Jassim Zaini

Biography

Zaini’s first public work is considered to be a billboard painted in 1955 above the door of a Persian carpet shop in Souq Waqif, the market in Doha. It showed the Syrian-Egyptian singer Farid al-Atrash. The shop belonged to the artist’s father.

He was born in Doha in 1943; some sources give 1942. His father, Mohammed Zaini, was a craftsman: he decorated house walls in blue and orange, made ornaments from gypsum, and small ships and animal figurines from wood. Later he went into importing and selling Persian carpets. The boy watched this work from childhood, his family encouraged his interest, and his school art teachers showed him the fundamentals, landscape above all, and drew him into school exhibitions. In secondary school he painted a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser in oils from a photograph and copied other artists’ paintings using a grid. In the late 1950s he designed signs and advertisements for local shops.

In 1962 the Ministry of Education sent him to study law in Egypt. Two years later he gave up law and in 1964 went to Baghdad, to the College of Fine Arts. His teachers were the Iraqi artists Faeq Hassan, Hafidh al-Droubi, Ismail Al-Shaikhly and Atta Sabri. In Baghdad he made his first Cubist experiments and the only series of prints of his life: he later found no materials for printmaking in Qatar. On graduating in 1968 he became the first Qatari to hold a degree in fine arts.

Back in Doha, Zaini was appointed art education supervisor at the Ministry of Education. The post did not stop him drawing cartoons and designing books and magazines; his cover opened the first issue of “Doha Cultural Magazine”. In 1969 the ministry commissioned three murals from him. The largest, 222 × 432 cm, is made of coloured mosaic and hangs above the main entrance of the ministry building: the school as a source of knowledge. The other two, each 80 × 110 cm, are made of light brown coloured cement paste and built around Arabic calligraphy, one with the word “Qatar”, the other with “Knowledge is Light”. He sold his first painting to the Ministry of Information, which commissioned from him a portrait of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

From 1971 he sat on the administrative committee of the Al Jasra Cultural Club, where he gathered young artists and taught them to handle colour, line and space. His students included Yousef Ahmad, Salman Al Malik and Hassan Al Mulla. In 1972 came “Qatari Features”: a girl wearing a bukhnuq sews a button on her brother’s shirt, and he wears a ghutra and agal. The artist explained that he grew up in a household of brothers only, and that the boy in the picture refers to his own experience; he elongated the girl’s figure slightly and set the knee away from the torso to convey movement and modesty. In Qatar and the Arab world the painting is regarded as his chief work, and it is kept at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. A mural of 1,060 ceramic pieces based on it was later made at Katara Cultural Village.

He called his style “advanced realism”. In it expressive realism is joined with Cubism, Impressionism and Surrealism, and in the 1970s with abstraction too: “Al-Hayir” (1972), “Modern Qatar” (1973). In “Fish Seller” (1977) the figure is built from triangles and diamonds, yet the proportions are not broken, as they are in Picasso. From the 1990s he made collages with boxes, wood, bottles, nails, fishing nets and old tools, as well as reliefs of pressed paper pulp. He painted the sea, the market, weddings, children’s games, folk medicine and traditional architecture. The painting “The Sad Summer” responded to the 1982 war in Lebanon: a Lebanese cedar grows from a bullet casing, and a weeping eye waters its roots. “In the Shadow of Cooperation” and “The Tanker War” belong to the theme of solidarity among the Gulf states.

He exhibited at the second Arab Biennial in Rabat (1976), at the Cairo Biennial (1984, 1986), in Bangladesh (1986) and at the Ankara International Biennale (1986, 1988). “Knights of Poetry”, a series of portraits of more than sixty local and Arab poets, was shown in Doha in 2010, when the city was Arab Capital of Culture. When the National Museum of Qatar opened in 1975, Zaini became its first curator, and later the first director of the Museums and Antiquities Department at the Ministry of Culture. In 1980 he became the first president of the newly founded Qatari Fine Arts Society. In 2007 he received the State Appreciation Award for his contribution to the visual arts.

He died on 1 October 2012.

He was buried the next day at Mesaimeer Cemetery. In December of that year the Ministry of Culture opened the Jassim bin Mohammed Zaini Hall in its building. Hundreds of his paintings are kept in his son’s private museum.