Born in 1940 in the town of Muharraq, Bahrain, the artist Nasser Alyousif was a pioneer of the country’s modern art movement. At a time when there were few role models for how to be an artist, limited resources in terms of materials, and more importantly a lack of institutions dedicated to the fine arts, Nasser Alyousif and his contemporaries spearheaded the formation of a modern art movement in Bahrain. While an aesthetic inclination was evident from an early age, it was during his school years that Alyousif’s potential was discovered and nurtured by his teachers and artists Ahmed Al Sunni and Abdulkarim Al Orrayed. These early forays into the field of art blossomed more fully in the 1950s and 1960s as Nasser Alyousif joined various artist groupings. Jointly they would explore Bahrain by strolling through its souks, harbors, and gardens on weekends.
From his earliest days, the characteristics that would accompany Nasser Alyousif through his artistic life were already evident – a passion for the human story as lived out in the daily lives and traditions of his native Bahrain, a relentless and rigorous approach to any field of enquiry, along with an innate curiosity and desire to explore and experiment with various artistic formal languages, media, and methods.
While never a formal student of the fine arts, Nasser Alyousif absorbed knowledge on the history of art and its manifold processes through every possible means – from periodicals, and academic texts on art history, theory and practice available in Bahrain’s bookshops, to international exchanges through workshops and exhibitions. From exploring Bahrain’s landscape details of day-to-day life in his early years, Nasser Alyousif went on to participate in most of the major art exhibitions in Bahrain, and also represented his country in group shows abroad. In the first national art exhibition after Bahrain’s independence, Alyousif was recognized as one of the country’s most important creative figures. Further recognition followed in Bahrain and throughout the region, most notably the award bestowed in 1995 by the government of Sharjah, acknowledging Alyousif’s role as a pioneer of the fine arts in the Arabian Gulf.
In addition to his outstanding artistic achievements, Nasser Alyousif played an important role in the development of the artistic infrastructure in Bahrain. From his active participation in artist gatherings and associations, he went on to become a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society, which he would be president of from 1983 to 1986. Al Talib Stationery Store, which Alyousif founded together with his cousins in the 1960s, sold books and periodicals on the arts, alongside fine art supplies, such as acrylic paints. In 1980 after attending the Asilah Cultural Forum in Morocco, he was the first to import printing presses into Bahrain. He was generous in sharing and imparting his knowledge, and numerous contemporary Bahraini artists – from Abduljabbar Al Ghadban and Abbas Yousef to Jamal Abdulrahim and Mohamed Al Mahdi – cite Alyousif’s influence on their own creative development. Accompanying the artist’s rigorous approach and generosity of spirit, was a sense of compassion and civil courage, which manifested itself at its keenest in an exhibition Alyousif held alongside his fellow Bahraini artist Ebrahim Busaad in 1982. Dealing with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, the works show an artist not afraid to express himself on challenging political issues. While the works in this exhibition obviously deal with a brutal subject matter – massacre, violence – a sense of foreboding and unease radiates through many works in the artist’s oeuvre-.
- Melissa Enders-Bhatia
Nasser Alyousif – The Heart of Bahrain’s Modern Art Movement The Quest for a Lost Paradise
By Dr. Maha Azizeh Sultan.
In the land of the sun, we cannot perceive art as the product of its moment without reference to its past. Fragmentation leads to a murky myopic vision. Fundamental knowledge of all cultural components is a gateway to understanding the point of departure of the modern visual arts movement in Bahrain. It is a pursuit which is grounded in assimilating the artistic aspects inherent in the successive archaeological discoveries of the Dilmun civilization up to the various architectural, calligraphic, and decorative aspects of the Islamic civilization. And the deeper we delve into the methods of the early modern artists, the more we find that the relationship is related to, if not intertwined with, the heritage of Bahrain and its museum-quality assets. It is a heritage rich in its manifestations, themes, vocabulary, and elements, akin to a virtual yet tangible extension of the recent past. This is due to the environmental and geographical factors and natural resources of Bahrain, as well as its traditional industries and professions. The most noteworthy of the latter is the craft of boat-building. These vessels were used by humans since the dawn of history for the purpose of fishing, and later for delving into the deep blue sea in search of pearls, which had been known to mankind since about 2,000 BC, as evidenced by the fact that the Assyrians used to set sail to bring “fish eyes” (i.e., pearls) from Dilmun, the fabled land of immortality.
Generally speaking, it is well established that the heritage of primitive peoples and ancient Eastern civilizations, with their profound technical properties, influenced Europe’s artistic sensibilities and led to the modern trends in the visual arts that have emerged since the early twentieth century. Therefore, civilization is inspirational. It is a heritage that is still visible in the ruins of Bahrain Fort, where the remnants of its ancient city walls date back to the Bronze Ages, as well as the domed tomb sites that resemble gateways to the underworld and the engraved seals that narrate the traditions and customs of the Dilmun societies and their relation to the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, their beliefs and legends. In every location in Bahrain, you find yourself walking as if on the edges of the earth, or treading on some abandoned relic of the past.
The first generation of Bahraini artists – most of whom were born after 1932 – lacked an academic background and any formal training in art. Their initial attraction to drawing came from the somewhat basic art classes taught in public schools, and from spontaneous sketches they did out of their natural interest the field. That generation of self-taught artists imbued their artworks with a passion for living in nature and the influences of day-to-day life in Muharraq and Ras Rumman in Manama. They also drew inspiration from the impressionist-style works of the few foreign amateur artists accompanying the Danish mission who painted the landscapes near their residence at Bahrain Fort, the villages adjacent to the Jabor coast and palm groves. This style soon spread among the first generation of Bahraini painters, who learned to draw the features of a scene and portray them as songs that follow behind the fishermen’s boats, the banks of the sandy beaches and romantic idling in glorious natural settings, from the alleys of the countryside to marketplaces, traditional cafes, orchards, freshwater springs, ports and villages. At that stage, the recognition of art – with all its emotions and surprises – was akin to the discovery of hidden pearls, inspiring several to reserve small “pavilions” in bookstores or shops in the Manama markets to showcase their artistic output.
