Kahlil Gibran: Things Saved, Things Given Anneka Lenssen
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“I am sending you a drawing,” Kahlil Gibran wrote to his friend and literary collaborator Mary Haskell, “Put it under glass if you can. The paper on which it is drawn is not strong enough to stand many things.”1 This request for the dedicated care of an unstable item—made within an ongoing exchange of artifacts mailed between Gibran’s home base in New York City and Haskell’s in Boston—may reflect Gibran’s early training in photography, which involves uncertain processes for fixing silver crystals into optical, physical images.2 But equally, it marks a creative threshold for the artist during the years of the First World War, when he turned to rapid wash drawings on relatively flimsy commercial typewriter paper.3 From 1914 to 1919, Gibran produced scores of wash renderings of shape-shifting beings such as centaurs and All-Mothers in cloudy layers of pigment and pencil. Many were generated between spells of intensive work for the Syrian-Mount Lebanon Relief Committee, a diasporic organization engaged in lobbying the American government to break a military blockade on the region by sending
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Kahlil Gibran to Mary Haskell, October 6, 1915, in Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell and Her Private Journal, ed. Virginia Hilo (New York: Knopf, 1985), 261. On the photographic character of Gibran’s approach to wash drawing, see Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 25–73. The drawings in this series were made on sheets that display the Elsinore Central bond paper watermark.