Love Made Visible: Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage

By Jean Gibran

A TOUCHING MEMOIR OF ART AND MARRIAGE IN BOSTON’S VIBRANT SOUTH END

In Love Made Visible, Jean Gibran portrays her role as spouse of a gifted artist and their often stormy family life together in Boston’s diverse South End. In the process, she vividly recalls to life the prolific Boston Expressionist art scene to which the South End was home. Retracing the course of her fifty-year marriage to sculptor Kahlil Gibran, cousin of the noted poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran, she reflects on the trials and joys of defying conventions of the 1950s, embracing another culture, raising a child in the household of a driven artist, and enabling her husband’s passion for sculpture and craft. Like her “mostly happy marriage,” and the fiercely local and independent artistic movement to which she pays homage, Gibran’s moving, idiosyncratic memoir finds its own form as she confronts the costs—and reaffirms the value—of creative commitment, in art and in life. Accompanying the memoir are a summary of the sculptor Gibran’s work, brief biographical sketches of many mid-twentieth-century artists and personalities who populated Boston and Provincetown, and commentaries by art historian Charles Giuliani of Berkshire Fine Arts and museum director and curator Katherine French of the Danforth Museum of Art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Olive Branch Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623710521

Jean Gibran

Jean and Kahlil G. Gibran are unusually qualified to present this story. The younger Kahlil Gibran, a noted Boston sculptor, is the poet's cousin and namesake. Jean Gibran is the author of Love Made Visible: Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage.

Book preview

Love Made Visible

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First published in 2014 by

INTERLINK BOOKS

An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.

46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060

www.interlinkbooks.com

Text copyright © Jean Gibran 2014

Photographs © the estate of Kahlil Gibran except where noted in captions.

Foreword copyright © Charles Giuliano, 2014

Afterword copyright © Katherine French 2014

Front cover photo by George Lynde (Joined Hands by Kahlil Gibran)

Back cover photo by Dennis Ditelberg (Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran,

Montreal, 1979)

See page 214 for additional credits.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any format by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or therwise without the prior permissin in writing of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gibran, Jean.

Love made visible : scenes from a mostly happy marriage / by Jean Gibran. --

First edition.

    pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56656-978-1

1. Gibran, Kahlil, 1922-2008. 2. Artists--United States--Biography. 3. Arab American artists--United States--Biography. 4. Gibran, Jean. 5. Artists' spouses--United States--Biography. I. Title.

N6537.G443G53 2014

730.92--dc23

[B]

2014003265

Cover design by James McDonald | Impress Inc.

Book design by Pam Fontes-May

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword by Charles Giuliano

Love Made Visible by Jean Gibran

Afterword by Katherine French

Sculptor Kahlil Gibran: Selected Works

Cast of Characters

Selected Further Reading on Boston Expressionism

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Charles Giuliano

It was June of 1956. Then sixteen, I was enthralled by the Boston Art Festival installed in a series of tents on the manicured Boston Public Gardens. In particular, I was floored by the sculpture of Kahlil Gibran.

The Institute of Contemporary Art was difficult to reach by public transportation on Soldier’s Field Road in Brighton. This effort was rewarded by a still vivid encounter with the first American museum exhibition of the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele.

For me a youngster just becoming aware of art, there was palpable excitement visiting the festival. In addition to exhibiting fine arts, there was a stage for live performances. I recall jazz by the renowned Boston baritone sax player, Serge Chaloff, a play by William Saroyan, and a solo ballet performance by Maria Tallchief. This ambitious annual festival (1955–1964) organized by Nelson Aldrich ended through a lack of funding. It was revived once but marred by the theft of a painting by Barney Rubenstein because of a lack of security.

There were prizes awarded by jurors of the BAF resulting in debates and controversy. This focused on a perceived dichotomy between traditional still life and landscape works and more progressive forms of abstraction. Visitors voted for a Popular Prize.