The art studio idea sprang from the shop established by the artist Abdulkarim Al Orayyed in 1960, which was frequented by many of those early pioneers: Nasser Alyousif, Ahmed Baqer, Karim Al Bosta, Rashid Al Oraifi, Rashid Swar and Osama Abdulsaleh. Shortly thereafter, Nasser Alyousif and his family established what he called the Al Talib Stationery Store which not only sold painting supplies and picture frames but also served as a permanent exhibition of his paintings and designs, a source of culture with all its Arabic and foreign language art magazines and books, a haven for cultural dialogue, as well as a showcase for the talents of new young artists.
Afterwards, Ahmed Baqer established his own studio in 1967 (near the old post office building in the Manama Souk) and made it a permanent exhibition venue for his works. This was quickly followed by the Banoush Gallery and the “Tourist Gallery,” founded by Rashid Al Oraifi. Modernism and the Nostalgia for Heritage The work of the pioneer generation embodied the aesthetics of nature and local heritage with its various elements and symbols in reflections inspired by the common heritage of Bahrain. Bahrain itself began its transformation into a modern state in the early 1950s. In the resulting shift from the rhythms of rural life to the bustle of the city, artists sought inspiration in tales of a bygone time amidst the inexorable tide of urbanism. Traditional ways of life were threatened with extinction under the wave of modernization, such as the construction of bridges and the airport, alongside seaports and glittering city buildings and luxury hotels, as the economy swelled with the proliferation of giant oil companies and new private sector corporations. Subsequently, the themes that prevailed in the work of the first generation of artists stemmed from this unstoppable surge from nonexistence into a new dynamic reality. An example of the effects of these changes is the village of Karabad, whose legacy had been associated with the sea and pearl diving for centuries.
Following the establishment in the 1930s of BAPCO, Bahrain’s petroleum and oil company, the ancient crafts of shipbuilding and pearl diving practised by earlier generations soon began to fade, as their offspring sought completely different interests and professions. In reaction to the shocking impact of modernism, the work of the new generation of artists of Bahrain evinced a prevalence of emotional elements and a keenly romantic awareness of locality. Consequently, Manama’s sprawling markets became a veritable free art school, drawing from topics of daily Bahraini life and the stories, customs, and traditions of its people.1Nonetheless, this did not prevent the integration of modernism, which had become a common obsession among the majority of leading artists. Bahrain’s environment, with its natural landscapes, folk scenes, and desert panoramas dominated the first generation’s works – as well as the leading artists of the generation that followed – because they were considered an integral part of the artistic identity of Bahrain. However, the direct contact and relationships forged with more experienced Arab artists through their participation in various Arab festivals, forums and exhibitions in Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Algeria, and not least at Morocco’s Asilah Arts Festival resulted in the shift of the dialectic of authenticity and contemporaneity and the search for an Arab identity to the very core of Bahraini artworks. Hence the emergence of works grounded in calligraphy and Dilmun heritage, as well as modern European schools of art (e.g., Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstraction) studied by the new generation of artists in some Arab and foreign capitals. The decorative patterns which dominated archaeological artefacts and local architecture and handicrafts (e.g., pottery, textiles, rugs, and ornaments) encouraged the adoption of geometric abstraction among some of the artists. What is said about the significant time-lapse between Arab art’s embrace of modernism and its demise in the West is also said of the assimilation of modernism and postmodernity into the practices of Bahraini artists of more than one generation.
The establishment of art associations from the 1950s onwards – from the Family of Art Amateurs to the Contemporary Art Association – played a prominent role in the dissemination of artistic awareness via exhibitions by Bahraini artists in the capital, Manama. However, the art scene truly flourished with the cultural development projects adopted by the Department of Theater and Arts of the Ministry of Information after Bahrain gained its independence in the 1970s. The official support of the Annual Fine Arts Exhibition helped encourage new talent, and at the same time created a cultural and enlightenment clash. This resulted in the launch of the Spring Exhibition – much like the erstwhile Salon des Refusés shows mounted to rebut the official Paris Salon in the 1800s – which preluded the establishment of the Bahrain Arts Society. Since 1983 and under the directorship of its president and artist Shaikh Rashid Al Khalifa, the Bahrain Arts Society worked on the development of programs, exhibitions, and curricula to serve as an academy for the arts, including the various emerging fields of contemporary art.
Nasser Alyousif – Pioneer of Modernism and the Art of Printmaking
A researcher, thinker, voracious reader, and seeker of knowledge, Alyousif developed a passion for art so deep that it became a way of life and his lifelong pursuit, a passion that matches poetry in its rhymes, desires, inner fire and rich inspirations. He used many techniques and tirelessly experimented with various raw materials and media, devising a mixture of techniques that preceded what we refer to today as mixed media. A pioneer of the art of engraving, Alyousif supplied the art scene in Bahrain with fresh elements in the aesthetics of printmaking. He pushed the boundaries of artistic production towards new aesthetic horizons and left his mark on his many students (including Ebrahim Busaad and Abduljabbar Al Ghadban).
Nasser Alyousif (1940–2006) is one of the founding pioneers of the modern art movement in Bahrain. Although he was a self-taught artist, he was influenced in his childhood by the work of his teacher Salman Al Sabbagh. His talent truly blossomed in high school under exhibition in 1957. Another of his teachers who encouraged him to pursue his talent was the artist Abdulkarim Al Orrayed.
