Provenance and Action: From Studio and Street to Exhibition and Museum – Past Disquiet Redux (Part II)

The provenance of artworks can tell unique stories of the roads they travelled, threading invisible connections between people, political movements, and actions. We knew that artists were commissioned to design posters but were surprised to discover how many paintings that were in exhibitions were reproduced as posters.

The Collectif de peintres des pays arabes (also known as the Collectif Palestine) was founded in December 1975 in Paris, spearheaded by Claude Lazar, a French artist who was an active in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and who had been close friends with the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) representative in Paris at the time, Ezzedine Kalak. During the 27th Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in 1976, the collective exhibited artworks, posters, and a collective work in support of Palestine. The siege of Tal al-Zaatar, a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, was on everyone’s mind and a focus for many artists. Most of the works concentrated on the Palestinian cause and two of the artworks – Tal al-Zaatar by Khozaima Alwani (Syria) and Tal al-Zaatar by Samir Salameh (Palestine) – that were exhibited at the Salon were later donated to the International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut. The work visible below is Palestine on the Mind by Claude Lazar.

Palestine on the Mind, which gifted to Ezzedine Kalak, was painted by Claude Lazar in 1975 and depicted a fedai wearing a keffiyeh. It was based on the photograph that appears on Guerre du people, a photobook by Armand Deriaz. The artwork was the basis for the graphics of posters made for different purposes.

The collaboration of two artist collectives and resulting exhibitions and intervention reveal the links between two of the solidarity collections/museums and draw out networks of artists who were actively engaged with political struggles. During the same year, Collectif Palestine collaborated with L’Arcicoda, an Italian artist collective whose member artists were based in Tuscany and were active around 1973. L’Arcicoda was cemented around the conviction that art should be produced against and outside the gallery system and the market. The collective organised exhibitions and interventions in independent and public spaces, looking for direct, anti-elitist contact with the public. L’Arcicoda collaborated with the Collectif Palestine and other groups, staging exhibitions and painting interventions in public squares in several towns in Tuscany to inspire solidarity with the people under siege in the Tal al-Zaatar camp. Among the exhibitions they organised included the Mostra Palestina (Palestine exhibition) in San Giovanni Valdarno in 1976. This photograph from the archive of artist Sergio Traquandi shows two works by Claude Lazar.

The painting above, Daily life in the occupied territories (1976), was donated to the International Art Exhibition for Palestine. In an interview with Claude Lazar in 2008, he revealed to us the link between the exhibition for Palestine and MIRSA. He mentioned that he made a work about Palestine which he donated to the Chilean collection. This image draws the links between the struggles and collections. 

In 1974, Jacques Médecin, the mayor of Nice, France, launched a city-twinning with Cape Town, the capital of South Africa, where the apartheid system had been in place since 1948. The Nice city council designated a day to celebrate the twinning. In protest, local artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest placarded the walls of the streets that the convoy of Cape Town’s mayor drove through on his official visit to Nice. The installation, which he titled Intervention/Images, included 900 silk-screened prints of a life-sized image of a Black family standing behind barbed wire.

Pignon-Ernest donated one of the prints that denounced apartheid to the International Art Exhibition for Palestine in1978 – a gesture linking apartheid in South Africa to the occupation of Palestine by Israel. In addition to this intervention in Nice and his participation in the exhibition for Palestine, Pignon-Ernest had also previously donated an artwork to MIRSA. After the exhibition in Beirut, he was contacted by the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid to imagine ways to mobilise international support from artists to endorse a campaign against apartheid. He, with Antonio Saura, organised the project to invite artists to donate works to a solidarity collection against apartheid, which became the Art Contre/Against Apartheid Collection. For many decades, Pignon-Ernest’s practice of ‘street art’ (before the official the term emerged) included making and installing prints in public spaces and streets in dozens of cities around the world – from France to Palestine to South Africa – and focused on urgent subjects of the times, such as occupation and immigration, among other subjects. 

A number of the works by Iraqi and Moroccan artists that were contributed to the exhibition had been on display at the second Arab Biennial in 1976 in Rabat, Morocco. The theme of the biennial focused on the Palestinian struggle. One work included the painting Palestinian Geometry by Mohamed Chabâa (1976) and was featured on the invitation card of the exhibition.

According to the catalogue of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, the majority of participating artists hailed from France, Italy, Japan, Iraq, and Poland. Artist unions represented a nexus of mobilisation. In the Arab world, most unions and artists’ associations were formed in the 1960s and early 1970s out of a basic need to defend artists’ rights, to create support structures for the promotion and dissemination of their work, and to solidify existing organic bonds of fraternity across the Arab region. The Union of Palestinian Artists (UPA), founded in 1973 in Lebanon, established an exhibition space known as Dar al-Karameh, which presented the work of Palestinian and international artists. 

The establishment of the Union of Arab Artists (UAA) formalised networking, exchange, and cooperation among artists at a regional level. The idea of such a union had been discussed at the First Arab Conference on Fine Arts in Damascus in 1971 and was formally constituted in 1972 at the First Arab Festival of National Plastic Arts in Damascus. Ismail Shammout, president of the UPA, was voted president of the UAA, a role he held from 1971 until 1977. The UAA’s mission was grounded in promoting relations between the Arab and Third Worlds. Two editions of the Arab Biennial, which were held in Baghdad in 1974 and in Rabat in 1976, were organised by the UAA, and foregrounded the dedication of Arab artists to the Palestinian struggle.

The participation of Moroccan and Iraqi artists in the International Art Exhibition for Palestine overlapped remarkably with artworks presented respectively at the two successive editions of the Arab Biennial, therefore inscribing the seed collection for a future museum in solidarity with Palestine in the generative network of Arab art initiated by artists. At some level, the International Art Exhibition for Palestine could have been the third – and concluding – edition of the Arab art biennials.