.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Born in Beirut in 1926, Elie Kanaan started developing his distinctive style of painting in his early twenties, having studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. After spending a couple of years of soul-searching in Italy, he returned to his native Lebanon where he began to exhibit in the early fifties. His peculiar style and growing success led to regular exhibitions both in Lebanon and internationally. He earned a good number of honourable awards, notably the First Prize for oil painting from the Sursock Museum in 1965 and the Prix Vendôme in 1969. Through the meeting of well-established and well-respected men in the art world, such as André Malraux and Georges Cyr, Kanaan was thus able to confirm his talent and expertise as one of the masters of art in Lebanon.
Christie's is honoured to offer three different works this season from the Estate of Elie Kanaan. Each of these exceptional pieces reference different periods in the artist's oeuvre, giving a broad overview and remarkable recognition of his artistic practice.
Kanaan's colour palette is a temple of sensibility. He mastered the complexity behind the beauty of association, by combining opposite fields such as tranquillity and agitation, light and dark tones, abstraction and figuration and most importantly East and West. Mixing his experiences in France with his traditional roots in the Levant, he was able to capture the reality of the outside world beyond its appearances. Kanaan takes the viewer on an introspective journey; whether from bliss to torment or from life to fatality, he intriguingly never fails to leave the viewer with a strong and lasting sense of hope. His works hold an ongoing duality; a dialogue between the softness of his greens, in which we recognise the immaculate beauty of Lebanon and its luscious landscapes, and his use of deep and rich reds, which sheds light on the violence and suffering of his people.
Kanaan's paintings are always a graceful composition of open horizons and organised chaos, leaving his pieces consistently recognisable, yet never repetitive. The experience of paint, becoming almost the subject itself, is tastefully enhanced and blurred into a world where shapes are born from colour.
Offering a delightful example of the artist's early work, the first painting entitled Rêveuses from 1965, exquisitely highlights the artist's ability to combine characteristics of the East and the West, whereby he depicts three female figures in a style that suggests a strong reference to Parisian Impressionism. The Mediterranean colour palette leads the viewer to believe the scene is taking place in the deep essence of Lebanese landscapes. Rather than working with colour scales, Kanaan uses different contrasting tones to represent one colour. He uses a rapid application of relatively small, thin yet visible broken brushstrokes. The artist was able to capture the momentary and transient effect of sunlight by painting outdoors and portrayed overall visual effects and sentiment as oppose to detail. He emphasises on an accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities as well as his common use of open composition and curious visual angles. His technique and the effect of vivid colour vibrations hint to Manet or Renoir, yet Kanaan's work stays loyal to his own distinctive manner and expertise.
The second work L'Attente strongly differs from the two others as from the late 1960s to early 2000s, Kanaan's work entered an obscure and mysterious period, most likely due to the Civil War in Lebanon in 1975. This delicate melancholia enabled him to produce a wide range of enigmatic pieces of which the present work is a seminal example. The painting presents a singular figure, perhaps his alter ego, standing on the edge of the frame in a non-descriptive surrounding. The background is covered with several tones of ice cold blue, placing us in what feels to be a cold winter night. Most likely, however, Kanaan was not trying to depict the darkness of a landscape, but rather the obscureness of his sentimental being. This piece can be considered the artist's subjective view on the world at the time, distorting it radically as a means to evoke his emotional state rather than physical reality. The blurriness of his mind is portrayed by abstraction, using modest and abrupt brushstrokes to build this chaotic background, Kanaan contrasts these with the static figure. By doing so, he builds an acute combination of stillness and movement which accentuate the effects of the passage of time and the inessentiality of his environment. The feeling of solitude and nostalgia in this painting reminds us of crucial elements of human perception and experience and is somewhat a courageous invitation into Kanaan's self.
The third work, entitled Au Revoir from 2003, is from the last period of the artist's oeuvre. Towards the end of his life, Kanaan went into a style of Abstract Expressionism, although not completely into non-representational frameworks. He adopted an approach to space in which all parts of the canvas play an equally vital role, stepping into an anti-figurative aesthetic. Once again in this work, Kanaan finds the ability to marry his colours together and creates a dramatic experience for the viewer. He develops a highly distinctive form of abstraction based on patches of vivid colour, vigorous gestures and textural contrasts. This energetic 'action-painting' reminds us of Jackson Pollock while the glorification of paint mirrors Hans Hofmann. Kanaan uses here an avant-garde somewhat organised disorder in which the harnessing of accidents that occurred during the process become an integral part of the work. The viewer witnesses the glorification of the act of painting itself as a means of visual communication and the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas.
