News
Donald Kuspit in Art Forum on Nabil Kanso: The Tomorrows, December 1, 2024:
Francisco Goya gave us “Los desastres de la guerra” (The Disasters of War), 1810–20, while Otto Dix provided “Der Krieg” (The War), 1924. Alongside these canonical series about bloody conflict, we should consider “The Split of Life,” 1974–94, by Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). Kanso, who was born in Lebanon, witnessed firsthand the devastations of war when his country was attacked by the United States in 1958. In 1966, he moved to the US to study at New York University, where he majored in political science and art history. When he came to America, it was during a time of extreme crisis: only two years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and at the height of the Vietnam War. D. H. Lawrence once remarked that the “essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” “The Tomorrows,” an exhibition of Kanso’s sublimely dark and brutal paintings at Martos Gallery, expertly curated by Kathryn Brennan, made this point grimly explicit.
See, for instance, Vietnam, 1973–74, a tour de force of expressionistic figuration. At almost twelve by twenty-three feet, its grand scale confirms the importance of the theme. It is a monstrous picture, as though set in the deepest pits of hell: Men wielding guns, cudgels, and knives attack one another as their flesh burns (perhaps with napalm, which the US military employed throughout its hideous campaign in Southeast Asia), all while they are ensnared by the branches of crepuscular trees bearing enormous thorns. With its unrelenting intensity and violent gesturalism—an all-out assault of vivid blacks, reds, violets, blues, oranges, and yellows—the image, like severely blistered skin, pulsates with agony. Indeed, the work 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.
Read more in the Art Forum, December 2024 Issue (online/print)
New York Times Review of Nabil Kanso: Endless Night by Martha Schwendener, August 8, 2024:
"How do artists protest war in their work? Nabil Kanso (1940-2019) was born in Beirut and surrounded by conflict in the Middle East in his early years. Later, protests against the Vietnam War coincided with his studies at New York University in the late 1960s. Kanso went on to exhibit widely and even owned galleries in New York and Atlanta, but confronting war became an integral element of his energetic, Neo-Expressionistic paintings and ink drawings, as you can see in “Endless Night” at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, curated by Mohammed Rashid al-Thani.
Large oil canvases like “Bursting Echoes” (1986) and “Soaring Load” (1988), with their twisting, surrealistic compositions and deep, saturated hues, recall the murals of Los Tres Grandes — the three Mexican muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco. 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) etchings, which documented the destruction in Spain caused by Napoleonic wars. In Kanso’s fuzzily sketched drawings, made at the height of the Lebanese civil war, there are gallows humor and lots of scatological references. The topicality of the work is also obvious. The geographical coordinates might change but the fact that war devastates the poor and often profits the rich is sadly timeless."
New York Times, August 8, 2024 (online/print).
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IAIA to Open Nabil Kanso: Endless Night on April 30, 2024
Endless Night: Nabil Kanso
Curated by Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani
April 30 - October 29, 2024
Institute of Arab and Islamic Art
22 Christopher St, New York NY, 10014
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Soaring Load (1988), Oil on linen 86 x 119.5
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Now on View at the High Museum of Art: Nabil Kanso: Journey of Art for Peace
(December 2023 - November 2024)
Lebanese American artist Nabil Kanso (1940–2019) lived and worked in Atlanta during the last four decades of his life. Like other neo-expressionist painters, Kanso championed painterly, figurative expressionism in reaction to the dominant modes of conceptualism and minimalism in the 1970s. Impacted by a fifteen-year civil war in his home country of Lebanon, Kanso identified with the ongoing struggles for civil and human rights in the United States.
Produced between 1974 and 1994, Kanso’s series of eighty murals titled “The Split of Life” was the core of his ambitious traveling exhibition “The Journey of Art for Peace,” which chronicled pivotal moments in world history marked by war and strife, including violent chapters from the five-hundred-year history of Kanso’s adopted country. By tackling subjects such as the systematic forced removal of Native peoples from their ancestral lands, the inhuman violence of slavery and racial terrorism, and the destruction of life in the American Civil War, Kanso aimed to educate the public through his mural-sized paintings by reckoning with the past in order to achieve progressive social change and to shift the actions of political leaders toward social justice and peace.
Right to left: Bleeding Eagles, The Split (North South Split), Chains Under the Blinding Sun, 1989–1992
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AMCA Announces Rachel Winter as the recipient of the inaugural Salwa Mikdadi Research Award.
April 20, 2023:
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Rachel Winter, Assistant Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, is currently researching Nabil Kanso’s (b. 1940, Lebanon-d. 2019, Atlanta) six decades of visual thinking around the Lebanese Civil War in preparation for an exhibition at the MSU Broad Art Museum from February–July 2025 that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War. Tentatively titled Lebanon, the exhibition centers on the monumental painting Scorching Sparks, which has never been shown before. Other accompanying paintings, sketchbooks, photographs, and videos will illuminate how the artist saw his estranged home in Lebanon and ruminated on the complexities of the Lebanese Civil War. During her research trip to Atlanta, Winter will work with the Estate of Nabil Kanso to not only study Scorching Sparks, but to explore the breadth of the artist’s work and review archival material, such as journals and photographs, that help illuminate the artist’s thinking on home, war, and global injustice.
The award was initiated by AMCA in 2022 in recognition of the pioneering work of Professor Salwa Mikdadi. Makdadi’s contributions have been instrumental in the development of the field, culminating in the establishment of al-Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYUAD. With the establishment of this award, AMCA seeks to highlight the importance of archival research and its dissemination while honoring the legacy of Makdadi’s career. The research travel grant aims to help scholars realize archival research they are not otherwise able to undertake.
Read more details here.
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Nabil Kanso to be featured in exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Tourcoing - "Picasso et les Avant-Gardes Arabes"
April 2 through July 10, 2022, Kanso's work will be featured along with archival materials in the group exhibition organized by the Institut du Monde Arabe in collaboration with Le Musée national Picasso-Paris. Read more details here.
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Research Fellowship and Publication Opportunity
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For Immediate Release:
June 9, 2021
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) (in conjuction with Nabil Kanso Estate) is thrilled to award the AMCA-Nabil Kanso Estate Fellowship for the summer of 2021 to Meriam Soltan of Aga Khan Program at MIT. The committee was impressed with Meriam's previous archival work, her thoughtful and responsible approach to the artist and his archive, and her scholarship thus far.
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This unique and one-time fellowship will begin on July 1st 2021 with a generous grant to cover travel to and from the Kanso archive in Atlanta, housing, and a living stipend for the designated 4-5 weeks of research onsite at the Nabil Kanso Estate Nabil Kanso. Following the archival research trip, Meriam will have the opportunity to publish her research on Nabil Kanso as part of the Anthem-AMCA publishing series.
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About Meriam: Meriam Soltan is an architect and writer interested in the intersections of language, design, and worldbuilding. She works to explore the design of fictions and how they are manifested in various contexts politically, culturally, and otherwise. In doing so, she hopes to better understand how various lived realities are fabricated, and how the parameters defining these stories might in turn be challenged. Meriam received her BArch from AUB in 2019 and is currently pursuing her SMArchS at MIT.
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