After graduating from the Teacher’s College, Alyousif worked as an art teacher at Al Salmaniya School, where he was colleagues with the artist Aziz Zubari (b. 1937). In the early 1960s, he began his outdoor drawing tours where he was among his companions “the adoring eye of heritage sites.” His sketchpads were filled with various drawings of common neighborhoods and decorative details derived from the plaster details, a typical feature of Bahraini architecture, which abounds on the facades of houses in Diraz, Muharraq, and Manama. Alyousif and his fellow artists contributed to the establishment of the Art and Literature Club, the Family of Art Amateurs and the Contemporary Art Association.2 He was elected as president of the latter from 1983 to 1986. He participated in all the fine arts exhibitions held in Bahrain from 1954 onward, as well as international and Arab exhibitions held in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, France, Japan, and Singapore.
He illustrated the collection of verses of the poet Ali Abdullah Khalifa, “The Thirst of Palms,” with an assortment of drawings that unlocked his imagination to poetic images, going on to similar projects for the poetry of Abdul-Rahman Rafi and Alawi Al Hashemi. In the early 1980s, following his visits to Egypt and the Maghreb, the art of Nasser Alyousif took a sharp turn that was manifested through consolidating his relationship with folk traditions inspired by Bahraini heritage in the composition of his paintings. In Cairo he became acquainted with the experiences of the modernist generation, which excelled in integrating the techniques of the West with elements of Egyptian folklore, a fact that cemented his convictions about the magic of the innate impulse which is closely intertwined with folktales and their symbols, references, signs, and connotations of the common environment and old Bahrain. Hence, he grew more inclined towards compositional flatness and emphasized the aesthetics of simplified colour fields in order to imbue his paintings with a sense of unadulterated impulse and spontaneity derived from the DNA of Bahraini folk art aesthetics.
This inclination evolved with his experiences and his attempts to delve deep into the memories of his childhood and recall folktales, especially following his journey to Asilah in Morocco. Meanwhile he became more closely exposed to Paul Klee’s unabashed experiments of subconscious spontaneity and pondered their effect on the manifestations of modern Arab art, recognizing the Swiss artist’s call for abandoning all forms of schools, styles and academic bents in art, saying: “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe… to be almost primitive (Klee’s diaries were written in German, so the quote should come from the English edition, not the French).”3Already immensely fond of printmaking, in 1980 Nasser Alyousif joined the engraving workshop at the Asilah Arts Festival in Morocco, where he worked under the supervision of the award-winning Sudanese artist Mohamed Omar Khalil (b. 1936), one of the world’s most famous Arab printmakers. While there, Alyousif was influenced by the aesthetics of artistic printmaking and its embrace of various manual and mechanical methods and techniques. Because Bahrain at the time lacked the required equipment, upon his return to the island Alyousif imported four printing presses and the necessary zinc components used for the preparation of the plates, in the tutelage of Ahmed Al Sunni (1933–2002), who encouraged him to participate in the school order to pursue his vision of modernizing artistic expression away from traditional drawing tools and, in the process, create a whole new aesthetic sense inspired by experiments on raw materials during printmaking process. Shortly thereafter, in 1982 Alyousif called for the organization of Bahrain’s first art exhibition dedicated to engraving. The exhibition was held at the Alumni Club, and also featured works by Ebrahim Busaad, Abdulkarim Al Orrayed and Kamel Barakat. In the late 1980s, Nasser Alyousif’s eyesight began to deteriorate and by 1992 he lost it completely. Amazingly, however, his artistic willpower never waned; in fact, this fate of darkness was challenged by the miraculous light of insight. His latest works were done in the linoleum print technique and showcased in 2004 at Albareh Art Gallery in an exhibition entitled “More Than Meets the Eye.” These prints represented the unique story of an artist who, through sheer will, regained the passion for artistic production and defied the difficulties of vision loss. Relying on his innate tactile dexterity and a pair of scissors, he deftly navigated the indentations in the paper and then cut the required shapes and patterns into linoleum blocks to create his artwork. In this way the artist’s hands replaced the role of the watchful eye, guiding the fingers to apply the proper amount of pressure to bring out high-quality colour tones, highlighting the lines features and details of the shapes.
The inspirations brought about by paper-cut collages were nothing but a bridge for Alyousif to cross into the concept of abstract composition rooted in the medium’s realist origins, as Henry Matisse did in his 1947 book Jazz. This technique marked the last years of Matisse’s artistic production after a heart attack left him very weak and in need of the assistance of his nurse Monica to place the paper scraps he would colour and cut on the wall in front of him to become works of art. These showed subject matters taken from folktales executed as prints and works of glass and ceramics that decorated churches and museums. “Since I cannot move or get up,” said Matisse, “I have made myself a garden of paper full of birds and fruit.”4 It seems that the paper-cut collages created by Nasser Alyousif also served as a bridge to the enduring grasp of folk arts; an essence which he had sought for a long time. The technique helped him embody this essence in paintings such as that depicting his wife “Um Mahmood,” who helped him prepare the paper and paint, giving him the opportunity to express the “insight of the inner garden” and the joy of living in the memory of places in Bahrain which had vanished over time. “My first sketches were of palm oases,” said Alyousif, “which I am still looking for in poets’ books but did not find after I lost my sight—except in the dreams of insight.” Notably, the artist profoundly summarized his later experiences by saying that he did “not need his eyes to finish the works,” as long as his heart and his soul were “filled with light.” In the course of his long career, Nasser Alyousif received a great number of awards and medals, including the first Dilmun Award in 1979, and, following an exhibition held in his honour in Sharjah, he received the Al Dana Award at the annual exhibition in Bahrain in 1996.
