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"... Blanche had her first painting lessons at the age of 10. Later, when the family returned from Egypt to live in Lebanon, the painting lessons continued. Law studies or not, there was still time for art, and for writing, which was to become also an important medium of expression for Blanche. She speaks about the journal she kept during her years at law school, the daily entries of events and experiences, many illustrated with small, humorous sketches. She speaks also about her art teachers and the other girls with whom she painted.
There was in Beirut during that time of the early thirties a Polish painter, Jean Kober, to whom a number of mothers entrusted the instruction of their daughters. The painting classes were a fashionable, social activity, and hardly intended to produce serious, professional artists. But to a few of the young women, the experience became more than pleasant afternoons of light gossip and the easy production of pretty pictures; they discovered the adventure of painting, the mysterious magic of transforming color and form into art. Along with Blanche, they participated in the group exhibitions of the day; art critics reviewed their works and wrote about them in glowing terms in the Beirut cultural press. Their lives eventually took other directions, but during those years, as a group, they comprised the first generation of contemporary women artists in Lebanon.
Blanche also spent a brief period of study with the Lebanese painter, Habib Srour. She recalls it as a distressingly boring experience: “How unlike Kober he was in his teaching approach! With Kober we were permitted free expression, each to develop an individual style. But with Srour… how can I forget the week after week after week of painting the same chair, each week the same chair but from a different angle.
No matter how much we protested, he simply pointed to the chair and said, “Paint”
Blanche Ammoun the artist, meanwhile, was also very much Blanche Ammoun the woman. Like any other young, privileged lady of that period, full of an ebullient taste for life, she went to tea parties and dances, sported the latest fashions, and from under her parasol flirted with the young men… until finally she fell in love with one, an officer in the French Army. In 1944, Blanche Ammoun and Colonel Andrea Loheac were married. Soon after, they went to live in Paris.
Blanche chose her husband well. Andre Loheac, although a man of military discipline, was also a French gentleman of culture and learning. Avant garde in his thinking, it pleased him that his wife was an artist, and throughout their life together he gave full encouragement to her efforts. With such support (and with her own inexhaustible energy), Blanche was able to do what few women artists can – to combine, with harmony and success, love, marriage, children, and art. ..."
www.onefineart.com 
Blanche Loheac Ammoun, 1912
by Nicole Malhamé Harfouche: Laurent Laloup le mercredi 18 juin 2008 - Demander un contact Recherche sur cette contribution | |
