An exploration of the role of writing in the artistic practice of Huguette Caland.
Through sketches, visual documentation and an essay by Brigitte Caland, a scholar and the daughter of the artist, this publication traces the Lebanese artist's unique fusion of image and text. It also helps understand the role of writing in Huguette's works, how by concealing parts she creates, consciously or unconsciously, a playful relationship with the viewer and how her handwritten fragments and invented symbols become a language of their own shifting at moments to abstraction.
From Beirut to Paris to Los Angeles, the book unveils how visual art and writing combined serve multiple purposes during a fully lived life.
With a master in Art Criticism and Curatorial Studies and a PhD in Literature and Civilizations, Brigitte Caland has taught at the Arabic and Near Eastern languages department at the American University of Beirut as well as the University Saint Joseph, Beirut. She is a trained chef interested in food history, who published her first book, Promenades culinaires (Les trois colonnes, 2020) on the evolution of culinary traditions in the Near-East. Since 2005 she has managed the estate of her mother
Huguette Caland and co-curated several exhibitions of her work.
Huguette Caland (1931-2019) was a Lebanese artist considered, along with Shafic Abboud,
Etel Adnan, Yvette Achkar and
Helen Khal, to be one of the leading figures of contemporary
Lebanese art.
Born in Beirut, the only daughter of the first post-independence president of Lebanon Bechara El Khoury, Huguette Caland observed the blossoming of Lebanon's creative and cultural scene as Beirut become a metaphorical jewel and the seat of many conjured mythologies. Following her father's death, and now married to Frenchman Paul Caland and with three children, she completed her first painting in 1964 and informally enrolled in art and design classes at the American University in Beirut (AUB). During this formative period she began a lifelong friendship with the bold and brilliant artist, educator, gallerist, and author Helen Khal, one of the many notable friendships of her career. In 1970, Caland left Beirut for Paris and there began one of her most storied collaborations, with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin who invited her to design a series of dresses and caftans. Having relocated again to Venice, California, in 1987 she became a doyenne of the Los Angeles art scene, regularly hosting fellow artists at her home, including
Larry Bell,
Chris Burden, and one of her dearest comrades, Ed Moses.
For Caland, the body was an unceasing point of obsession and a centrifugal point of investigation. Lithe in outline, her art—erotic compositions on paper, expressive collages, layered self-portraits, and her celebrated 'Bribes de corps' paintings cumulatively manifest a composite image of a body in perpetual motion. Hers is a figure that refuses to be contained by logic or ideology, a self that is not prescribed by others but instead open to all of life's possibilities, its people, and their interpretations.
