On Leila Nseir: Beyond Social & Artistic Conventions

Introduction

The recent publication of the personal archive of Leila Nseir (1941-2023) by the Atassi Foundation, as part of their Modern Art of Syria Archive (MASA) project, offers an insight into her work and the evolution of her visual, emotional and cultural consciousness, and as well as her social and artistic critical awareness. The personal archive was made possible thanks to Ahmad Kasha (b.1995), a young Syrian artist who, in 2004, began to help Leila Nseir collect and preserve her personal archive, a project they pursued for the last decade of her life. 

Leila Nseir’s career resists traditional readings. She moved freely between poetry, painting and sculpture, and in both her personal life and art would rebel against society’s expectations, be it norms observed within her immediate family, or those that governed the wider artistic circles in which she moved. Firstly, Nseir often left her work untitled and undated, particularly those pieces that depicted human suffering. This was principally because, given their subject matter, she believed they should stand outside time and place,¹ but also because she wanted to distance her work from the frameworks imposed by artistic historical discourse and permit a greater freedom of interpretation. In one interview, when asked why she didn’t title some of her works, Nseir said: “I feel that a name lays a trap. In my view, it is better to be able to read a work from multiple perspectives and keep away from literary signifiers and forms.”² Secondly, she frequently changed technique and approach – a flexibility that stemmed from her strong commitment to experimentation³ – and remained indifferent to the criticism she received in the press as a result. She “experimented”, as she described it, with realist romanticism, surrealism, expressionism and abstract expressionism, though never passed through distinct and discrete phases, instead moving back and forth between them. This fluidity, and the lack of information about some of her work, makes it difficult to develop a chronology of her artistic production. 

In light of this, any reflection of Nseir’s work must begin with an analysis of her politically committed perspective, in particular its two main foundations: a profound belief in humanist concerns and a rejection of conflict, as well as her interest in feminist thought. Humanity and human suffering in the form of war, hunger and gender persecution were the generative core of her practice as an artist. Working from interviews with Nseir, this Essay will attempt to shed light on the most important elements of her career, from historical influence to personal motivation and artistic contacts, in order to elucidate the aesthetic and philosophical principals and concepts that, together with the events she lived through, helped form her identity as an artist.

Human Suffering & Early Artistic Influences

Born in the coastal city of Latakia, Leila Nseir came into a world of social inequality and poverty. Her father, Mousa Nseir, was a senior official, a kaymakam, and his work required him to travel with his family throughout Syria. Nseir spent periods of her childhood in northern Syria, near the town of Afrin in the isolated mountain village of Rajo, where she observed rural life and lived in nature. In interviews, she frequently mentioned how affected she was by the sight of the village children going barefoot to school, or witnessing the women constantly at work, steadfast and resilient. 

Literature was the first of the arts to capture her attention. Thanks to her mother, Wadia Rabahiya, she was exposed to a wide variety of Western and Arabic classics, from Shakespeare and Baudelaire to Taha Hussein and Gibran Khalil Gibran, and openly credited her mother with introducing her to art. During her adolescence, Nseir was profoundly affected by the 1956 Tripartite Aggression (otherwise known as the Suez Crisis), an event whose influence was palpably felt in Syria, since the Syrian army assisted Egypt, and as a result many Syrian soldiers returned wounded from the front. As a volunteer nurse in public hospitals, Nseir witnessed this firsthand. After graduating from high school with distinction, Nseir received a grant from the United Arab Republic (at that time, Egypt and Syria were a united country) to study art at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo. She started her training in 1959, and one of her professors was the renowned Egyptian artist Hussein Bicar (1913-2002) who also became a father figure during her years in Egypt.