In 1956 that was awarded to Kahlil Gibran for a nearly seven-foot, welded metal sculpture of Saint John the Baptist. It stunned and amazed me. With limited experience, it was the greatest work of art I had seen. Much has changed since then, but that galvanic sculpture continues to hold its place in my inner sanctum of all-time greatest hits.

Long before my encounters with the illustrations of Vitruvius, dissections of Leonardo da Vinci, or Gray’s Anatomy, that sculpture evoked a visceral response. With thin rods following the contours of muscles, it was as if Gibran had skinned the prophet, the better to reveal suffering and religious ecstasy.

So taken by this work, I never imagined that I would come to know the artist. Or eventually write an introduction to this book by his widow, Jean English Gibran.

Frankly, this memoir is not the book that I anticipated. As a trained art historian and critic, I expected an orderly, well-documented biography. But there are other ways a book can lead to further research of this lost generation of Boston artists, can be a step toward giving this particular Gibran and his peers their rightful place in the history of postwar American art.

There is a perfect storm of reasons why these artists have languished in a stagnant backwater of provincialism compared to the titanic epic of what Irving Sandler has dubbed the triumph of American art. There has been no such luck for Boston artists, whose efforts in the American art world have signified scattered and Pyrrhic victories.

Looking back to the 1950s, there were few opportunities to see works by leading contemporary Boston artists in a museum setting. Despite an ambitious new director, Perry T. Rathbone, who was intent on making the MFA more progressive, that did not extend to embracing the predominantly Jewish Boston Expressionists. In the traditional Brahmin arts community, there were unmistakable aspects of racism and anti- Semitism.

While Rathbone collected modern European art, particularly examples of expressionism, he showed little or no interest in Boston Expressionism. Unlike the directors who followed, Rathbone exhibited and collected modern art, but underwhelmingly.

The position of the MFA regarding modern and contemporary art was established by the renowned curator of Asiatic art Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877−1947), a Ceylonese philosopher and curator of Tamil and British origin who would have a key influence on young artists. But the museum was only interested in deceased artists with established reputations.

Major works by the leading Boston Expressionists Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe came to the MFA much later as part of the Lane Collection of American art and photography. Even today, the museum owns only a minor work by Jack Levine, who as a teenager with Bloom was nurtured by the Federal Works Progress Administration, a crucial player in its support of young artists. Both Bloom and Levine also were tutored by Harvard professor Denman Ross. He collected their juvenilia, later donated to the Fogg Art Museum. It languishes in storage and may be viewed by appointment.

Other than the occasional Brahmin Boston artist, like Jan Cox (1919–1980) of the Museum School, Rathbone kept his distance from local artists. The postwar era marked a sea change for the Boston art world.

Arguably, the decade between 1940 and 1950 represents a paradigm shift for Boston on every level, from social and economic to aesthetic. The faculty and focus of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts changed from polite and innocuous, ersatz American Impressionism to gritty and graphic Boston Expressionism. The old guard and its socially acceptable artists showed with the Copley Society or the Guild of Boston Artists. The work of the young Turks, Jews, and immigrants or their sons—like the Lebanese-American Gibran—showed with gallerist Boris Mirski or his former assistants Hyman Swetzoff and Alan Fink of Alpha Gallery.

Only in the past few years has the Institute of Contemporary Art decided to collect. Gibran and his peers showed with the ICA particularly early on, like a 1947 Boston Institute of Modern Art group show. Work by the young Gibran was singled out for praise by the city’s leading critic, Dorothy Adlow, in the Christian Science Monitor.

The global status of Boston in the field of modern and contemporary art would be entirely different if the ICA had collected from its beginning. During the 1950s, Thomas Messer of the ICA advised the MFA on some remarkable acquisitions. There was a plan to merge the ICA with the MFA, hiring Messer as its curator. It was deemed that the institutions should not compete (still true), and Messer decamped for New York.

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has long been dedicated to the artists of New England. There were major surveys—Expressionism in Boston, 1945–1985; Painting in Boston, 1950–2000 (2002–2003); and Photography in Boston: 1955–1985 (2001). While invaluable resources for research, these efforts were flawed by flagrant omissions, such as Gibran, and a general lack of curatorial or critical acumen.

