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Paint butt and sit on canvas9/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Starting with a pencil at the top of the page and drawing without breaking the line was a routine exercise required of her. According to Wilson-Goldie, she was taught to focus on the potentialities of the line. In the 2018 monograph Huguette Caland: Everything Takes the Shape of a Person, 1970–78, essayist Kaelen Wilson-Goldie quotes Nadine Beghdache, daughter of Caland’s Lebanon gallerist Janine Rubeiz: “Huguette was a free woman and it was too much for Beirut … the place for women in society was really changing.” At the time, Caland was painting nudes, which reportedly caused speculation and shock about her morals among members of the local art scene.Ĭaland came to art somewhat late in life, beginning her studies at the American University in Beirut in her 30s. ![]() She had three children with Paul Caland in Beirut, but she also soon took a lover called Mustafa before she decided to leave her children, her lover, and her husband for Paris. Khalil died in 200 Michel is now 91.) But she was to disappoint her father by falling in love with a French-Lebanese man, Paul Caland, the nephew of El Khoury’s greatest rivals. Huguette Caland was the only daughter of Bechara El Khoury, the first post-independence president of Lebanon-a hero of Lebanese nationalism who served from 1943 to 1952. There, Caland’s luscious “body fragments,” as she calls them, were presented alongside erotic caftans-clothing that she had made first for herself in Lebanon as (the Los Angeles Times once observed) “a step toward … self-acceptance” and developed into the 1970s after relocating to France, where she would collaborate with Pierre Cardin. ![]() I came back to LA a few weeks later to see that curators Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker had dedicated an entire gallery to Huguette Caland’s work in the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Made in L.A. There, we unearthed giant sheaths of paper etched with bodies in black and white and in color notebooks filled with erotic drawings and poems massive canvases marked with abstractly sensual figures and lines, as well as with voluminous forms that advanced the formal limits of what abstraction could be through the sense of sensual abandon contained within them. art world,” a force and an anchor, and yet her legacy is absent not only from that city’s artistic history but also from the global canon of feminist art.īrigitte took me to the studio adjacent to the house. Articles that I have read on Caland refer to her as the “Gertrude Stein of the L.A. Brigitte named the LA artists who frequented the house, of whom the most prominent and important to Caland was the since deceased Ed Moses (1926–2018), a dear friend whom she often painted in abstract form. Often, Huguette would continue working while people gathered around her. Brigitte regaled me with stories of how the Los Angeles art world would gather for dinner and parties in this home. The home was clearly in transition-a dream world about to evaporate, to pass hands from the matriarch to her son. I recall the floors being painted in bold colors. There, painted directly onto the wall the hanging rod that entered both figures’ mouths, at either end of the closet, a suffocating phallus. The closets were empty, but they beckoned me to enter. As we ascended to the second floor, the bedrooms also bore no doors. In the kitchen, her singularly unwavering line took over the walls surrounding her cabinetry, appearing over and over again in ebullient and striking color. There were no doors everything was wide open, as she likes it. Her former home was so inflected with Caland’s singular artistic vision as to constitute a testament to her sense of rapture with the world. Caland’s work has the capacity to phenomenologically move the soul in the most unexpected of ways.Īlmost two years ago, at the invitation of her daughter, Brigitte Caland, I walked into Huguette Caland’s house in Venice. To write comprehensively of Huguette Caland’s work is difficult: she is, arguably, one of the greatest Arab artists to have emerged since the 1970s, yet so little is written about her that each word put to paper carries a particular weight-a burden to represent a practice that is polyphonous, rhythmically enchanting, and as innately intricate as it is majestic. I came to Huguette Caland’s work too late, but haven’t we all? The octogenarian artist has been prolifically weaving and casting spells through her intricate lines on paper and canvas with delicate eroticism for more than 40 years, first in her native Beirut, then in France, and finally in Venice, California, where she lived for more than 20 years before retiring to Lebanon. ![]()
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