon” or "Salon des Amis des Arts". Onsi published his views on art in the local press and, especially during the early years of the founding of the Lebanese Republic, lectured to local organizations for intellectual and social development, such as the Cénacle Libanais (1947) and the Arab Cultural Club (1948). He was a co-founder of the Lebanese Artists Association — Painters and Sculptors in 1957, and when the Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock Museum of the Beirut Municipality was founded in 1960, he was appointed a board member.
In the 1940s and 50s, Onsi continued to travel internationally, and his work was shown in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Egypt. In 1969, he died of stomach cancer. His impact persisted in the post-war reconstruction period through a monumental retrospective held at the Sursock Museum in 1997.
