Kahlil G. Gibran (November 29, 1922 – April 13, 2008), sometimes known as Kahlil George Gibran, was a Lebanese American painter and sculptor from Boston, Massachusetts. A student of the painter Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibran first received acclaim as a magic realist painter in the late 1940s when he exhibited with other emerging artists later known as the "Boston Expressionists".Boston Expressionism Called a "master of materials", as both artist and restorer, Gibran turned to sculpture in the mid-fifties. In 1972, in an effort to separate his identity from his famous relative and namesake, the author of The Prophet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, who was cousin both to his father Nicholas Gibran and his mother Rose Gibran, the sculptor co-authored with his wife Jean a biography of the poet entitled Kahlil Gibran His Life And World. Gibran is known for multiple skills, including painting; wood, wax, and stone carving; welding; and instrument making.
Early years
Childhood Gibran aspired to be an artist since he was seven. The third of five children, he was inspired by his namesake cousin and godfather, the poet Gibran Khalil Gibran. Related to the author on both sides of his family, he was nurtured by his Lebanese immigrant family in Boston. Gibran spent hours in his father's woodworking workshop. From his cabinet-maker father, he learned about instrument making and helped fashion stringed instruments, including a miniature violin that he treasured all his life.
Gibran lived in what is now Chinatown, Boston, and attended local public schools. As a boy, he frequented the Denison House where he occasionally would see social worker Amelia Earhart drive up in her famous yellow roadster. He regularly visited the local public library and enjoyed crafting exotic objects like the scimitar in Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum or the guillotine from Tale of Two Cities. At eleven, he received Honorable Mention in a national soap-carving contest, and during his senior year at English High School, was awarded the Lawrence Prize for Art.
Studying Gibran entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1940. He was offered a full scholarship if he concentrated on sculpture. However, he chose a partial scholarship given by the painting department where he studied with Karl Zerbe. The experience shaped his career. “It was an atelier", he recalled. “They let us develop our own vision while grounding us in the fundamentals – drawing, anatomy, techniques, and materials". Winner of The Boit Summer Competition in 1942, the young artist soon was recognized as a master of diverse materials. He was known as jittery Gibran for prodigious production fueled by an abundance of nervous energy and for his deep concern that he not be a burden to his family. In 1943, shortly after his study for a mural Entrée á Paradis was awarded the Karl Zerbe prize, he left school in order to apprentice at several craft-related organizations.
For a period during World War II, he served as draftsman at Harvard's Underwater Sound Laboratory. Later his carving skills led him to work for Martin Heiligmann, a gilder of fine objects and frames. Finding a Joy Street studio on Beacon Hill, he also started to work for Boris Mirski whose Charles Street Gallery was attracting Boston artists and collectors. Word of the young artist's talent spread, and Gibran briefly honed his skills at the Conservation Laboratory of Harvard University's Fogg Museum. He finally located a studio at 15 Fayette Street in Boston's Bay Village, where he settled in as a freelancer, restoring and repairing fine art objects during the day, and painting at night. Shortly after moving, he met sculptor and conservator Morton C. Bradley. The two would maintain a lifelong friendship.
Early career
Painting Gibran first displayed original creative work at Boris Mirski's Charles Street Gallery in 1944. A January 1946 review of his pictures at the Stuart Art Gallery, introduced him to Boston's art world: “Mr. Gibran is in his early twenties. ... He is a mystic and seeks a symbolism which can convey transcendent ideas... a romantic of the artistic clan of Redon.Dorothy Adlow, “Francis Criss, Kahlil Gibran Show Works", Christian Science Monitor (January 18, 1946), p. 9 In another Stuart Art Gallery exhibit, Study of a Head by Kahlil Gibran was described as “the tenuous enterprise of another young Boston mystic".Dorothy Adlow, “Back From War Seen in Show at Stuart Gallery", Christian Science Monitor (July 15, 1946), p. 4 Soon his paintings appeared at Symphony Hall, along with panels by his mentor Karl Zerbe in a selection of work by contemporary artists titled Fantasy in Art. One reviewer wrote: “There are also among these fantasts, visionary artists who perceive images in tenuous dreamlike mists... The portrait for example by Kahlil Gibran".Dorothy Adlow, “Contemporary Painters Seen in Display at Symphony Hall", The Christian Science Monitor (December 16, 1946), unpaged clipping.
By June 1947, a New York Times review of paintings he exhibited at Jacques Seligmann's gallery in the group show, Artists Under 25, acknowledged his efforts with the brief but laudatory comment, “Kahlil Gibran works subtly and effectively in encaustic".Edward Alden Jewell, “ New Group Twenty-Five and Under", New York Times (June 8, 1947), unpaged clipping. Five months later, Boston's Institute of Modern Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) featured works “carefully chosen from the recent production of notable artists in Massachusetts".Portrait of the Art World: A Century of ART news, photographs. Deidre Enterprises Publishers in association with National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution and Yale University Press, 2002, pose variant from John Brook photo, Plate 29 Exhibitors included Karl Knaths, Edward Hopper and Edwin Dickinson along with younger Boston artists. ART news published a John Brook portrait of eleven Boston painters including Karl Zerbe, Reed Champion, Ture Bengtz, Giglio Dante, Maud Morgan, and Lawrence Kupferman. The photograph shows a serious and pensive Gibran in profile seated on a ladder near the painter Esther Geller.
