Entre Orient et Occident : Jamil Hamoudi, Louise Janin et la revue Ishtar

The next session of the ARVIMM seminar will be dedicated to Ishtar magazine (1958–1962), founded and directed by Iraqi artist Jamil Hamoudi (1924-2003) in Paris.

This publication served as an essential meeting point for artists from various cultures, offering an unprecedented space to explore and share renewed visions of modernity and abstraction. As a genuine crossroads between Eastern and Western artists, Ishtar facilitated a creative encounter that redefined the contours of modernity through a cosmopolitan and decolonial perspective, thus affirming the role of art as a universal language and a driver of intercultural dialogue.

Among the artists invited to contribute to the magazine, Louise Janin (1893–1997) holds a significant place. In 1959, she was the subject of a monograph published by Ishtar publishing house, written by art critic Jean-Jacques Lévêque. This publication examines the characteristic elements of Louise Janin’s abstraction—simultaneously symbolic, musicalist, and spiritual—tracing connections with artistic productions borrowed from different cultures.

In this context, the intersection between Marion Sergent’s research on Louise Janin and Zouina Ait Slimani’s work on Jamil Hamoudi opens new methodological perspectives for art history. Their respective works, complementing each other, reveal not only shared creative dynamics but also the potential of a methodology that crosses gender studies and analysis of artists from peripheral regions.