Beirut and Beyond | Nicole Rudick
In a self-portrait from 1980, the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s head and upper body are posed against a thinly painted teal background. Her face is blank like an unfinished canvas—a pale green surface empty of features. The white garment blanketing her round shoulders plunges into a vee in the middle of her chest. A black shirt blooms from the valley of the neckline. She is landscape, artist, art. The idea of home—in a city, in one’s body, in a corpus of visual art—is the thematic link for the twenty-three works in “Huguette Caland: My Home,” which breezily surveys her five-decade-long career. She was born in Beirut in 1931 to a wealthy Maronite Christian family; her father, Bechara el-Khoury, became Lebanon’s first president after independence from France in 1943. She married at twenty-one and had three children, but after her father’s death in 1964, she sought liberation from patriarchal expectations. She began to wear loose caftans over then-fashionable Western couture and enrolled in the fine arts department at the American University of Beirut. In an untitled …
