Introduction

Summary

“Art brought out more in me than anything else I’d ever experienced. I never dreamed I could go so deep in my soul.”

—Nabil Kanso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 8, 1984

Containers of film, slides, and tapes are stacked against the walls of the Kanso archive. The oldest boxes clatter with small, white-framed photo slides and canisters of 35mm film. The cameras used to capture them rest on the adjacent drawers. Others, newer cases, contain black VHS tapes and faded Polaroids, then stacks of glossy prints, CDs, and eventually a handful of USBs and hard drives. The artist that calls out from a few dozen of these tapes—home videos—gestures widely at various paintings, at the site of his first gallery in New York, at the crowd gathered to hear him speak at an exhibition in Caracas. The photos, both digital and analog, capture him at home in Lebanon or Atlanta, among friends, colleagues, and fellow artists around the world. Others turn a lens toward his art on exhibition, on show in the halls of research centers and peace museums—proof that they, at some point, had a devoted audience.

In the adjacent room, these same paintings—hundreds of them—are rolled tight against the light and humidity, their vibrant interiors muted by the blank undersides of the tan canvas. It has been decades since most of these massive, mural-scale artworks were on show—others still have yet to be exhibited. The adjacent bins of notes, diary entries, exhibition catalogs, letters, the beginnings of a memoir, and, elsewhere, of an autobiography, help piece together an understanding of this vast, unpublished archive—the life's work of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist Nabil Kanso (1940–2019).

The first of its kind on this artist and the result of a research fellowship wherein I was invited to work through this archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of mural-scale, neo-expressionist art. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, and recorded interviews, to recreate the public life and reception of his since-retired oeuvre.