Initially, Nseir was strongly drawn to sculpture and had dreams of becoming a sculptor like Michelangelo, but her instructors, Bicar included, encouraged her to enroll in the oil painting department. Her training during this period was principally realist, and she was heavily influenced, both visually and intellectually, by ancient Egyptian art – in interviews she has spoken extensively on how it made her feel to stand before the awe-inspiring Egyptian reliefs from this period. She was also interested in modern Egyptian art, especially the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar (1891-1934). The body of work she submitted for her graduation in 1963 comprised expressionist paintings that depicted mentally disabled children whose physical appearance and gestures she had studied during visits to various clinics in Cairo. They occupied the center of the canvas, dressed in monotone traditional Egyptian garb, wearing expressions of indifference to their surroundings, though the setting was always left vague. After her return to Syria the following year, she painted, From Latakia,⁴ one of the only purely abstract works in her oeuvre, though later she would work principally in abstract expressionism. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, her humanitarian interests and sensitivity to the human condition led to the production of a series of works entitled Hunger depicting a family, sometimes accompanied by a cat, sitting around either an empty table or sometimes with a single dish containing fish bones. This theme continued until the 2000s. 

Depicting the Consequences of War

During the mid-1960s, as she started to mature and establish her style, Nseir began to consider themes of universal conflict and injustice. She painted two canvases on this subject, Racism (1965) and Vietnam (1966). They are two of her most important paintings. In Racism, both expressionism and surrealism coexist. Skulls fill the ground. Some are broken, others have retained their eyeballs. These skulls gradually fade as they reach the horizon line: the body of a young man in shadow is laid out horizontally, supported by skeletal legs that act as pillars, with bone hands connecting them to the floor. There is a lone pelvis, and a gaping mouth. The bones are depicted with anatomical precision, though with an expressionist emphasis. Their presence seems to emphasise that all of us, regardless of ethnicity or background, share the same fate. Vietnam, which she painted several different versions of, depicts a crowd of people of all ages, some of whom are clearly frightened: the dead and the living stand side by side, and at their centre a young fighter carries a gun. Though the faces are small, they are clearly Vietnamese, something evident in the shape of their eyes and the traditional, conical Vietnamese hat worn by one individual at the top of the canvas. 

Leila Nseir’s stance against injustice was always evident. The Syrian critic Abdel Aziz Alloun (1934-2011), who once compared her to an Arab resistance fighter, wrote in the catalogue of an exhibition of her work in Damascus in 1972: “She presents a fully-realised depiction of the contemporary woman on Arab territory,” and that, “the character Leila represents might be thought of as a portrait of a young warrior who we see girded with bullet belts and a gun, as though about to set out on a mission of revenge, or maybe already deep in the fighting.”⁵ Her non-conformist spirit was evident in her working practices. In the early 1970s, while working on one of the iterations of Vietnam, she became so involved in the work that she began painting with her bare hands. The chemicals leached through her skin and left her with serious medical issues. Because proper treatment was not available in Syria at the time, the state sent her to France, and when she recovered, she returned to Damascus. However, her symptoms returned a few years later, and in 1981 the then head of the Artists’ Syndicate, Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999), secured her a document to travel back to France for treatment. Unfortunately, neither of these medical trips gave her an opportunity to visit museums and immerse herself in European art. Her health issues – which meant she had to avoid oil paints that had poisoned her – forced Nseir to transition to acrylics, graphite, pastels and crayons, and from the early 1980s onwards, she began experimenting with various printing methods until she was able to settle on her own technique. This involved making monotype woodcut prints, by colouring wooden blocks with pastels and heating the paper to make the final impression.⁶ 

Despite their severity, these bouts of ill-health did not prevent Nseir from continuing to evolve as an artist. In 1978 she painted The Martyr (The Nation), the same year in which Israel launched Operation Litani, occupying territories in southern Lebanon with the intention of degrading the capabilities of Palestinian fighters based there. In 1982, as the Israeli invasion progressed, Nseir headed to the south of Lebanon in order to share the day-to-day realities of the fighters as she drew and painted them. During this trip she produced a number of works, including Arnoun and Southern Lebanon, Beirut is Burning (which she painted between 1982 and 1985) as well as other pieces such as Beirut’s Resistance, Arab Silence, and The Massacres in the Camps.⁷ She also made paintings and drawings of fedayeen from Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan. Her lived experience of these events not only placed her work in a direct relationship with the struggle, it also established war and suffering as the central themes of her career. She described her style at this time as abstract expressionism, with heads and bodies reduced to geometric planes, specific colour schemes, and logic replacing expressionist detail, usually based around green, red, blue and yellow. Nseir did not follow the model of American abstract expressionism, established in the 1950s, but applied the term to her technique of rendering faces as geometric, colored planes while retaining their features. 

