On Helen Khal: The Transformative Power of Art
A Matriarch
When asked about who she is, Helen Khal would say, “a painter, a writer, an editor, a mother, and a grandmother, but above all, first and foremost, a human being.”1 Helen Khal, born Helen Joseph in 1923 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, made significant contributions to art history that gave rise to modern Arab art and artists. Her influence on the art world extended beyond her own artistic endeavors. Helen paved the way for women’s participation in the creative community and played a crucial role in the burgeoning art scene in Beirut. She developed an archive of weekly published art critiques she authored, which provide comprehensive accounts of the thriving cultural scene of that time and valuable insights into a period that has largely been ignored by Western art history. Although she may not have directly identified as a feminist, her legacy and influence as a matriarch left a lasting impression for generations.
Helen was a time capsule into Lebanese modernism and the Golden Era of Beirut. In the mid-1940s, Lebanon gained its independence, and its capital was flourishing as an intellectual and financial center. An influx of contemporary cultural trends emerged in the mid-1950s through travel, experimentation, and scholarships from both the Lebanese government and embassies that sent Lebanese artists abroad.2 “It was a time of exchange. A time when Lebanon was open to all sorts of ideas […] ideas of Che Guevara, revolutions, and the study of Islamic art and Arab history and culture.”3 A confluence of German, Italian, French, English, American, and Arab cultures was centralized in Ras Beirut. The American University of Beirut (AUB), also located in the same neighborhood, set up a Department of Fine Arts in 1954 focused on the Bauhaus school of thought, an advocate of abstract art.4 This, in addition to other art schools such as Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), founded in 1937, would make Lebanon the cultural hub of the Arab World.5
An overview of Helen’s work is documented in Cesar Nammour’s book, Helen Khal, published in 2004. Due to her many relocations, Helen did not always keep track of her art, and thus, details of the artwork were often recalled from her memory. Another important source is an exhibition from 2019 at the Sursock Museum in Lebanon, titled At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance.6 Curators Carla Chammas and Rachel Dedman recall a period in Lebanon when Helen was a central figure and unearth the stories and connections of the artist and the period. Looking into her personal connections, Helen’s close circle of friends would later become renowned and influential figures in modern art and writing.
Helen Khal was a matriarch in her own right. Her extensive research and publication of The Woman Artist in Lebanon in 1987 documents the overlooked contributions of female artists in the country. Her work is still referenced today, having left an incredible and influential life story behind. The evolution of her painting is parallel to her personal experiences. Influences of her education, travel, the thriving cultural scene of Beirut, and her personal life are reflected in her style, which changed from realism to cubism and abstraction.
Early Years
Helen Khal’s journey into art began when she was twelve years old. Walking in her hometown of Pennsylvania, Helen passed by Dr. Walter Baum’s Saturday afternoon class, which later became an established school, The Baum School of Art.7 She was invited into the class and immediately felt connected to life drawing and portraiture. The following week, she enrolled as a student.
During her visit to Tripoli in northern Lebanon with her mother and sister over ten years later, in 1946, Helen realized that art was not ‘just’ a hobby.8 Two months into her visit, she enrolled at ALBA and moved to the capital. For two years, Helen was taught under the direction of Cesar Gemayel and Fernando Manetti, both of whom were trained and worked in European impressionism.9 Their emphasis on color engrossed Helen, moved by the emotive quality of art. Apart from daily life drawing classes, the course was largely independent. Students were encouraged to learn from one another, facilitating a strong bond between them. It was her introduction to art as a profession in Lebanon that propelled her to further study and explore art. Her formal education at ALBA opened channels of discovery and reconnection with her homeland.
In 1947, Helen married Yusuf Al Khal, a surrealist modernist poet. The couple relocated to New York when Yusuf was offered a job with the United Nations. His relocation was an opening for her to the prestigious Art Students League and the world of the avant-garde in the city. Under the tutelage of Will Barnet, a contemporary painter and graphic artist, Helen took a class on “Life Drawing, Painting and Composition.”10 Barnet focused on structural design, technical graphic arts, and understanding formal elements of drawing and composition. Helen also studied under John McPherson, taking his “Life and Still Life, Painting in Oil and Watercolor” class.11 These instructors’ teachings of form, color, and style influenced her work. That era of the late 1940s and early 1950s in New York marked a dynamic period of transformative change that propelled many avant-garde artists into stardom. It was an exciting time for artists, witnessing the peak of the emergence of the New York School, an influential group of poets, painters, dancers, and musicians. The influence of that creative direction is reflected in many of Helen’s canvases and ideas at the time.
