Who's Who 

   Caza - Zgharta

Saliba Douayhi   1912 – 1994

Saliba Douayhi was born in Ehden the 14^th of September 1912 and that’s why he was named Saliba. September 14 is the day of the Holy Cross (Salib). He went to “Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes” school in Zgharta where he got his education. During this time Saliba was making paintings of the pictures in his books.

From 1928 to 1932 he began his career in the workshop of painter Habib Srour. For two years Saliba worked in Srour's studio learning the basic techniques of drawing and painting the human form, using plaster casts and reproductions as models. He also assisted Srour in his large church murals. He flew then to Paris in 1932 and was accepted in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts and graduated in the year 1936. He went back to Lebanon in1937.

The Patriarch Antoun Arida recommended Saliba to make the paintings on the walls and ceiling of the church of Diman. During the forties Saliba kept painting the beautiful scenery of Lebanon’s mountains and valleys.

In 1950 he went to the United States and began a new era in his art. He stayed in New York 25 years during which he came to Lebanon twice (in 1956 for the 27 paintings for St. John church in Zgharta and in 1972 For the Cathedral Of Aanaya where for the first time he used the stained-glass technique). In 1956 he recieved the Medal of High Honor from President Camille Chamoun.

He spent in London four years (1982 – 1986) where he got married. He went back to Paris in1989 then back to New York where he died on Friday 21 January 1994.

He got an award from Philadelphia Academy of Beaux Arts in 1968 and the Golden Medal of the Italian Academy of Arts and Works in 1980. He got his name mentioned in the Who’s Who book in the U.S.

Saliba Douaihy

...The process of distillation and refinement through which Douaihy's painting evolved was for him a challenging one. Part of the process was, of course, intellectual and , he says, may have been stimulated by Immanuel Kant. He read the work of the German philosopher while taking a course in aesthetics under Professor Eugen Kollman at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1961. From Kant he derived an impetus to find the sublime, to reduce all elements to their most basic form. This was not a simple concept for him to translate into hi painting. His thorough indoctrination in academic theories and techniques presented a serious obstacle. He found it difficult to free himself immediately from these long-standing habits and to apply paint in one solid color and as a flat plane. Even in abstract expressionism the spontaneous manipulation of the brush or painting tool was intrinsic to the creative process. It was the work of Josef Albers, he said, and Japanese prints that were the major factors in helping him to arrive at the total flatness he wanted.

The canvases of the 'sixties were, therefore, the result of this concentrated experimentation and search for absolute simplification of both form and color. But at the same time Douaihy sought "flatness", he saw the concept of "infinite space" as the basis of, and ultimate source for, his compositions.

...It was in the 'sixties that Saliba Douaihy began to experience in New York a different sort of recognition - one that was brought about by his new direction and the innovation of his style. By the middle of the decade the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the David Rockefeller Collection had acquired examples of his work. In 1966 the Contemporaries Gallery gave him a one-man show, which was favorably reviewed by the critics.

Below Saliba and his daughter

The reviewers of his 1966 Contemporaries Gallery exhibition certainly saw his painting as highly successful in their own terms and, as well, took cognizance of Douaihy's cultural heritage. John Gruen of the New York Herald Tribune (March 12, 1966) commented:

These handsome abstractions ... consist of beautifully composed color planes which, through a subtle play of value intensities, create the illusion of collage. The illusion is further abetted by a torn-edge relationship occurring from shape to shape. Disciplined in the extreme, the work also exudes a sultry, sensuous atmosphere.

Charlotte Willard in a New York Post (March 20, 1966) review said of his show:

Douaihy offers us the fruit of years of experiment and work with the conundrums of color. First, as an artist using stained glass, later as an abstract expressionist, he has presently resolved his past experience in a kind of Near East hard-edge painting.

The highly sophisticated colors of Persia, the glow of stained Glass, the emotional overtones of expressionism come through to us from his paintings. His cavasses break away from the anonymous formulations of most of the hard-edge work of today by his interruptions of his geometric line with unexpected projections, sensuous curves, original forms. With a minimum of flat colors, he has been able to create a harmony and order, moving and motionless where the near and far meet in equilibrium.

                                                                                                      The Art of Saliba Douaihy

                                                                                                          Moussa M. Domit

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