Nseir then returned to Damascus, where she lived until the late 1980s before being forced to return to Latakia due to difficult economic circumstances and her father falling ill.

Feminist Thought in Modern Syrian Art

“Being a woman is my core, but femininity is not.”⁸ – Leila Nseir 

Leila Nseir suffered the consequences of gender inequality in Syrian society throughout her life, particularly as it applied within the art world, where “showing women’s art was an event of great social significance.”⁹ On several occasions her career was derailed or diverted as a result of interventions from her family – which still maintained patriarchal attitudes – or the arrogance of male artists. 

In a televised interview, her sister Nadia Nseir explained how, in 1964, their mother had objected to Nseir painting her in a revealing dress, insisting that Nseir couldn’t exhibit the painting as it depicted Nadia inappropriately. As a result, Nseir had to rework the canvas and cover her sister more modestly.¹⁰ But Nseir could not be kept quiet for long. In the early 1970s she left Latakia for Damascus in direct defiance of her father’s wishes. According to her niece Yara Nseir,¹¹ the 12-metre-square studio space where she lived, restricted her opportunities as an artist, and Nseir would voice her objections to the discrimination that stood in the way of women making art in Syria: “Syria is a very conservative country, where it is impossible for women to get their own studios, making their struggles even harder. A woman’s existence as an artist is always under threat.”¹² Despite these difficulties, she was able to secure relative financial independence when, in 1972, she began working as an art teacher at the College of Education in Damascus, permitting her a certain degree of freedom in making decisions for herself. 

Speaking in an interview in 1983, Nseir elaborated on how she used to object to the paternalistic attitude of some of her instructors, and how she maintained her self-respect to the end. She explained how their assumptions altered the course of her life: “Sculpture requires strength, and in their Oriental paternalism – just as a father would select activities for his daughter that he regards as feminine, such as needlework or playing the piano – my teachers chose painting for me, imposed it on me, without regard for what I had inside me.”¹³ Needlework is of course thought of as domestic work par excellence in many cultures, and is referenced by many feminist writers as a symbol of the restricted role of women in society. At the same time, however, Leila did not completely turn her back on traditional representations of women in Syria. Most notably, she continued to use the image of the virgin in which a woman or a mother was used to represent the nation,¹⁴ or values such as generosity and endurance. The working class women who appear in her work are powerful and resilient, their features drawn both from Leila’s own observations as well as the stylistic approaches of local Syrian artistic traditions. They are rendered with brushstrokes both sharp and delicate, a quality that she had from the very start of her career and which had drawn praise from her instructors in Egypt. As for depicting the human body, she believed that it had “both political and spiritual ramifications, and references clarity and freedom from superficial impressions.”¹⁵ 

Leila Nseir never advanced a radical or ideological feminist discourse. Her demand for gender equality was based on humanitarian principles. She might be considered a feminist in the sense described by critic Lucy R. Lippard, who writes that feminism, is “neither a style nor a movement” but rather “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.”¹⁶ Nevertheless she had her own critical vision: she repeatedly spoke of the centrality of men and economic power as negatives impacting the progress made by women as artists. Her financial independence was a means of asserting her feminist activism when she was lecturing and teaching at the faculties of fine arts and architecture at Latakia in the 1990s. She was also socially and politically conscious, as when she attributed the scarcity of women artists in Syria to the fact that “successful women are subjected to patriarchal control.”¹⁷ Her feminism was not limited to the themes in her art or her personal testimony either. It was evident in her involvement in exhibitions and events focussed on the work of women artists, and her efforts to promote their work. She participated in The Arab Woman and Artistic Innovation exhibition, held in Damascus in 1985, the inaugural Amman Conference for Arab Women Artists exhibition, held in Amman in 1996, and the International Women’s Exhibition, held in Bonn in 1986. She wrote and spoke about herself and her colleagues when she represented women Syrian artists in a lecture she gave in Sharjah in 1995, as part of the events surrounding the exhibition Arab Eyes. The press reported the following extract from her speech: “Following the departure of the French colonial forces, Syrian women began to involve themselves, [they were] a group of amateur artists whose work was predominantly traditional in nature, such as Catherine Masarra, Mutiaa Chouri and Ramzieh Zunburuki. They were followed by Nemat al-Attar, who was influenced by Tawfik Tarek and painted landscapes, but in a documentary style. Professionalism began with the impressionist Munawwar Morelli, who was noted for her productivity, alongside Eleanor Shatti, Leila and Hala Qowatli, Mai Estawany, Bahia Shoura, Iqbal Qaresly and Aline Geofroy.”¹⁸ She also wrote a monograph entitled The Contribution of Women Artists to Syrian Fine Art, which was published as part of an exhibition at the Baladna Gallery in Amman in 1996. The monograph opened with quotes about women by Aristotle, Plato and Nietzsche. 

