ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 historicizes the 1953 launch of an art department at the American University of Beirut under Chicago-based artist Maryette Charlton (1924–2013). It draws on archival material from the papers of Charlton housed at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, archives at American University of Beirut (AUB), and interviews with department graduates to consider how the founding rhetoric of the department situated the visual arts within a liberal arts tradition and relied on paradigms of individualism and freedom of expression, tropes characterizing American abstract expressionism during the Cold War. Charlton’s approach to art pedagogy stood in marked contrast to the strong presence of a nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts tradition, taught at the older and more established l’Académie libanaise des beaux-arts (ALBA). This enabled AUB to mobilize the visuals arts within Cold War plays for American influence against the strong francophone legacy of the mandate; AUB’s department institutionalized the concept of an artist whose professional expertise lay in the vision of the eye rather than the technique of the hand, an alternative to the dominant nineteenth-century European Beaux-Arts tradition. Central to this supposedly distinctive American “coup,” to use the term of one AUB faculty, however, is a result of the prominent presence of exiled German Bauhaus artists and architects in the United States after World War II and the prominence of their pedagogical philosophy in the Department of Education at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
