KHALIL GIBRAN'S POETRY AND PAINTINGS

Khalil Gibran's Poetry and Paintings

Khalil Gibran's Poetry and Paintings

Introduction

The Prophet has been among us since 1923; by 1976 the volume of counsels had been bought in America alone by more than six million people, read certainly by three times that many. The book has been too highly praised by the True Believers, but it also has been too roundly and imprecisely attacked. Gibran was a man of considerable talents, and a critical sketch of his work and life is in order now, a half century after their publication; it is necessary both to correct these imprecisions and to probe the actual merits and defects in the works.' Many of those merits and defects are intimately bound to Gibran's struggle to live within two cultures, the Lebanese-Arab and the American. In Gibran's case, the struggle led him to adopt a pseudo- wisdom posture which can be called "exultant dualism." Gibran's personal psychic suffering in maintaining the posture before his audience is variously demonstrated in some of his best, certainly most poignant, lyrical moments. These lyric passages, which constitute the most authentic Gibran, dramatize the pangs of cultural discontinuity. Gibran's life and work and the small body of critical comment on that life and work are, however, so little and poorly known, despite the popularity of The Prophet, that I find it necessary, for the purposes of this introductory essay, to outline both.

The Art of Khalil Gibran Savannah City

In September, the Telfair's Kahlil Gibran holdings will make their Jepson Center debut in the Varnedoe and Levitt Galleries. This ever-popular assemblage of drawings, watercolors, and paintings by the Lebanese-born, visionary artist and author Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) spans his career—with works from his first exhibition at photographer Frederick Holland Day's studio in Boston in 1904 to art created during the last years of his life. In supplement to providing a survey of Gibran's vocation as a visual artist, the display articles his relationship with his patron Mary Haskell and substantiates his scholarly vocation with examples of some drawings and watercolors used as illustrations for six of his English-written books. The public showing will also encompass images of Gibran and his New York studio, as well as a portrait of the young artist painted by Lilla Cabot Perry.

Best renowned for authoring The Prophet, a collection of short, philosophical term papers that became one of the top-selling publications of the twentieth century, Gibran immigrated to Boston with his family in 1895 at the age of twelve. Through a fortuitous sequence of events stemming from the recognition of his creative gifts at a local town dwelling, the aspiring creative person contacted Mary Haskell, the headmaster of a Boston young women' school. The two formed an significant, lifelong connection that culminated in Haskell's patronage and supplied Gibran with the security to pursue his career. In 1950, Haskell (who became Mary Haskell Minis in 1926) donated her individual holdings of almost one hundred works of art by Gibran to Telfair Museums, which now possesses the biggest ...