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THE DAILY STAR LIFESTYLE FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2003
Hamra gallery honors 20th century design with 60s retrospective
Furniture, fixtures, textiles offer ‘revival with everything’ to those suffering from nostalgia
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Special to the Daily Star
 About a year ago, Souheil Hana discovered a trove of vintage carpets from the 1960s. All funky mod squad colors and bold geometric patterns, they had originally been imported to Beirut back in 1968 but never sold.
When Hanna found them, they were in pristine condition, still wrapped in plastic. For a decorative arts dealer with a keen eye and a sleuth’s instinct, this was quite a catch.
Hanna and his younger sister Hala run the XXe Siecle (20th Century) Gallery in Hamra. Hanna is the design expert; Hala, who studied advertising and graphic design at ALBA, has restoration skills and a good head for dealing with customers.
Specializing in furniture, fixtures, and textiles from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the sharp-looking shop is a haven for international design with a decidedly modern twist. And to stock it, Hanna trolls through foreign cities-making early morning missions to Paris flea markets or visiting the showrooms of such auction houses as Christie’s and Sotheby’s-always looking for some rare original, or unusual piece.
So it was surprising to find such a cache of carpets right here in Beirut. And it gave Hana an intriguing idea.
XXe Siecle is celebrating its one-year anniversary this month, and although Hana is technically a specialist in 50s era design, he decided to mark the occasion with a full-scale homage to the 60s.
“A revival, with everything,” he says as he takes a fast glance around the shop.
In addition to the carpets, he is exhibiting a large collection of lamps he picked up in Paris, mostly rare prototypes (meaning that, at most, only five copies of each piece were ever produced) that herald a time when chrome, neon, and Plexiglass were cutting-edge.
But what nails the show, and Hanna’s vision for it, is the series of Victor Vasarely lithographs, all bought at Paris auction house Drouot three months ago, encircling the gallery’s main floor.
“I wanted to saturate the place with motifs and optical designs,” says Hanna.
To his credit, the arrangement of furniture throughout XXe Siecle is meticulous. And to amplify the shape of every couch with works by Vasarely-by all accounts the undisputed pioneer of optical and kinetic art is no small stroke of ingenuity.
Vasarely is one of those artists who even if you don’t know his name, you know his work. His mathematically precise images of geometric, biomorphic forms, and his masterful optical illusions have had a huge influence on pop culture, architecture, fashion, and computer science over the last four decades.
Born in 1908 in Hungary, Vasarely was schooled in Bauhaus at an academy in Budapest. He moved to Paris in 1930, worked in advertising and graphic design, and ripped through such seminal art movements as constructivism, abstraction, cubism, and surrealism before settling into his own visual style.
In addition to a prolific body of work, Vasarely developed an entire philosophy with his artless individual, more communal, adapted to the mutations of the modern industrial world.
He published four volumes of his own writing (all of which Hanna has, in pride of place, on the shelves of the gallery’s corner library). And he was also enormously successful in his lifetime. He died in 1997.
To look at Vasarely’s resume of exhibitions is to see a running list through forty years of the art world’s hottest galleries and hippest cities. He hit Paris’s Denise Rene in 55, New York’s Sidney Janis in 66, and Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery in 73. Hits travel itinerary from 1974 to 1975 alone stretched from Tokyo to Stockholm to Tehran. The man has two museums Erected in his individual honor-one in his Hungarian hometown of Pec, the other in Aix-en-province.
“What I love about Vasarely,” says Hanna “is that his work is very cold. There’s no emotion. Vasarely thought that we lived in a very modern world, that painting was dead, and that we had to express our feelings about this modern world through the deformation of optical sensations.”
Op Art, as it is known shorthand, hit its peak in the mid-60s but it has enjoyed a number of revivals since, for example in the work of such painters as Ross Bleckner, whose canvases were dubbed Neo Op in the 80s.
“Op art is not something small. I’m from the generation of the computer,” explains Hanna, who was born in 1969.
“Now you can press a button and have a Vasarely. But he was thinking about all this in the 40s. He was the best artist to really feel the machine.”
And his work, with its grids and networks, presaged much of the technological advances that wouldn’t arrive on a mass level until the 90s.
“In France, his influence is very strong,” adds Hanna. It is bolstered in the US and Europe by the fact that 20th-century design in general is so fashionable.
But in Beirut-and here Hanna laughs-Vasarely’s influence is not so strong.
“A few clients came in recently and told me there had been a Vasarely exhibition in Beirut before. They said, ‘we saw Vasarely in the 70s and we never saw him here again.’ The generation before hated him at the time and they still hate him. It’s for our generation to discover him and appreciate him.”
Hanna links this to a larger trend: “The older generation comes in (to the shop) disgusted.
They hate the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
They lived in this, so for them it’s not nostalgic, it’s démodé, and it doesn’t look rich enough.
“They want to have a house that looks rich, but the younger generation wants to have a house that looks modern. Couples in their fifties or sixties want to show that they have money and for them, the style of the 60s and 70s looks too poor, even though it has real value at auction.
“But it’s interesting to the young, and I’m working for them,” he adds.
Most furniture dealers in Beirut, and indeed in the Middle East at large, tend to cater to that older generation’s taste-antique as opposed to vintage, Louis XIV as opposed to Jean Royere.
So Hanna and his sister are taking a risk in betting on the young-a risk that, so far, seems to have paid off.
XXe Siecle’s first year has been a good one, with solid sales and notable press. And it helps that the gallery’s prices are reasonable.
“The point is not to make people die of a heart attack”
When flipping over the price tag, says Hanna. One can find a fine conversation piece at XXe Siecle for about $100. Or one can shell out up to $100,000 for a major work, though Hanna, who also has a substantial collection of Jean Royere furniture, tends not to show the highest end items on the gallery floor.
The twenty Vasarely lithographs on view range in price from $500 to $1,500. To put this in perspective, consider that Sotheby’s in London is offering two Vasarely paintings in its contemporary day sale at the end of this month; the presale estimate for the larger of the two is $20,000 to $25,000.
“The prices are very low compared to local artists who sell for mad prices.
They’re like 18-and-a-half, they’re not known, and they’re selling their work for $6,000?” Hanna says mischievously.
Having studied French literature at the Sorbonne for 10 years before taking up design, he demurs to a Shakespearean reference.
“I think something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark."
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