Hassan Massoudy
A Survey

Hassan Massoudy began his apprenticeship in traditional calligraphy as a child in his native Iraq. He completed his studies in Baghdad in the mid 60s and expatriated to France, where he has lived since. The late 60s were a great time for a calligrapher to be in Paris, with many confluent and divergent movements going on in all the arts. The Islamic tradition of calligraphy has always drawn on diverse sources, and Massoudy was partially prepared by his basic training for what he found in France. You could argue that calligraphy such as that of the middle east - or China - has an inherent experimentality built into it, that not only allows the artist to incorporate many elements from different places and circumstances, but encourages individual experiment. Thus it could raise some questions about our mechanical western notions of experimentation.

But I doubt that Massoudy has much interest in arguing about things. His activities include practicing his calligraphy in his studio, as you might expect, but also as a form of traditional performance art. This includes not only music, but also story telling, which can be integrated with calligraphy in a number of ways. On its simplest level, this is central to forms of elementary education, in which writing to musical accompaniment helps teach the rhythms and continuities of movement; and stories aid not only in understanding a text, but also in remembering it. Adult Moslem audiences more or less take this continuity of arts for granted, as a part of their heritage. Let me note that in the Chinese tradition, poetry, music, calligraphy, and painting also make up a composite art. Non-Moslem audiences seem to find little trouble in relating to this sense of community, even though some surprise themselves with their response.

The sense of community is essential for Massoudy, and that community is most emphatically not limited to Islam. Much of his work focuses on peace and tolerance as a prerequisite of all that has value, and this quite naturally leads him into work with Amnesty International, UNICEF, and other related organizations. If peace forms one of Massoudy's major themes, it reaches back into one of the basic social currencies of his tradition, the proverb. Proverbs may promote fellowship and agreement in a limited community, but Massoudy reaches out to those of other traditions in the hope that these will help form a common tender, based in shared community experience, that may bring the world's cultures together.

Massoudy contributed to most of the last dozen issues of Kaldron, and some of his work may be found elsewhere at this site, but it seems fitting to bring this survey together here. In addition to strings of examples related to peace and proverbs, we have set aside a section on calligraphy itself, where Massoudy in one way or another adapts specifically western forms to his texts. Please remember in looking at these that the originals are often large, and that, in addition to the main text, Massoudy often paints elaborate auxiliary texts, and auxiliary texts within auxiliary texts.