“Memory of Place” in the Art of Nasser Alyousif
No other artist managed to embody their dreamlike relationship with place as convincingly as Nasser Alyousif. There is hardly a painting or print of his that does not have a spatial connotation. This relationship diverges between visual viewing in the way of the Western nature painters (description of places) and the act of recollecting which is important and dominates the majority of his prolific and mixed-media work. Alyousif began his artistic career in search of places he deemed suitable as outdoor drawing subjects. These early works were studies done in coloured pencils, markers, and watercolours (Figs. Xxx, 1961–1968). His quest took him from the neighbourhood square, Bilad Al Qadeem village, the boat harbour and surrounding villages, drawing landscapes of farms, huts and markets.
One of his favourite subjects was the Thursday market and flea market. In the town’s coffee shops, he had the chance to meet a great many farmers and workers, average people who became living models for his portraits. As he wrote in his memoir, he was often accompanied on these trips by Abdulkarim Al Orrayed and Hussain Al Sunni. “All we had was our desire for painting, but little in the way of artistic culture. However, we began to acquire some background knowledge by reading some of the books available at the British Council,” he noted. “Our discussions became sprinkled with expressions like colour, composition, shadow, light and distance. We began to read technical journals that expanded our horizons, and subsequently, our paintings would show signs of that knowledge.”6 During this period, Alyousif made forays into Cubism, as testified by his sketch of the Al Humaid Mosque (Fig. xxx, 1968). “I began to feel my way into the modern methods of artistic practice after reading art books and my visits to Cairo’s museums and art exhibitions.”
These wandering field studies of the discovery of the aesthetics and purity of places were a cognitive approach to the local environment with all its elements, characteristics, nature, and people, and the styles and decorations of its buildings. These exercises of observation generated a personal visual depository of motifs and themes reflecting the realities of daily life, both rural and urban, that would later change the course of his life and guide it through the twists and turns of his art, drawing increasingly from memory.
Indeed, from 1968 to the late 1970s the landscape features created by Alyousif’s brush moved increasingly away from the readily visible to the personally perceived. One of the most important themes of this stage was his “Diver” series, which consisted of ten oil and watercolour paintings exhibited at the Bahrain Family Fair in Kuwait in 1969 (Figs. xxx). The event established Alyousif’s stature among modernist Arab artists thanks to his simplistic style that remained true to his innate spontaneity in dealing with the shapes and elements he integrated into the composition of the scene: gates adorned with inscriptions, decorated facades of traditional Bahraini houses, and building interiors. These works were inspired by the poems of the Kuwaiti poet Mohammed Al Fayez, whose “The Light from Within” recounts the memoirs of a pearl-diver.
These memoirs helped Alyousif tease out the meanings he was seeking in his investigation of folktales in order to express the tragedies experienced by divers. Thus, the houses (especially the door, the basket, and the housewares), the farewells to spouses, loved ones and children on the beach, the bittersweet moments, the anxieties and hopes that enter into their minds during their sea voyages, appeared in a language that draws on the collective reservoir of memory of place, and its timeless reserve of tales handed down through generations. Most of the residents of the neighbourhood where Alyousif lived were boat captains, pearl merchants, and divers. All his life he had played with their children, sung with them, celebrated festive occasions with them, and listened to stories of men who had been swallowed by the sea. In this way, he experienced firsthand their moments of joy and times of misery. His art would shift from the elements of the outdoors and wealth in the journey, to capturing the indoors, documenting the personal possessions, the secrets: “In Search of Lost Time” took its title from the masterpiece of the French writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Like Proust, Alyousif created for himself a distinctive form of narrative based not only on embellishing the story, but on conjuring a world from a unique perspective by which memories become life. This correlation between mankind, place, plant, and animal, which is conveyed in a flat two-dimensional surface, denotes the singular family and community bond echoed in the characteristic contiguity of neighbouring Bahraini houses. This close-knit arrangement is determined by the architectural geometric structure of the Islamic style prevalent in traditional neighbourhoods of Bahrain and similar old neighbourhoods in cities throughout the Arab world. This template emerges in the way Alyousif replaces the traditional horizontal view lines with a vertical grid, especially when his characters stand in lieu of the architectural and geometric features, as molds8 symbolizing place. Thus they essentially become the form of the mould, reflecting the facades of the houses, doors decorated with inscriptions, or domed entrances, under whose arches stand the groom and bride with their traditional embellished regalia. These created places are warm and tender settings in which loved ones meet and embrace in rapture, like those who have not seen one another for some time.
What Alyousif achieved through instinct, insight, and intuition (all qualities inherent in Islamic art) which transcended sensory knowledge (the principle of representation in the Western perspective), has affinities with the Iraqi artist Jewad Selim’s “Baghdadiat” in the way it incorporates geometric patterns that surround the human figures as spatial indicators, along with the flattening and reduction of those figures (in a schematic or Cubist-geometric style), recurring symbols (crescent, palm tree, talismans, and Hand of Fatima), and expressions (women and roosters, neighbourhood children, married couples, wedding processions, women and birds, song gatherings, and henna nights). These are common subject matters of Iraqi neighbourhoods inspired by the miniatures of the thirteenth-century artist Al Wasiti (“The Assemblies of Hariri”), which tell stories by referencing well-known landmarks of Arab cities. These miniatures inspired modern Iraqi art experimentations, especially with the introduction of the simplified Cubist style in the figuration of popular topics (as seen in the works of Faiq Hassan), or in the synthesis of Cubism with the Arabesque style to depict markets and neighbourhoods (Hafidh Al Droubi).
Based on the innate rituals rooted in religious beliefs that Alyousif reached through his profound relationship with Bahraini heritage and his interest in its vocabulary and atmosphere, these aesthetic elements seem to indicate that the artist was seeking a safe haven for himself and a knowledge to which he could cling. This quest ranks him among the many great painters who have chosen not to follow the laws of art, but instead access a spiritual world that soars above those laws, transcending them.
