Huguette Caland, a perspective unbound by limiting conventions in art and life. (Credit: L'Or Iman Puymartin)
Like many women artists of her generation, it took time for Huguette Caland, born in 1931 and passed in September 2019, to have her talent and the importance of her art finally recognized. Only in the final years of her life, with her participation in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, did the artist's work – who embraced painting at the age of 16 as a vital expression of emancipation – gain international recognition.
Today, she is widely represented in the collections of the world's greatest contemporary art museums, with her works found, among others, at the Hammer Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, MoMA and MET in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern and the British Museum in London, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Not to mention the exhibitions regularly, or almost continuously, dedicated to her in major galleries and museums in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
The richness of the production of this Lebanese artist, her bold freedom, and the periodic renewal of her work provide curators ample themes to propose to their audiences.
For example, Parisian gallerist Kamel Mennour presented this fall a selection of works from "Huguette Caland's Parisian Years (1970-1987)" and her famous erotic paintings Bribes de corps, which travel internationally, are expected in April at the Arts Club of Chicago.
A 'Red Sun/Cancer' as a starting point
While Caland's art is regularly celebrated in solo or group exhibitions worldwide, the one dedicated to her by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid – in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg – is the most significant organized for her in Europe so far.
The reason is that it is an extensive retrospective spanning six full months (from Feb. 19 to Aug. 25, 2025) and covering more than 280 paintings, sculptures, drawings, paper-mâché works or textiles, the five decades of work by this artist with prolific creativity.
Spread across 12 rooms of the Madrid Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, the corpus of works chosen by curator and art historian Hanna Feldman offers a comprehensive panorama of the work of this artist, inseparable from the story of her life. A free woman who broke the aesthetic, social and sexual conventions of her time and the different places she lived. Since her first painting, the almost monochrome Red Sun/Cancer, painted in 1964, she evoked both a sense of renewal and the loss of her father, Lebanese President Beshara al-Khoury, who died of cancer.
However, beyond these quick interpretations "based exclusively on her libertine attitude, provocative spirit and cosmopolitan displacement…" the exhibition curator, chair of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs of contemporary art history at the University of Pennsylvania, offers "a new narrative around Huguette Caland's practice … showing an artist deeply connected to the community, communication, and the idea of home."
Highlighting "a work that explores notions of gender, body, belonging, love, aging and personality, all in opposition to the broader geopolitical trends of a decolonized and neoliberalized world."
This is achieved through a selection of pieces from her most famous series, such as the erotic Bribes de corps or unique Caftans, but also lesser-known ones, like her self-portraits, or L'argent ne fait pas le bonheur, mais il y contribue largement, a satirical condemnation of the monetization of the art market and the financial precariousness of artists.
Organized chronologically, this retrospective entitled "Huguette Caland. A Life In Few Lines" is accompanied by a publication signed by several art critics, taking visitors through a progressive discovery of the different artistic and personal phases she went through.
Opening and closing in Beirut, the exhibition's scenography follows the itinerary of the artist's travels and residences and their impact on her production. Her succession of pictorial periods imbued first with the spirit of the sixties in a tumultuous pre-civil war Lebanese capital, then the utopian liberalism of Paris where she settled in the 1970s/1980s, later the bohemian art scene of Los Angeles, concentrated in Venice Beach, where Caland lived from the 1990s until the early 2000s before returning to her homeland, in a Lebanon where she tried to rediscover the charm of childhood memories and its Mediterranean brightness.
The importance of drawn and painted lines
A "Larger than Life" artistic personality, whose life and work cannot be summed up in a few lines, unlike what a false reading of this retrospective title might suggest. Whereas for the curator of "Huguette Caland. A Life In Few Lines," it was a matter of emphasizing "one of the undeniable characteristics of Caland's work quality, which is the drawn and painted line," as she states in her note of intent.
Noting that "her sinuous line drawings originate from the courses she took at the American University of Beirut, from John Carswell, an artist and amateur Islamist who introduced her to the art of the 'continuous line,' which consists of drawing without lifting the pencil or pen from the paper until the idea or concept … has been resolved," she said that in one of her last interviews, Caland confessed her belief in "a single line that crosses the universe."
"It's my great fantasy," she said. "It's an elastic and entirely imaginary line. For me, it exists. Every time you make a sketch, you trap that line and then let it go."
After Madrid, Hamburg
Viewed from this angle, the corpus of presented works reveals, in addition to the various formal phases of Caland's work, "her visual resources and strategies built on colors, shapes, lines, grids, or the repetition of figures, as well as on words and letters that appear in her work," stated Feldman.
Linguistic references that, discreetly traverse Caland's early works, reach their apex of pure linear expression in the Silent Letters series. A suite of large works on paper began in the 2000s and which, in the most minimalist way possible, tells her life story in a few lines.
The exhibition is open until Aug. 25 at the Museo Reina Sofia and from Oct. 25 at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, where "Huguette Caland. A life In Few Lines" will move until April 6, 2026. Featuring an augmented version "with about twenty works from Lebanese collections that could not be included in Madrid due to the war," said Brigitte Caland, the artist's daughter.
Huguette Caland, A Life In Few Lines
Born in Beirut in 1931, Huguette Caland (née al-Khoury) took her first painting lessons at the age of 16 with Manetti, an Italian artist residing in Lebanon. Following the death of her father, President Beshara al-Khoury, one of the fathers of Lebanese independence, Caland decided to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. After four years of fine arts studies at the American University of Beirut, Caland moved to Paris in 1970. Freed from social obligations, she could flourish and meet many contemporary artists. In 1987, she moved to California, where she created the studio of her dreams. Huguette Caland passed away on Sept. 23, 2019, in Lebanon at the age of 88.
