Louay Kayyali was one of the first artists to give meaning to art as a means to class struggle and social advance in Syria, painting portraits and imagined scenes that embody a modernist notion of culture as a tool of social evolution.  Kayyali's consistency of approach to “types” of laborers and “rooted” accessible visual forms exemplifies the understanding of “objective realism” in the early post-colonial Arab art.  He joined the faculty at the Higher Institute for the Fine Arts in Damascus in 1962 with the prestige of a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and the honor of having been Syria’s representative to the Venice Biennale in 1960 (with Fateh al-Mudaress).

I have a very particular opinion about art criticism in general, and in Syria specifically; it is sharp and frank.

An artist’s mission ends when he presents his production to the audience, and nobody has the right to ask for an explanation from the artist about his work of art. Rather, they should ask someone else, the art critic, who has the sensual and aesthetic qualifications that brings him closer to an artist’s production and drives him to appreciate a pure work of art. He also has the academic and artistic qualifications that make him understand the production. From there he works on analyzing and explaining it, then on critiquing and evaluating it. That is no easy job at all. For the art critic has the same moral and material responsibility that the artist himself has when presenting his production.

When art assumes a new understanding in the collective intellectual repository and a form of social consciousness, attaining to it an aspect of struggle, this essentially constitutes a rebellion against and refusal of the given social condition. In other words, it constitutes an unceasing desire for radical change and the beginning of a struggle to improve the social condition. But as long as art production is the embodiment of reality and a radical attachment to it, how can it also be a refusal of reality? And what is this refused reality? Why is there this desire to change it from its roots and to wage a struggle for its improvement? What are the principles to attain it? For whose benefit will it be?

Every person wants to say something about any event from everyday life, whether through his own words, his behavior and actions, or his production. No doubt by doing this, he has taken a stance on life. His stances become varied with the occurrence of subsequent events. Thus, such incidents deepen his experience of life, and clearly and steadily define his stances towards the premises and goals of his life as well as his attitude towards humankind in general.

Louay Kayyali was born in Aleppo in 1934. From 1956 to 1961, he studied decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Afterwards he joined the faculty at the Higher Institute for the Fine Arts in Damascus in 1962 with the honor of having been Syria's representative to the Venice Biennale in 1960 (with Fateh al-Mudaress). Although his teaching and productivity was limited to the brief period of 1962-1976, his impact on the younger generation of Syrians, not only artists but the wider "laboring masses," spread through traveling exhibitions, lectures, museum acquisitions, teaching in public institutions. He died tragically in a fire in his home in 1978.

Kirsten Scheid
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Kirsten Scheid is a Beirut-based anthropologist and art historian who writes regularly on modern and contemporary art in the Middle East. Her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class.  She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut.