About the artists

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Helen Khal (1923-2009) was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to a Lebanese-American family from Tripoli, Lebanon. She started her painting career at the age of 21. On a visit to Lebanon in 1946 she met and married a young Lebanese poet, Yusuf al-Khal (they later divorced), and remained in the country to study art at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1948. She returned to the United States briefly, but in 1973, after moving back to Lebanon, she established Lebanon’s first permanent art gallery, Gallery One.

With the encouragement of well-known Lebanese artists, such as Aref Rayess, Khal pursued her art and held her first individual exhibition in 1960 in Galerie Alecco Saab in Beirut. Other solo shows took place at Galerie Trois Feuilles d’Or, Beirut (1965), Galerie Manoug, Beirut (1968), the First National Bank, Allentown, Pennsylvania (1969), in Kaslik, Lebanon (1970), at the Contact Art Gallery, Beirut (1972, 1974 and 1975) and at the Bolivar Gallery in Kingston, Jamaica in 1975. Her work also appeared in the Biennales of Alexandria and São Paulo.

She also taught art at the American University of Beirut from 1967 to 1976, as well as at the Lebanese American University from 1977 to 1980.

Additionally, Helen Khal was recognized as an author and critic. From 1966 to 1974, Helen Khal was an art critic to two Lebanese periodicals, The Daily Star and Monday Morning. She also wrote a number of publications in the Middle East and the USA and frequently lectured on art.

A series of 22 lectures that she gave was collected and published as a book titled The Woman Artist in Lebanon. Not only that, but Khal’s work was also included in the 1994 exhibition Forces of Change at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In 2023, her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940 -1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

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Jean Khalifé (1923-1978) is considered to be a pioneer in art in Lebanon, and his work has sparked the interest and enthusiasm of the general public and has appealed to art critics.

He was born in 1923 in the village of Hadtoun, Northern Lebanon. Between 1947 and 1950, he studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts under the Lebanese painter César Gemayel and the Italian painter Ferdinando Manetti. His peers were Shafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, Farid Aouad, Michel Basbous and Helen Khal.

From 1951 to 1954, he lived in Paris and continued his studies at the School of Fine Arts as well as at Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Between 1959 and 1960, having won a scholarship from the Italian government, he stayed in Rome where he participated in the IIième Salon d’Hiver, which was held at the Margutissima Art Gallery.

Khalifé conceives his work as a metaphysical allegory and his paintings are loaded with symbols that draw the viewers into their own interpretation. He draws his inspiration mainly from Lebanese culture as well as from oriental and universal cultures. Khalifé allows himself to push his brushstrokes towards abstraction while not completely freeing them from figuration.