Marwan Kassab-Bachi - A Damascene Face in Berlin's Mirrors

6 September 2026

In the spring of 1957 a 23-year-old Damascene, two years of Arabic literature study at Damascus University behind him, set out to become a painter. Paris was the plan; France's political turmoil rerouted him to Berlin - an administrative accident that became one of the richest stories in twentieth-century Arab art.

A student among the new expressionists

At Berlin's Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste, Marwan joined Hann Trier's class and studied alongside Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schoenebeck - the names that would soon detonate German painting. He was not a guest of that scene but a co-founder, a point too often forgotten: Marwan belongs to German art history as much as to Arab art history.

His figurative work of the 1960s carried Damascene memory and the political grief of the Levant - including Three Palestinian Boys (1970), now in the Barjeel Art Foundation collection. Then came the shift: through the 1970s the face expanded until it swallowed the canvas. Critics called them face landscapes - a forehead like a plateau, furrows for wrinkles, an eye like a distant well. He was no longer painting people; he was painting what it is to carry a country in one's features.

The head as homeland

From the face landscapes through the Marionettes to the Heads that occupied him to the end, the question never changed. Painted in dense layers, again and again across decades, the head was not repetition but a deepening of the same well. Asked whether these heads were Damascene or Berliner, his working answer was that the two had never separated: he kept writing in Arabic, kept his studio open to generations of Arab artists passing through Berlin. German institutions recognized him early - visiting professor at the Hochschule der Kuenste from 1977, full professor from 1980 until retirement in 2002. When he died in Berlin on October 23, 2016, German obituaries mourned a great German painter and Arab ones a great Arab painter. Both were right.

The market catching up with the museums

Marwan's market followed the healthiest possible order: museums first, auctions after. His work entered the Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Staedel, and the Berlinische Galerie before his public prices rose. The current record is $491,200 for Head (1973) at Christie's London, October 31, 2024. Set against Louay Kayali's $900,000 and Fateh Moudarres's $374,500, many observers consider major 1970s Marwans still priced below their museum standing - and supply is scarce. Documented results are compiled in the most expensive Syrian artworks at auction.

His question - how do you carry your country in your face from far away? - became the question of millions of Syrians after 2011, which is why younger exiles read him as a founding ancestor, much as Safwan Dahoul interrogates solitude from Dubai and Sara Shamma works between London and Damascus. More artist files in the articles index.