Berlin is famous for its walls and for decades a select group of people have treasured lumps of its former Cold War dividing line.
There is something appropriate about a chunk of wall from the Berlin studio of Marwan Kassab-Bachi sitting at the heart of a blockbuster exhibition of his work at Christie's in central London.
The mountain is his soul staying in the landscape and in the soil of Syria
Ridha Moumni,
Christie's Middle East
The Mayfair institution has been taken over by a display of Marwan's work that does full justice to his long career, which was almost entirely based in Berlin.
It was his roots in Syria that helped to shape his work.
A practitioner of art as an enigmatic expression of the soul, Marwan is seen by Christie's curator Ridha Moumni as working out a deep attachment to his Syrian childhood in his paintings.
Not least in the breakthrough period of his work when Maran painted many heads reclining but with an identifiable landscape on the canvas.
You can take the boy out of the foothills of Mount Qasioun but for the painter it was a lifelong resource. The exhibition sets this up with a series of almost monochrome postwar Berlin photographs by the famed Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The chairman of Christie's Middle East and Africa has chose Marwan: A Soul in Exile as the third Christies summer series on art of the Arab World.
Works like the Parisian Head in 1973 or Kopf moved the focus to the head with rich, deep French-inspired use of colour to show how he brooded on his past, almost like a man lost in thought staring into a mirror. The mountain is never depicted but its brows and ridges are reflected in the flesh.
"The head is mixing directly with the landscape," says Mr Moumni at one point of a tour on the opening morning of the month-long retrospective. "He acknowledged that the faces and the heads that he's painting all his life are part of the mountain. The mountain is the core of his painting - the–mountain is his soul staying in the landscape and in the soil of Syria."
From the 1967 war through to the outset of the 1970s, Marwan's work took on a political dimension with piece such as The Disappeared, where handkerchiefs and scarves covered the faces. There was also the haunting Three Palestinian Boys in 1970.
"When the veil comes over the face it is almost a feeling of the disappearance but also a feeling of covering the face in front of the atrocities of the world," said Mr Moumni. "This is a very, very strong and impactful painting from 1970.
"The Three Palestinian Boys is a painting that was displayed very extensively through his life and it is not only a work on that did not only on the displacement but what he wanted to do was a representation of the Palestinian voice. This is why he represented them from below."
The dramatic perspective flips Marwan's usual order with big bodies and small hands and, crucially, heads. Typically the head or the face dominated his work but not in this case.
Meanwhile, as the decade progressed he would go on to develop portraits of political figures such as the Syrian Munif Al Razzaz or the Iraqi Badr Shakir Al Sayyab.
Intimate artist
Marwan eventually resumed his direct relationship with Syria. He was not banned from his home country, although he had suffered the schism of his family land being seized not long after he started studying in Berlin in 1957.
A trove of his correspondence in Arabic forms a side exhibit and is as illuminating as the body of paintings. "Marwan was very poetic in the way he was writing -he was really writing almost like a poet," he added. "He was writing these letters in Arabic to people and showing that reading and writing in Arabic and using Arabic letters and its literature was very important for him."
Homeward bound
In the 1990s what had been an intermittent relationship with the Middle East and his work – he exhibited at the Arab Cultural Centre in Damascus in 1970 – came to be a part of his career.
A portrait of Mona Atassi, the driving force behind the Attasi Foundation, by Marwan is part of the exhibition for that reason. As director of the summer academy at Darat Al Funun in Amman, he became a mentor to a generation of Arab artists.
In the decade before his death in 2016, Mr Marwan honed in on the face and in these paintings what surrounds the faces are telling, according to Mr Moumni. In this as elsewhere in his work there are hallmarks of a Cezanne influence.
"What you see around [the face] is the question of the soil but also the question of the death," he explains of one work. "The hair is creating almost a continuity with the landscape and here it's almost a wall, almost a darkness created by the idea of the afterlife."
The candidates
Dr Ayham Ammora, scientist and business executive
Ali Azeem, business leader
Tony Booth, professor of education
Lord Browne, former BP chief executive
Dr Mohamed El-Erian, economist
Professor Wyn Evans, astrophysicist
Dr Mark Mann, scientist
Gina MIller, anti-Brexit campaigner
Lord Smith, former Cabinet minister
Sandi Toksvig, broadcaster
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
THE LOWDOWN
Photograph
Rating: 4/5
Produced by: Poetic License Motion Pictures; RSVP Movies
Director: Ritesh Batra
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Farrukh Jaffar, Deepak Chauhan, Vijay Raaz
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MOUNTAINHEAD REVIEW
Starring: Ramy Youssef, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Rating: 3.5/5
Why seagrass matters
- Carbon sink: Seagrass sequesters carbon up to 35X faster than tropical rainforests
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Notable salonnières of the Middle East through history
Al Khasan (Okaz, Saudi Arabia)
Tamadir bint Amr Al Harith, known simply as Al Khasan, was a poet from Najd famed for elegies, earning great renown for the eulogy of her brothers Mu’awiyah and Sakhr, both killed in tribal wars. Although not a salonnière, this prestigious 7th century poet fostered a culture of literary criticism and could be found standing in the souq of Okaz and reciting her poetry, publicly pronouncing her views and inviting others to join in the debate on scholarship. She later converted to Islam.
Maryana Marrash (Aleppo)
A poet and writer, Marrash helped revive the tradition of the salon and was an active part of the Nadha movement, or Arab Renaissance. Born to an established family in Aleppo in Ottoman Syria in 1848, Marrash was educated at missionary schools in Aleppo and Beirut at a time when many women did not receive an education. After touring Europe, she began to host salons where writers played chess and cards, competed in the art of poetry, and discussed literature and politics. An accomplished singer and canon player, music and dancing were a part of these evenings.
Princess Nazil Fadil (Cairo)
Princess Nazil Fadil gathered religious, literary and political elite together at her Cairo palace, although she stopped short of inviting women. The princess, a niece of Khedive Ismail, believed that Egypt’s situation could only be solved through education and she donated her own property to help fund the first modern Egyptian University in Cairo.
Mayy Ziyadah (Cairo)
Ziyadah was the first to entertain both men and women at her Cairo salon, founded in 1913. The writer, poet, public speaker and critic, her writing explored language, religious identity, language, nationalism and hierarchy. Born in Nazareth, Palestine, to a Lebanese father and Palestinian mother, her salon was open to different social classes and earned comparisons with souq of where Al Khansa herself once recited.
Mica
Director: Ismael Ferroukhi
Stars: Zakaria Inan, Sabrina Ouazani
3 stars
Some of Darwish's last words
"They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay, because they are afflicted with hope." - Mahmoud Darwish, to attendees of the Palestine Festival of Literature, 2008
His life in brief: Born in a village near Galilee, he lived in exile for most of his life and started writing poetry after high school. He was arrested several times by Israel for what were deemed to be inciteful poems. Most of his work focused on the love and yearning for his homeland, and he was regarded the Palestinian poet of resistance. Over the course of his life, he published more than 30 poetry collections and books of prose, with his work translated into more than 20 languages. Many of his poems were set to music by Arab composers, most significantly Marcel Khalife. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 after undergoing heart surgery in the United States. He was later buried in Ramallah where a shrine was erected in his honour.
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
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How to watch Ireland v Pakistan in UAE
When: The one-off Test starts on Friday, May 11
What time: Each day’s play is scheduled to start at 2pm UAE time.
TV: The match will be broadcast on OSN Sports Cricket HD. Subscribers to the channel can also stream the action live on OSN Play.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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