MADRID.- The exhibition Huguette Caland. A Life in a Few Lines, which can be seen at the Museo Reina Sofía from February 19 to August 25, 2025, is the first major retrospective in Europe of this Lebanese artist whose life and work constantly defied the aesthetic, social, and sexual conventions of her time and of the different places where she worked. The show, organized in collaboration with Deichtorhallen Hamburg, brings together approximately 300 works, many previously unshown, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, design, and collages on loan from Europe and the United States. The goal is to propose a new narrative of the artist’s production that exceeds fast-forming narratives based exclusively on her libertine attitude, her cosmopolitan uprootedness, and what is misread as a manifestly apolitical stances.
Huguette Caland, the only daughter of the first president of the independent Lebanese Republic, Bechara El Khoury, was born in Beirut in 1931. There she began her first art studies, although she lived for much of her adult life in Paris and Los Angeles, returning to her native Beirut in her last years. Caland fought for her freedom at every turn of her life, whether it was freedom to dress as she wanted, to live as she wanted, to make art as she wanted, to love whom and how she wanted, or to parent how she wanted. Her attitudes were uncoventional, but they were organized by the larger pursuit of liberty and an understanding of social interaction in which all entities were entitled to equal space within the collective. Like many other women, it took time for her to be accepted as an artist, but her work is widely recognized today and represented in the collections of the world’s great contemporary art museums, among them the Hammer Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, MoMA and the MET in New York, and Tate Modern and the British Museum in London. Many of the works in this exhibition come from these institutions. However, thirty-three pieces currently in museums and collections in Beirut, the first from her youthful period in Lebanon and the last of her career, have had to be left out of this exhibition because their transfer was endangered by the conflict that recently erupted in Lebanon after its invasion by Israel. Precisely one of those which has remained there, A Life in a Few Lines, is the one that has lent its title to this exhibition.
Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines is organized chronologically as well as recursively, occupying a total of 12 rooms in which visitors progressively discover the different artistic and personal phases traversed by the artist, who died in 2019. It starts and finishes in Beirut, going from her first works of the 1960s and 1970s to the second decade of the 21st century. The works in the exhibition, curated by the contemporary art historian Hannah Feldman, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Chair of Contemporary Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, are shown in relation to the places where Caland produced her prolific oeuvre: the tumultuous years of post-independence but pre- Civil War Beirut, the utopian liberalism of Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, and the bohemian decadence of the art scene in Los Angeles, concentrated in Venice Beach, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Huguette Caland lived in close contact with politics on a wide scale, and not obly because of the fact that father was the first president after the country’s independence, and her husband, with whom she had three children, was the son of an oppositional figure who favored the French mandate. In 1969, she co-founded Inaash, an NGO which today continues to help Palestinian women in Lebanese refugee camps to make a living from the traditional Palestinian embroidery called tatreez. In turn, tatreez and other forms of embroidery are present as a motif in many of her works.
The artist considered that her medium did not lie in the conventional tools of the artist, paint or pencils, but in her encounters with lovers, friends, relatives, cultures, artists, writers, animals, insects, and even inanimate landscapes. “The media I used for art is mostly my own life,” she wrote.
In her work and everyday habits, Caland transmitted the necessity for sexual freedom and liberation and a ludic contempt for conservative social and legal norms. Her artworks, which embraced many genres and formats (painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, writing, and design), trace a carefully steered path between communication and provocative sublimation. The artist, who had once aspired to be a writer, was proficient in Arabic, French, and English, as well as her own language of pictographic forms and configurations.
From her most celebrated series like Bribes de corps to her highly personal kaftans and other lesser-known works, like her large production of self-portraits, the exhibition does not so much reveal an aesthetic development through the different formal phases of Caland’s oeuvre as a series of visual resources and strategies constructed on colors, forms, lines, grids, or the repetition of figures, as well as on the words and letters that appear in her work.
Rooms 1 and 2. Becomings.
In 1964, after the death of her father, Caland, who had taken drawing lessons at the age of 16, painted her first picture, the almost monochrome Red Sun/ Cancer, so titled because it simultaneously represents both a new beginning for Caland as an artist and the cancer that had devoured her father. At 33, Huguette enrolled at the American University of Beirut, developing what the critics of the time described as a highly original style evoking comparisons with Pop Art, Surrealism, and the thick lines of contemporary graphic design. In these first rooms, we also see Self Portrait in Smock (1992) one of the many self- portraits she painted throughout her career, though one of the few in which she appears expressly portrayed as an artist, with signs of her own production both on her body and framing it as background.
In these rooms, we also find fantastic creatures resembling insects together with cityscapes, landscapes, and seascapes. The works of her early period depart from normative expectations and reflect themes related to what she experienced as the claustrophobia of her surroundings and her nascent curiosity about the representation of body parts, language, and graphic signs divorced from representational significance. Her painting Enlève ton doigt [Remove your Finger, 1971], painted shortly after she left Lebanon, is a response to the asphyxiating social conditions that limited the possibilities of expression and action of a young woman hungry for freedom in the ‘golden sixties’, as the decade prior to the civil war has been called.
