Paul Guiragossian (1926-1993) was a major figure in Lebanese painting. He was born in Jerusalem in a family of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. In the 1940s, he settled in Lebanon; thus, in some way, he experienced exile in the context of two major tragedies of the 20th century. In 1956 he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In 1962, he obtained another grant to study painting in Paris. From the early 1960s till his unexpected passing away in 1993, Guiragossian became a very active and successful painter.

Executed in 1961, this painting entitled Harmonie was part of a solo exhibition that opened on the 14th of May 1968 at Galerie l’Amateur in Beirut. It depicts three seated figures around a oud (lute) a musical instrument. The bodies are motionless though strongly articulated, as if they were out of time, as is often the case for Guiragossian’s works from this period. The authors of the artist’s reference monograph, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, write “There is a dynamism that takes over the work of Guiragossian through this highly prolific period starting in the early 1960s and going into the 1970s which sees his earlier constellations of human figures slowly but confidently, transform from clusters of huddled geometric formations, within traces of recognizable physical spaces where the rules of perspective sill more or less apply, to bold sweeping brushstrokes and paint batches, which while still marinating some anthropomorphic features, increasingly move away from representation and emerge from an abstract, often monochromatic void.”