Lebanon and the Split of Life: Bearing Witness through the Art of Nabil Kanso

By Meriam Soltan

This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). It explores key moments across the artist’s transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly spatial readings of his painterly practice, of which the act of bearing witness is highlighted as permeating the entirety of his oeuvre. It concludes with a contemporary recontextualization of Lebanon in the country’s current social, political, and cultural climate, and emphasizes the artist’s work as essential to the theorization of larger traditions of political and protest art.

The first of its kind and the result of a research fellowship wherein the author was invited to be the first to work through the artist’s unpublished archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of the neo-expressionist art movement of the 1960s. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, recorded interviews, and the like. To best animate that source material within the context of this publication, each chapter is prefaced with short narrative anecdotes inspired by the artist’s personal notes to better ground the subsequent research and scholarship in the artist’s own terms and experiences.

Born in Beirut, Kanso, like many of his generation, would seek sought refuge abroad from political instability in his home country. It is through this intrinsic proximity to, yet physical distance from, the cycles of violence and corruption in Lebanon that Kanso would go on to create his grandest greatest mural-scale series. This book, more than anything, explores the artist’s oeuvre as an attempt to bear witness and offer testimony to those moments, an inclination that would see the artist grapple with some of the most ferocious crimes against humanity committed throughout his lifetime. As such, this book pairs close readings of Kanso’s art and personal practice with both historical and contemporary context meant to animate the relevance of his vast yet never-before-seen artistic archive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839989643

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1 Kanso on a visit to Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, 1978. Courtesy of The Nabil Kanso Estate.

Art brought out more in me than anything else I’d ever experienced. I never dreamed I could go so deep in my soul.

—Nabil Kanso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 8, 1984¹

Containers of film, slides, and tapes are stacked against the walls of the Kanso archive. The oldest boxes clatter with small, white-framed photo slides and canisters of 35mm film. The cameras used to capture them rest on the adjacent drawers. Others, newer cases, contain black VHS tapes and faded Polaroids, then stacks of glossy prints, CDs, and eventually a handful of USBs and hard drives. The artist that calls out from a few dozen of these tapes—home videos—gestures widely at various paintings, at the site of his first gallery in New York, at the crowd gathered to hear him speak at an exhibition in Caracas. The photos, both digital and analog, capture him at home in Lebanon or Atlanta, among friends, colleagues, and fellow artists around the world. Others turn a lens toward his art on exhibition, on show in the halls of research centers and peace museums—proof that they, at some point, had a devoted audience.

In the adjacent room, these same paintings—hundreds of them—are rolled tight against the light and humidity, their vibrant interiors muted by the blank undersides of the tan canvas. It has been decades since most of these massive, mural-scale artworks were on show—others still have yet to be exhibited. The adjacent bins of notes, diary entries, exhibition catalogs, letters, the beginnings of a memoir, and, elsewhere, of an autobiography, help piece together an understanding of this vast, unpublished archive—the life’s work of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist Nabil Kanso (1940–2019).

The first of its kind on this artist and the result of a research fellowship wherein I was invited to work through this archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of mural-scale, neo-expressionist art. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, and recorded interviews, to recreate the public life and reception of his since-retired oeuvre.

Born in Beirut, Kanso, like many of his generation, sought refuge abroad from political instability in his home country (Figure 1). Civil war displaced him first to London and then to New York, where he eventually settled, studied, and established his own art studio and practice in 1968. By the 1970s, he was hosting solo shows at his 76th Street Gallery, an exhibition space he founded under the auspices of long-time patron Dorothy Whitcomb (Figure 2). His earliest shows, writes Whitcomb in a gallery guide, whether mythological or imaginary, revolve[d] around the theme of WOMAN as seen through the eyes of the artist.² The paintings and pastels drew early critical acclaim for the young artist, attracting the attention of prominent critics and museum executives, including Alfred Barr. As the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural director, Barr provided praise that Kanso recalls in many interviews and personal correspondences as a memorable source of encouragement.³

Figure 2 Kanso and his early works, 1970s. Courtesy of The Nabil Kanso Estate.

Despite that early success, Kanso’s artistic subject and style would almost entirely shift by 1974. Mounting frustration with the United States’ protracted military operations abroad inspired the first of his mural-scale artworks, Vietnam (1974), a tribute to the victims of the eponymous war and occupation (Figure 3). Painted in shades of fiery red and yellow, the mural unfolded visions of warring soldiers and flayed casualties across 24 feet (7.3 meters) of unstretched canvas. The outbreak of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War the following year only further fueled this particular mode of artistic expression, paving the way for an 88-painting series Kanso eventually named The Split of Life. Endless wars and hostilities, details Kanso in his manifesto, threaten our planet, splitting nations and peoples, and assaulting the very essence of humanity. With paintings created for The Split of Life well into the 1990s, the murals were offered by the artist in protest of, among other things, apartheid, civil war, occupation, invasion, and genocide.

Figure 3 Vietnam by Nabil Kanso, from the series The Split of Life, 1974, oil on canvas, 3.65 × 7.3 meters (12 × 24 feet). Courtesy of The Nabil Kanso Estate.

Together, the hellish⁴ paintings, what he came to call mobile murals, became the primary focus of Kanso’s longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). Critical to this exhibition was his 1983 painting Lebanon—one of his largest ever murals and a tribute to the victims of civil war in his home country. That this painting and others like it, brutal as they were, could, perhaps, be made to appeal to one’s inner humanity, that they could be leveraged in favor of peace talks and justice advocacy, consumed Kanso’s practice for the remainder of his lifetime.

This commitment did not come without heavy personal and professional losses. During one of his earliest exhibitions of the mural-scale war works, remembers Kanso, Alfred Barr expressed a particular concern in which he feared that the walls of commercial galleries might become frightened by the intensity, fury, and scale of the paintings.⁵ Over time, concedes Kanso in his manifesto, his point of view evinced its reality.⁶ Kanso struggled to find an audience willing to genuinely and consistently engage with his protest art in New York. And while he eventually left the city for Atlanta in 1980, incessant censorship, racism, and xenophobia followed Kanso to the American South, leaving him feeling both personally and professionally ostracized.

These frustrations, compounded with the lack of commercial support for his art, encouraged him to sever his ties with the