Personal Info
- Country of residence: France
Information
Jumana El Husseini was born on April 2nd, 1932, in Jerusalem, where she lived until her family’s forced flight in 1947. El Husseini’s family ultimately settled in Lebanon, where, in 1953, the artist began an undergraduate degree in political science at the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University). An interest in politics came naturally to her, having been born into a prominent family of Palestinian nationalists; her grandfather, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, served as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate and was an avid opponent of both British and Zionist colonial rule. Jumana’s educational path took a different direction when she transferred to the American University of Beirut, where she enrolled in an art class and was encouraged by her teachers to develop her skills. She graduated from AUB in 1957 and participated in her first group exhibition at the Sursock Museum three years later. El Husseini lived and worked in Beirut until the Israeli invasion of 1982, when she relocated to Paris, a city she would call home for the rest of her life.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as the late artist and art critic Kamal Boullata has noted, Beirut’s Palestinian artists generally operated either in the orbit of the PLO in the refugee camps orthe more cosmopolitan world of Beirut’s art galleries. Husseini was a notable exception, bridging the scenes with art that was both politically committed and aesthetically experimental. From the very beginning, Palestine was her primary source of artistic inspiration, and the city of Jerusalem became a recurring theme in her work. Rather than painting the city “realistically,” however, Husseini broke the stone buildings of her youth down to basic, deliberately “naïve” geometric shapes, which she rendered in limited, often cheerful color palettes, occasionally accented with gold. Notably, her depictions of Jerusalem are almost always devoid of people, and their emptiness adds to the dreamlike quality endowed by her strategic use of color and negative space. With celestial and oneiric effects, the artist allows the viewer to gaze at Jerusalem as if looking through her own dreams.
Throughout her career, El Husseini worked in numerous media, from painting and sculpture to ceramics and embroidery. By the early 1970s, Husseini had begun to work in mixed media, combining, for example, oil paint with stitching to create compositions that were uniquely multidimensional and unwilling to acknowledge a border between “fine arts” and “handicrafts.” In Paris, she began to explore more abstract compositions, shifting from her usual array of whites and bright hues to darker, moodier colors and making extensive use of the Arabic language (and forms derived from it). During the late 1980s through the 1990s, Husseini created numerous mixed-media works in which she scratched scribbles, shapes, and words into paint, creating compositions that were at once morose and chaotic; she claimed to see these works as letters to her dead mother, who was buried in Jerusalem and whose grave she thus could not visit.
Though she was unable to return to the city that so inspired her, El Husseini continued to create art well into her old age. She passed away in Paris on April 11th, 2018.
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