Huguette CalandBribes de Corps

Huguette Caland: Bribes de Corps  presents painted works by the Lebanese artist whose life and career traversed decades, continents, and media, defying both aesthetic and social conventions of her time and place. Drawing upon many never before exhibited or published paintings, this exhibition focuses on the body of work that Caland produced while living in Paris in the 1970s, the Bribes de corps [“Body Bits”], and will be the largest presentation of the series in America.

Caland’s own body and her preoccupations with its size and its pleasures motivated much of her work throughout this period, and this exhibitions introduces the languages—sometimes joyful and sometimes pain-ridden—she cultivated in shape and color to speak of her experience alongside those of other bodies. The artist also  played with what Western art history refers to as abstraction and figuration, rendering the distinction between color and line indiscernible, subject positions and parts indecipherable, and making normative or binaristic gendering unimaginable even as the body parts she painted often transform into landscapes or blend into the haze of color fields.

The work is contextualized in relationship to debates about gender and sexual norms in both France and Lebanon during the time. It concludes with a more recent painting from the artist’s late series of tapestry-like paintings, which bring her interest in the body and its surroundings to full force through a painterly idiom that borrows from the techniques and cultures of tatreez, or Palestinian embroidery. The exhibition also includes a selection of three dresses, which Caland designed and wore, that consolidate the relationship between art and flesh in her practice.

This exhibition is curated by Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

Huguette Caland was born in Lebanon in 1931, the only daughter of Bechara El Khoury, the first President of the newly independent Republic of Lebanon, and Laure Chiha, also a member of a prominent political and banking family. In 1951, she married Paul Caland, whose family was fiercely opposed to El Khoury’s nationalist politics. The artist was famously overweight, and much has been done with this biographic fact in exhibitions and criticism that focus on the body and its sensuousness, as well as her rebellious nature, which manifested, for example, in her openly taking a series of lovers while married.

With her husband, she ran a popular restaurant in Beirut, and hospitality was always an important part of her life. In 1964, her father died—four years after her mother—following a 3-year struggle with cancer, during which time Caland had remained steadfast at his bedside. It was only after his death that she, long interested in becoming a writer but never trained as such, decided she would pursue instead her passions as a visual artist.

Having previously studied drawing privately for a year at the age of 16 with Fernando Manetti, an Italian artist working in Beirut as the primary educator at ALBA (the Lebanese Academy of Beaux-Arts and who also trained Helen Khal), she undertook study at the art department at the American University of Beirut, which adhered to a Bauhaus-style curriculum developed by a number of innovative educators, primarily from Chicago. Trained in the classroom, for example, of John Carswell, she established a studio in her family home in Kaslik, which she eventually shared for a short time with the artist and art critic, Helen Khal, also a close friend.

In 1970, she moved to Paris, leaving her three adolescent children, her husband, and her lover in Beirut. In Paris, she exhibited little, at least formally, and sold even less. Eventually, she became closely involved with the Romanian sculptor, Georges Apostu, and also spent a year collaborating with Pierre Cardin on a series of prototypes for a couture and household collection line based on the elegant Abayas she had been wearing for decades and on the traditions of Islamic art. Against emerging narratives that celebrate her refusal of motherhood in favor of art-making, her family remained an important part of her life and work throughout.

In 1987, she moved to Venice, California, where she built what many have called her dream home. There she ran a productive studio, and hosted many of the best-known California artists of the time, including Ed Moses, with whom she and her family developed close relations, while exhibiting her own work very little locally. Throughout this period and often during her time in France, she regularly returned to Lebanon, where she made and exhibited work. Her production was incessant until the early 2010s, when her health began to decline. Eventually she moved back to Beirut, where she passed in 2019 at the age of 88.

Her work is only now receiving the attention, globally, that it deserves as she is exhibited in institutions around the world, and her works now stand in major collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Sharjah Art Foundation, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Tate, amongst others.