Khalifé Jean 

Hadtoun (Lebanon), 1925-Beirut, 1978

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Jean Khalifé came from a background of Maronites clerics and clergymen from which he never entirely escaped.

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He studied at the Seminary College in Maifouk in 1936, followed by the Collège des Frères Maristes in Jounieh, and when he enrolled at ALBA, from 1947 to 1951, his uncle – a priest – came with him to Beirut to supervise his moral path, which astonished the naked models quite a bit.

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Khalifé entered painting as one enters religion: confident in the faith, if not waiting for its possibilities, anxious to measure his radical honesty for himself more than for others. When he left for Paris after his studies at ALBA, he knew where this journey could or could not lead him. He did not reject traditional religious painting or the Maronite environment, but he looked upon them with the same look of truth as the rest. What he wanted to explore was painting, the very possibility of painting.

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Studying at ALBA made him aware of his technical shift from Gemayel’s virtuosity. He did some landscapes on site, but these landscapes had to be urbane, before anything else. Khalifé or the destruction of innocence by the plasticity of art; a way of believing that innocence is enough when faced with the commerce of ideas and plastic conception.

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Khalifé experienced a moment of balance in the 1950s, when he painted canvases that were the clearest interrogation of the Lebanese reality, when he had the most appropriate pictorial and plastic means to render it without too much of a gap between intention and creation. The gap between the means and the end would become more and more cruel – or was perceived as such in the psychology of the painter – so that his demanding research led him not to push towards abstraction so much, but towards the dilemmas of his personal conflicts. Something had been severed in abstraction’s possibilities, in the mastery of the technical means, and sometimes in the conscience of their existence. In this perspective, one can hardly rely on the reading of the young Maronite who came to Beirut as one comes to painting, bewildered by the nakedness of the first nude female model at ALBA. 

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He enrolled at the Ecole nationale supèrieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1951 to 1954 and, strangely enough, Khalifé saw Paris as the place for additional naivety, the place where everything was possible: to visit a gallery, to get into the exhibition circuit, to move into abstract painting as a natural language, without historicity, and without realizing what was going on around rue Bonaparte – if galleries concerned with modernity did exist in this area, it was not necessarily directly because of the world’s pictorial culture, as he thought, but for commercial imperatives. Yet for him, to have access to these galleries, to be able to exhibit in them, was not less of a victory. Besides, he was not fooled by an overly elementary approach, and clearly said so. He wanted to stay in Paris, and only the letters of Fouad Haddad, the Director of the Department of Fine Arts at the National Ministry of Education, managed to convince him to return to his country.

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What sort of painting would he have done, had he remained in Paris? Part of the answer lies in the personal and social level, rather than in the cultural domain. One also has to research the conflicted relationship between Paris and Beirut: a dichotomy and a connection, a physical separation but a cultural and intellectual presence. The real question he asked himself was whether it would be better to stay there, where everything fascinated him. Therefore, when he had to take the decision to return to Beirut, the relationship with Paris led him to a radical hostility towards Lebanese society in regard to which, hoping in vain for a reply, he had stayed open-minded for several years. But he had to confront Beirut in Beirut. It was not easy for him to assimilate the data and the confused conformity in which the city floated. Fortunately he had his passion for painting, and also the patience to surround himself with some students who shared this passion.

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If this generation of the 1950s did not achieve truth in painting, it did attempt it through exercises and a new characterization of its possibilities. These were due less to historic conditions than to situations specific to a series of individuals interested by painting, and also to a particular environment: ALBA, Manetti, César Gemayel, the Poles who taught at ALBA and who brought along the echo of European culture, and the experience of painters such as Farroukh and Onsi. 

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The problems of the 1920s and 1930s, Lebanese landscapes, Lebanese “types”, “Lebanese light”, folklore and illustration had been overtaken. The tearing between the postcard and identity were resolved to the benefit of radicalisation, in which it seemed that an “Academisation” of pictorial problems could no longer be the future. Painting was no more about providing salons with landscapes, dining rooms with still lifes and libraries with portraits. From now on, it was necessary to face the painting itself, and not its social and commercial destinations. Khalifé was still a student at ALBA in the 1950s, but not only did he reply to the era’s questions in an original way, he also characterised modernity without plagiarizing. A kind of shift that lets one recognize a painting because it is reminiscent of readings, or of other paintings. In the history of painting in Lebanon, there is a moment when questions about the problems of historicity, of being out of step, of identity, and of self-expression stop being asked. A painter would often reply with sadness and difficulty, at the same time trying not to cut himself off from the history of world painting, of the progress of local painting, and of his own claims for personal expression.