From the Archaeology of Memory
As the writer and philosopher Jean Lescure said, “An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”9 The geometric dimensions of the place that attracts the imagination in this way cannot remain ambivalent. It is a place in which humans lived not only in the objective sense, but with all the bias that imagination brings as well. We are attracted to such places because they amplify existence within protective boundaries… When we remember homes and rooms we learn to live within ourselves (obscure). And so, in the 1970s Alyousif began to reminisce on the life he once lived in the traditional neighborhoods after that world had disappeared under the wheels of modernization that steamrolled the collective Bahraini consciousness, a past that kindled his imagination with its spiritual harmony and natural balance. Thus inspired, he embarked on a series of oil and watercolor artworks that vibrated with his Bahraini heritage, replete with symbolism rooted in his childhood recollections of Muharraq and Manama, evoking the features of the heritage houses with their alleyways, frescoes, and walls bearing witness to rituals, customs, and traditions, throbbing with vitality and nostalgia. He painted traditional songs, evoked the legend of the Woman in the Headdress, and the dualities of the woman and the rooster, the family and the cat, the rooster and the sun, the cat and the caged bird, the woman and the pigeon, the woman and the palm tree, and then the green land; all subjects that have no material substance, but instead derive from the soul’s yearning, from the archaeology of memories and the oases of his childhood wanderings through palm groves and villages on the banks of freshwater springs.
This phase started with the traditional song “God Protects the Harvest” in the year 1970 which was printed on blank paper against a backdrop painted in oil colours, part of a series he did about the traditional songs by the Bahraini poet Ali Abdullah Khalifa in his poetry collection “The Thirst of the Palms” (1966), which Alyousif illustrated and marked his first foray into combining art with poetry. He then selected a few of these drawings to do in oil colours (Figs. xxx, 1971). In this approach, the artist used the technique of cutting paper and using it as a blank template placed on the easel, a basic working method derived from his love of working with his hands. This ability would serve him well in his later years when he had to rely on his tactile skills to continue creating after losing the use of his eyes. While his passion for palm trees began initially with his yearning for their tall elegant forms, the sense of longing accompanied him throughout his journey through the alphabet of symbols, and he continued this quest until his dying breath. After all, historically the palm tree has been associated with such qualities as tenderness, goodness, fertility and motherhood, and indeed was a unique icon of the Dilmun civilization (3rd century BCE onwards, according to the legend of Gilgamesh), adorning engraved seals since ancient times.
“In this poetry book,” observed Alyousif, “I moulded the decorations of clothes and doors into backdrops for the painting, and sometimes they became essential figurations in which I tried to build the personality of the Arab Gulf.”10 From this phase came the painting Your Henna is From Dough (Fig. xxx, 1973), about the bride’s ‘henna night’ that precedes the wedding, an event that spreads joy among the neighbourhood residents. The work featured many symbols common in popular art such as the talismans of the palm and the eye, along with tattoos and birds facing one another (symbolizing love and affection).
There are existential questions relating to the struggle for survival and the duality of good and evil which Alyousif expressed with striking simplicity in his oil paintings, drawing from his childhood memories, such as the symbolic image of the cat stalking a bird—as he used to raise pigeons and roosters, and got to know firsthand the predatory inclinations of cats. In his painting Protection (Fig. xxx, 1978), he depicted these feline marauders prowling the city’s rooftops in the moonlight, sneaking stealthily from one house to another to prey on the newborn chicks. The painting reflects the artist’s expressionist leanings, with the textured density of colour layers, denoting anxiety, tension, and the passage of time and the marks and creases it leaves in its wake. Sometimes he incorporated ready-made materials (wood and iron rods), which he glued onto his creation, such as in the work entitled Waiting (Fig. xxx, 1979). Greyish-blue hues dominate his works from that period, along with clayey and dark green tones. In that same year, he created The Groom (Fig. xxx, 1979), a painting characterized by an acute figurative style that reduces the human forms to semi-geometric units, and in which the door of the room becomes the most prominent feature. Here, the open door takes on a metaphysical and sentimental meaning, for the door has a special significance as one of four elements recurring throughout his works – the others being the rooster, the pigeon, and the cat. This element of the threshold is entrenched in his formative years, when he used to run his fingers over the carved doors to feel their engravings, curves and contours, only to later realize that all things in life offer a doorway of sorts, gateways that give on to the beyond. This, in a way, is a metaphor for man, because the human being is the beginning of everything and the key to all knowledge. Painting the real world around him did not preclude the artist from using abstract forms. He experimented with calligraphy and Arabesque details and achieved significant results in abstract geometric designs by cutting and integrating paper through collage techniques.
These experiments, which continued until the early 1980s, were in line with the fine arts influences of the new wave of modern Arab artists who advocated ethnic identity, authenticity, and a return to Arab heritage to combat the pervasive effects of Westernization. Their concerted efforts challenged the hegemony of modernism coming from the West (Les Nabis, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, to name a few), which themselves often referenced Islamic decorative arts and the vast heritage of ancient civilizations. In truth, abstraction was very suited to Alyousif’s artistic sensibility, and his deep fondness for the traditional Bahraini way of life, with its aura of warmth and nostalgia. Starting in 1983 he exhibited a collection of works (executed in acrylic) which are considered among his masterpieces, including The Delivery (Fig. xxx, 1983), in which the foreground forms a focal point of the subject in relation to the background (meaning?); fronts of houses and intersecting alleyways coupled with an ample section of street simmering under the intense afternoon sun contrasted by the soothing shade of the deep interiors. Following this same aesthetic logic is the flatter and more impulsive (meaning?) painting The Gulf Bride (Fig. xxx, 1983), followed by The Gate (Fig. xxx, 1984), the latter presenting three knights bearing shields decorated with triangles and circles. Behind the figures rises a magnificent ornamental composition, almost like a mirage, an extension of the spectrum of the city with its bands of desert and blue walls. The Meeting (Fig. xxx, 1989) offers yet another painting marked by the prominence of contrasting colour fields and forms. The 1990s saw the artist return to portraying the rural and marine landscapes and villages he used to paint in his youth.
