A major retrospective in Hamburg is bringing the work of Huguette Caland to Germany for the first time, tracing the Lebanese artist's five-decade journey from presidential daughter to pioneering painter of sensuality and freedom.
"Huguette Caland: A Life In A Few Lines" at the Deichtorhallen comprises 300 works spanning painting, sculpture, textile design, and fashion from an artist whose life trajectory mirrored her artistic evolution—unconventional, experimental, and fiercely independent.
Born in Beirut in 1931 as the only daughter of Bechara El Khoury, Lebanon's first post-independence president, Caland began her artistic career at 35 following her father's death in 1964. Her first painting, Red Sun / Cancer, was a red-colored composition with a central sphere emitting a ripple-like effect—both an abstract work and a reference to her father's final illness.
"I grew up with the idea of independence, and I wanted to convince them that the independence was personal and that I wanted to be independent. I was 13 years old, and it was difficult for my loving parents to listen to such lectures on freedom coming from their daughter. And I was very stubborn," Caland once said.
In 1970, at an age when most artists have established careers, Caland left Beirut for Paris alone "to spread her wings." There she produced her famous Bribes de Corps (Body Bits) series—minimalist paintings of human anatomy that art historian Hannah Feldman, who curated the Hamburg exhibition, describes as near-perfect studies of form and volume that exude mystery and subtle provocation.
The exhibition, organized with involvement from Caland's family including her daughter Brigitte Caland, includes personal artifacts: her paint-smothered smock, an 80-centimeter brush made of horse hair, handwritten letters, and newspaper clippings. "She was different, at a time when 'different' wasn't perceived the way that it is today," Brigitte said in a video created by Caland's granddaughter L'Or Puymartin.
Caland's creative output extended beyond canvas. Known for wearing loose-fitting abayas she personally designed with whimsical patterns, she co-established the Inaash Association, which continues supporting displaced Palestinian female embroiderers in Lebanon. Her 1978 encounter with French couturier Pierre Cardin led to a year-long collaboration on the "Nour" collection—the only salaried position she held.
After her lover, Romanian sculptor George Apostu, died in Paris, Caland moved to California in 1987, where she worked with letter art and writing. She returned to Beirut permanently in 2013, creating intensely detailed tapestries resembling city maps, filled with personal memories, flowers, boats, and child-like houses. In one tapestry marked with endless lines and dots, she wrote: "Brigitte is my reminder of how much fun I always was and still am."
Caland's work, which received limited recognition until late in her career, now resides in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She died in 2019 at age 88.
In this region, today's headline is yesterday's history repeating. Caland's retrospective arrives as debates over women's creative and bodily autonomy continue across the Arab world—a conversation the artist navigated through form and color rather than explicit politics. Her rebellion, as her daughter noted, was elegant and polite, but unmistakable.
The Hamburg exhibition demonstrates how Caland's experimental approach—moving between mediums, defying expectations of presidential daughters, leaving marriages and countries in pursuit of artistic freedom—created a body of work that speaks to contemporary conversations about agency, desire, and the right to define one's own creative path.
"She proved, in a way, to her husband that she was right... that following her instinct led her to something," Brigitte Caland said. That instinct produced a legacy that German audiences, and a new generation of viewers globally, are now discovering.