Rooms 3 and 4. Being Flesh. Bribes de corps (Body bits).
In Paris, where she settled after leaving Beirut in 1970, Caland cast off her European clothing and liberated herself corporally and colonially through the kaftan, a long, loose garment that became one of her identifying features. She continued to produce her work, which she scarcely exhibited, and started what has become her most celebrated series, Bribes de corps [Body bits], currently in the collections of leading international art museums and collections. With great chromatic force and minimal formal expression, these canvases recall color field painting. The works look like brilliantly colored assemblages of shapes that are turned into ambiguously gendered and sensually suggestive representations of flesh that meet other bodies even as they maintain their autonomy. In their allusions to breasts, buttocks, and labia that metamorphose into more ambivalently gendered half-open protuberances, they offer us an erotic landscape of flesh presented in vibrant colors and softly attenuated lines.
As the 1970s came to an end, and perhaps because of the degeneration of the Lebanese Civil War, that had started in 1975, Caland’s Bribes de corps began to change and adopt different scales. They now include intimate works of the size of a postcard where the body parts acquire almost caricaturesque eyes and mouths with broad puckered lips, adding new orifices to the artist’s repertoire. In Guerre incivile [Uncivil War], we see a rare representation of the Lebanese civil war. Where body parts had before been harbingers of pleasure and tactile sensation, they are transformed into amputated limbs and agonized faces. At the same time, however, the work is also not without its erotics, suggesting Caland’s interest in the shared drives of Eros and Thanatos.
Room 5. Seductions.
The linear qualities of Caland’s drawn and painted line constitute an unmistakable feature of her work. Materially speaking, these sinuous line drawings originated in the classes she was taught at the American University in Beirut, where John Carswell, an artist and amateur Islamicist, had instructed her in the art of the ‘continuous line,’ which involved making drawings without lifting the pencil or pen from the paper until the idea or concept—usually pegged to a political or contemporary question—had been resolved. In a late interview, the artist explained that there was “a single line that crosses the universe. It’s been my great fantasy… It is an elastic and totally imaginary line. For me, it exists. Every time we sketch something, we trap that line, and then we let it go.” Most of Caland’s drawings continue with her exploration of body parts in connection and collision. They suggest intimate encounters, including her own with several lovers, as is the case of Mustafa acrobate (1971).
In this room, we also see how, in the 1970s, the artist lifts her linear drawings onto the textile surface of the kaftan where they reappear as embroidered forms that animate the body beneath the dress. Presented on mannequins that were made for a French exhibition dedicated to the Thousand and One Nights in 1985 in an installation that Caland entitled “The Thousand and First Night of Scheherazade”, these creations realize the artist’s career long ambition to “write” the body, a body that was at the same time singular and collective.
Room 6. Interiors. Créatures dès rêves.
In France, Caland continued throughout the 1980s to explore means of depicting the body and its relationship to questions of selfhood and autonomy. She did a great deal of work but exhibited little. In the small space of her Paris studio, the paintings she worked on gradually turned towards interiorities: emotions, dreams, and those parts of the body less visible to the eye or to touch. Her paintings also began to acquire a sculptural magnitude that Caland had observed in the work of her lover, the Romanian sculptor Georges Apostu. In the ‘tightrope walker’ of Funambule, she presents a figure that negotiates several forces, above all that of gravity, while advancing along a thin, tensed rope. The work expresses the gravitational forces put upon the artist herself, whose life, stretched out between people and places without the benefit of much institutional support, must have seemed to her at times like an authentic balancing act.
Room 7. Exterioriorities. Espaces Blancs.
In the mid-1980s, Caland traveled with Apostu to a small French town famous for its limestone quarries and oak trees. There her work shifted towards representations of landscape that incorporated, on an altered scale, the forms and shapes from some of her early paintings from the Beirut period as well as the gentle undulations of the body bits she painted in the Bribes de corps. As the artist herself wrote on one occasion: “Nothing is so like a body as a landscape… The same lines can resemble a face, a flower, a landscape,” or perhaps the form of a coastline. She started to develop “bodyscapes” blending the idea of landscape with parts of the body. After this series she moved to Venice, California in 1987 following the death of her lover Apostu.
Room 8.
During her time in Los Angeles, and when she travelled to Paris, Caland incorporated new materials into her artistic language, among them the letters she had sent to her lover Moustafa decades prior. She tore these letters into pieces to insert them in her work, and in 1991-92 constructed an extensive series of collage self-portraits as well as the monochrome masterpiece Nude Letters. In these self-portraits, which mix writing and painting, we see occasionally illegible scraps or fragments of letters stuffed into the representation of Caland’s mouth, emphasizing her long-standing investigation of language and, ultimately, silence. Silence, Caland was to say, is the best form of communication, although this assertion may represent a way of reconciling herself to a world that had little room for her art or her discourse.
