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"Deeply researched and beautifully written, this book is a pleasure to read. Lenssen's vivid, incisive, and powerful analyses of artworks shine. The aesthetic and intellectual encounters of Arab and European artists come alive in this timely and compelling addition to scholarship on global modern and contemporary art."—Sonal Khullar, author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990
"Lenssen has produced one of the most exciting examinations of modern Arab art in decades. The result is an invaluable contribution not only to those interested in Syrian art but in the Global South’s own experience with the promises and discontents of modernism."—Stephen Sheehi, author of Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910
"Beautiful Agitation provides a groundbreaking account of art making in a temporally and geographically 'expanded' Syria, expertly guiding us to understand the complex mix of transnational exchange, local tradition, spiritual thinking, and political aspiration at the core of Syrian modernism. Along the way, Lenssen creates a new lens to see the politics and potentialities of abstract painting tout court. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and deftly argued with both clarity and wit, the book’s contributions cannot be underestimated."—Hannah Feldman, Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University
"This is the first and only book in English (and I believe in French and Arabic as well) to examine Syrian painting in the twentieth century comprehensively. Beautiful Agitation is also an exemplary work of global art history—truly transnational in its scope, framework, sources, and analysis."—Heghnar Watenpaugh, author of The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Text
Introduction
1. Arab Romantics: Kahlil Gibran and the Awakening Storm
2. Colonial Syria: Finding Life within Culture
3. Popular Politics: Adham Ismail and the Aesthetics of Revival
4. National Excavation: Fateh al-Moudarres and the Unholy Image
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Illustrations
Index
About the author
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Summary
In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.
Additional text
"Beautiful Agitation operates as an essential act of recuperation, providing precious evidence that modernist narratives need not follow presumptions of originality, exclusive ownership, or authenticity. Certainly, it will prove invaluable to all art historians and art lovers who wish to go below the surface."
