Paul Guiragossian was born in 1926 to an Armenian family and grew up in Jerusalem until 1948 following the partition of Mandatory Palestine. The family relocated to Lebanon, which would become Guiragossian’s permanent home. Guiragossian enjoyed successful sojourns in Europe; from 1957 to 1958 he received a scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, during which time he exhibited solo at the Galeria d’Arte Moderna La Permanente. In 1959, Guiragossian received a prize at the 1959 Paris Biennale, in which he was the only Lebanese artist to participate. He also received a grant from the French government to study for six months at Les Atelier Des Maîtres De L’Ecole De Paris. Vacillating between his Armenian heritage, Palestinian upbringing, European education, and francophone Lebanese culture in which he later evolved, Guiragossian assumed an artistic preoccupation with questions of cultural identity.
“Each time there was a new inflection, depending on his circumstances: exiled from Jerusalem; civil war in Lebanon. If these desolate history paintings do depict life, then it’s bare life, experience stripped down to the smallest things. Even moments of celebration remain haunted and subdued.”
The human form has remained a central subject of Guiragossian’s oeuvre, rendered with the evocative spirit of his personal experiences of displacement. His recurring depiction of mankind was reshaped constantly throughout his lifetime, during which he continuously reinterpreted the colours, depth, form, and size of his subjects in careful abstraction, revealing raw memories of human connection, tactfully imbued with notions of consolidation and community. Often depicting his loved ones and scenes of fraternity, Guiragossian revealed his earnest humanity, sensitivity to his surroundings, and enduring reflection of his own existential questioning. One may draw parallels between his disposition and that of Vincent Van Gogh, who was likewise appreciated for his skilful yet sombre perceptivity; in fact, Guiragossian claimed that he was such a great admirer of Van Gogh that he would impersonate the artist: “I would walk like him, dress like him, and paint nature and the poor like him…bit by bit I would rid myself of Van Gogh" (the artist quoted in Sam Bardaouil, Paul Guiragossian: The Human Condition OR An Entry into the Study of Arab Modernity, Academia, online). From the 1960s, Guiragossian’s works developed into abstracted renditions of the human figure, reduced to their essential forms, as in the present work. Elongated and huddled closely, his figures never break beyond the boundaries of the canvas, as if confined, creating a sense of togetherness that is at once unified and yet vulnerable. The horrors of regional conflict came to influence a majority of Guiragossian’s later works with the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, though he did not cease to paint during these decades; The March to Deir-Zor (La Grande Marche) recalls the mass migration from Türkiye to Syria through the desert during the Armenian Genocide, providing a narrative on collective trauma and solidarity.
The nuance of Guiragossian’s recognisable body of abstract figurative works lies in their ability to be relatable on both an individual and universal level; they offer a touching window into the psyche of a man who transcended cultural and identitarian boundaries to reflect upon life’s fundamental values. The artist passed away in Beirut in 1993 after finalising a last work, his masterpiece, dedicated to his family.