A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) is one of the best-selling books of all time: Elvis Presley’s well-worn annotated copy of The Prophet was found posthumously among his effects. Gibran, a popular Lebanese American poet, artist, and mystic remained fixed in the collective spiritual imagination for decades; Gibran, a Maronite Christian, included other religions, Sufi mysticism, Jungian psychology, Buddhism, and Theosophy in his mix. Before her death in 1891, Helena Blavatsky (the founder of the Theosophical Society) had opened a portal into Eastern spirituality with her channeled Mahatmas dispatching wisdom from the astral realm. A few decades later, several dishy Mahatmas would materialize in the flesh: Blavatsky’s successor Annie Besant with her protégé, the stunningly handsome Jiddu Krishnamurti. The exhibition’s pulchritudinous Levantine transplant appears in his full peacock glory in an archival photograph Kahlil Gibran with Book (1896). Another Adonis/guru with flowing locks, Paramahansa Yogananda, was hosted at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927. They were captivating!

This enlightenment from the East came at the tail end of the phenomenon Edward Said coined Orientalism, and Gibran, Krishnamurti, and Yogananda fulfilled a Romantic fantasy with their pathways to enlightenment. All three were part of a zeitgeist, a larger movement toward amalgamated universal religions, such as the Baháʼí Faith. A charcoal drawing included at the Drawing Center, The Divine World (1923), featuring a floating raised hand with an eye in the palm, reads like an emblem for Gibran’s transcendent beliefs.

A Greater Beauty opens with a chronology of Gibran’s remarkable life. Gibran immigrated in 1895 with his mother and siblings to Boston, site of the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community. His mother supported the family as a seamstress. A teenage Gibran was sent back to Lebanon to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse and learn French and Arabic; some of his best poetry would be written in Arabic, and he would later be memorialized as a Lebanese poet. After his return to America, Gibran showed early promise as an artist and, with the help of his patroness Mary Haskell, studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910 at The Académie Julian, and the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens. In Paris, Gibran met Rodin and even drew his portrait. Rodin’s influence can be seen not only in watercolors like The Waterfall (1919), but in Gibran’s study of dancers like Ruth St. Denis (Rodin made many studies of dancers’ movements). Gibran’s nude figures in ascending postures, sometimes raising another figure aloft as in Uplifted Figure (1915), are seen in Rodin’s sculptures like The Gates of Hell (1880–1917). The artist’s debt to Rodin was immense. Even multi-figure works like Sketch for “Jesus the Son of Man” (1923) resemble groupings from Rodin’s drawings and sculptures.

Gibran was also a home-town mystic who settled in New York in 1911 and lived in the Tenth Street Studio building until his early death. His first book, The Madman, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918. He also exhibited with M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. Along with his fellow countryman Ameen Rihani, Gibran holds an important place in the cultural life of the city as an early voice from the Levant.

This well-researched exhibition was a labor of love by Claire Gilman, the curator at the Drawing Center, who first viewed Gibran’s work at the NABU Museum in Lebanon. Works were culled from the Museo Soumaya·Fundación; Carlos Slim; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Kahlil Gibran Museum; the NABU Museum; the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Viewers will be surprised to discover that Gibran was a visual artist collected by important institutions, not only a poet and writer.

As a critic who loves all things mystical, on first viewing I was captivated and hit with a wave of nostalgia and sympathy for this celebrated but fragile artist. In all fairness, Gibran made many of his works as illustrations for his writing. In his art more than his writing, he was a product of Europe rather than the Arab Romantic movement. At heart he was a Symbolist who adored William Blake, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and J.M.W. Turner. We also see traces of Maxfield Parrish and the Pre-Raphaelites. On later viewings, the figures seemed to have a limited number of familiar academic poses, possibly borrowed from Rodin. Put up against artists who possessed prodigious skill and imagination like Gustave Moreau, William Blake, or “Sâr” Mérodack’s crew at The Salon de la Rose+Croix (Paris 1892–1897), Gibran pales a bit. His portrait of his dying mother reproduced in the catalogue, Towards the Infinite (1916 ), has none of the emotional impact of Ferdinand Hodler’s deathbed drawings. Gibran’s delicate works can feel like academic exercises veering off into illustration. At times this viewer longed for what Thomas Grey referred to as being “pregnant with celestial fire.” These are subtle works with light washes, and even when Gibran goes for drama in a work like The Dying Man and the Vulture (1920), this critic longed for a more riveting carrion like the one found in Gustave Moreau’s Prometheus (1868). Gibran’s art is best seen as part of his total oeuvre and should be appreciated as such.