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The abstract was therefore seen as a means of questioning painting, without always being aware that the problem was there. A series of pictorial attempts in the 1950s and 1960s was made as a round-trip between the figurative and the abstract, and Cyr assured its continuity on the local scene. It was he who, by calling it into question, provided Cubism to young painters as the necessary tool and sensible means of destroying the figure. It is necessary to see this manifest itself in each one’s paintings, for there was truly little of a collective movement.

For each Lebanese painter, painting was his own act, his own radicalism. Therefore the story of this painting is only the sum of the readings of personal histories. The deciphering of influences has less to do with progress and a historic continuity, than with an arbitrary game of influences, readings of itineraries and the riskiness of social and cultural life in Beirut.

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Upon his return to Paris, Khalifé spent two years in Italy (1959-1960). His experiments with form and figure gave birth to a series of large nudes from 1961-1962 that relegated the importance of the subject to the background. In an increasingly oppressive manner, this radicalised his need for invention and plastic expression. Abstraction was then no more than a free, arbitrary form, a situation that would create a deep unease in contemporary Lebanese painting, for it brought back the debate about the limits between the figurative and the abstract. 

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Khalifé distances himself from the problematic of tearing, imitation and pose. With him, the response to the absence of representation is not the abstract, but this plastic work that, by the end of a long period of research, culminated in the great exhibition of 1973 at the Kennedy Centre. He enjoyed color and a work where the presence of color is physical, color in its full texture in the canvases in large format where, henceforth, the introduction of figurative elements is no more allusive, but comes from the same work on sensitivity.

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Deep down inside him, an old violence, due in part to the incomprehension of the audience and the critics, led him to express himself fully, in a painting that integrated the visual elements, notably the female nude, but above all a part of this nucleus of emotions and feelings. To get there, he had to stiffen his paintings, which did not go without great difficulties. Khalifé saw himself progressively isolated in a society of painters who had a very narrow mind set. He was not skilful in playing the game of pictorial socialization. The 1950s and 1960s were devoted by the Lebanese painters to make their craft admitted, and to find the means of integrating it to the economic and social circuit of the country. In this marginalization, the most striking element about Khalife was linked to the nature itself of his work. Here is a painter who had studied and lived several years in Paris and who would not have returned, was it not for Fouad Haddad’s insistence. Nevertheless, he did not linger in the Paris-Beirut problematic. Paris, for sure, had liberated him, but he himself had forged a plastic language that achieved, around the 1970s, a real originality and a presence. He placed himself in the issue and historical optic where Paris had been, ultimately, the initial catalyst.

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Khalifé painted the paintings he wanted, with the elements he developed by working out different pictorial possibilities, without seeing them as experimental though. In the cautious Lebanese painting of the time, more concerned about the result of the canvas than about the canvas itself, he seemed to follow an unjustified, extremist path. He was, moreover, one of those rare painters who followed a path that led where he wanted it to go. Others cautiously refused to engage into this path, preferring to copy below or beyond the historical currents, setting themselves out of step with the times. Often they did not even take risks at all, for lack of technique and of intellectual horizons.

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Khalifé had an acute awareness of form. It explains the plasticity that made him progress from figurative art – that had some poetic elegance – to abstraction, but did not make him turn to a geometric art that, in his case, would have been a pure and simple game. If he was giving shape to painting, it is because he needed the thickness of the paint. It corresponded to the real world. He did not paint a lot because he did not have much money, and could therefore not always afford the large-format works where he felt most at ease, because by balancing the strength, color and work of the paint itself, they allowed him to express emotions, feelings, and the happiness of painting combined with the exercise of painting itself.

