Before Painting: Nicola Saig, Painting, and Photographic Seeing

This article hopes to excavate a history of modern painting in the Ottoman Arab world and its relationship with the practice of photography by examining the work of the Palestinian artist, Nicola Saig (Niqula Sayigh).The rise of painting in the Ottoman Arab world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century among its native bourgeoisie should not be understood as a crass derivation or mimicry of the European tradition.Nor was it only as an outgrowth of indigenous traditions such as handcrafts, iconography, miniature painting, illuminated manuscripts, Muslim visual practices, and Eastern Church aesthetic traditions.The rise of painting, especially at beginning of the twentieth century, was a manifest, visual expression of the radical social, political, and economic transformations of the era and generated through the intellectual and cultural circuits in provincial cultural capitals such as Jerusalem.The rise of modern oil painting, therefore, is historically contingent on the naturalization of a modern Arab scopic regime that is particular to photography and one that fascinated and facilitated the project of capitalist modernity of the new Arab bourgeoisie and nationalist classes.In other words, both visual practices were only made possible by the reordering of Ottoman Arab society and the creation of new local elites due to shifts in the political economy of self, society, polity, and material life, where the aesthetic was less European criteria than the effort to create a modern project appropriate to the new Arab individual of capitalist modernity (and national identity).