Building Community Through Art
Throughout history, the power of friendships and artistic exchange has played a significant role in shaping the art world. The success of many artists can be attributed to the community they kept; a theory observed in well-known artists throughout history.
Having immersed herself in the many forms of art, writing, and community, Helen and her husband built a community of Arabs and creatives in New York, which included Saliba Douaihy, a hard-edge abstract painter, and Gibran Khalil Gibran’s cousin who later became a sculptor. During this period, her interest in spatial light and color grew, and her painting style evolved from impressionism to neo-cubism. She “began to see planes of light and color moving across the image and penetrating the space around it. The image and its environment began to converge into one before [her] eyes.”12 Retaining her interest in portraiture, she injected elements of abstraction, which kept the composition of her landscapes and portraits while also using cubist attributes to the perspective. Evident in On the Beach (1960), the landscape is fragmented into various perspective planes with half a figure on the right edge to provide context and perspective to the landscape.13 As she experimented with this approach, she gradually moved away from figuration altogether. In Landscape (c. 1970), her focus on color, shapes, and shadow overcomes the subject.14 These shifts led to an emphasis on overall compositional development rather than a focus on the subject itself, a key element in abstract expressionism. Helen also worked with Yusuf on designing the cover of Sh’ir, the first Arab quarterly modern poetry magazine that he founded.15 Her designs were a combination of calligraphic and cubist, even constructivist styles.
Helen was always surrounded by creatives. Her classmates at ALBA included Shafic Abboud, Farid Awad, Yvette Achkar, George Guv, Mounir Eido, and Nicola Nammar, some of whom would become lifelong friends. This group of artists’ strong friendship and mutual support had a profound impact on one another. Archived letters exchanged with Shafic Abboud show Helen’s witty and cheeky personality and that, at times, he was more than just a friend, he was her lover.16 She also maintained a close relationship with Aref Rayess, a Lebanese painter and her mentor. He was a constant source of support and encouragement for her artistic endeavors and played a pivotal role in organizing her first exhibition at Galerie Alecco Saab in Beirut in 1960.17 Helen would also frequently visit Saloua Raouda Choucair, an important figure in her life, to admire her sculptures and creative process. Despite Saloua being seven years her senior, the two maintained a strong friendship. Huguette Caland was also one of Helen’s closest friends, they shared a studio for many years in the north of Beirut. In the 1970s, they spent months painting together, producing 40 canvases.18 Their styles were vastly different; Hugette’s was more cartoon-like, while Helen was moving into color field abstraction. But their art was still connected. They were looking at the same work, hearing the same ideas, learning the same subject matter, and painting from the same palette. Their friendship remained strong her entire life.19
Further impacting the art scene in Lebanon, Helen suggested opening a gallery in the office space across from her husband’s office. With the help of a friend’s contribution, Gallery One was established, becoming the first permanent gallery in Lebanon. While working at the Jordanian Tourism Bureau, Helen managed the gallery with her co-director, Leila Baroody. They alternated managing the gallery between the mornings and afternoons to accommodate Helen’s schedule. Actively engaged in social and political discourse, Gallery One pursued cultural unity in the Arab World by showing artists from different Arab countries. It supported both established and emerging artists, hosted literary salons and a variety of programs, and operated as a commercial art gallery. On an evening in May 1963, Gallery One’s opening night was a resounding success.20 The many guests in attendance stayed for hours, even after the power cut, mingling and drinking wine by the candlelight. This was a thrilling time for Beirut, entering its Golden Era and experiencing a surge in cultural growth. Gallery One sparked an influx of gallery openings, solidifying women’s place in Beirut’s art scene, running and founding galleries across the country.21
The city became a hub for the region’s intelligentsia, with people from all over coming together for creative, social, and political discourse. While this period was a time of growing success for this creative society, it was only representative of the wealthy capital and elite spaces. The rest of the country suffered various problems including corruption and poverty which, unfortunately, would persist and lead to political upheaval and the current state of the country.
