In a self-portrait from 1980, the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s head and upper body are posed against a thinly painted teal background. Her face is blank like an unfinished canvas—a pale green surface empty of features. The white garment blanketing her round shoulders plunges into a vee in the middle of her chest. A black shirt blooms from the valley of the neckline. She is landscape, artist, art.
The idea of home—in a city, in one’s body, in a corpus of visual art—is the thematic link for the twenty-three works in “Huguette Caland: My Home,” which breezily surveys her five-decade-long career. She was born in Beirut in 1931 to a wealthy Maronite Christian family; her father, Bechara el-Khoury, became Lebanon’s first president after independence from France in 1943. She married at twenty-one and had three children, but after her father’s death in 1964, she sought liberation from patriarchal expectations. She began to wear loose caftans over then-fashionable Western couture and enrolled in the fine arts department at the American University of Beirut.
In an untitled abstract painting from 1968–1970, made just after her graduation, a slash of green, outlined in white, cuts vertically through a bright red canvas—the colors of the Lebanese flag. In the 1970s Caland made a series of paintings called Bribes de corps, or body bits, so it’s not a stretch to see this earlier work as a representation of genitalia. But it may instead signal a rupture: in 1970 she left her family and country for Paris and devoted the rest of her life to her art. She returned to Lebanon only in 2013, six years before her death.
The Bribes de corps, five of which are included in the show, are her best-known works, and it’s easy to see why. The linen canvases are filled with rich, sensuous clouds of color that depict isolated parts of the body. In one, a narrow area of white peeks from between a pair of pink loaf-like shapes that might be thighs. Other compositions are less easy to identify but no less alluring: a fulsome magenta square pinched into round quarters, for instance, or two areas of yellow, one softly mottled and the other intensely golden, divided by a thin, red-hot line.
When Caland moved from Paris to Venice, California, in 1987, her paintings became even more abstract. Two canvases from the late 1990s, composed solely of vertical brushstrokes, suggest that she was thinking mainly about the gesture of the brush itself. In the next decade these gestures helped Caland form a kind of invisible or redacted writing—her own secret language. A painting made on a wrinkled piece of muslin from the series Silent Letters resembles a weathered and enigmatic missive. Caland once playfully told a friend that she could have been a writer but chose painting in order “to be incomprehensible.”
Caland’s paintings on unstretched materials and handmade paper from this period are filled with mysterious information written on raw-edged, textured surfaces. Silent Memories, a nearly twelve-foot-tall painting on linen, is filled with tiny lines and geometric shapes amid a melting spectrum of color, resembling a sweeping aerial view of a landscape. The detailed patterning in these maplike compositions evokes embroidery and cross-stitch. So too in the esoteric and fantastical Rossinante series—named for Don Quixote’s aging horse and begun when Caland injured her knee and needed a cane to get around—which reintroduces biomorphic elements into her abstract vocabulary.
In addition to the paintings represented in “My Home,” Caland made many other types of work, including line drawings, hand-painted abaya, ink portraits, collages, sculptures, and a cheeky series of mixed-media compositions called Homage to Pubic Hair. The show hopes to trace her inventiveness from place to place, but this sparse sampling from such a varied career begins to feel fragmented. The self-portrait is the only work from the 1980s on view. What did her other work from that decade look like? How do we understand the seeming outliers here, including a lone sculpture and her collaborations with the poets Andrée Chedid and Alain Bosquet? Her art has been the subject of several career-spanning surveys, including at New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in 2018 and the Drawing Center in 2021. Now is the moment to spotlight specific segments of Caland’s output, to see more clearly how she understood her place in the world, one bit at a time.
English (US) · 