Written by ZEID EL AMINE

Elie Kanaan was born in Beirut in 1926. He began as a self-taught artist in his adolescent years with the encouragement of French painter Georges Cyr, who wrote a positive review for La Revue Du Liban about Kanaan's first exhibition in 1950. In 1957, Kanaan co-founded the Lebanese Artists Association and was awarded the first prize in painting at the "Salon du Printemps", as well as the UNESCO prize in 1958, which secured him a scholarship to enroll at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Between 1963 and 1974, he taught drawing and painting in Lebanon at the Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour, the Lebanese University, and the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA).

Paris left a profound impression on Kanaan. During his education there, the artist befriended painters Yves Alix and Jacques Villon, through whom he was introduced to art critics Waldemar Georges and Maximilien Gautier. He was inspired to capture scenes of everyday life in the city, as in En attendant le metro (1962), where he painted people awaiting the train as a pale crowd on a greyish blue background. Moved by the city’s famously nocturnal culture – and, perhaps, its oft-romanticized melancholy – Kanaan preferred to create at night, and his color palette, in turn, became dimmer. Parisian inspirations remained with him long after he returned to Lebanon. In a La Revue du Liban write-up of his 1972 solo exhibition at Beirut's Excelsior Hotel, the French writer Pierre Lautney was noted to have felt “transported to Paris” while admiring Kanaan's works, even though the content of the paintings was not related to the city. 

Following his return to Lebanon, Kanaan began to make use of Mediterranean colors in his work. He was taken by light and often used contrasting reds, blues, and yellows that are layered and masterfully balanced to create a sensation of motion or even tension between pigments. In Combat de Soleil (1985), for example, a saturated outburst of hues dominates the canvas, drawing the eye to a glowing yellow that leaps out amidst reds and blues. As suggested by the painting's title, which means the sun's combat, Kanaan depicts light's victory over darkness. In other canvases, however, it is the darkness that “wins”; Kanaan silences powerful reds with dark tones or shades of grey, almost extinguishing their fiery impact. Artist and critic Helen Khal compared his colors to Arabic poetry in their texture and sensual rhythm. Faysal Sultan, also an artist and art historian, saw in Kanaan's colors a language that bypasses the distinction between the colors of reality and his own interpretation of these colors, communicating the union of nature and imagination through the rhythmic, emotional treatment of light and shade. 

Kanaan's early style embarked from post-impressionist aesthetics, inspired by a group exhibition of French artists in 1948 at the École Supérieure des Lettres in Beirut. For a while, the artist’s work was impregnated with romanticism and communicated a loose, creative relationship with the formal principles of painting. This period, however, didn't last long; the artist soon restricted himself to the harsh discipline of drawing in order to develop a more disciplined relationship to the values of proportion and mimesis that are central to the academic painting. Eventually, however, Elie Kanaan broke free from his canonical French training and developed the abstract style for which he was ultimately best known. Widely considered a colorist first and foremost, the artist disengaged, in most of his works, from the guidance of the line; his landscapes, for example, became vast color fields, constructed only by the scintillating play of hues. However, his abstractions were not totally liberated from figuration. Practicing a reconciliation between abstraction and reality, Kanaan often introduced real-life elements in his canvas: figurative silhouettes emerged from larger compositions of buzzing, formless, non-representational color. In La Prière (2008), for example, he gesturally depicts a woman kneeling against an abstract background, blending tints of blue, indigo and green to make her appear floating. In some works, like Duo (1985), a white patch activates the surfaces of several colors.

One of the central figures in the history of abstract Lebanese painting, Elie Kanaan remained consistent in his artistic style from the 1960s until his death in 2009. Satisfied with what his brushstrokes had achieved, he remained loyal to them and continued to make use of explosively energetic colors until the end of his career. He worked between studios in Beirut and Paris, but ultimately finished his final artwork, Le Paradis (2009), in Lebanon; he signed it only hours before passing away in his Beirut home. 

Sources

Abillama, Nour.S & Tomb, Marie. Art From Lebanon: Modern and Contemporary Artists 1880-1975. Lebanon: Wonderful Editions, 2012.

Resonances 82 Lebanese Artists. Beirut: Fine Arts Publishing, 2011.

Elie Kanaan La Lumière Colorée. Beirut: Fondation Audi, 2011.

سلطان، فيصل. كتابات مستعادة من ذاكرة فنون بيروت. بيروت، لبنان: دار الفارابي، 2013

"Elie Kanaan." Elie Kanaan. Accessed May 16, 2019. http://www.eliekanaan.com/

سلطان، مهى. "ايلي كنعان في معرض جديد في بيروت. يكسر رتابة اعماله السابقة من خلال التجريد." الحياة. 19January 2000. http://www.alhayat.com/article/1020918/يلي-كنعان-في-معرض-جديد-في-بيروت-يكسر-رتابة-أعماله-السابقة-من-خلال-التجريد-nbsp