The Characteristic Features of the Art of Nasser Alyousif and Their Arab Connections
It is no easy task to draw a line between the expressionism of Nasser Alyousif, its relation to the traditional environment and heritage, and its broader Arab environment. The elegant naivety which he displays by reducing, elongating and flattening the human form and the use of details of the physical environment in a scene is directly bound to the Bahraini social (???) consciousness. We can discern the homogeneity of a love-filled way of life, which he portrayed in light of the influences of traditional lifestyle that permeated the works of Mahmoud Said and Ragheb Ayyad (Egypt), where logic is partially missing and replaced by street cafes, festivities, weddings, and bands of folk musicians; aspects of Egyptian life that date back thousands of years. His experience is especially connected to the forceful and dense application of colours (in the 1970s) with the chromatic details typical of the Egyptian painter Tahia Halim’s style in such works as her Lover of Nile Country, as well as the influences these artists share in the deliberately spontaneous figurative method. The clay-like tones of the faces she borrows from Pharaonic art resemble the sunburnt features of the sailors and pearl divers in Alyousif’s paintings. Add to this the realm of women (the female figure, bird or rooster, lovers’ tryst, or palm trees whose sprawling fronds provide shade for women performing their tasks seated on the riverbanks). It stands to reason to witness the recurrence of featureless faces, which is characteristic of the Islamic art of the miniature. It goes without saying that so-called “amateur” artists contributed to the establishment of modern Arab art, just as Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau had a hand in Parisian modernism after receiving the recognition of Pablo Picasso. Such “amateur” artists include the likes of Baya Al-Tunisia, Chaïbia Talal, and Mohamed Ben Allal (Morocco), whose paintings embody the life in the alleyways, markets, and neighbourhoods of Marrakesh; and not least Mohamed Ali (Egypt), whose works depicted Cairo’s old neighbourhoods, and notably accompanied the musical compositions of Sheikh Imam and poems of Ahmed Fouad Negm. If there is a singular distinct or unique advantage in the present time to instinctive oramateur paintings, it is its capacity to be malleable or includes as much detail of the surrounding environment that the artist intended to paint or explore as he or she pleases. Decorative talent works to keep the artist away from the anatomical controls and academic rules that limit his or her primal spirit and freshness. There is no doubt that spiritual and religious factors are among the primary motives that make mankind look for a means of expression reflecting his relationship to life and existence. Art is a force that lives through the physical and spiritual aspects, according to Wassily Kandinsky.
The Art of Etching
From an early age, Alyousif experimented with printmaking. Before attempting the linocut technique and applying it to oils in 1978, he tried out leather and wood-prints. He then experimented with etching, developing a world of his own revolving around symbols, figures, places, markets, memories of pearl divers and women’s gatherings, the same scenes that had previously appeared in his watercolours and oils.
The aesthetics of his etchings took a new turn, however, notably after his return from the art workshop in the Moroccan city of Asilah (1980). This manifested itself in his introduction of special effects to create spots and networks of color on the surface of the etching. Although this technique altered the results and visual effects, he maintained his personal way of recounting the familiar reality of the domestic indoor situation, a seated woman in wait or taking a rest in a room populated with things and objects, a space with a door onto another room, where the light draws the eye toward some mysterious deeper place. This is how the line of the earth (1981–86) and the game of perspective plays out in his depictions of daily life, or those views portraying fishermen in landscapes with the memories of the boat, the realm of women with all its joy, frustration and preoccupation with household chores, family portraits of the artist’s family and grandchildren, birds, and fishmongers. Most remarkable are the scenes of moonlit nights, with their perfect interplay of shading clouds and shafts of light.
Certain other works by Alyousif show affinities with the etchings of the Iraqi artist Rafi’ Al Nassiri in their use of the zinc etching relief technique on paper. In these, Alyousif expressed Dilmun symbols of the land of immortality, roosters and the moon, loved ones gathering in fields (using wavy lines and palm trees), as well as the monoprint and linoleum prints in which he depicted ruins, faces, masks, and decorations of houses.
Songs in a Dreamer’s Night
Even after the loss of his sight, as darkness took over Nasser Alyousif nevertheless managed to turn his inner truth into a visual illusion, driven by his need to continue living in peace with what he loved to do. This was a kind of self-defence, a need to protect his existence. While it is true that Claude Monet went colourblind shortly before his death, no artist who needed his or her eyesight to paint ever fully continued to create art after going blind. In his case, Alyousif managed instead to find ways of working around the fate that befell his eyes, and in many ways he actually prospered, relying on the free flight of his imagination to explore the vast spaciousness of his inner world: he was a dreamer, one who could relive the sweetness of the past and touch the very texture of its splendour, far from the bitterness of the present.
At this point, Alyousif realized that the fulcrum of his entire artistic output pivoted on his early memories of his childhood home. Basically, his relationship to art harkened back to the early stages of visual awareness entrenched in the Islamic aesthetics inherent to Bahraini folklore and were rooted in the daily work of the decorators, potters, builders, and even the garment industry. This utilitarian aspect of the Islamic arts was part and parcel of the country’s way of life. And because we constantly relive our memories of the places we inhabited, those houses and streets continue to inhabit us, throughout our lives. The home becomes both flesh and soul, the cradle itself, whereby the house embodies that “cradling childhood,”12 in the words of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962).
