Kanaan Elie 

Aley (Lebanon), 1926-Beirut, 2009

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Elie Kanaan defended his sensitivity to color throughout his career. His manner of applying the paint was based on color, so that the scene would only unfold according to the logic of color and the relationship of one color with another. His work reveals an idea about pictorial taste that is based on the arrangement of forms; in his still lifes and landscapes, it looks at first as if his choice of subject is based on naivety – not that he was a naive painter, but he seemed to be a painter who did not ask himself about the subject of his paintings, as he was too anxious and only driven by the desire to paint.

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Kanaan took on a subject or theme, and used it as a recognizable structural framework that had to be sensitive enough to achieve what interested him the most: color and the forms that color wanted to fill. Often, in canvases from his later years, the strength and the presence of the work contrast with the subject, which only appears as a pretext. In this structuring of color that takes place during the execution of the canvas, Cyr had only shown him the rigidity of Cubism, under the pretext of the rigor of the drawing, without revealing the possibilities of Cubism’s sensitivity, which Cyr did not deploy in his Cubism but only in his watercolor of Lebanese subjects.

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A rigidity of drawing mingled with a Cubist construction showed the need for deconstruction. Nevertheless, Kanaan was only able to recourse to post-Impressionism, which he rendered, in the best cases, in a more and more abstract way, or through a symbolic thematic. The interest in his development is partly due to his use of different pictorial languages, or in the manner in which he tried to replace one with the other, and often halfway between the work of the canvas these languages were partly dissolved into color. In his pictures, the oil became a physical subject.

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Kanaan was moving towards a new and virginal terrain for Lebanon, something that was not abstraction and not related to the idea of a beautiful painting and a beautiful use of paint, but something about the moment of pictorial application. There was no distance from the subject, restricted to a touch subordinated to the forms it treated, and which only freedom seemed to be through elongation. It is useless to speak about his drawings, it only makes sense to speak about the freedom of the canvas and the colors. He achieved this when neither the subject nor the canvas imprisoned him. Therefore he was never asked, “What are you trying to say, exactly?”, for one always knows what it meant.

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His approach to the abstract was just a skilled extension of the figurative.

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Cyr would sometimes say about Kanaan: “He will never know how to draw and there is where his great fault lies.” Nonetheless, there are some canvases by Kanaan that are as cruelly drawn as a Cubist still life. We have to accept one pictorial fact about him: form worked with color. This sometimes resulted in a magma of paint released in the background of an Impressionist sensitivity, where Modernism definitely wanted to go beyond romantic and naturalist Lebanese painting, but where there was also a real and strong desire to experiment with the world, through canvas and color.

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Kanaan’s taste for color came from Cyr and the French tradition that, through Cyr, lived on at the end of Impressionism, the integration of Fauvism to the pictorial process, and the reference to Cubism as a language of modernity. Cyr’s influence was like an echo of the experimentation of forms, and oil painting was like a need for security. But Cyr had hesitated in his choices in the aftermath of the Second World War, and had returned to post-Cubism in order to be able to exhibit in Paris, convinced that he was of historic importance in the Cubist vocabulary. Light, nevertheless, had led him to other things.

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Kanaan kept the good and bad aspects of this French tradition: the recipes and artisanal taste of its love of the paint itself – taste and recipes that always had, in the background, the idea of becoming a painter for the onlooker. But aren’t paintings made for onlookers?

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If he did not position himself in the course of the history of painting in Lebanon by studying at ALBA – he was an autodidact – and no more so by his sojourns abroad – he hardly travelled at all, contrary to other painters of his generation – he would settle there by his socio-cultural choices and the evolution of a painting that left Impressionism at the borders of Abstraction to be formed anew, in an approach to the subject where patterns only seemed to be there to structure the colors.

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In the direct orbit of Lebanese pictorial culture, Kanaan was always obstinate and passionate about painting, rescuing it from the gravity of its environment; he had a physical taste for the subject and the paint itself, and a happiness about color that maintained his authenticity. For him, painting started as a result of his own sociology – historical, community-driven and cultural – and came to progressively integrate itself with the history of culture in Lebanon. 

This path, this manner of hanging the painting, is the same one that many Lebanese painters followed, not because of general rules but because of the environment, from the 1940s onwards. This was no longer the generation of Onsi, Farroukh and Gemayel, founded in the French matrix of the 1920s and 1930s, but was a style of painting that was in the process of making itself, questioning and seeking to establish itself, after the effective establishment of Lebanese independence.

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At a time, this son of an honest and conscientious craftsmanship was seen as Cyr’s spiritual heir. He painted in themes, in series. To paint as a way of life, and as one’s work in Beirut society – this was a new optic. Guiragossian also approached this process, but he blended more into the nascent intellectual milieu ; he considered journalists and writers as his most precious potential allies.

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Exhibiting every year, Kanaan was the painter of faultless Francophone good taste.

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He had a real command of color. The way in which he used it was linked to his cultural evolution, to the way in which he perceived History of Art, and to the resonance of the right tone or what he supposed it to be.

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He exhibited in Beirut in 1949 at Gallery Audi, from 1950 to 1953 at the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures, at the Fritz Gotthelf Gallery in 1955 and 1956, at the Hotel Bristol from 1956 to 1959, at the Hotel Excelsior in 1962, 1963 and 1966, in 1965 and 1969 in the l’Orient newspaper officrd, and in 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1974 at the hotel Le Vendôme.

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Kanaan continued Cyr’s French good taste, where the obsession to paint came from a sociology that was as careful in its ambition as silent by its shyness. 

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Kanaan achieved what he wanted – a tantalising and seductive painting in revolt against the model of Cyr’s post-Cubism – while aiming to replace him for the same public. 

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Kanaan did not have Cyr’s literary culture, nor even the literary culture related to this kind of painting, made by the unfortunate contribution of feeling sieved through  modernity and color. 

There is something very mundane about all this. That particular moment in the 1930s when César Gemayel offered his entire public what he wanted to see – a blend of anecdote and Impressionism that made Impressionism stand out as the greatest liberty on the terrain of anecdote itself. 

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Kanaan therefore only seemed superfluous to all of this, but he added the sweet and mute obstinacy of making his public – and himself – believe in the secret of the feeling that he placed at the heart of his painting.