There were some superb exhibitions organized by the Fuller Museum of Art, in Brockton including the nineteenth-century mystic, William Rimmer, a Yankee Michelangelo (1986), and retrospectives for Hyman Bloom (curated by Dorothy Thompson, 1996) and Henry Schwartz (1990). Several years ago, the institution, after years of fiscal struggle, reorganized as the Fuller Craft Museum.

Keeper of prints, drawings, and photographs for the Boston Public Library, Sinclair Hitchings, now retired, collected contemporary Boston artists in depth. For a period of time, Robert Brown, working out of an office on Beacon Hill, roamed New England gathering papers and conducting oral interviews for the Archives of American Arts in Washington, DC. The New England branch office was closed through a lack of funding.

More recently Katherine French, director of the Danforth Museum and School, has focused on exhibiting modern and contemporary Boston art. Significantly, Jean and Kahlil Gibran gave the museum fifty works by their friends and peers.

Early on in this book, I found myself accompanying Jean to Mass General Hospital and a harrowing account of Kahlil’s death through congestive heart failure. With her, I felt numb and traumatized, disoriented by a team of doctors and their frenzied but futile efforts. Was there the possibility that hooked up to machines he would be sustained beyond all quality of life? Were there decisions, do not resuscitate, which in the confusion had slipped by her? How to navigate her confluence of grief and potential guilt? With different and quicker response, might he have been saved? Questions that torment loved ones.

Following that emotional and vivid introduction, I anticipated a next chapter that, in the manner of most biographies, would start with childhood and lead us through a chronological study of a career and its accomplishments.

Instead we return from the hospital to their home in the South End. It is a monument to the sculptor’s craft and creativity. We shadow Jean contacting family and friends while making arrangements for the funeral. She is coming to grips with the burden and responsibility of being the widow of an artist and seeing to the archiving, exhibition, research, and publication of a lifetime of work. Jean researches books by the renowned widows of artists. She wonders about her emerging role and identity as the designated keeper of the flame. It is a daunting and exhausting responsibility. Some artists establish foundations and consign works to established galleries. Resources are established to enhance the future reputation of the artist and sustainable value of the aesthetic legacy. In other cases, heirs seek someone to relieve them of the burden. Even sympathetic museums are reluctant to accept more than a couple of works of marginal market value without an endowment. Then what?

For Jean these concerns are further compounded by the responsibility of not just her husband’s work but also an extensive and valuable archive of paintings, drawings, papers, and memorabilia by his cousin and namesake, the great Lebanese poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931). Before the sculptor’s death, this collection was transferred to Museo de Soumaya, named for the wife of mogul Carlos Slim Helú. It is a private museum in the Nuevo Polanco area of Mexico City, with resources to care for the collection.

Following four years of research and writing, in 1974 Jean and Kahlil published Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World. During that period, Kahlil abandoned his own work. Living frugally on her income as a teacher, occasional sales of his work, and money from restoration and sales of antiques and artifacts, they collected works by the poet.

Jean brought me back to the precious time I spent with them in the South End home that he totally renovated and enhanced with precious craftsmanship. The prize-winning squid sauce was served during the dinner we shared in the handwrought dish he created for it. With a twinkle, he related how he had crafted it to sway the judges. Her book reveals how, like many starving artists in Provincetown, the squid was given to them by fishermen on the docks. They also gathered muscles and clams. Numerous narratives by Provincetown artists attest to the generosity of the Portuguese fishermen.

Often reclusive, moody, depressive, obsessed by work, and withdrawn, Kahlil—even when he won his first Guggenheim—refused Jean’s pleading that they travel. He turned down a potential lead for a Prix de Rome. His exposure to Old Masters was confined to books.

From Jean’s narrative we feel their marital tensions and how Kahlil, a brilliant, obsessed artist, could be oblivious to her needs and feelings. Along with her, we wonder at how she sustained an often stormy marriage.

