A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran

About

A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran is the first comprehensive exhibition of Kahlil Gibran’s drawings in the United States. Best known in the United States as the prolific poet and essayist who authored the 1923 publication The Prophet, Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran viewed himself equally as an artist, producing paintings, watercolors, sketches, illustrations, book covers, and other visual material as a complement to his written work. In his writing, Gibran broke with the rigid conventions of traditional Arabic poetry and literary prose, and his non-sectarian approach, which combined elements of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Jungian psychology, was a revelation to Arabic-speaking and immigrant communities in the United States. Gibran took a similar approach in his visual art, practicing an idiosyncratic fusion of symbolist pantheism and spiritual mysticism to create a uniquely egalitarian, universalist aesthetic. A Greater Beauty will present an overview of Gibran’s drawings and sketches alongside manuscript pages, notebooks, correspondence, magazine illustrations, and first edition publications, providing a glimpse into the artist’s production in the context of his work as a whole.

​A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran is organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator, with Isabella Kapur, Curatorial Associate, and Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art, University of California, Berkeley.