Helen Khal was born in Pennsylvania in 1923 to a Lebanese-American family, and was initially an aspiring writer. Upon becoming bedridden for six months from a bout of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two, Khal took up painting by chance, a decision that at the t.mes she did not imagine would be of any particular importance. Mesmerised from her first experience, Khal explained, “[...] it opened up a completely new and fascinating world. From the first hour, I felt that excit.mes nt and complete involvement of self which the practice of art can give” (Helen Khal, The Woman Artist in Lebanon, Beirut 1987, p. 88). Soon after, Khal travelled to Beirut to discover her roots, and subsequently enrolled at the Académie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), Lebanon’s first national institution of higher education, where she studied painting from 1946-1948. Under the tutelage of César Gemayel (1898-1958), French impressionist painter and then-director of the art department, Khal absorbed the Parisian spirit of light and colour; they painted from nature, with Khal claiming that the use of black was avoided so stringently that she became reluctant to use it in her own compositions (ibid., pp. 88-90). The use of black in the present work makes it all the more rare therefore, yet its use is still considered, imbued with tinges of purple and green to mediate a delicate balance between light and shadow. During her t.mes at ALBA, Khal met Syrian-Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal, who would soon become her husband and co-founder of Gallery One, Lebanon’s first permanent art gallery opened in 1963. The couple moved between New York and Libya before eventually resettling in Lebanon in 1955 with their two sons.
Khal’s impact on Beirut’s burgeoning cultural scene of the 1960s and ‘70s - otherwise known as the ‘Golden Age’ - was considerable, owed to her work as an artist as well as a gallerist, writer, and critic. Never straying far from her literary ambitions, Khal published a seminal book in 1986 entitled The Woman Artist in Lebanon, a study into the country’s prominent female artists and their gendered relation to their practise and environment. Khal remarked that while Lebanon enjoyed social freedoms and modernisation more so than some of its Arab neighbours at this t.mes , the woman artist still attempted to resolve and project her identity, and thus her liberation, through her art (ibid., p. 22). At this t.mes , Lebanon enjoyed the greatest number of female artists than any other country in the Arab world; Khal herself shared a studio with her closest friend and contemporary Huguette Caland (lot 1). Khal fervently supported the visibility of women artists and greater creative purpose beyond perceived regional achievement, whilst believing it also capable of transmitting the country’s fluctuant history through the medium of abstraction.
“The path I choose – as in my abstract work – is one of expressing my deep responses to the emotive power of colour, its changing light and vibrancy. Heightened and moulded, the colour forms I use portray not only the human being in his or her own personal world, but also finally the vision of my own private world.”
Khal’s works reflect an enduring exploration into serenity through deliberations of colour and light, principles to which she became entirely dedicated from 1965 onward. Diluted oil paint is built up in thin layers, allowing the artist to create windows of colours delicate and diffuse yet simultaneously resolute and assertive, as in the present work, which plays with contrast. Her distinguishable canvases, marked by their hazy rectangular hues, recall the colour field technique of Mark Rothko, whom she cited as an artistic reference, and Helen Frankenthaler, whom she likely would have been exposed to during her t.mes in New York in the 1940s and ‘50s. Khal’s decision to focus on colour was driven by emotional response, with an intention to “create a presence that may be entered visually; and through that sense a sight to find replenishment, sustenance, respite, from the jarring realities of an everyday world where serenity lies hidden.” Viscerally and intellectually preoccupied with painting for its “living colour” and “quiet seduction,” Khal’s painting creates a world of escape for the viewer into one of pure tranquillity (the artist quoted in Chammas, Dedman and Kholeif (eds.), Rachel Dedman, 'In Detail,' in Exh. Cat., Beirut, Sursock Museum, Helen Khal, p. 48).