The myriad decorative details of Nasser Alyousif’s childhood years – as he wrote in his memoir – are reminiscent of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights (which became the basis ships, and the inner sanctums of homes and passion for folktales (Antara bin Shaddad’s heroic epic poems, and the stories of the Beni Hilali migration to North Africa) that were often told in the household gatherings during his youth. For Alyousif, the city of Muharraq was like “a home with many houses.” Here he was born, and here he began to grasp the aesthetics of the house. “I look at the roof of a room,” he wrote, “and I am drawn to the thatching and bamboo decorated in red, yellow and green. I see the walls, openings and the plaster decorations. I loved to pass my fingers along the golden pins that adorned the large wooden box that sat in the corner of the room topped with the distinctively- shaped clothes basket embellished by overlapping ribbons of scarlet, green and red wicker.
There was also the large bed with its decorative skirt and, hanging on a nail in the wall, was a brightly-coloured dress embroidered with silver thread. I also often pondered the decorations carved into the wooden door of the room.
Perhaps the scissors that occupied Al Yousif from his early artistic endeavours as he cut and shaped the paper stems from his father’s profession as a famous tailor of traditional men’s robes. About this, he wrote: “There was a large room in our house in which many robe tailors from Al Ahsa would come to work. The motifs they created with golden threads interested me, especially when the robe was completed and the threads were hammered against a thick block of wood to polish it and make its decoration truly glimmer and shine. The decoration was simple, often made up of triangles. The glittering embellishments of women’s clothing were far more beautiful. Every decoration had a meaning and an echo in the soul as colours do in their expression of emotion.”
The linoleum print technique (1981–2004), in which Alyousif cut and stencilled paper into the desired shapes and then pressed on the linoleum screen, stayed with him. The white contours stood out against the black forms, like the duality of light and darkness. This highlighting process in graphic expression turns lines into the forces of power from which humans, objects and worlds are created from active memory. It is the youthful memory that simply left the door of life open for a while, only to later return to that place, the source of all his artistic creativity. Indeed, it is the consciousness of all the past moments and subconscious scenes picked up by the eye and saved to resurface at a later date. By art alone does man live, and this is how Nasser Alyousif elevated art and its higher aesthetic value. Contrary to what Plato said about imitation and simulating reality, Lescure said that “art starts a new beginning as soon as it becomes self-sufficient... Art therefore enriches the fertility of life and is a kind of debate between the types of surprises that alert our awareness and prevent it from going numb.” It is often the inner breadth that gives real meaning to certain expressions of the visible world.
Nasser Alyousif’s work elevates reality to the level of dreams, reaching out each time to awaken the objects sleeping in the childhood home and pulling them out of its warm lap. He is immersed in the depths of his inner self, listening to songs of the sea and singing folk songs. There is an overlap between the dream and the imagination, or as the poet Robert Desnos put it: “The dreamer and his reverie enter body and soul into the substance of happiness.” In his darkness, Alyousif returned to walk in the reverie of his imagination between the palm groves, villages and banks of the freshwater springs. He recalls the neighbourhoods for one of his artworks) with their dreamy oriental landscapes, the waves of the sea, voyages of their maze of alleyways and narrow streets, to convey vivid details of the hustle and bustle of this environment: festivals, weddings, henna nights, and men’s dances of various types, musical instruments and rhythms, as well as women’s dances with their embroidered costumes and bejewelled hands and necks, swaying their bodies and clapping to the beat of the tambourine. Is it not strange that this music has the ability to conjure up images that are mixed with senses and colours? What is even more surprising still is not the sheer abundance of his later artistic production, but its qualitative and technical value and his ability to control the landscape and the distribution of elements on the surface of the etching, something which those who have the gift of sight are unable to do. One does not feel that he or she is seeing a black-and-white print, but rather a world that fluctuates between its two faces, reflected in the glow of the magic of the story and its narrative style. Sometimes the artist introduced a colour or two to the predominant black colour (often blue or pink). In doing so, perhaps he was using his hearing to listen to the language of colours, and draw out the vague from his mirage and shape it into visual realities.
In our eyes, the artist’s linoleum prints emerge like rolled-out carpets adorned with patterns that glitter like bright stars on a seemingly flat surface, but in reality, it is populated by women, children, homes and street vendors amidst the bustle of markets alternating sunny places and shady spaces. Nasser Alyousif was able to present a record of Bahrain’s folkloric traditions with the passion of one eager not to miss the last days of the sun: huts made from palm fronds scattered along the beach, popular street cafes, fishermen and boats, traditional wedding processions, fishing-basket makers, ship-builders, potters, traditional wall cupboards, banquets, women preparing the traditional harees dish, picnics, pearl divers’ songs, and the ululations of joy. All of these vivid memories accompany Nasser Alyousif as he resurrects the past and dissolves the self into the collective imagination of the Bahraini people.
Among his most beautiful works in linoleum are those that apply Islamic decorations to fill empty spaces. This type of decoration, with its prodigiously complex variety and aesthetics, presents myriad silhouettes expressing the artist’s ritualistic yearning and inward joy as he traces out the breath of life, exhaling and inhaling the solitude in which he sleeps and awakens. But these creations are not mere figments of a dream: Alyousif worked with a sense of devotion and fulfilment. When the dreamer reconstructs the world and magically transforms it through utmost care and attentiveness, we soon realize that everything and each moment in the life of the artist is the substance from which he draws his creations. It is a towering presence, much like the night, that the artist can navigate and determine the path to a familiar depth as if peering into its deepest interior and the finest hidden recesses of his existence. It did not occur to Nasser Alyousif that he was so astoundingly pure and great, but he knew that all the stars he had woven into his work were made for him, and existed within him. Outside his love, those stars did not exist. How creative and cognizant this artist seems to be of his love for life and for giving, and how dreadful the world must seem to those who do not know themselves.
Biography
1940
• Born in the Al Hayayeek neighbourhood in Muharraq, Bahrain.
1951–58
• Attends Western Primary School in Manama.
