Kamal Boullata
كمال بلاطة
Painter and art historian
A Jerusalem painter locked out of his city by the 1967 war, who built an abstraction out of Kufic script and the eight-pointed star, and wrote the first full history of Palestinian art.
Kamal Boullata was born in Jerusalem in 1942. His first art teacher, Khalil Halabi, was an icon painter, and Boullata spent hours as a boy sketching the geometric patterns of the Dome of the Rock, taught to trace pattern and script upon a grid. The lesson he took from iconography — that, as he put it, an iconographer does not paint an icon but writes it — set the terms of everything he made afterwards. He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating in 1965, and took an MFA at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., in 1971.
His painting is geometric and, after the early years, almost entirely non-figurative. Working in silkscreen and acrylic, he built compositions out of squares, mirrored symmetries, and the eight-pointed star, and out of Arabic letterforms — particularly Kufic — used as structure rather than as text, an approach associated with the Hurufiyya current in modern Arab art. Colour and light, he argued, were the specific inheritance of a painter formed by Jerusalem’s stone and mosaic.
He was also the field’s historian. Boullata wrote steadily for the Journal of Palestine Studies and on contemporary Arab artists, and in 2009 published Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present, the first comprehensive account of the subject in English and still the standard reference. He lived in Washington until 1974, then in Beirut, then between Morocco and Paris in the 1990s, and finally in Berlin, where he died on 6 August 2019. He was buried at the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
Selected works
- There is no i but i (silkscreen, 1983)
- Homage to the Flag (silkscreen, 1990)
- Twelve Lanterns for Granada (1995)
- Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (Saqi Books, 2009)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.