Final Exhibition of a Palestinian Artist in His Homeland
On November 29, 1947, an exhibition featuring 53 oil paintings by the Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb opened at a Maronite church in Haifa, Palestine. It would be Tomb’s last exhibition in the nation. The show’s opening date also marked the United Nations’s approval of Resolution 181, the Partition Plan of Palestine, which eventually led to the Nakba. 750,000 Palestinians, including Tomb and his family, were expelled from their homeland or forced into exile. Most of his body of work, including the oil paintings in that exhibition, was lost when Israel annexed Haifa.
A new Montreal exhibition, The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return, will pay homage to those 53 lost paintings, featuring that exact number of works by all different artists and spanning a range of disciplines, including drawing, sculpture, and video. Curated by Rula Khoury, Joëlle Tomb — Maroun’s granddaughter — and Haidi Motola in collaboration with the institution Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI), the exhibition is on view at two spaces: MAI and articule.
For the curators, sharing The Lost Paintings during the ongoing genocide of Gaza initially seemed troubling. “The idea for this exhibition was born at the beginning of 2021,” says Motola. “Now, when we are witnessing with horror the ultimate colonial violence of erasure and destruction in the form of the genocide and ethnic cleansing, it suddenly felt … futile and irrelevant.” With time and feedback from the artists, Motola eventually felt differently. “The urgency of continuing to talk about Palestine, the ongoing Nakba, the colonial violence, and resistance became stronger.”
The origin story of The Lost Paintings is one of serendipity and coincidence. Joëlle is the eldest of Tomb’s grandchildren, and “grew up surrounded by his presence.” His work adorned the walls of all five of his children’s homes, transforming them into “miniature museums filled with his vision, colors, and spirit.” Though Tomb was known to be a prolific painter in Lebanon, Joëlle was surprised to learn during her research that he’d been an active exhibiting artist in Palestine, too. By chance, she met Motola, whose grandfather, also an artist, was a friend of Tomb’s in Haifa.
“Tomb and his family belonged to the Maronite community,” Motola explains. “His uncle was the head of the community, and in the old church book, you can find traces of the family history. I discovered the archival documents revealing the story of Tomb’s lost exhibition while working on another project about Haifa and my family archives.”
Just a few documents from the show remain, including a full list of work titles. The pieces by the 53 participating artists who were invited to reflect on this checklist are titled after or in response to Tomb’s. “The invitation to reimagine these titles opens the possibility to imagine not only what was, but also what could be,” Motola says. Many of the artists are from Palestine — “Arab ’48 [Palestinians who now live within the borders of the Israeli state since its founding in 1948], the West Bank, Gaza,” says Khoury — or part of the diaspora. Some of Tomb’s relatives, including his son Fouad Tomb and his granddaughters Lorena and Sandra Tomb, are included.
Participating artist Joanna Barakat was inspired by Tomb’s title “Zoo Garden – Cairo” because her own father was once photographed there in the 1930s. “She painted this photograph of him,” Khoury shares. Artist and designer Mado Kelleyan created a virtual reality experience telling the story of her grandparents, who, like Tomb, lived in Haifa. Painter and collagist Raed Issa, who recently escaped Gaza, was able to take a series of paintings and small drawings he started making in 2023 with him. “This is a continuous Nakba since 1948,” Khoury says. “It’s still relevant.”
Motola reflects that The Lost Paintings consists of two aspects: “one concrete, the other more symbolic.” The search for Tomb’s lost paintings is important on its own — the artist belongs in the larger canon of Palestinian art and history. But the loss of the paintings made in Palestine, Motola explains, “is a symbol of a much wider loss and prompts the idea of a symbolic gesture to reimagine and reclaim with the means of artistic practices.” In the spring of 2024, the UN expressed concerns about the “scholasticide” in Gaza — the destruction of most, if not all, the region’s educational and cultural institutions. The Lost Paintings presents a way to revive work once lost to cultural erasure, using imagination and memory alone.