Lebanon and the Split of Life

This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). It explores key moments across the artist’s transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly spatial readings of his painterly practice, of which the act of bearing witness is highlighted as permeating the entirety of his oeuvre. It concludes with a contemporary recontextualization of Lebanon in the country’s current social, political, and cultural climate, and emphasizes the artist’s work as essential to the theorization of larger traditions of political and protest art.

The first of its kind and the result of a research fellowship wherein the author was invited to be the first to work through the artist’s unpublished archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of the neo-expressionist art movement of the 1960s. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, recorded interviews, and the like. To best animate that source material within the context of this publication, each chapter is prefaced with short narrative anecdotes inspired by the artist’s personal notes to better ground the subsequent research and scholarship in the artist’s own terms and experiences.

Born in Beirut, Kanso, like many of his generation, would seek sought refuge abroad from political instability in his home country. It is through this intrinsic proximity to, yet physical distance from, the cycles of violence and corruption in Lebanon that Kanso would go on to create his grandest greatest mural-scale series. This book, more than anything, explores the artist’s oeuvre as an attempt to bear witness and offer testimony to those moments, an inclination that would see the artist grapple with some of the most ferocious crimes against humanity committed throughout his lifetime. As such, this book pairs close readings of Kanso’s art and personal practice with both historical and contemporary context meant to animate the relevance of his vast yet never-before-seen artistic archive.