Like looking at pictures of fun after the fun’s been had
Huguette Caland Tate St Ives
The Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, now in her 80s, started out during the cultural renaissance known as Beirut’s “golden age”. This is going back a while – to the Sixties, before the civil war (1975-90), and the optimism of an independent Lebanon, of which her father, Bechara El Khoury, was the first president.
Having married young, Caland had three children. Then, in 1964, she enrolled on a fine art course at the American University of Beirut. Radical ideas were in the air at the time (the American artist Mary Kelly, future trailblazer of feminist conceptualism, was teaching there) and Caland’s two lives – as a daughter-mother-wife and as an artist – began to pull apart. We can guess how conflicted she may have felt, but oppressed she certainly wasn’t. In 1970, she took off alone for Paris. “It was such a freedom to wake up by myself,” she recalls, in terms that resonate for any artist-parent. “I needed to stretch.”
After five decades when few people paid much attention, Caland’s star has recently shot high. Who knows whether the sudden discovery of a female artist from the Middle East’s social elite can be ascribed to the quality of her work alone, but Caland is at last finding her wider audience.
After outings in Sharjah and Los Angeles, Tate St Ives’s new retrospective is her first solo show in Britain. It brings together early works produced in Lebanon with paintings from the nearly 20 years she lived in Paris and some of the distinctive decorated kaftans she made for herself and, at one point, designed as a line for Pierre Cardin. Had she been looking for a commercial career, fashion might have fitted her gifts as well as art.
The ink drawings Caland made in her early 40s are classic exercises in Paul Klee’s formula of “taking a line for a walk”. Instead of Klee’s mysterious cities and forests, however, the nib of her pen delighted in tracing soft headlands of flesh and pubic thickets. Sex, in a word.
She adapted her mentor, the American/lebanese artist Helen Khal’s warm-toned abstraction to body parts, each colour field bounded by contour lines where skin meets skin. Caland’s female bodies, it should be said, are not the kind that bleed or wrinkle. OK, they seem big, but Caland herself, who was large as a younger woman, was at ease with her body, recalls her daughter Brigitte: “It was always other people who were uncomfortable with it.”
By far the largest work in the show, and the largest Caland ever made, is Visages sans Bouches, Bouches sans Visages (Faces without Mouths, Mouths without Faces), a 10m-long banner painted in 1971 for the Fête de l’humanité in La Courneuve. It’s a lollipop-coloured frieze from the psychedelic high-water mark of pop, in which green-haired, penis-nosed heads are linked by scarlet-lipsticked mouths. How good it would be to see this out in the sun, dancing above the crowds. Fixed to a wall in the gallery’s environmentally controlled, subaqueous light, it doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with itself.
Caland herself tends to be insouciantly upbeat. “I love every minute of my life,” she has said. “I squeeze it like an orange and I eat the peel.” But, for all the coy crevices and pillowy folds, her art is more than jaunty flag-waving for the joy of sex.
Two 1973 self portraits from her Bribes de corps (Body Parts) series share a gentle, rosy intimacy that feels at odds with the hangar-scale gallery space in which they’re displayed. Strangely enough, her exploration of the sensual possibilities of the human body seem here less sensual under the public gaze: like looking at pictures of people having fun after the best of the fun’s been had.