21 November 2011
BEIRUT: As an artist, the late Helen Khal devoted much of her life to color field abstractions that captured the particular qualities of light and hue that filled the view from her Ras Beirut studio. With her late-husband, the poet Yusuf Khal, she opened one of the most influential modern art galleries in Lebanon, Gallery One, in 1963.
She wrote a groundbreaking book on Lebanese women artists, which was completed in 1976 and, after a Civil War-induced delay, published in 1987. She was a popular teacher, a highly effective, if unofficial, cultural ambassador and a tireless advocate for the advancement of the arts in Lebanon.
Khal was also a pavement-pounding, deadline-crunching, workaday critic for a daily newspaper (this one) and a weekly magazine (“Monday Morning”).
Intermittently from 1967 to 2003, she wrote weekly exhibition reviews, chronicling the ups and downs of Lebanon’s art scene, dragging herself around to Beirut galleries, looking at work, listening to artists and dealers and their ilk, and conveying what she saw and heard, reasoned and felt, in prose that was plainspoken yet passionate.
Though she is widely regarded to be one of the seminal artists of her generation, Khal was under no delusions of being able to support herself by painting. She wrote primarily to secure a stable income.
“I like my double life,” Khal once told her fellow critic Cesar Nammour. “It gives me total freedom in my art and at the same time keeps me actively in touch with the outside world. Painting is a solitary occupation and I don’t think I would want to be an artist 24 hours a day, every day of my life.”
Since publishing a book of his own criticism in 1990, Nammour has been pushing the bibliophilic end of the local art scene. He has produced close to 20 monographs for Lebanese artists.
A few years ago, he opened the wondrous bookshop Recto Verso on Monnot Street. He has staged art fairs for art books in Unesco Palace and the Beirut Souks. With his partner Gabriela Schaub, he organizes monthly street festivals for booksellers in Beirut.
Five years before Khal’s death in 2009, Nammour published the first and only book devoted to her paintings.
“She didn’t like it at all,” he says with a sad laugh. The images of her work were all scanned from bad slides that hadn’t been professionally photographed. For an artist obsessed with color, getting the reds and blues wrong was a major disappointment.
Undaunted, Nammour decided to publish another book devoted to Khal, this time focusing on her criticism. Now, after two years of trying to get the images right, he has published that book, which is the first comprehensive anthology of a Lebanese art critic’s writings in English.
“Resonances: 82 Lebanese Artists Reviewed by Helen Khal” is a big, heavy, hardbound tome that covers four decades of observations and encounters. Edited by Nammour and Schaub, the book is arranged by artist in alphabetical order, with four pages dedicated to each artist, ranging from legends like Shafic Abboud to relative unknowns, such as Julie Bou Farah.
The first spread features Khal’s review, tweaked by relatively minor edits, and a splash of images. The second spread includes a biographical profile and a portrait of each artist.
Khal occupied an enviable position as a critic. She was an outsider and an insider at once. A second-generation immigrant born, in 1923, to Lebanese parents in Allentown, Pennsylvania, she came to Beirut in 1946, took classes at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and met and married Khal.
Together, they returned to the U.S. Khal studied at the Art Students League in New York. The couple moved to Libya for a few years, then back to the U.S., and then back to Lebanon in 1955.
Five years later, Khal had her first solo exhibition in Beirut. Gallery One followed soon after. Then the marriage fell apart. In 1967, Khal started teaching at the American University of Beirut and began writing criticism for The Daily Star. Somewhere in between she also represented Lebanon at that year’s Sao Paulo Biennale.
In 1972, Khal added “Monday Morning” to her writing schedule, but she left Lebanon, and criticism, in 1976. She didn’t return for good until 20 years later and the bulk of the reviews in “Resonances” were written in the late 1990s. What is striking about Khal’s work in this period is the manner in which she used her columns to fill the gaps of her absence.
Tacked onto the end of her book are four pieces she wrote about the local art scene generally. One is ostensibly a review of the Musée Sursock’s 1997 Salon d’Automne. Another is a year-in-review piece, published on the last day of 1999, which looks ahead to the young artists of the new millennium.
Both track the dramatic changes in Lebanon’s cultural landscape from the 1960s through the 1990s, and how those changes were reflected in the work artists were producing, whether it was paintings that seemed disturbingly oblivious to the violence of the Civil War in the 1980s or, a decade later, “young men and women who spent their childhood against the backdrop of war, [who] have taken over a totally different storehouse of memories to feed their creative purposes.”
Khal approached the artists she wrote about as a peer. She addressed the formal aspects of art as only someone who makes art can – with a keen eye for technical skill and an all-consuming love of color, brushstroke, texture and tone.
That said, “Resonances” is also significant for what it is not – namely, a chance to approach Khal as a stylist, or a journalistic record of the issues afflicting Lebanon’s modern and contemporary art over the key decades of its development and transition. (At $100 a copy, the book is also too expensive for students, who might have benefitted from a $10 paperback edition with a few color plates.)
“It has always been my obsession to reprint the articles of the art critics and writers who have written in newspapers,” says Nammour. “We had a choice between two things, either a reference book about Lebanese artists, or a book about Helen’s criticism, and about Lebanese art from the perspective of a critic.
“We opted for the first choice, which is panoramic, not analytical. The second choice would be more analytical and scholarly. Our work here is more of a survey, although I do believe it is necessary to do the second kind of book, which would add real value to the quality of art criticism here.”
How long will it take for someone to step up to take on that project?
“Resonances: 82 Lebanese Artists Reviewed by Helen Khal,” 352 pages, $100, edited by Cesar Nammour and Gabriela Schaub and published by Fine Art Publishing, Beirut. For information, call 01-271-500 or visit www.fineartspublishing.com
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