Any attempt to sketch an overview of feminist thought in Syrian art today, is indebted to her thinking and her revolutionary strength.

The Myth & The Word

Alongside her central preoccupation with the human condition, Leila occasionally painted landscapes, still-lifes, animals and mythical beasts, as well as executing a number of sculptures. From the late 1980s to the end of her life, myth was a constant source of inspiration. The critic Saad al-Qasim recalled how she drew inspiration from ancient seals and other local visual traditions, mentioning, “the influence of cylinder seals and wall reliefs from Mesopotamia and the civilizations based around Mari and Ugarit, moving away from conventional perspectival representation.”¹⁹ Most of these mythic works were either painted in acrylic or printed. They depict groups of people arranged in rows, strongly reminiscent of the impressions made by ancient cylinder seals when rolled in clay. The influence of ancient Egyptian art on these works can also be felt. 

Her relationship with her Arab and Islamic heritage found further expression in poetry. Nseir wrote poetry all her life, and her poems were mainly published in regional cultural publications and the Syrian press, accompanied by her pictures. When she was asked what a poem could do that a painting could not, Nseir said: “the poem is a vast collection of canvases.”²⁰ Between 1969 and 1972, she kept a journal which she later titled The Notebook of Poetry and Sculpture. The book contained daily entries in verse, while the majority were poems on love and loneliness. The entries were written in metrical verse with a strong symbolist tendency reminiscent of Baudelaire,²¹ perhaps influenced by her early experiences as a reader. It also contained a number of short stories and sketches of sculptures. These imagined sculptures were a mix of works reflecting the solidity and mass of stonework from ancient Syrian civilizations, and others whose play with surfaces and perspectives was heavily influenced by cubism.

Conclusion

Leila Nseir devoted her life to art, sacrificing her health in the process. The choices she made condemned her to a life without economic resources and filled with rejection, not only from the wider society but even the more intimate circles in which she moved and worked. Her decision not to have children of her own meant that she shouldered the suffering of children everywhere: she depicted their pains and trials and was tormented by the brutality of the world towards them, and the effect of war on their present and future. She wandered public markets and streets to draw inspiration for her work and to share life with “the blind, the crippled and homeless, the political prisoner,”²² and always maintained that the artist “belongs to their epoch, class, and nation,”²³ a statement which demonstrates how her humanist principals overrode even considerations of gender. 

She had no fear of experimentation. Mustafa al Hallaj (1938-2002) considered her “one of the country’s fiercest painters,”²⁴ and she was proud of having developed her own printing technique. Though her works speak of a rich creative process, foregrounding experimentalism and surrealism and engaging with the artist’s relationship with society, as well as mounting sharp critiques of women’s status in society and the cultural scene, and though she was always recognized in the local press (despite her unambiguously feminist stance), Leila Nseir was never given the credit she deserved within Syria as one of the founding figures of contemporary Syrian art. As a result, her work was never properly documented. What made Leila Nseir an international artist was her feminism. What made her Arab was her anti-war stance. But it was the totality of who she was, her work in particular, that made her Syrian. 

This essay is part of Written Portraits: Arab Women, Art, & History, a series that focuses on the lives and works of Arab female artists, authored by Arab female researchers in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation. This essay on Leila Nseir was commissioned in collaboration with the Atassi Foundation.

Cover image: Leila Nseir, The Martyr (The Nation), 1978. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

To access the works cited & endnotes, download the full report.

The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author and do not represent Fiker Institute.