Event

From 3 to 5 February 2023, the Boghossian Foundation will host the Menart exhibition, dedicated to artists from the Middle East and North Africa.
The Françoise Livinec Gallery is exhibiting works by the Franco-Egyptian painter Georges Hanna Sabbagh (1887-1951) and the Armenian-born artist Elvire Kouyoumdjian, known as Elvire Jan (1904-1996).

 

Elvire Jan was born in 1904 in Bulgaria to a large family of industrialists of Armenian origin, the Kouyoumdjians, who took Persian nationality in 1911. Between Europe and the United States, uprooted, she chose painting as her homeland.
She enrolled at the Julian Academy in 1926 and began exhibiting in 1931. With her friends Bazaine, Bissière, Le Moal, Manessier and Singier, she belonged to the second Paris school from the 1950s. Together they developed a non-figurative landscape painting.

 

Born in 1887 in Alexandria, Georges Sabbagh grew up in Cairo. He arrived in Paris in 1906 to study law, which he soon abandoned to devote himself to painting and in 1910 joined the Académie Ranson. There he studied with Paul Sérusier and Félix Vallotton and became a friend of Maurice Denis.
From the 1920s onwards he exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants and then at the Salon d'Automne, and in the Bernheim, Druet and Weill galleries. In 1927 he was consecrated with the Allegory of the Bath. Sabbagh then began missions to Egypt on behalf of the State Secretariat for Fine Arts. His return to his roots had consequences for Sabbagh's work. He began to paint portraits in which psychology exceeded physical reality, moving away from the Cubist, Fauvist and Nabis artistic movements he had previously experimented with, and towards a more personal style.