Lebanon - Sursock Museum - Khalil Gibran

[Nishee]

Features

The wisdom of Gibran, in images not words
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, the Sursock Museum’s display speaks
volumes
Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star

The world knows Kahlil Gibran as the author of The Prophet. Loved universally
as a poetic spiritual guide, the book has been translated into more than 35
languages and stands second only to the Bible as the best-selling book of all
time.
Few people, however, know Kahlil Gibran, the painter.
The Sursock Museum’s current exhibition, Horizons of the Painter, is an
admirable attempt to fill that blank page in the annals of Gibran’s
creativity.

The face of Almustafa: Gibran saw the body as a face in itself. He wanted "the
whole body to be the face, to be expressive"

Organized by the museum in cooperation with the Gibran Museum in Bsharri, the
exhibition contains a selection of 178 oil paintings, drawings, ink washes and
watercolors which span the evolution of Gibran as a painter, beginning with the
pencil drawing of a reclining nude drawn in 1900 when he was 17 years old
through to a series of portraits in charcoal created during the last years of
his life.
The Sursock Museum and especially its co-curator, Sylvia Agemian, are to be
complimented for the comprehensive range of the selection and for the
imaginative staging of the exhibit as a whole.
Filling the museum’s two floors, the works are appropriately displayed in
chronological sequence and informatively labeled with descriptive notes and
verbatim quotes related to the circumstances surrounding their creation.
All the works are from the collection of 450 pieces housed in the Gibran Museum
in Bsharri and include many items never before seen by the public.
The exhibit’s color catalogue is elegantly designed and contains fine
reproductions of most of the pieces, along with some intriguing details on
Gibran’s experience as a painter.
In looking at the work, one is inclined to speculate on how much further Gibran
could have gone as a painter had he not turned his concentration toward poetry
and literature.
But then one also must wonder whether he would have created The Prophet had he
spent all his energy pursuing painting to the best of his ability. That he was
talented and skilled as a painter is evident, particularly in the early years
when he was painting in a post-impressionist style and showed a strong interest
in portraits.
He was flawless in his drawing of the human figure ­ at times approaching
Leonardo da Vinci in quality ­ and also extremely sensitive to the subtleties
of color in establishing form.
Even then, however, he was directed more by a literary search to express
metaphysical ideas than he was by the unique potential and magical mystery of
painting per se.
The drawings of floating nude figures that he exhibited in Boston in 1904
prompted one art critic to write: “Mr. Gibran manifests in his drawings the
poetical and imaginative temperament of his race and a remarkable vein of
individual invention … All these drawings are spiritual allegories of the
most solemn character and import. The earnest desire to give expression to
metaphysical ideas has triumphantly prevailed over technical limitations.”
Later, during his sojourn in Paris in 1908-1910, Gibran paid little attention
to the revolutionary leaps of Picasso and Braque into cubism. He could
appreciate the modern art movement as “a revolt, a protest, a declaration of
independence,” but his interests lay elsewhere.
As he expressed to Mary Haskell, a close friend with whom he corresponded
throughout his life: “It’s hard to separate style and subject. What a man
wants to say determines how he says it … Style and ideas are one.”
Gradually, as he became more deeply immersed in writing, Gibran’s involvement
in painting became exclusively directed by the search for a style that could
best convey his philosophical thoughts on life.
By 1915, he had focused on the nude figure as his visual metaphor to express
human struggles, aspirations and transcendence and, regarding the medium, he
had moved from the relative opacity of oils to the ethereal transparencies of
ink washes and watercolor.
Gibran saw the body as a face in itself, as he once told Haskell: “We are
accustomed to think of the face as expressive. I want the whole body to be
face, so to speak, to be expressive … I want each figure to express thought
… I want it so that nobody need think of the brush strokes or how it was
done.”
Included in the Sursock exhibition are a dozen watercolor illustrations
produced in 1923 for The Prophet. Here are the nudes we all know and associate
with the book ­ the male and female bodies standing or floating alone or in an
embrace, earthbound or ascending to heaven against a surreal landscape of Earth
and sky, giving visual image to Gibran’s words on the meaning of love, pain,
marriage, children and other existential concepts.
Also included is the charcoal drawing of the face of Almustafa, the
“prophet,” which for decades has been gracing the cover of every English
edition of the book.
In the final analysis, Gibran’s paintings cannot be separated from his
writings. His nudes, almost unisex in appearance and totally devoid of physical
desire, and ache with spiritual yearning.
That they should be looked upon and misread as naked flesh disturbed him.
In 1920, he expressed this to Haskell: “The thought that a drawing of mine is
making someone uncomfortable, in body or in spirit, is a source of pain and
unhappiness to me. We can’t teach the chastity of the nude, people must find
it for themselves. We can’t lead people to the heart of life. They must go by
themselves and each one must go alone.”

Horizons of the Painter, at the Sursock Museum, Rue Sursock, Achrafieh, until
Jan. 31, 10am-7pm daily. Tel: (01) 334 133