Willy Aractingi

Willy Aractingi (1930 - 2003) was one of Lebanon’s most talented Modernists. Willy Aractingi was a self-taught artist who was born in New York. He spent his childhood in Egypt, where he was raised by extended family and began painting at just 12 years old, before moving to Lebanon as a teenager. Despite his evident talent, Aractingi put his art to one side for many years to focus on his day job and support his family, only beginning to paint full-time in the mid-1980s, once he felt that it made financial sense to do so. In the intervening years, however, he often spent his free time painting portraits of family members and friends, despite heavy work commitments.

Aractingi described himself as a naïve primitive artist, and the influence of artists who adopted this style, such as (Paul) Gauguin and (Henri– Le Douanier) Rousseau, is evident in his work.

Folklore was a major source of inspiration, providing opportunities for Aractingi to reinterpret fictitious narratives, such as the oriental stories of Antar and Abla, and Geha, alongside much-loved Western tales like Tarzan and Sleeping Beauty. He also painted scenes of family life, animals, flowers and others depicting his surroundings, including Lebanon, Egypt and the US cities he visited, such as Miami and Chicago. Using a vibrant palette of oil or acrylics on canvas, Aractingi’s compositions evolved over the years, in tandem with phases in his life, from small-scale, less refined pieces to larger, more complicated works.

However, he is best known for his illustrations of the fables of the French poet Jean de La Fontaine, including the world-famous stories ‘Le Corbeau et le Renard’, ‘La Cigale et la Fourmi’ and ‘Le Lion et le Rat’. This vast oeuvre took around seven years to complete, from 1989, and consisted of more than 240 artworks of Fontaine’s stories, with every single one of them illustrated at least once - some many times. Aractingi remains the only artist to have painted all of La Fontaine’s fables in oil on canvas. Some of the paintings were even selected by Air France, the country’s national carrier, to be featured on the front cover of the airline’s in-flight menus, with Fontaine’s accompanying words reproduced on the back. The fables are brought to life in Aractingi’s hallmark cleverly shaded, bold colours and attractive, deceptively simple settings, shapes and lines, which have long helped to make them so accessible, highly popular and sought after.

“I always describe my father’s pictures as joyful - that’s one of the things that makes them so attractive,” his daughter, June Nabaa, told Artscoops in an interview. “He was a very happy, funny man, constantly making people laugh.”

Public and Private Collections

Aractingi’s artworks can be found in prestigious public and private collections worldwide, including a large number held at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, which were donated by the family.

His art has been displayed in over 100 exhibitions over the decades, held in Lebanon, France, the UK and the US. These include an extensive retrospective spanning 1973 to 2003 at the Sursock, held in 2017, titled ‘Les Mondes de Willy Aractingi’, and a show at Artscoops’ premises titled ‘Art on Board’ (2023). Other recent exhibitions featuring Aractingi’s work include: ‘Lebanon | Untitled: Modern & Contemporary Lebanese Art’, Artscoops and Janet Rady Fine Art, Gallery 12, Cromwell Place, London (2023); ‘Tales, Myths and Legends’, Galerie Tanit, Beirut (2022); and ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut (2019).

Aractingi lived between Lebanon and France. He continued painting until his death in 2003, in Barcelona.