There is clearly a remarkable bond between Jean and her surgeon daughter Nicole, or Nik. Some of the most moving passages in the book occur when, after the funeral, the daughter tries to restore order to her father’s meticulously neat studio. Some precious objects and handcrafted tools were stolen or misplaced. Jean offers,

…a glimpse of everything: the dance master’s pochette with its tortoise shell bridge and ivory head carved from a pool ball, the kangaroo hide wallets, the Matisse-like flowery screen in our precisely constructed black slate prism of a bathroom, the red office desk and accompanying chair, the award-winning hand-hammered squid pot, the ergonomic rolling pin manufactured for maestro drummer Vic Firth’s line of wooden items and drumsticks.

There is a dual irony. While Kahlil won the Popular Prize at the Boston Art Festival, he never enjoyed the critical reputation and institutional support that he deserved. (To be fair, he won two Guggenheim fellowships.)

Similarly, the poet’s best-known work, The Prophet, has sold multiple millions of copies worldwide in more than 180 languages but earned little respect from literary critics. Their meticulously researched book strove to document that this lack of critical respect is unfounded. There is an ever growing critical bibliography. But a typical and snooty review of the biography in the New Yorker damned it with faint praise. Jean was hurt and offended, while Kahlil opted not to dwell on the insult.

In a poetic and beautifully written memoir, Jean reveals that attitudes toward both Kahlils have been tied to stereotypical, orientalist perceptions about people of Arabic heritage and Islam. During an opening of Provincetown artists, a drunken artist poured a beer over sculptor Kahlil’s head, calling him a fucking Arab. There was a similar insult by a New York dealer who wouldn’t show a fucking Arab to his largely Jewish clients. The irony is that Gibran was Christian, while most of his patrons and collectors were Jewish.

I prefer to think of the work of sculptor Kahlil George Gibran as poetic, classical in its canons of beauty, while obsessed with technique and craft. His practice was unique, particularly as rooted in a Lebanese heritage (Arabic was his first language) and craft traditions, transmitted from one generation to the next. It largely falls outside the confines of Boston Expressionism. True, he ran with the pack, but mostly Kahlil roamed as a lone wolf.

There is the enormous challenge of understanding his whimsy and invention. That was entirely unique. No other artist of his circle had that range or versatility.

Through the first third of the book I resisted what I felt was a widow’s lament. I wondered who this book’s readers might be. The artist died in relative obscurity, so that comprises a limited audience. Would people of Lebanese or Arabic heritage be attracted to the book? Both in life and death there is the blessing/curse of his familiar and famous name. Through an online search, one comes up with a lot about the poet and precious little about the sculptor.

But reading on, gradually, there was a remarkable, forceful transformation. In this nonlinear, individualistic, iconoclastic memoir, I became absorbed, indeed riveted, as Jean found her own remarkable persona and voice. The last third of the book cascaded over me like an avalanche.

Everything I was looking for was there. It just took patience to let it happen and absorb the insights. Ostensibly the book is about Kahlil, the artist. It is really more about Jean and the complex life they shared. It is the story of someone asked to make so many sacrifices for her spouse’s art. But it is less about tarnishing his halo than an honest and real glimpse of what it means to be the wife of a gifted artist and to navigate complex cultural currents. Her narrative is so plain, sincere, and understated that it conveys enormous emotional leverage. As she lays out the details, we feel her struggling and grasping with the mixed blessings of a supportive role in the arts.

In truth this memoir speaks to a universal audience, as it eloquently shares the commonality of love, loss, and memory. I became galvanized by Jean’s story, mining it for nuggets of the poorly appreciated and now vanished Boston School, recovered through a poignant, compelling portrayal of a creative marriage.

