Chapter 2 - The Journey of Art for Peace

Summary

Twisted silver staples fell to the floor of the studio as foot after foot of brightly painted canvas was methodically pulled free from the walls. Once on the floor, one end of the painting was rolled across the warehouse towards the other until the bundle of linen and thickly layered paint could safely be carried over to the existing stack of paintings. There, paintings from The Split of Life were delicately layered and rolled into a veritable palimpsest of human suffering until they could be slipped into one of the three shipping tubes lined up by the door. Sealed shut and waterproofed in brightly colored plastic and packing tape, the only hint as to what lay inside the massive cylinders was a neatly printed packing slip. “8 CANVASES; 108’×72’; NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE.” It was September 1985 and Kanso was bound for Caracas.

Prior to its repatriation to Spain in 1981, Picasso's Guernica spent 42 years on show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. With debates on the natural home of the painting consuming the art world during Guernica's time abroad, that extended tenure at MoMA was not without major public contention. While Picasso himself did not wish to see the painting returned to Spain until democracy was established in his homeland, fellow artists, critics, and activists came to see the anti-war mural's exhibition in the United States as a disservice to its meaning and spirit in light of the country's protracted military operations abroad. But it was perhaps precisely because of that very context that Picasso famously shared his conviction that Guernica “would do most good in America.”

This faith that paintings could be said to do good for the places and people for which they are on show was a guiding principle of Kanso's Journey of Art for Peace exhibition (Figure 2.1). On tour internationally in various iterations between 1985 and 1993, the show was Kanso's decade-long attempt at building solidarity around the tragedies personified by his mural-scale, Split of Life art. With over ten years of mural works to pull from, the exhibition would become Kanso's longest-running show. Toured almost exclusively internationally, it showed dozens of murals—including Lebanon—across Latin America, Kuwait, and Switzerland.