November 3, 2020
Anneka Lenssen has published Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics (UC Press). Based on more than a decade of research, in Syria (until 2011) and elsewhere, the book traces the interplay of vitalist painting theories and the making of Syria as a contested territory between 1900 and 1965. It examines works by such artists as Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres to show how Syrians used the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world.