Consistency of Art Through Challenges
Using art as an escape from painful moments became a constant form of therapy throughout the adversities in Helen’s life. In her early twenties, Helen fell ill with tuberculosis and spent six months in a sanatorium. Drawing was an outlet to distract herself from her extended stay at the hospital. “The hours I had spent drawing had taken me completely out of the painful reality of my life and opened up another timeless, serene and untroubled world.”22
Later in her life, hardship came after the birth of her first son, Tarik, facing the challenges of early motherhood and postpartum. Helen recalls feeling disconnected from her newborn with “no surge of instinctive mother love.”23 The birth of her second son, Jawad, coincided with the day US Marines landed in Lebanon.24 The political unrest and demands of the early years of motherhood weighed once again on Helen, making it a challenge to focus on painting.
In the span of three months in the early 60s, Helen’s mother and brother suddenly passed from heart attacks. Meanwhile, her marriage was in turmoil, leading to the ultimate fall of Gallery One’s short-lived success. Despite Helen’s leadership role, Yusuf imposed his ideas and plans on the gallery, expecting her to comply with them. These pervasive patriarchal beliefs created tensions in their relationship,25 which ultimately caused its dissolution. “Yusuf could not handle the stronger person I had become after the death of my mother. [That] was, essentially, the cause of our divorce.”26 While Helen played multiple roles in one lifetime, Yusuf struggled to balance his desire for individual freedom as a poet with his responsibilities as a husband and father. Their divorce resulted in the loss of custody of her two sons and ownership of the gallery.
The accumulation of these calamities and heartbreak led her into a depressive state, which was reflected in her emotive and chaotic turn toward abstract expressionism. Her canvases became a channel for her pain and grief. Cold Sea (1961) shows her push for abstraction even further, creating a powerful interplay between luminous blues and whites, in unison with the darker shades and more fluid and stronger brushstrokes.27 This cathartic experience allowed her to emerge from her intense grief and confusion with newfound strength, noting, “For a whole year I felt like a wounded animal cringing in a corner, unable to face the world […] but suddenly one day, in one miraculous moment I shall never forget, the pain disappeared and I found myself whole and filled with newborn strength.”28
Frustrated with the tightness and confinement of her compositions, quasi-cubism became too rigid for her emotional state. Aref Rayess advised her to continue painting, resulting in her experiments with emotive brushstrokes and thin patches of color. By exploring the use of translucent color, she created minimal compositions that relied solely on the power of color to convey meaning, making “color an oasis for the emotions.”29 Galerie Trois Feuilles d’Or exhibited this sudden breakthrough into minimalism in the mid-1960s.30 Moving away from figuration, color became the dominant force in her canvases. The general evolution of her work arrived at ethereal color field abstractions. She played with shapes and minimal contrast. These compositions of landscapes and portraits felt free, embodying nostalgic and romantic feelings, reminiscent of the landscapes of Lebanese painter and writer, Etel Adnan. Helen painted to find “replenishment, sustenance, respite from the jarring realities of an everyday world where serenity lies hidden.”31
Personal challenges did not however affect her creative career. She participated in the Salon d’Automne of the Sursock Museum and the Spring Salon of the Ministry of Education annually until 1975.32 The same year, Contact Art Gallery in Beirut hosted a retrospective of her figurative work.33 The exhibition, titled Portraits and Figurations, 1947-1972, showcased the distinct style of her portraits, which displayed a realistic portraiture style while still highlighting her interest in color.
