ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the career and paintings of Beirut-based Palestinian artist and inaugural director of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Art Department, Ismail Shammout (1930–2006) and his wife and collaborator, artist Tamam al-Akhal (b. 1935). Against the push of abstraction and the American University of Beirut’s pedagogical philosophy of personal expression in the arts, figuration remained a prevalent mode of artistic expression rooted in the Beaux-Arts tradition. In the paintings of Shammout and al-Akhal, figuration served to embody a collective Palestinian subjectivity. The chapter begins by documenting the role of Palestinian art and activism in forging international alliances with nonaligned revolutionary movements during the decade of the 1960s. The chapter offers a close critical analysis of the role of the paintings of Shammout and al-Akhal as speaking for a displaced and disenfranchised Palestinian population in ways never possible by a supposedly universal abstraction.
