Simone Baltaxé Martayan (1925-2009) is a key figure in Lebanon’s 20th century art history, whose works have been collected by major institutions worldwide, including the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.
The pivotal moment in Paris-born Simone Baltaxé Martayan's artistic life was her move to Lebanon in 1951, following her marriage to Armenian-born hydraulic engineer Noubar Martayan. For Simone, shifting her relocation from post-war France to the Mediterranean sunshine set a course that would define her life until she left Lebanon for Paris in 1982.
Today, looking back on her late mother's oeuvre, Simone's daughter Elsa identifies the moment when Lebanon's charm and character materially changed Simone's practice.
"The colours she used changed, first of all," remembers Elsa. "Then came light, people, the whole texture of daily life. Lebanon became a treasure for Simone." The Frenchwoman took to her new home with full-blooded enthusiasm. "It became her country," recalls Elsa.
Settling into the fertile art scene of 1950s Beirut, Simone found her place not only creatively, but also socially and politically. She taught art, made friends and gathered a lively, left-leaning intellectual and artistic circle around her. Elsa remembers how progressive her parents were, both equally passionate about building a vibrant creative community in the city. Simone and Noubar both believed in progress in a very practical sense, through education, science, medicine, culture, social welfare and infrastructure. Noubar's work prioritised engineering solutions to improve people's lives, while Simone's contribution came through her art. They were united in their underlying belief: everyone has a part to play in reshaping society.
We can see this in Simone's subject matter. She painted workers, children, refugees, markets, beaches… just look at her paintings and a communal energy radiates from groups of people gathered together. And there is a strong interest across her works not only in individuals, but in how people live alongside one another. Even in the smaller drawings and studies, figures are plugged into a wider environment – the city, their work, their peers, public life.
One of the most powerful examples of this is Untitled (Palestinian Women in a Dispensary in South Lebanon) from 1952. Elsa recalls that soon after arriving in Lebanon, Simone went to visit Palestinian refugee camps. As a Jewish woman who had lived through the Nazi occupation of France, she was especially attuned to persecution and oppression. At the refugee camps, she drew and painted what she saw there. The surviving works on paper retain a sense of urgent despatch, recalling Henry Moore's drawings of figures sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. Simone's works are imbued with emotion and empathy while still carrying the formal intelligence of an artist who thought carefully about the relationship between bodies, space and composition.
And so it flourished, over her years in Lebanon. A souk, a group of builders, a restaurant, women by the sea, a Ramadan gathering: Simone was fascinated by the way people occupy space and how a crowd can become a composition without losing its human character.
Her training, at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and then the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the late 1940s, gave her formal fluency, but Lebanon supplied raw inspiration. In response to the country, her colours become more intense, the compositions more animated. Everyday life crashes through the frame. Elsa remembers how her mother embodied the fresh wave of energy that defined late 1950s and 1960s Beirut, a spirit of growth, expansion and dynamism. French rule had ended in 1943 and a subsequent influx of intellectuals and cultural practitioners from across the turbulent Middle Eastern and North African states sought sanctuary in Beirut, leading to an unprecedented artistic boom. This was driven by a surge of foreign money flowing into the city, which funded new commercial galleries, independent art spaces and museums. Beirut was bursting at the seams, with people from around the world and their ideas.
This sense of ambition really started to effervesce when Simone progressed to creating large-scale works. Studying in Paris, she had seen how public art worked in an urban context. Now, she brought those vast visions to Lebanon. A fresco at Beirut Airport in 1955 was completed with the Armenian-Turkish artist Jak Ihmalyan, while there were other mural projects for a cinema and for public institutions. Much of this work was later destroyed, but seeing what survived reminds us that Simone was active within architectural contexts, in terms of walls, public space and scale.
In parallel to public art commissions, her shift towards tapestries in the mid-1960s makes complete sense. Having met Beirut weaver George Audi in 1964, she began producing tapestries in which colours become heavier and figurative forms simplified, but there are still traces of bodies, foliage, movement, landscape and dance. Elsa points out that while forms have been reduced to bare elements, they avoid abstraction. Simone's work, as the 1960s and 1970s progressed, would never quite abandon the world, but continued to distil it, while retaining a core vision of observation.
Simone's life in Beirut places her within the story of cosmopolitan Modernism in the city. She was a Parisienne, her husband was Armenian, and their circle in Beirut included artists, intellectuals and political figures from disparate backgrounds. Today Elsa recalls them as outsiders who nevertheless became part of a central cultural milieu – a foundational aspect of Simone's life and work. In Beirut, she was a key figure within the networks where Modernism was being remade, through shared conversation, migration, inspiration and lived experience.
The 1975 Civil War brought this world, with all its optimism, hope and ambition, crashing down into a bloody mess of chaos and despair. Simone returned to Paris in 1982, suffering from cancer. Elsa remembers the sadness and grief she felt leaving her adopted homeland, her distress at the ending of a golden age. Paris had once been home, but returning there was almost like being displaced again.
But even while grieving and laid low by illness, her innate curiosity about her surroundings soon inspired new work. Once recovered, Simone threw herself into the city's life, drawing on the energy found in painting children, circus scenes, roller-skaters and merry-go-rounds. Parisian life might have been superficially different to Beirut's tapestry, but her creative impulse was sparked by the same attraction to movement – groups of people, light, colour, the noisy humanity of shared spaces.
The 'merry-go-round' paintings from Simone's Paris period are especially telling as they embody so much of what had always interested her: bodies, rhythm, repetition, movement, light and a sense of collective pleasure. And this, perhaps, is the thread that runs most clearly through Simone's work. While her life was shaped by migration, political upheaval, illness and loss, her paintings repeatedly return to connection. There is always that sense of the individual as part of something larger.
Today, Elsa speaks of her mother's almost stubborn belief that things could improve, despite the challenges life threw at her. That optimism underpins her work with a belief that art, like society, could be remade, and that colour, movement and human presence could still carry the possibility of a brighter future for all.