Ismail Shammout
إسماعيل شموط
Painter
Pioneering Palestinian painter whose images of the 1948 expulsion from Lydda — above all *Where to?* (1953) — became icons of the Nakba.
Ismail Shammout was born in Lydda on 2 March 1930, and his talent was spotted by a schoolteacher while he was still a child. Three days after the fall of Lydda and Ramla in July 1948, his family was driven out on foot toward Ramallah, forbidden to carry water; his young brother Tawfiq died of thirst on the march. The family ended up in the tents of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, where Shammout sold pastry and volunteered to teach drawing in the camp’s tent schools before joining the Fine Art Academy in Cairo in 1950, supporting himself by painting cinema posters.
In 1953 Shammout and his brother Jamil exhibited some sixty paintings at the Employees Club in Gaza — including Where to?, his image of the Lydda death march — in what is regarded as the first contemporary art exhibition held in Palestine by a Palestinian artist. After study at Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti, he settled in Beirut, marrying fellow artist Tamam al-Akhal in 1959; the two worked side by side for the rest of his life. In 1965 he set up the PLO’s Artistic Culture Section, and in 1969 he co-founded the General Union of Palestinian Artists, serving as its secretary-general until 1984 and establishing Beirut’s Dar al-Karama exhibition hall for camp artists. After the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon the family moved to Kuwait, then Germany, and finally Amman, where he died on 3 July 2006.
Selected works
- Where to? (1953)
- A Mouthful of Water (1953)
- We Shall Return (1954)
- Memories and Fire (1956)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.