Written by Zeid El Amine
Born in Baalbek in 1944, Moustafa Haidar grew up surrounded by the rugged mountains of the Beqaa Valley, though he always longed for the sea. In 1958 Haidar journeyed to Beirut at age 14 to enroll at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). His enrollment was first denied by director Alexis Boutros, citing his young age and lack of secondary education. As a corrective, the painter and professor César Gemayel enrolled him at Al Ahliya School in Beirut’s Mazraa neighborhood to complete his high school degree, and concurrently at ALBA to study painting. Mentored by Nicolas Nammar, he studied alongside Amine El Bacha and Hassan Jouni, painting for roughly fifteen hours a day. After graduating from ALBA in 1962, Haidar worked as a caricaturist at Al Ahad magazine. In 1963, he was awarded the bronze medal at the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries. He taught at the Lebanese University from 1967 to 1990, as well as in public high schools in South Lebanon.
Haidar came of age in a nationalistic atmosphere that rejected colonial dependency. Inspired by his father, who spent a decade in prison due to revolutionary organizing against the French, Haidar used painting to search for truth and liberate man from self-enslavement. Personally and artistically, the artist remained connected to his cultural roots in the Beqaa Valley, and the folk history of Lebanon more generally. In 1989, for example, he created a mural depicting the abduction of Europa, a mythical Phoenician princess, by the god Zeus. He painted this well-known mythological scene on a wall facing a cemetery in Tyre, where Europa is said to have been born.
In April 1996, Haidar witnessed Israeli helicopters open fire on an ambulance that had been transporting civilians from Al-Mansouri to Tyre, killing four children and two women. Moments after the attack, Haidar headed to the scene, and as a gesture of resistance, exposed himself to an area shelled by Israeli forces to exhibit his paintings in the street. The Qana massacre took place only five days later, during which hundreds of Lebanese civilians taking shelter at the village’s United Nations compound lost their lives to Israeli strikes. Haidar described the scene as “a sea of blood and corpses.” That same day, the artist defiantly set up a canvas on a sidewalk and depicted the scene using diluted oil paint, all while Israeli helicopters flew overhead.
Haidar is known for his skill in coloring and transparency. His one-stroke rule soaks his watercolor paintings in light, and he achieves it by impulsively selecting colors and mixing only two at a time to access their infinite derivatives. Haidar uses a similar palette to depict both Lebanese landscapes and portraits of women. In his two 1996 solo exhibitions, Watercolors of Memory and the South and Watercolors of Memory and Color, he painted his female subjects with the same yellow-orange he used to portray natural light. These exhibitions consisted of over one hundred watercolors, and his affinity for the medium earned him the moniker “Father of Watercolor.”
In 1975, Paul Guiragossian (1926-1993) was receiving treatment for a leg injury at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, where he saw a watercolor painting that reminded him of Haidar’s work. Guiragossian then discovered that the hospital owns 24 of Haidar’s aquarelles, whose calming and vivid colors assist patients in the healing process.
In addition to watercolor and oil paint, Haidar uses acrylics, pastels and India ink. Across these different media, Haidar portrays landscapes, nude figures, and politically-charged scenes of tragedy alike in a gestural, unembellished style. The artist’s priority lies not in the details of a given form as much as in the spontaneity of his color choices, including his use of lilac in watercolors, or in the distortion of perspective in his depictions of violence. Haidar breaks his subjects down to simple forms, using a play between loose, fluid brushstrokes and harsh, jagged angles to imbue each of his works with an emotional overtone. This emotive style does not oppose his formal training, but it allows for the senses of his inner self to take precedence. His creations exaggerate emotions while tending toward realism, as he believes truth exists in both imagination and reality.
Haidar lives in Tyre and keeps a studio in Sidon.
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