Room 9. Play
Now in Los Angeles, at her studio in Venice, Huguette Caland created several series that are on display in Room 9. Among them is Argent, whose full title is L’argent ne fait pas le bonheur, mais il y contribue largement [Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, but It Contributes Greatly to It]. This is a series in which she created a small picture each day based on a currency from some parts of the world, around which she constructed a painting. Bearing in mind that she sold hardly any work as an artist, Caland here takes a humorous and ironic approach to the art market, monetarization, and financial insecurity. In this room, we can see another series of small papier mâché sculptures; an abstract portrait of her lover, the painter Ed Moses; the series Cristine, with erotic poses by one of her muses and Pubic Hair. For Pierre Cardin, Huguette produced a ‘capsule collection’ called Nour, with several designs for kaftans that were displayed to the public at the Espace Cardin in 1979.
Room 10. Retreats
In the 2000s, Caland started to paint the series she called Silent Letters. Here, writing becomes a pure linear expression emerging from lines made on pages of handwritten letters destined for real people. These ‘voiceless’ letters no longer demand concrete signs to communicate their contents to their intended recipients. The hushed linguistic referents that had run through Caland’s earliest works have now ironically become loud, since the lines multiply to follow patterns that not only imitate the ‘letters’ which frame the epistolary series but at the same time emulate pages of books. In the most minimalist way possible, they tell a life story in a handful of lines.
Room 11. Grids: Cityscapes
In the same decade that she developed the Silent Letters series, Caland was also exploring the ways in which the line finds meaning in the urban landscapes in which they lived and in their gridded, cartographic formation. Her explorations of cityscapes at this juncture of her life tell of an artist in her advanced years, suffering the aging of her body and yearning to find a compositional ground to secure forms that might otherwise float freely, untethered. In a series of Cityscapes, the lines that emerge in Caland’s purification of the epistle into pure form are used to carefully and studiously map the gridded spaces of a city, bringing the reminiscences of language to her understanding of urban expression and daily life. The cities depicted could be any, but they certainly bear special relationship both to the gridded blocks of Venice Beach and the chaotic urbanism of Beirut, suggesting the artist’s desire to specify and locate the sense of home starting to recede from physical access.
As with her earlier, 1960s paintings of urbanscapes, here the city begins to feel as if it is too dense and claustrophobic to support bodily freedom, a problem Caland tackled in collaboration with the Lebanese artist and filmmaker Fouad Elkoury in their Utopia City. At the same time, the grids in the Cityscapes anticipate the regular, quilt-like patterns of her later paintings. These paintings, her last, unfold like tapestries, portraying layered, nonlinear experiences and representations, where rigid grids finally yield associative memories of earlier moments in life. Many of the Cityscapes were exhibited in 1998 in an exhibition entitled “Spaces and Escapes” at Elena Zass Gallery in Laguna Beach.
Room 12. Ends, Returns, and New Beginnings: or, Towards the Sea
In the last decade of her life, Huguette Caland returned to Beirut in 2013 and reflected on her old age. After injuring her knee, she developed an affinity with the character of Rocinante, Don Quixote’s “emaciated steed”, and created a series of humorous but very dark works which culminated several decades of her development of a signature pictorial language consisting of dots, grooves, cross stitches, and diacritical marks.
Appearing in these settings are caricaturesque faces and fantastic insects framed within patterns that reference Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez (where every pattern of stitches tells a story about the place and home of its maker). These pieces speak of an artist who is attempting to understand the aging of her body.
In her last works, we see the culmination of a whole life’s endeavors in large-format canvases that resemble murals as much as they do tapestries and sometimes quilts. These, she painted in parts, folding them on her lap in sections after previously dying the cloth in a washing machine. Most of these works speak of old memories of her youth and fantastic dreams of places she has never seen, offering a reiterated exploration of tatreez and a solemn contemplation of the end of life and the new beginning – or perhaps the return—that death promises. Although bright colors predominate, the artist moves away from the original reds with which she first announced her career and towards blues, which evoke the Mediterranean Sea of her childhood as in Le Grand Bleu [The Great Sea]. Body parts are replaced by blossoms, which proliferate on the canvases, along with gridded formations that recall tapestries and embroidery. In the end, the artist returns to her beginnings, reincorporating the traditional signs of the Lebanese landscape in her compositions that continue to upset the relationship between figure and ground, so that the shapes and forms appear as flat motifs floating on the surface. Developing the theme of blue, which is the sea and the cosmos at the same time, a pair of simple pictures of boats heightens the metaphor of death understood as a new voyage, a return home and a return to the sea. Huguette Caland went back to Beirut in 2013 and died in 2019 at the age of 88. In the last years of her life, her work achieved great international recognition, as confirmed by her participation in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