In her review of this seminal show, Dorothy Adlow, wrote in the Christian Science Monitor: “Kahlil Gibran, who like Mr.David Aronson is 24 years old, paints a Pietà in oil with remarkable technical adaptation of pigment".Dorothy Adlow, “Massachusetts Painters in 1947", Christian Science Monitor (November 10, 1947), unpaged clipping. And later, when the Pietà was exhibited in a March, 1948 Artists’ Equity show, this critic heralded it as “one of the more distinguished pictures painted in Boston in recent years".Dorothy Adlow, “Artists’ Equity Exhibition", Christian Science Monitor (March 22, 1948, p. 4
Within a year, his identity as a “visionary” with great technique was spreading. Reviewing contemporary New England painters at the Fitchburg Art Center, Ms. Adlow reinforced this image: “The Old Fashioned Bouque’ by Kahlil Gibran sets forth once again the sensitive gift of that young visionary. Mr. Gibran employs his wax technique most effectively. He works with consistency, grace, and poetry".Dorothy Adlow, “Varied Styles Displayed at Fitchburg Art Center", Christian Science Monitor: (June 7, 1947), unpaged clipping,
Gibran continued to exhibit in group shows at the Niveau Gallery, and made his New York solo debut at the Mortimer Levitt Gallery, April 1948. In The Artists Speaks, Adlow again introduced him:Dorothy Adlow, “The Artist Speaks", Christian Science Monitor (April 9, 1949) p, 6 "Gibran is one of the exceptional group of talented artists who have come to the fore in Boston in the last few years. He has a rare capacity of envisioning intangibles, for conjuring the immaterial in tenuousness and exiguousness of concrete image... the most recent painting Joseph’s Cloak discards the subdued chromatic scheme for a rich palette of colors that sing out movingly".
Time in Provincetown
By June 1949, then married to Eleanor “Elly” Mott a fellow student at Museum School, Gibran began working for the sculptor Ken Campbell during a summer in Provincetown. With his growing reputation as a magic realist, he formed close friendships with several Provincetown artists, including Varujan Boghosian, Mischa Richter, Giglio Dante, poet Cecil Hemley, and painter/poet Weldon Kees. For editor Hemley's The Noonday Press he designed that publishing house's first colophon. He also became involved with Forum 49, founded by Hemley and Kees a pivotal event in American 20th century culture. Jules Aarons brilliant physicist and photographer of Provincetown's artistic community documented Gibran, his wife, and colleagues during that fecund period. Notable is a portrait of the artist with his fish skeleton painting On the Beach shown at Gallery 200 during the original exhibit of Forum 49, and then again, at the Provincetown Art Association's fiftieth anniversary memorial show in 1999. Spending summers in Provincetown, Gibran and his wife opened a boutique called Paraphernalia. It became known for its fanciful signs, innovative displays and handsome mannequins, all crafted by Gibran. But soon, railing at life as shopkeeper, he explored other avenues professionally and personally. The couple agreed to separate, Gibran returning to Boston and Elly taking over the shop.
Innovation During the early fifties, Gibran, with the young Boston painter William Georgenes, spent two summers in Nantucket, working on new paintings and exploring new techniques. Always experimenting with the latest in materials, he and artist Alfred Duca, also living at the 15 Fayette Street studio, made major media breakthroughs. New Plastic Medium Used by Painter was Dorothy Adlow's response to Gibran's innovative technique shown at the Margaret Brown Gallery, during the winter of 1952.Dorothy Adlow, “New Plastic Medium Used By Painter", Christian Science Monitor (February 28, 1952) p, 6
At 30, Gibran turned to a completely new art form. “My marriage was breaking up.."., he told the Globe in 1967. "I had too much energy.... After my divorce, psychiatry made me understand I had to sculpt".Gregory Mcdonald “the second Kahlil Gibran: Boston sculptor who has emerged from the shadow of the poet", Boston Sunday Globe Magazine (January 1, 1967) p. 7 Crediting Dr. Clemens Benda, with pointing his way to sculpture and, in some ways, transforming his entire persona, even his approach to art, Gibran developed a strong bond with that Jungian psychiatrist. He had learned of him from Hyman Bloom who, like many Boston artists of the period, were searching for spirituality in non-traditional ways.
Instrument-building
Throughout the 1940s, Gibran's friendship with Bloom was, in part, due to their mutual devotion to the music of what was then called “the Orient". The young Gibran had always searched for recordings of early 20th century Arabic singers and instrumentalists, and soon joined a group of devotees of Middle Eastern and Indian music that included Bloom, composer Alan Hovhaness, painter Hermon Di Giovanno, sculptors Frank and Jean Teddy Tock, Dr. Betty Gregory, and, later on, James Rubin, founder of Boston's Pan Orient Arts Foundation.