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\n\tSliman Mansour, a pivotal figure in contemporary Arab art history, with an oeuvre synonymous with the struggle for Palestinian statehood, has died at 79. The news was announced yesterday by Mansour\u2019s family, who had previously shared that he was in critical condition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe final chapter has been written,\u201d the Mansour family said on Instagram. \u201cWith hearts heavy beyond words, we share that our beloved father has passed away. \u2026 To the world, he leaves behind a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched. But to us, we lost a father, our source of love, strength and home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tLike the work of other Palestinian artists of his generation, Mansour\u2019s paintings helped carry the dreams and testimony of his people beyond the walls enclosing Gaza and the West Bank. One of his best-known works, 1973\u2019s Jamal Al Mahamel<\/em> (Camel of Hardship), depicts an elderly Palestinian porter carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, one foot forward. The golden dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem rests in the center. The work captures Mansour\u2019s unmistakable signature: imagery that is at once surreal, epically emotive, and unmistakably Palestinian.<\/p>\n \n\tHis works continuously countered Western media depictions of Palestine. For Mansour, the country was not one defined by death. In Perseverance and Hope<\/em> (1976), three Palestinians in a razed refugee camp gaze upward at a dove.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe lost a giant today,\u201d wrote Emily Jacir, the Golden Lion\u2013winning Palestinian artist, beneath a photograph of her and Mansour. \u201cMy friend, collaborator, mentor on this road since we met 30 years ago \u2026 In deep pain and loss tonight. But then I remember your warm smile, heart, and that smile\u2014that smile that always made me smile.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tZawyeh Gallery, founded in Ramallah in 2013 as the first gallery dedicated to Palestinian artists, wrote: \u201cHis influence reached far beyond his own practice. As an artist, educator, and mentor, he helped shape generations of Palestinian artists and played a defining role in the development of Palestinian visual culture. With his passing, Palestine and the Arab world lose a towering artistic figure.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tThe Sharjah Art Foundation, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art\u00a0in Dubai, and London\u2019s Mosaic Rooms also mourned his death in separate statements, describing it as a loss to the international art community.<\/p>\n \n\tSliman Mansour was born in Birzeit, a town near Ramallah, in 1947, months before the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel (an event known in Arabic as the Nakba<\/em>, or \u201ccatastrophe\u201d). Its legacy of occupation defined both Mansour\u2019s life and artistic practice, the two inextricably intertwined.<\/p>\n \n\tHe graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1970, a member of the first generation of Palestinians raised there under occupation. \u201cThe Palestinian art movement started effectively in 1972. Before that date there was no infrastructure or any framework for art,\u201d Mansour once told Arab Weekly<\/em> of that period. \u201cWe were living in a kind of cultural ghetto, isolated from cultural developments. Movement was difficult. Many artists were banned from traveling. Artists were often arrested and their works confiscated. I, myself, was thrown in jail four or five times.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1972, Mansour and his peers staged the first art exhibition in occupied Palestine, a group show of roughly 18 artists based in the West Bank and Gaza. The following year they established the League of Palestinian Artists (he served as its leader from 1986 to 1990). Later he cofounded Gallery 79, the first art space in the West Bank.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to Mansour, Israel initiated a legal crackdown on \u201cpolitical art\u201d in the 1980s that included a ban on red, black, green, and white paint. \u201cThese colors are the colors of the Palestinian flag, and the flag is a symbol of the people,\u201d Mansour told Al Jazeera<\/em> in 2024. The restriction, he explained, inadvertently gave rise to one of the most enduring symbols of Palestinian resistance: the watermelon, whose similar colors tested the bounds of the ban.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1989, two years into the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation,\u00a0Mansour and three fellow artists\u2014Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari, and Tayseer Barakat\u2014made art history,\u00a0cofounding the New Visions movement. \u201cThe first Intifada had brought a philosophy of self-reliance,\u201d Mansour told the Institute for Middle East Understanding of the movement\u2019s beginnings.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNew Visions forewent imported art supplies from Israel and the West in favor of materials found or sourced locally, undertaking, as their 1989 manifesto states, \u201can aesthetic quest to elevate artistic vision to a level that affirms the artist\u2019s inner freedom and ability to envision beauty and truth in the midst of their daily struggle for freedom.