(1898 - 1958)

Born 1898 in “Ain el Touffah” near Bikfaya, César Gemayel is an exemplary artist of the “second generation”. Pioneering alongside Youssef Howayyek, Georges Corm, Omar Onsi, Saliba Douaihy, Moustapha Farroukh and a handful of others, Gemayel freed the arts in Lebanon further by breaking the old-school art norms and principles which had stayed standing even after the “first generation” artists had done their due in opening up the art world of the West on Lebanon.
Gemayel quickly abandoned his pharmaceutical studies to devote himself to painting while in university. He attended the Julian Academy in Paris, and returned to Lebanon in 1930 where he participated in many exhibitions and became a leading figure in the Lebanese art community. Soon after, in 1937, he engages in teaching in the ALBA University in Beirut.
After many of his predecessors and teachers’ pilgrimages to the Western art capitals such as Rome, Paris, London, and New York, Lebanese art was freed from the straitjacket of formalism and academicism. However, the mentalities of art-school do’s and don’ts still obstructed the way of modernization of painting in Lebanon. Gemayel’s role was to fully liberate this bound art form, his motivation, mainly Gemayel’s techer, Khalil Saleeby, who opened up Gemayel’s eyes and heart to what lay in the outside world: the bedazzlement of landscapes and portraits and the deviation from photographic resemblance greatly revered in the past.
Gemayel was decorated by the Lebanese Government by The National Order of The Cedars. He is undoubtedly one of modern Lebanese art’s founding fathers.For, like the masters he revered - not only Renoir but Reynolds and Jean-Paul Laurens (Whose studio he attended) - César Gemayel was a pre-eminently sensual man who insatiably consumed with his eyes everything that could feed his appetite for colour - colour before shape - and set his palette ablaze. César Gemayel, or the "ardent brush".

His themes - the female nude, glowing flowers, landscapes green and red, dances and "dabkés", the occasional epic evocation - are the product of his almost aggressive, feverish thirst for living and painting. The various techniques he employed reflected that same impetuous curiosity.