Culture

In our previous article, we reviewed Gibran’s life. In this second installment, we explore several facets of the thinker: the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gibran the rebel, and his role as a precursor of Lebanese nationalism. “I am a son of earth and sky. The forest is my church, the field my sanctuary, and the stars my companions in meditation.” Gibran Khalil Gibran “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss .” Friedrich Nietzsche During his stay in Paris, Gibran discovered Nietzsche, a revelation that profoundly transformed both his thought and his style. He moved from a melancholic, nostalgic poet to a thundering prophetic voice. His writing became aphoristic, prophetic, and powerful.

An exceptional artistic return by Lebanese visual artist Walid Raad, after forty years or so spent in New York, to exhibit his work once again at the Venice Biennale, then at the Festival d'Automne in Paris. A major exhibition that opens with the "inverted chassis" of a Volkswagen Beetle, in an avant-garde visual art space rich with inventive ideas born from the shaping of imaginaries, denouncing the organisation of wars and new bombs, without any faltering in the balance or mechanisms of conception. It is an art that weaves the play of ideas with fictional archives around the geopolitics of the Middle East and the "war market" — a market that endures on the terrain of artistic competition, allowing the best to triumph illusorily in the invention of imaginaries, imaginaries distinguished by a poetic irony constructed in the gaps of Lebanese memory.

“I am but a small cloud drifting across the sky, knowing neither where it goes nor whence it came.” Some souls defy every border and elude every label. Gibran Khalil Gibran was one of them. At once celebrated and strangely insufficiently known, he remains among the most compelling figures of the twentieth century. Born in Lebanon, he came of age amid the restless energy of Boston and New York City. Through his work, Gibran quietly disproved Rudyard Kipling’s famous assertion that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In his life and writing, he embodied both the spiritual depth of the East and the rational modernity of the West.

At the Grand Palais, a rare exhibition of exceptional scope, bringing together more than three hundred works from international collections, explores until 26 July the final thirteen years of Henri Matisse. Far from an epilogue, it reveals a moment of intensity in which, constrained by illness, the artist entirely reinvents his language. Paintings, drawings, books, textiles, stained glass and cut gouaches compose a journey conceived as a living studio: that of a man who, at the edge of the end, chooses to open himself still further. There are exhibitions that open like doors, and then there are those that impose themselves more slowly, almost quietly, until they displace something older than the gaze itself: a manner of holding time, a dense and profound way of standing upright before it, in its slowness as in its light.

Nabil Nahas, a leading figure in Lebanese-American contemporary art, is currently at the center of the international art scene. He has been officially selected to represent Lebanon at the upcoming Venice Biennale, which will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Nabil Nahas occupies a singular position within the contemporary art landscape. He is one of the few artists to have achieved a distinctive synthesis between radical American abstraction and an Eastern sensibility deeply rooted in nature and spirituality. The exhibition, titled Don’t Get Me Wrong , is curated by Nada Ghandour, curator and commissioner, in collaboration with the Lebanese Visual Art Association (LVAA). It will take place at the Arsenale (Sala d’Armi), one of the most prestigious venues of the Venice Biennale.

Moustafa Farroukh ranks among the leading pioneers of modern Lebanese painting and played a major role in shaping the country’s artistic landscape. He was born in 1901 in the modest Basta neighborhood of Beirut, into a Sunni family, and died in 1957. From an early age, he was encouraged and trained in the studio of the modernist painter Habib Srour. In 1927, he left Beirut for Rome, where he studied at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti (San Luca), graduating the same year. He later continued his training in Paris, notably under Paul Émile Chabas, then president of the Société des artistes français. He began exhibiting in major artistic events, including the Paris Salons, the Rome Biennale, and later in Venice, New York, and Beirut.

A key institutional figure and a major painter, César Gemayel stands as one of the pillars of modern painting in Lebanon. His career is defined by a transition from rigid, static academicism to a more sensuous and Oriental form of expression. He helped shift Lebanese art from purely religious or documentary forms toward a more personal expression, transforming traditional Lebanese forms of art into a modern visual language shaped by Impressionist and Parisian influences. The Man César Gemayel was born on February 9, 1898, in Aïn el-Touffaha, a small village in Mount Lebanon near Bikfaya, then under Ottoman Empire, into a family of notable standing.

As noted in our previous article, the four pioneers of modern Lebanese painting – Khalil Saleeby, Omar Onsi, César Gemayel, and Mustafa Farroukh – imbued Western Impressionism with a distinctly Lebanese and Eastern spirit. Omar Onsi, a leading figure in modern Lebanese painting, is distinguished by his mastery of transparency and light. By working primarily in watercolor, he captured the poetic essence of Lebanon’s mountaintops and its natural landscapes. Influenced by Monet, Onsi abandoned the use of black, instead rendering shadows in deep blues and purples. Painting outdoors, his exceptional command of light earned him the nickname “Lebanon’s master of light.”

It was while walking the streets of my neighborhood that I stumbled upon one of the most unusual sights: an accordionist playing for no one and for everyone. To offer a moment of happiness in a country seemingly enamored with violence. He seeks neither money nor attention. He plays to share the magic of music with those who can still feel it. Thomas Kassis. That's his name. The one his adoptive parents gave him after he was moved from one foster home to another, those who finally chose to keep him. His biological parents? He doesn't know them. Thomas also works in construction, a sector hard hit by the current situation. But it is with his accordion that he lives a true love story. A passionate love story that began to blossom in 2017.

The year 2026 marks the centenary of the death of Claude Monet, one of the founding figures of Impressionism. It was, after all, one of his paintings – Impression, Sunrise (Impression soleil levant) – that lent the movement its name. Impressionism emerged in France in the 1870s, carried by artists such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro. Breaking with the rigid rules of the Academy, the Impressionists moved away from the idea of rendering the “subject” with polished perfection. Instead, they sought to capture light, the fleeting moments, and the impression that a scene or model conveys. They embraced a spontaneous, unfiltered vision of the world, stripped of hierarchy – characterized by fragmented touches, swift, visible brushstrokes, and an intensive use of color, in which even shadows shimmered with hues of blue or violet rather than of black.