After the outbreak of the 1975 Civil War in Lebanon, Helen relocated to Washington DC for almost two decades, until the end of the war. Despite occasional visits to Lebanon, the pain of being separated from her hometown had a profound impact on her work. Helen’s style evolved to be more meditative and reflective. In letters to Cesar Nammour, she wrote of her struggle to come to terms with ending her connection to Lebanon and her son, Jawad. In another letter she wrote, “I sometimes think I never painted in my life at all. I can’t seem to break through this block and begin producing as I did in Lebanon.”34 The depression lingered, and in 1989 she wrote: “I seem to lack the necessary creative energy. I paint but without excitement. […] This has generally been so ever since I left Lebanon. But I continue to paint because I cannot imagine my life without it.”35
Empowering Through Art
As a part-time painting instructor in the Fine Arts Department at AUB, Helen left a strong impact on the next generation of artists. During her tenure from 1967 until 1976, Helen taught many students who went on to become well-known painters, including Afaf Zurayk. Afaf reminisces, “I was young when I first saw Helen’s work. She was a good friend of our neighbor, which is where I saw her paintings and became very affected by the way she used transparency. She taught me privately and later taught me three courses in painting at AUB.”36 Afaf has recalled, “That light that emanated from Helen’s paintings felt like it mirrored an emotional state, an inner light.”37 These classes Helen held on Afaf’s rooftop in Hamra, left a memorable impact on her. “Always with a cigarette in her hand, Helen was mostly observant […] to explain something, she would paint it instead of verbalizing it. I learned a lot about how to channel and focus my emotional experiences through color treatment.”38
Helen wanted to promote contemporary Arab art around the world so, with AUB, she organized a two-month lecture tour to 22 universities across the US.39 This tour was the first of its kind in the country. She introduced audiences to the richness and diversity of Arab art, advocating for the idea that art inspiration was not a purely West-to-East influence, but rather a dialogue between the two. The inclusion of Huguette Caland in those lectures helped make Huguette’s work well known in the US.
In addition to her art, Helen published weekly art reviews in The Daily Star and Monday Morning from the mid-1960s onwards, amassing a substantial collection of essays. The Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World chose Helen to document the accomplishments of women artists in Lebanon, through a series of interviews. The information gathered through the research project produced The Woman Artist in Lebanon, a groundbreaking analysis of the artists and society in that period.40 Ahead of her time, Helen handled an unexpected and unpopular field of study when women all over the world were being overlooked. She conducted interviews with twelve women, analyzed their work, and then added a second group of 24 other distinctive women artists.
Years of art critiquing culminated in a talent for analysis and the expertise to interpret content, style, and technique of art while researching the larger demographic of artists in Lebanon, the Arab World, and the West. One of her seminal discoveries was the ratio of male to female artists active in Lebanon. Twenty-five percent of Lebanese artists practicing in the 1980s were women.41 This percentage was higher than in any other country, including the West. Women were considerably involved in the growing artistic movement, notably in membership of the Lebanese Artists Association of Painters and Sculptors. Her interpretation of the matter was twofold. Firstly, many of the women came from upper-class families and were not obliged to work for a living. Learning art was easier for families to accept, as it did not require long periods of study and could be studied at home compared to other degrees. Secondly, the study of art was relatively available to many through public and private art centers in Lebanon. Painting became the new fashionable art at the time in Beirut, replacing the long-lasting crochéing.42
Helen once again shifted her style, opting for the logic and rationality of geometric abstraction over the chaotic style of expressionism that did not fulfill her emotionally and mentally. She continued to experiment with color and remained a focal point in her work, even when she dabbled in figurative work.
Conclusion
Helen’s life and work exemplify her resilience and creativity. Confronting personal and political obstacles, she persisted in painting and writing, using her art to challenge dominant narratives and pave the way for future generations. Her contributions to the art world and women’s studies carry substantial weight, and her legacy continues to inspire artists and scholars today. Through her preserved archive, we gain detailed insights not only into her own life but also into the lives of those around her. Helen, alongside other formidable women of her time, left an incredible impact on society. Reflecting on the influence of women as role models, Afaf Zurayk recalls how she viewed them as “choosing art above everything else, making tough life choices, and being confident enough to take their life in their own hands […] It was a revelation to see them struggling, conquering, and living a real independent life. I was addicted to their passion for art. That affected me beyond anything else. My life itself is the testament to that.”43
Decades later, Helen’s impact endures, and her artistic evolution continues to mirror her personal experiences, leading to profound breakthroughs. Through her letters and writings, we are offered a glimpse into the depth of intellect, humor, and spirit that defined her. Helen’s life serves as a reminder of the transformative power of art: to heal, to resist, to empower, and to affect meaningful change.
This essay is part of Written Portraits: Arab Women, Art, & History, a series that focuses on the lives and works of Arab female artists, authored by Arab female researchers in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation.
To access the works cited & endnotes, download the full report.
The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author and do not represent Fiker Institute.