\u201d Recent scholarship has situated the movement prominently within the history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance, describing it as an \u201cartists\u2019 precursor to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBeginning in 1989, oil and acrylic paints gave way to olive oil, henna, tea, spices, and coffee, while animal glue, mud, and leather also shaped the group\u2019s posters, paintings, and mixed-media assemblages. In his aesthetic response to the movement\u2019s stance, Mansour made mud his medium, layering and molding it for pottery. \u201cI remember being anxious at first, worried about the cracks in the clay I was using,\u201d he once told Al Jazeera<\/em>. \u201cBut in time, I saw the symbolism in those cracks. They carried something honest and powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThinking about this approach more broadly, he added, \u201cI believe that was the link between traditional and modern art that the younger generation is producing now.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMansour devoted much of his life to building an art infrastructure for future generations of Palestinians. In 1994, he cofounded Al-Wasiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem, which maintained a network between artists in Palestine and those in the diaspora. With his New Visions compatriots, he also established the Palestinian Association of Contemporary Art and later founded the first international academy of fine arts in the Palestinian territories (eventually integrated with Birzeit University).\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cHe was always incredibly generous with his time, his thoughts, and his willingness to help the artists who came after him,\u201d wrote the artist Sama Alshaibi, who shared on Instagram that she first met Mansour during her first trip to Palestine in 2004. \u201cYes, he is a legend, but also just an incredible family man and friend. I can\u2019t imagine a world in which he isn\u2019t in it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe Palestine Museum praised Mansour as a \u201cbeloved face of Palestine and one of those who, over decades, taught us how to see it.\u201d His paintings, the Birzeit-based museum continued, \u201cbecame one of the ways we preserved and imagined this country.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat institution marked the 37th anniversary of the First Intifada and the 35th anniversary of the New Visions group\u2019s founding with four murals created with the help of young artists and faculty from the art, music, and design departments at Birzeit University. Mansour\u2019s mural, titled Ala Janah AlMalak <\/em>(On the Wings of An Angel), features the Old City of Jerusalem.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cBorn as the foundation of the Palestinian Museum\u2019s permanent exhibition,\u201d the museum announced upon their unveiling, the commissioned works \u201cwill remain on its walls as long as it lasts, as a token of gratitude to the New Visions group artists who led a movement of renewal while drawing strength from their people\u2019s magnificent heritage.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tMansour maintained his studio practice until his condition grew dire, regularly posting new artworks on Instagram through last year. He used his public platform to criticize Israel\u2019s response to Hamas\u2019s October 7 attack. (As of this writing, at least 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces, a military campaign deemed a genocide by UN independent commission\u00a0earlier this year.)<\/p>\n \n\tArt and politics were a frequent interview topic for Mansour, who never shied away from responding. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI think I\u2019m siding with the right side of history and I\u2019m doing my best in my ability to show that. I don\u2019t think there is a formula for what artists should do,\u201d he told Al Jazeera<\/em>. \u201cBut they should be truthful with their feelings, and they should feel with other people. I can easily go and work in my studio and forget about anything else and make flowers and nice girls and make exhibitions and sell and so on. But that\u2019s not how I am built. And artists should not do that. They should be more active in their society.<\/p>\n \n\tHe added, \u201cI believe in art as a social instrument, not as decoration for wealthy people\u2019s houses.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/sliman-mansour-palestinian-painter-dead-1234795661\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sliman-.jpg?w=1024″] Sliman Mansour, a pivotal figure in contemporary Arab art history, with an oeuvre synonymous with the struggle for Palestinian statehood, has died at 79. The news was announced yesterday by Mansour\u2019s family, who had previously shared that he was in critical condition.\u00a0 \u201cThe final chapter has been written,\u201d the Mansour family said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2113396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2113396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2113396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2113396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2113396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}