Patrons and Saints: Saliba Douaihy’s ‘Symbolic’ Sixties

Saliba Douaihy was, narrowly speaking, twice “Americanized” in the nineteen-sixties. First as citizen of the United States, in 1963, then as artist, with the acquisition of his 1965 abstraction Majestic by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the city where he lived and worked. This paper takes up the specific case of his entry into MoMA's collection—likely the first Arab artist so enfolded—to prompt a critical-historical assessment of his relation to the pan-American Lebanese presence of the sixties. Majestic was purchased out of a 1966 New York gallery show and given to MoMA by the chairman of Lebanon's Intra Bank, Yousef Beidas, as his firm was collapsing. That crisis precipitated the financier’s flight to Brazil shortly thereafter, and within a few years he was dead, succumbed to cancer in Lucerne. Beidas’s fall was “considered by some to presage the terrible Lebanese-Palestinian disputes of the seventies,” his relative Edward Said would later write, concluding that it “symbolize[d] the broken trajectory imposed on so many of us by the events of 1948.” Holding Said's words in mind, my paper moves from the scene of the painting's acquisition to the site of Douaihy’s New York labor: the artist’s perch at a Maronite church in Brooklyn. I locate in this conjuncture the preliminary materials for a formal-material argument about Douaihy's sixties practice, conversant with accounts of his work and its reception yet critically motivated by the political economies and political theologies at play in these American relays.