Life and Art
“I think an artist cannot detach himself completely from this world. Make believe that we don’t live in this world. We are part of it. And we respond to it in an artistic way. And this is why it’s so important to bring up whatever expression, whatever sentiment, whatever feeling, whatever vision... So what would the artist do, sit aside and do something completely different? I always thought we have to be involved.” – Nabil Kanso
Kanso works in his Atlanta studio during the mid-1980s
Born in Beirut in 1940 and educated in London and New York, artist Nabil Kanso launched his career when he established his New York studio in 1967. Kanso was a leading exponent of figurative expressionism and a force of radical innovation in twentieth and twenty-first century art. Over more than five decades, Kanso staged audacious and expansive exhibitions across the globe, traveling from New York to Porto Alegre to Geneva in furtherance of his enduring commitment to making his art a force for peace. Kanso drew global acclaim for his monumental canvases that depict the human condition and the realities of war. Since Kanso's passing in 2019, his work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), the Sursock Museum (Beirut), among other leading public and private institutions across the globe.
Beyond the large, mural-size paintings that are synonymous with Kanso’s style, his oeuvre includes a strong body of major works and series on paper. Kanso’s work spans subjects from the global conflicts that punctuate modern history, such as Vietnam, World War II, and the Iraq War, to literary works, such as Othello, Faust and the Raven, to numerous historical, humanist, and mythological themes.
“Wars have had a profound effect on my life. By responding to war and violence through my work, I have the opportunity to bring before the public a visual transmission of personal emotions, experiences, and visions in the hope of engaging the viewer and establishing a dialogue about art and important issues affecting our lives.” – Nabil Kanso
Kanso in Beirut, Lebanon in 1978 during the nation’s civil war, which raged from 1975-1990
In 1961, Kanso left Lebanon to attend the London Polytechnic, where he studied for four years. This period was crucial in exposing him to art institutions and the Western art canon, which he later studied formally to develop a deep expertise in the history of art and the technique of painting. By 1966, Kanso relocated to New York and enrolled at New York University (NYU), where he studied Political Science and Art History, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in 1970 and a Master of Arts in 1971.
After initially working out of a smaller studio in Gramercy Park in 1967, Kanso opened his first major studio in the Upper East Side of New York in 1968. Shortly thereafter, in 1970, Kanso expanded his studio and took possession of the full five-floor townhouse on 76th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, which he called 76th Street Gallery. Over the next four years, Kanso’s gallery regularly held exhibitions, along with conferences and performances by artists, poets, and musicians.
In 1971, Kanso opened his first major solo exhibition at his 76th Street Gallery, displaying 80 paintings that garnered significant attention from the artistic community and was attended by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Kanso’s sketchbooks from the early 1970s feature several portraits of Barr, alongside other important figures he spent time with including Henry Geldzahler, John Hall Wheelock, and Salvador Dali. Kanso’s early exhibitions at 76th Street Gallery attracted positive reviews from critics in major art publications, including ARTnews, Arts Magazine, and Park East. In one such review for Arts Magazine (February
1972), Gordon Brown writes, “What we really need is more pretty girls. Formerly this romantic need was supplied by Louis Eilshemius, whom Marcel Duchamp named our greatest painter. N. KANSO carries on this genre; like Renoir, Kanso is good at depicting translucent, pearly flesh” (Brown 1972).
By 1973, Kanso was creating works on the Vietnam War and later described the chaotic atmosphere in New York caused by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War as important factors in reshaping his outlook as an artist. Reviewing a 2024 exhibition that included Kanso’s Vietnam (1973-1974), Donald Kuspit writes for Artforum: “Indeed, the work [Vietnam] is a masterpiece of rage and pain. Kanso deals with the same inevitable horrors of war as Dix and Goya did, but with an even greater, more visceral zeal” (Kuspit 2024).
In late 1974 and early 1975, Kanso lost his studio amid a severe financial crisis in New York, which later resulted in the destruction of a significant body of work from his early career. At the same time, the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 had a profound impact on him, influencing his style and deepening his commitment to depicting the horrors of war on canvas. After briefly returning to Beirut to witness the initial devastation, Kanso journeyed to the American South in 1975, working in various studios in North and South Carolina and later in Louisiana.
New Orleans, known for its rich cultural heritage and musical history, provided the central backdrop for Kanso's exploration of jazz music through his art. There he was inspired to create his Jazz series, 1978-1979, after initially being drawn to the subject in New York. The series depicts crowded bars, musicians, and tightly compressed interiors that unfold through rhythmic brushwork and bodily proximity. Beyond inspiring these works, music was a pivotal part of Kanso’s practice, and he regularly played music in his studio by composers including Beethoven, Berlioz, Puccini, and Tchaikovsky.
In the late 1970s, Kanso settled in Atlanta and married his wife Randa in 1980. Over the next 12 years, he mounted more than a dozen major solo exhibitions traveling across institutions in North America, South and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. Alongside creating his monumental paintings, Kanso developed an extensive body of drawings, sketchbooks, aquarelles, and works on paper that are a more intimate yet equally expressive dimension of his practice. These smaller-format works often explore movement, figuration, interior scenes, and psychological tension through fluid washes of color, layered lines, and gestural mark-making.
By carefully considering and studying art history, Kanso developed his own highly personal visual iconography that seeks to build on centuries of artistic breakthroughs in communicating emotion. His palette often includes fiery reds, oranges, yellows, and dark earth tones, while gestural brushwork and compressed pictorial fields intensify the immersive and psychologically charged nature of his compositions. Kanso repeatedly recalled the profound influence of Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso. His writings and works also reference Los Tres Grandes—the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros—Eugène Delacroix, Gustav Klimt, and Théodore Géricault, among others.
