PARIS.- Mennour is presenting the first exhibition of Huguette Caland (1931-2019), the successful outcome of its collaboration with the artist’s Estate, announced in June 2024. A key figure in the Lebanese Golden Sixties, Huguette Caland belongs to the same generation as Shafic Abboud, Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal and Saloua Raouda Choucair. However, her free and protean work however has little visible presence in France even though she lived, worked and exhibited there between 1970 and 1987.
This original retrospective exhibition focuses on those decisive and fruitful years during which Caland made some of her greatest works. It will highlight the boldness, dynamism, mischief and beauty of Caland’s art adventure by gathering for the first time an exceptional body of nearly fifty major works, of which twenty-four paintings—among them works from the famous series “Bribes de corps [Body Parts]” from the 1970s—as well as nineteen works on paper and two kaftans—one from her collaborative work with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin.
This unprecedented exhibition in France marks the start of big events in Europe and the United States, among them a major retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in February 2025. Mennour is honoured to contribute to the international rediscovery of an œuvre that resonates so much with our current preoccupations.
When she arrived in Paris in 1970 at the age of 39, Huguette Caland had completed her studies at the American University of Beirut, started in 1964 following the death of her father, the first post-independence president of Lebanon, Bechara El Khoury. She exhibited in Beirut, among other places in Dar el Fan, an art centre directed by her friend Janine Rubeiz, which became one of the epicentres of the cultural scene in West Asia. Caland decided however to leave it all behind to settle in Paris and “follow her star”: getting away from Paul Caland— with whom she had been married since the age of 20—and her three children, she no longer wanted to be “the daughter of”, “the wife of” and “the mother of”. At the beginning of the 1970s, Caland took part in exhibitions in England, Italy, Japan and the United States but also at the Venice Biennale in 1972 where she exhibited the prints made in Paris, at Bellini’s, the printing studio of Sam Szafran, which were eventually acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Huguette Caland was first and foremost a painter: in the Parisian art salons she was confronted with artists from all over the world, first at Salon de Mai, then from 1974, in Réalités Nouvelles and Grands et jeunes d’aujourd’hui. In 1980, Waddah Faris, her friend and gallerist in Lebanon—the Contact Gallery—had just settled in Paris and gave her her first solo exhibition. Signing the preface of the exhibition catalogue, the art critic Raoul-Jean Moulin, creator of MAC VAL, showed unfailing support to the artist, collected her works and published her first monograph in 1986.
From 1978, Caland collaborated with Pierre Cardin who, amazed by the original kaftans she was wearing, proposed that she creates “in total freedom a collection of kaftans […] using Islamic art at its best level”, a haute couture collection presented in Espace Pierre Cardin in 1979. Caland also frequented the Parisian literary milieu thanks to the poet Venus Khoury-Ghata who introduced her to Alain Bosquet, the instigator with Juliette Darle of poésie murale [wall poems], an adventure in which Caland immersed herself by signing several drawings resonating with the poems of Bosquet but also with those of Andrée Chédid and Salah Stétié. Caland also tried her hand at experimental cinema then, following a stay in the United States in 1981-1982, she practiced sculpture, which she discovered with her companion, the Romanian sculptor George Apostu. Together they went to Limousin, where she painted a new series, Granite and Limousin, almost never shown in France.
Though she had already worked in a monumental-scale format with a composition more than ten metres long unfolded at the Fête de l’Humanité in 1971, Caland explored large formats in the 1980s. The artist produced masterpieces like “Espaces Blancs”, recently celebrated at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 3 and “Ligaments”, shown for the first time at UNESCO in 1985. At the death of Apostu in 1986, Caland was tempted by the American adventure, which she embraced in 1987 by settling in Venice, on the Californian coast. There she kept company with the artists Ed Moses, Nancy Rubins, Laddie John Dill and many others, beginning a new chapter in her art career. For Caland, “one never leaves one’s country, one goes further in order to not go backwards”.
A painter, designer, engraver and sculptor, Huguette Caland found her way in Paris and created a sensual art of line, colour and volume, in which eroticism, humour and poetry are combined in total freedom. “Eroticism is an abstract thing. It is the gaze that creates the mood”, she declared in 1973, an idea that found an echo in all her work during her years in Paris. For it was in that city that she painted what became her most famous and most sought-after series, the “Bribes de corps [Body Parts]”, in which the enlarged fragments of bodies compose abstractions in Pop art colours. Only on close observation do they reveal their eroticism, but also, according to her friend, the great artist and gallerist Helen Khal, “the tender humour and wit of a surreal imagination that insists on the pleasures of sensual discovery and denies any taboo”. In Caland’s art, the body, drawn and engraved is whole, as shown in her encounter with Noëlle Châtelet for Sade’s writings: 4 the bodies are intertwined, self-beget one another in unrestrained farandoles. In that obsessional exploration of an intimate territory, the body becomes the matrix of a relationship with the world. For the art critic Joseph Tarrab, Caland painted “the inner quiver and the vibration of the bodies as their encounter approaches or is achieved”. The artist questioned topics as current as the norm, desire and sexuality of women, themes that at times brought her closer to Niki de Saint Phalle, Dorothy lannone and Kiki Kogelnik. Celebrating the body in its entire ambiguous truth, her works alternate between figuration and “body abstraction” (Raoul-Jean Moulin), if not a kind of “erotic abstraction” (Salah Stétié), without the artist ever claiming to have been influenced.
In all her work, a perpetual ambivalence appears between the assertion and the erasing of the body, in her practise as in her self-staging, from her self-portraits of “Bribes de corps” to the creation of kaftans for Cardin, which “allows [her] to live [her] life as a woman while forgetting about [her] body, to accept it and reconstruct it by finding another type of seduction, outside the norm”.
“Huguette Caland. Les années parisiennes (1970-1987)” invites the public to rediscover an œuvre seriously current, free, ambiguous and joyful, like a link between art and life. At the heart of the “plural modernities”, Mennour aspires to contribute to new, more open and more global artistic narratives.
—Sylvie Patry, curator of the exhibition assisted by Léo Rivaud Chevaillier