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Khalifé exposed himself to every misunderstanding and was often considered as a skilful experimenter, on the lookout for formulas everywhere. But he knew how to translate emotions, feelings and the plastic language of a man for whom painting was the only wager. 

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In his generation and the one that followed, there were a few itineraries close to his. But on the whole he was the only one, as a result of his stubbornness and internal heaviness, who did not give up too much of what he wanted. He also had the talent and the opportunity to experiment – sometimes to the point of failure – with the possibilities that were presented to him.

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How did he see himself within Lebanese painting? He decreasingly questioned the place that Lebanese painting occupied in the history of painting in general and in Contemporary art in particular. To him this seemed quite secondary in the real contemporary life he was living, which he had been obliged to assume without asking questions about the Lebanese pictorial milieu, where half the time was spent intriguing. 

He had other worries. His innocence was not always due to naivety or a lack of vision, as many wanted to believe. It was rather because of the excessive distance between social reality and the painter’s pictorial perception of it. In the middle of the 1950s, Khalifé painted canvases that went right to the heart of Lebanese reality, and had the most relevant pictorial and plastic means to render it.

Whoever tries to understand the world is never liberated of its weight. Yet the world keeps echoing the one for whom this question without answer is a wound that nothing could heal. Khalifé thought that he alone was reworking all the painting of the world. This was his innocence, but also his strength.

Jean Khalifé exhibited in 1960 and 1961 at the Alecco Saab Gallery in Beirut, from 13th to 20th November 1962 at the Carlton Hotel in Beirut, from 17th May to 8th June 1963 at the gallery of the University of Paris, from 3rd to 12th November 1964 at the Hotel Saint George in Beirut, in 1965 in the offices of the l’Orient newspaper, in 1970 at Dar El Fan in Beirut, from 16th August to 4th September 1971 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, from the 24th May to 4th June 1971 at the Kennedy Centre of Beirut and from 21st to 31st March 1972 and from 23rd January to 5th February 1973 at the Modulart Gallery in Beirut.

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In Paris in the late 1950s, Khalifé and Elbacha brought a desire for contemporaneity that came from their true youthfulness and the need to remove the layers of wandering and regression that the preceding generation had not dared to undertake. 

It must also be said that this Lebanese landscape was completely crushed by the obsessive presence, even in 1950, of 19th-century painting, which was not even Academic. 

More than History of Art, his historicity and progress, it was Khalifé’s reading that came to a dead-end when faced with the difficulty of seizing the spirit, motivations, biographies and ideas of a chaotic route. 

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What can we hope for? To be able to open the inside of a painting like carving a chicken, and to understand everything about it, undertaking an intellectual and mental dissection? 

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Every Lebanese painter seemed to repeat ad infinitum the same problem and the same solution without variation. The only differences were in sociological, cultural and family data. The same painters painted the same painting, reiterating the successive division of the word. The mysterious creator, who said the entire mystery of creation and truth, definitely lays elsewhere does not speak this language. 

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Khalifé had a way of touching the canvas, as an abrupt substitute for the despair that he carried within him and which limits his intelligence made him measure every time. 

The limits of his intelligence made him aware of not being able to possess the means to defer the dead-end of the painting he practiced. He came from a Maronite clerical background, with an innocence and relationship of trust with the painting – in his case Abstract painting – and understood betrayal too late, when his large abstract and colored canvases from the early 1970s confirmed his talent and mastery of color. 

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Art is a discourse about another discourse, but which one? Another level of the history of representation and imagination had to be passed through, and he had to dare to leave the structural environment of determinism that made the history of Lebanese painting appear like a lesson in applied sociology. A comparative cultural anthropology also allowed for a reading of codes and their discrepancies. The real problem was that this deserved a great deal of effort. 

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The history of forms of the imagination and representation was carried on two extremes that went from the individual – whose work was sufficiently rich to deserve to be dived into –, to the vague sociology of form – where History of Art was only a way of saving the anecdote. 

Lebanese painting had not yet moved away from Impressionism, that improbably joyful world – a world between the parentheses of freedom for two or three centuries.

What is interesting is this reading of Impressionism, and of the way in which it was perceived in the craftsmanship and apprenticeship of the hand.