Reviewing Kanso’s exhibition Endless Night for The New York Times, Martha Schwendener situated Kanso along several of these figures, writing: “Large oil canvases… with their twisting surrealistic compositions and deep, saturated hues, recall the murals of Los Tres Grandes… Kanso’s are ambitious, explosive paintings that carefully mix allegory with human and animal figures. Ink drawings from Kanso’s series Leaves from the Theater of War (1980-1992) also recall an earlier model of protest art: “Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810-1820)”(Schwendener 2024).
During the mid-to-late 1970s, Kanso traveled across the Southern and Midwestern United States, working and exhibiting his paintings from the Carolinas to New Orleans. In 1981, converting a warehouse at the outskirts of the city into what he called “a temple… a magic place giving birth to enormous paintings reflecting the restlessness of a visual life confronting day-to-day challenges, and pursuing a process of continual development and renewal” (Kanso 2013). His artistic approach involved painting directly onto canvases without preparatory sketches, allowing for raw and immediate expression of his subjects. Although he held several exhibitions in the early to mid-1980s in Atlanta and received positive critical reception in major regional publications, he encountered instances of censorship that deeply affected him and further encouraged him to focus his attention on international audiences. Kanso's earliest exhibitions in the South included shows with the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition and the Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now called Atlanta Contemporary).
In 1984, Kanso launched a series of exhibitions that traveled throughout Central and South America under the theme of “The Journey of Art for Peace,” which blanketed institutions across the world in what he called “mobile murals” from Museo Caracas (1987) to Museo Universitario Del Chopo in Mexico City (1989) to Museu De Arte Do Rio Grande Du Sul (MARGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Kanso’s exhibitions became sites for peace conferences featuring poets, musicians, and scholars, along with open public dialogue. In Kanso’s estimation, more than 100,000 people across the globe attended these events. With the aspiration to create a museum dedicated to peace, Kanso expanded his practice to include outreach to world leaders, seeking to use his art as a diplomatic vehicle for peace and nonproliferation.
Notably, Kanso held a landmark exhibit at the Free Atelier in Kuwait immediately after the Gulf War that then traveled to the Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time of Kanso’s exhibition in April 1992, Kuwaiti artist and Director of the Free Atelier, Jassem al-Sultan remarked:
“There is no precedent in Kuwait for an exhibition like this. For us, these works represent great achievements of a world artist depicting the tragedy inflicted on us by the war, and holding an exhibition here of these works offer a new and different perspective for us as Arabs.” [Sawt At-Kuwait, 22 April, 1992, translated from Arabic.]
During the 1980s and 1990s, Kanso’s work developed into a broader examination of the human condition through themes of violence, displacement, mythology, memory, sexuality, power, spirituality, music, and collective historical experience. Throughout this period, he regularly visited Lebanon, including during the summer of 1982, when he witnessed the destruction firsthand and continued to work on themes related to the conflict until its end in 1990. While deeply shaped by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and the Gulf War (1990-1991), Kanso’s paintings moved beyond specific geopolitical moments to address recurring cycles of destruction, survival, and regeneration across human history and imagination.
His contributions to art also extend far beyond depictions of war and conflict. Kanso produced a vast series drawn from literary, mythological, and biblical sources: 58 paintings and drawings on Shakespeare's Othello (1985), 128 works on Goethe’s Faust (1976-1986), 188 works on Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1981-1995), and 192 works on the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation (1982-1984). Across these series, Kanso continuously returned to humanity's dual potential for destruction and transcendence. These themes are particularly evident in The Split of Life series (1974-1994), a monumental body of work composed of 88 mural-scale paintings that Kanso retrospectively assembled into seven sub-themes. They address wars, nature, defining moments in human history, and Kanso's conception of space and time. Kanso’s practice is unique for his radical devotion to the cause of art for peace and his refusal to engage in commercial activities.
This refusal contributed to the loss of his Atlanta studio in 2000 and pushed him to spend the next two decades working at a smaller scale while also archiving his body of work so that it could survive him. Even after facing numerous setbacks over decades, Kanso saw creating art as his purpose. In his last decade he continued working prolifically, creating several series including Bicentenario (2010) on the 200th anniversary of independence movements across Latin America, Ladders/Syria Under Siege (2011-2016) on migration and the global crisis created by the Syrian Civil War, and Behind Bars (2012-2018) on mass incarceration in the United States. In 2016, Kanso was awarded the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation's prestigious Individual Support Grant for his work on his Behind Bars series (2012-2018) on mass incarceration and injustice in the American criminal legal system. In one of his final interviews, he was emphatic: “I live to paint. Without painting, I cannot function (Kanso 2009).
The artist passed away at the age of 79 from cancer and designated his children, Daniel and Lilly, as the guardians of his Estate. Nabil Kanso’s work remains a significant and influential force in contemporary art, bridging personal and universal themes by immersing viewers in monumental and psychologically charged visual environments. Across his paintings and drawings, Kanso’s work continually confronts themes of persistence and human emotion, while urging viewers to engage with deeper questions. His legacy endures through an extensive body of work that continues to inspire critical reflection on humanity’s capacity for destruction, survival, and renewal.
Nabil Kanso in 2017, looks up at a sculpture by Alexander Calder at the Guggenheim Museum.