1951
• Meets the artist Abdulkarim Al Orrayed at the Western Primary School, who as his art teacher encourages him to participate in the school’s art club; Meets artist Ahmed Al Sunni, his art teacher during his secondary school days.
1958–59
• Attends the Teachers College in Manama; graduates with a teacher diploma in 1959.
1956
• Participates in the first exhibition of the artist association, the Family of Art Amateurs. Other participating artists are Ahmed Baqer, Karim Al Bosta, Ishaq Kooheji, Rashid Al Oraifi, Ussama Salah, Ahmed Al Sunni, Aziz Zubari. The exhibition of exclusively oil paintings is held at the Uruba Club in Manama.
1957
• Participates in the art exhibition held as part of the Commercial and Agricultural Fair in Al Andalus Garden; the artist shows an artwork titled Winter Night; the exhibition is opened by Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, accompanied by Charles Belgrave.
1959–72
• Art teacher at Khameez School, Salmaniya School and Al Gharbiya School; meets artist Aziz Zubari at Salmaniya School.
1960 onwards
• Attends Abdulkarim Al Orrayed’s art salon at his store in Shaikh Abdulla Street; this is an informal gathering place; other participants include Karim Al Bosta, Ahmed Baqer, Rashid Al Oraifi, Rashid Swar, Hussain Al Sunni, Ahmed Nashaba.
1960s to late 1970s
• Founding of Al Talib Stationery Store by Nasser Alyousif and his family; the store becomes a key supplier of artist materials, books and periodicals on art history and techniques amongst other items (exact dates not known).
1963
• Attends Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt for a course in geography/history; Meets the Egyptian artist Mustafa Al Bazzaz, who strongly influences the artist through his interest in local folkloric traditions.
1967
• Participates in the Middle Eastern Art exhibition organized by the British tobacco company, House of Carreras; the exhibition travels to seven Arab countries and three European countries. The exhibition opened in London, and then moved to Paris, Rome and on to Cairo, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad. It was a watershed exhibition in terms of exposure and cultural exchange.
1969
• Participates in an exhibition held in Kuwait organized through the association, the Family of Bahraini Artists.
• His artwork Diver’s Wedding is featured in full colour on the cover of the Kuwait-based magazine Al-Arabi, leading to widespread recognition for the artist.
• Begins work on illustrations for the collection of the Bahraini poet Ali Abdulla Khalifa's The Thirst of Palms, first published in 1970 in Beirut (4 editions).
1971–85
• Participates in all the exhibitions held by the Contemporary Art Society (founded in 1970).
1972–92
• General Manager and partner of the Arabia Glass & Mirrors Company.
1972
• Contributes the cover illustration for the book Where Does the Sadness Come From? on the Palestinian occupation, by the Bahraini poet Alawi Al Hashimi.
• First instalment of the Annual Fine Art Exhibition, held under the auspices of the newly independent Bahraini government’s Ministry of Information; is recognized as one of Bahrain’s top ten artists.
1972–96
• Yearly participation in the National Day exhibition mounted by the Ministry of Information, Bahrain; and the Annual Fine Art Exhibition at the Bahrain National Museum.
1977
• 6th Annual Fine Art Exhibition by Ministry of Information – Certificate of Merit.
1978
• 7th Annual Fine Art Exhibition by Ministry of Information – Certificate of Merit.
1979
• Receives the Delmon Award in the Annual Fine Art Exhibition in Bahrain.
1980
• Receives the Delmon Award in the Annual Fine Art Exhibition in Bahrain.
• Participates in the Asilah Arts Festival (Morocco) together with Abdulkarim Al Orrayed, Ebrahim Busaad, Kamil Barakat, and Ishaq Khunji; joins the printmaking workshop and meets Mohamed Omar Khalil, who would exert a profound influence on the artist; encounters the work of Swiss-German artist Paul Klee; orders a lithographic printing press on his return to Bahrain and begins experimentation in the medium.
• Participates in the GCC Exhibition in Qatar and Singapore, together with Abdulkarim Al Orrayed, Yusuf Qassim and Rashid Al Khalifa.
1981
• Participates in the GCC Cultural Week in Paris.
1982
• Joint exhibition with the artist Ebrahim Busaad about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; held at the Alumni Club in October.
• Organizes exhibition of zinc engravings in Bahrain at the Alumni Club; other participating artists Ebrahim Busaad, Abdulkarim Al Orrayed, Kamel Barakat.
1983–86
• Becomes president of the Bahrain Contemporary Art Society.
1984
• Participates in the International Biennial Exhibition of Arab Art held in Cairo.
1985
• Participates in the GCC Cultural Week in Japan.
• Contributes cover illustration to the book Beginning of Love by Bahraini poet Abdulrahman Al Rafie.
1988
• Solo exhibition of zinc engravings sponsored by the Bahraini publishing, framing and export-import trading company Dar Al Ghad, held at the Bahrain Car Parks Company Building.
1989
• Participation in the 9th Norwegian International Print Triennial.
1991
• Starts complaining of deterioration of eyesight.
1992
• Complete loss of eyesight.
1995
• Recognized in Sharjah as a pioneer in the field of Fine Arts in the Arabian Gulf.
1998
• Solo exhibition at Albareh Art Gallery, titled “Challenge One"
2000
• Solo exhibition held at Albareh Art Gallery, titled “Retrospective Exhibition.”
2001
• Receives the Al Dana Award in the Annual Fine Art Exhibition in Bahrain, the highest honour in this annual event.
• Receives the Golden Palm Prize, Qatar.
2003
• Solo exhibition at Albareh Art Gallery, titled “Challenge Two.”
2004
• Solo exhibition at Albareh Art Gallery, Bahrain, titled “More Than Meets the Eye,” features exclusively linoleum prints.
2006
• The artist Nasser Alyousif passes away on 16 June.