May 22, 1968 - May 24, 1968
Soviet Cultural Center, Beirut, Lebanon

In May 1968, an exhibition of forty-five paintings and linocuts by the Soviet artist Aleksei Shmarinov opened at the Soviet Cultural Center in Beirut before traveling on to Damascus and Baghdad. It arrived at a charged moment: just a year after the Arab world’s defeat in the 1967 war, when many were questioning what solidarity between the Soviet Union and the Arab world could still mean.

The show offered a portrait of an artist shaped by his travels. Visitors encountered sunlit watercolors from Shmarinov’s youthful voyage through Egypt in 1956, on the eve of the Suez Crisis; landscapes from the Russian countryside; and lithographs celebrating the wild beauty of Kamchatka. At its center hung A Curse on the Aggressors (1957), a monumental painting of a lone woman crossing the ruins of Port Said — the work that had made Shmarinov’s reputation a decade earlier, when Khrushchev himself praised it before Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But this was more than a diplomatic gesture. In the galleries of Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad, Shmarinov found Arab artists asking many of the same questions he was: about heritage, nationalism, and what art owed to tradition versus the present. Those conversations — as much as the paintings themselves — are the real subject of this exhibition’s story.