Calligraphy

The calligrapher Hassan Massoudy was born in Baghdad in 1944, but has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s.

What can be admired in Hassan Massoudy is the masterful use he makes of colours in his compositions. He has opalescent washes, flows of emerald, monochromes of beiges enriched with deep wood tones and sandalwood fragrances. This is a new era, which is then open to calligraphy. Indeed, lovers of exoticism and antique may be disappointed. Hassan Massoudy is not the living fossil of the old Arabic calligraphy. He is an artist of our time. His art belongs to that very end of the twentieth century, despite the ancestral roots that he immerses in the tradition of the Orient. - Michel Tournier.

The colours are most certainly vibrant, even within the restrictive confines of reproductions such as these. I'd love to see some of these works in their original state.

The sense of community is essential for Massoudy, and that community is most emphatically not limited to Islam. Much of his work focuses on peace and tolerance as a prerequisite of all that has value, and this quite naturally leads him into work with Amnesty International, UNICEF, and other related organizations. If peace forms one of Massoudy's major themes, it reaches back into one of the basic social currencies of his tradition, the proverb - Karl Young.

Whether derived from proverb or quotation, the texts and titles of Massoudy's works seem as though chosen with the utmost precision and tact.

Hassan Massoudy's calligraphies enact a rhythm, a musical structure which echoes back to the very remotest times. Powerful emotions are evoked by the movement of his lines, their weight, their lightness, their transparency; the balance between black and white, the fullness and the vacuum, the concreteness and the abstractness... The artist has retained from his training the noble spirit of an artisan able to make his own tools and to fix his own inks and pigments...

Numerous books about Massoudy's art, or otherwise illustrated by him, have been published in France.

All but the last of these images were taken from this site. All are © copyright Hassan Massoudy.

I found the last image here. It is one of several simply entitled Peace.

Posted by misteraitch at February 11, 2003 08:20 PM | TrackBack