Chafic Abboud

Biography

Shafic (or Chafic) Abboud (1926–2004) was a Lebanese painter, born in Mhaidseh near Bikfaya. He studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and left for Paris in 1947, where he worked in the ateliers of Jean Metzinger, Othon Friesz, Fernand Léger and André Lhote before studying at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He moved from a Lebanese tradition of figurative and landscape painting to a colourful, personal abstraction, while remaining attached to his oriental roots. Besides painting he worked in ceramics, terracotta, carpets and lithography. Although he spent most of his life in France, he is considered one of the most influential Lebanese artists of the twentieth century; the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris showed a retrospective of his work in 2011.