Caland Huguette 

Beirut, 1931

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Huguette Caland was the daughter of Bechara el Khoury, the President of the Lebanese Republic and the niece of Marie Haddad, a painter, writer and follower of Daheshism, who came into conflict with el Khoury when the latter imprisoned Dr Dahesh. Marie Haddad then became a sort of counterpoint to her, an unsurpassable figure whom it was nonetheless necessary to overtake, but whom she was forbidden from meeting.

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Painting allowed Caland to transgress this prohibition, and she engaged herself in it with intimate relationship with her life and times. Painting so became her talisman, one that conjured much emotion and feeling. At the Department of Fine Arts of the American University of Beirut in the early 1960s she learned the hedonism of good taste and the diversion of anxiety into a desire to create works of art, which Carswell had made his speciality and way of life.

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Her painting evolved from problems linked to representations of the body and space towards questioning the plasticity of content. With her, objects and their traces question memories and emotions, to be used as pictorial signs. This plasticity is perceived as the scattering of one’s self-image and is the welcome pretext for a greater freedom. But it was the non-conformism required by this greater freedom that aroused the physical participation to the act of painting, and an ironic refusal to intellectualise. For Caland, painting was also a makeshift job about oneself and the world. 

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A woman of subtlety and humor, she maintained a trace of the little girl who plays unexpected and shocking tricks, where morality is only a detour.

Huguette Caland