Excessive Poetics in Aleppo’s Modernist Art

In the 1940s, the Syrian city of Aleppo gave home to a modernist circle engaged in reclaiming the mythological landscape of the Fertile Crescent as a history of excessive creation both imaginative and material. Adapting Surrealist notions of psychical repression into readings of antiquity, painters and poets developed interpretations of Assyrian stelae and sacrificial altars as emanations from a Syrian collective unconscious. Importantly, the project raised interpretive questions about art’s objecthood that presumed an intimate and motivated relationship between physical attributes and the imaginative work of poetic constitution. When artist Fateh al-Moudarres exhibited his paintings of epic heroes, he appended textual explanations in the form of blank verse poems mimicking archaeologists’ translations of cuneiform myths. Meanwhile, critic Urkhan Muyassar published manifesto-like texts about radical Surrealist condensation, daring Arabophone poets to use their psyches to convert Symbolist digression into the polished nouns of free association. In this paper, I explore how the work of this Aleppo group—their thinking about the problem of aesthetic excess(es), posed within an idea of cyclical time—may serve to challenge habits of modernist art history writing. The 1940s are often taken to mark a threshold to Cold War battles pitting emergent American formalism against French belle lettristic writing (a fight that resonates, still, in anxiety about unstable global distinctions between art history and journalism). Can we escape the purist binary to rethink the stakes of the interface of poetry and artistic objects? Might we fashion a modernist history from acts of ornamental overproduction?