Like Abboud and many of the other most distinguished Lebanese artists of the 20^th century, such as Omar Onsi, Mustafa Farroukh and Elie Kanaan, Achkar would spend formative years in Paris during the decade following the end of World War II. Paris was bustling with emigré artists from the Global South, who would later bring different schools and styles of abstraction back home, inaugurating rich, hybrid traditions that in many cases would be difficult to trace back to the source.

Indeed, the political history of abstract art in the Arab world is difficult to codify. Many partial explanations for abstraction emerged under the influence of Arab nationalism, arguing for a kind of nativist understanding that drew on everything from Islamic art to Byzantine icons to Arab mathematics. But these interpretations, while rightly opposed to the traditional Eurocentric view that all abstraction comes from the West, operate under a misunderstanding between abstract painting as a modern art movement and abstraction in any form of representational art—a cultural and anthropological process across history, going all the way back to the prehistoric art of the Ice Age, when early modern humans discovered symbolic forms. The latter abstraction wasn’t invented in the Europe of the 20^th century, but it also didn’t emerge in the Islamic Golden Age. In other words, the argument over when abstract art really emerged misses the point because abstraction is not a historical period, but an ongoing process.

Nevertheless, the iconography of modern art encouraged both the Eurocentric and the Arab nationalist and nativist interpretations. Many Lebanese artists heavily influenced by Cubists like Jean Metzinger and Fernand Léger would return home and develop reinterpretations of regional traditions, set against European templates. In the case of Achkar, this oversimplification wasn’t possible. She painted in Cubist style for a short period, before moving on to develop her highly personal style around 1970, characterized by long and irregular stripes of vibrant colors in the manner of European Expressionism, but in a painterly atmosphere closer to the American Color Field painting. In my mind, it is the only serious attempt by any artist anywhere to build on the early foundations of Synthetic Cubism laid by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1912-1913. In the 1910s, Braque and Picasso invented the revolutionary technique of papiér collé, using large stripes of paper interlocked in a painting, to produce the effect of a non-objective space, abolishing the representation of objects altogether. But Braque, whom Achkar always mentioned as a central influence, and Picasso both quickly moved on from this foundational period of their art (in his later years, Braque returned to semi-figurative Cubism, while Picasso devoted himself to Surrealism).

Achkar’s mature paintings are an attempt to apply Synthetic Cubism to the already deconstructed color field. “It is like layers of paper placed on top of each other in quantity, you tear them off one by one, to arrive at the primordial which is the self,” she said in 1989, in her typically enigmatic way, of her painting process and, perhaps, as a hint of her devotion to Synthetic Cubism. “Remove everything that is superficial to arrive at the center, and the center is once again, the notion of a circle, that is to say life, and fear will say death.”

The rise of formal abstraction in Paris in the 1950s, both in its expressionist and minimalist versions, and its subsequent journeys to the postcolonial world, however, weren’t simply the triumph of the avant-garde over academic realism or impressionism. It was in large part due to the cultural imperialism of the United States during the Cold War, spearheaded by the Museum of Modern Art, and in Paris, specifically, by the art initiatives of the Marshall Plan. This part of the Marshall Plan’s aim wasn’t simply to make a case for American cultural hegemony through influential traveling exhibitions, but to counter the growing influence of Soviet Socialist Realism, including in the Middle East. In parallel to the “School of Paris,” an umbrella term in many global south countries for home-grown abstract expressionist movements that trained in Parisian studios between 1950 and 1980, many influential artists from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were trained in the Soviet Union.