A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran

Ali Cherri

Joseph Geagea

Claire Gilman

Waïl S. Hassan

Isabella Kapur

Anneka Lenssen

Jordan Nassar

Mounira Al Solh

Isabella

Director’s Foreword

Laura Hoptman

During my first meeting as Executive Director with Claire Gilman, The Drawing Center’s longtime curator, she told me about an exhibition she hoped to do on the works on paper of Kahlil Gibran. I knew that Gibran was a popular poet whose book The Prophet (1923) was a classic of its genre, the sweetness and muzzy spirituality of its lyrical lines making it the source of countless wedding vows for the better part of the twentieth century. Like many though, I didn’t know Gibran was a visual artist. My surprise at his oeuvre piqued my interest; I likewise didn’t know that Victor Hugo was an accomplished artist until I saw an exhibition of his magnificent watercolors at The Drawing Center in 1998. Such a show, of visual art by a well-known literary figure, was in The Drawing Center’s DNA, so I enthusiastically green-lit the project. That was almost four years ago. After several trips to Gibran’s home city of Beirut, hours of research and consultation, and the collegial generosity of the Gibran Museum in Bsharri, Lebanon, the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, and numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad, A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran and its eponymous catalog arrive at The Drawing Center.

Gibran (1883–1931) was one of the twentieth century’s best known literary figures, a “tragic dualist” who was outspoken in his support for a greater Syrian and even pan-Arab state while at the same time accused in his work of “self-orientalizing.”

Described as a “non-sectarian mystic” with “a foot in” both Arab and Euro-American culture, he was a proud Arab and Maronite Christian, a Syrian patriot who spent most of his life on the urban East Coast of the United States and wrote in English as well as Arabic. His literary output drew on his knowledge of both Eastern and Western literary traditions, and his hybrid style appealed to his readers’ curiosity about the mysterious East while speaking to them in a romantic but colloquial style. The Prophet was the best-selling work of its time, and exactly 100 years after its publication in 1923 by Knopf in New York, it has been translated into over 100 languages and sold over ten million copies worldwide.

Gibran had made visual art since he was a teenager, but by 1916 he was drawing intensely and often, a practice he would follow for the rest of his life. The works he produced are clearly influenced by French and British artists of the nineteenth century, from William Blake to Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. There is also something PreRaphaelitic in his drawings of luscious, otherworldly female bodies and a clear strain of Symbolism in his misty atmospheres created by his signature use of bright, sky blue watercolor that delicately tints the thin paper he favored. But, as this exhibition argues, Gibran was as singular in his visual art as he was in his literary one. Accessible but also mystical, Gibran’s works on paper display an astonishing graphic talent coupled with the finesse of a great storyteller. As known as Gibran’s writing might be, his body of work on paper will be a surprise to most of our audiences.

The Drawing Center owes huge thanks to Claire Gilman, whose love of visual art and literature has often produced surprising and moving exhibitions by hyphenate visual artists who are also poets, writers, and illustrators. Claire was more than ably assisted by Isabella Kapur, our Curatorial Associate, who is also a crack researcher and a brilliant writer. Colleagues with expertise in Arabic and the art of the Arab world were also key to this project, as were contemporary artists from the region where Gibran was born. Their fascinating accounts of the artistic milieu that created Gibran or their reflections on the impact of his work on present-day artistic endeavors are included in this volume. For its beauty and its coherence, thanks are due to our editor, Joanna Ahlberg, and our designer, Peter Ahlberg.

An exhibition of this ambitious scale could not have been undertaken without the vision and support of our lead funder Dominique Lévy. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Karim F. Tabet and Family, Sandra and Tony Tamer, the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, Zaza and Philippe Jabre, Tony and Elham Salamé, Carla Chammas and Judi Roaman, Joumana Rizk, and Sara and Hussein Khalifa for their contributions to this exhibition and its attending publication. Furthermore, we are deeply grateful for the generosity of The Drawing Center’s Board of Directors, particularly Isabel Stainow Wilcox, Frances Beatty

Adler and Allen Adler, Dita Amory, Jane Dresner Sadaka and Ned Sadaka, Harry Tappan Heher and Jean-Edouard van Praet d’Amerloo, the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and Waqas Wajahat, who have all contributed meaningfully towards this project.

To display art that is rarely exhibited and to tell its story with love and scholarship is a great privilege, and those of us who now work at The Drawing Center are thankful to do so, as others have done for almost five decades. Exhibitions like A Greater Beauty are the products of passion coupled with expertise, and they are made possible by an audience of artists and art lovers in a city that gets its energy from diverse visions, consummate abilities, and that little sprinkling of genius present in all great works of art. We welcome Kahlil Gibran’s work with joy and with the unmatched excitement of sharing it with a panoply of new people, as well as myriad lovers of Gibran’s artistic efforts, both literary and visual.