Elie Kanaan gives the viewer two significant realities; the physical reality of the painting and the implied reality of the image, which co-exist exquisitely in an impeccable marriage of unexpected tones. The particularity and meticulousness of his brushstrokes has earned him an international recognition and placed his works amongst some of the most important collections in the world. Standing amongst the gems of the region, he is today unquestionably one of the most important figures in Modern Lebanese art.
Christie's is honoured to offer three different works this season from the Estate of Elie Kanaan. Each of these exceptional pieces reference different periods in the artist's oeuvre, giving a broad overview and remarkable recognition of his artistic practice.
Kanaan's colour palette is a temple of sensibility. He mastered the complexity behind the beauty of association, by combining opposite fields such as tranquillity and agitation, light and dark tones, abstraction and figuration and most importantly East and West. Mixing his experiences in France with his traditional roots in the Levant, he was able to capture the reality of the outside world beyond its appearances. Kanaan takes the viewer on an introspective journey; whether from bliss to torment or from life to fatality, he intriguingly never fails to leave the viewer with a strong and lasting sense of hope. His works hold an ongoing duality; a dialogue between the softness of his greens, in which we recognise the immaculate beauty of Lebanon and its luscious landscapes, and his use of deep and rich reds, which sheds light on the violence and suffering of his people.
Kanaan's paintings are always a graceful composition of open horizons and organised chaos, leaving his pieces consistently recognisable, yet never repetitive. The experience of paint, becoming almost the subject itself, is tastefully enhanced and blurred into a world where shapes are born from colour.
Offering a delightful example of the artist's early work, the first painting entitled Rêveuses from 1965, exquisitely highlights the artist's ability to combine characteristics of the East and the West, whereby he depicts three female figures in a style that suggests a strong reference to Parisian Impressionism. The Mediterranean colour palette leads the viewer to believe the scene is taking place in the deep essence of Lebanese landscapes. Rather than working with colour scales, Kanaan uses different contrasting tones to represent one colour. He uses a rapid application of relatively small, thin yet visible broken brushstrokes. The artist was able to capture the momentary and transient effect of sunlight by painting outdoors and portrayed overall visual effects and sentiment as oppose to detail. He emphasises on an accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities as well as his common use of open composition and curious visual angles. His technique and the effect of vivid colour vibrations hint to Manet or Renoir, yet Kanaan's work stays loyal to his own distinctive manner and expertise.
The second work L'Attente strongly differs from the two others as from the late 1960s to early 2000s, Kanaan's work entered an obscure and mysterious period, most likely due to the Civil War in Lebanon in 1975. This delicate melancholia enabled him to produce a wide range of enigmatic pieces of which the present work is a seminal example. The painting presents a singular figure, perhaps his alter ego, standing on the edge of the frame in a non-descriptive surrounding. The background is covered with several tones of ice cold blue, placing us in what feels to be a cold winter night. Most likely, however, Kanaan was not trying to depict the darkness of a landscape, but rather the obscureness of his sentimental being. This piece can be considered the artist's subjective view on the world at the time, distorting it radically as a means to evoke his emotional state rather than physical reality. The blurriness of his mind is portrayed by abstraction, using modest and abrupt brushstrokes to build this chaotic background, Kanaan contrasts these with the static figure. By doing so, he builds an acute combination of stillness and movement which accentuate the effects of the passage of time and the inessentiality of his environment. The feeling of solitude and nostalgia in this painting reminds us of crucial elements of human perception and experience and is somewhat a courageous invitation into Kanaan's self.
The third work, entitled Au Revoir from 2003, is from the last period of the artist's oeuvre. Towards the end of his life, Kanaan went into a style of Abstract Expressionism, although not completely into non-representational frameworks. He adopted an approach to space in which all parts of the canvas play an equally vital role, stepping into an anti-figurative aesthetic. Once again in this work, Kanaan finds the ability to marry his colours together and creates a dramatic experience for the viewer. He develops a highly distinctive form of abstraction based on patches of vivid colour, vigorous gestures and textural contrasts. This energetic 'action-painting' reminds us of Jackson Pollock while the glorification of paint mirrors Hans Hofmann. Kanaan uses here an avant-garde somewhat organised disorder in which the harnessing of accidents that occurred during the process become an integral part of the work. The viewer witnesses the glorification of the act of painting itself as a means of visual communication and the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas.
Elie Kanaan gives the viewer two significant realities; the physical reality of the painting and the implied reality of the image, which co-exist exquisitely in an impeccable marriage of unexpected tones. The particularity and meticulousness of his brushstrokes has earned him an international recognition and placed his works amongst some of the most important collections in the world. Standing amongst the gems of the region, he is today unquestionably one of the most important figures in Modern Lebanese art.