Charles Giuliano

Publisher/editor, Berkshire Fine Arts

North Adams, Massachusetts

Prologue

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60

This story begins with an ending—to a life, to a way of life, and to a love affair lasting fifty years and ten months. For more than a year afterward, terrified that I would forget a word, a gesture, a step, everywhere I went I lugged memories of our final days together, like the heavy shopping bags he always insisted on carrying. Breathless, I would obsess. Were we careful enough? Should we have called his doctor sooner? What if we had stayed home and never bothered with the hospital? Why didn’t I make a scene when I first heard the nurse talk about medication for high blood pressure? Should I have insisted on seeing his medical records?

Whenever I walk to the University Club pool, I retrace our steps on that windy April Monday: how we stopped and sat on the purple granite benches in front of Back Bay Station; how, when we got up, Kahlil, always meticulous, was disgusted to find that he had stepped in pigeon shit (I laughed and said it was good luck); how he let me do all the talking in the bank and then, for the first time in our years together, suggested that we take a taxi home from Copley Square instead of walking.

Seeing our neighbor Susan Passoni, who had run for state rep that year, I default to Tuesday, when he stayed in and read the book on Chinatown she had given him. I picture him in his new reading glasses, seated on the patchwork velvet couch he had upholstered, meticulously taking notes about his childhood streets. I can hear his excitement when he yelled, Jean, here’s Paul Lee. I dashed to the book with K’s shakily inscribed words next to the photo of a scrawny boy standing with other Chinese kids. For the rest of the day, K’s eyebrows arched and his eyes twinkled as he crowed over the sepia photo of his childhood friend.

Each time I visit our branch library, I remember that Wednesday when we passed the pizza shop and its Lebanese owner spotted us. "Ammu, Uncle, Gus called out using the honorific as he ran to shake his elder’s hand, painfully swollen with gout. The familiar guttural sounds lit up K’s face as they chatted briefly in Arabic. Then, perhaps for my benefit, K reverted to English. So, he joked, are you coming to my funeral?"

"Basmala, in the name of God" Gus cringed. The spell was broken. We laughed, waved goodbye, and continued walking.

That was silly, I chided. What got into you?

Just joking, he chuckled.

Tremont Street crowds my memories. Not only do I picture our almost daily walks to the Garden of Eden, our favorite restaurant, but I review every detail of that long, hot hike he insisted that we take on Thursday. It all started with the Chinatown book. He wanted to visit those early scenes. I protested. You need to walk there? I had asked at breakfast. Aren’t we going to the museum? I believed he would relent. But when I got back from the pool he was waiting. We started off, just before noon, and the moment we reached Tremont Street he stopped. Two carpenters were refinishing an old door, probably an original from the bowfront they were restoring. Spread out on sawhorses, it was scarred and pitted. While the workers pulled and scraped, K scrutinized every move. We stood there for at least a minute, as though we were watching a tennis match. The workers ignored him, until finally K caught their eyes and smiled, Good job, he offered as he gazed longingly at the stressed wood. He never could ignore a work-in-progress.

I also summon up folks we met after he had treated me for lunch, not at the Garden of Eden (sadly, it had just closed) but at Aquitaine next door. He was hungry and ate all his soup. Order a martini, he urged. I did. The mood was lively. The food was good. We were content. When we left and crossed Tremont, we greeted two photographers, Marlene Karas and Rick Friedman, who through the years had taken wonderful photos of K, in his studio, at the park, in our garden. They were seated outside at a new bistro. Agreeing to come back all together one day, we walked on. At the light, a car stopped just before the crosswalk. Someone yelled. It was Steve Wolfe who had bought a sculpture from K’s Ceres Series. Never one to miss a beat when it came to clients, he walked to the curb and told Steve that he had just sold a sculpture to friends of the soon-to-be-renovated Childe Hassam Park on Columbus Avenue. I still have the best one, grinned Steve. The light changed.

The day was turning hot, so different from that wintry spring. I tied my jacket around my waist. Are you sure you want to walk all the way? I asked. Wait here. I’ll run back and get the car? Nothing doing, he insisted adamantly. Actually, we’re almost halfway there. Just as he was unzipping his coat, my swimming buddy Atheline Nixon approached, walking her bike. Always in shape, she had come down from Beacon Hill on her way to