PLATES

ON THE ART OF KAHLIL GIBRAN

“The lives of former generations are a lesson to posterity.” This quotation from the volume which is currently accepted as the masterpiece of ancient Arabic literature, The Thousand and One Nights, serves in a slightly paraphrased form as a fitting introduction to the work of the most authoritative artist and poet of modern Arabia—Kahlil Gibran.

In the near East there are over a hundred million whose native language is Arabic and the poetry of Gibran has become so incorporated with the national traditions of these people that one is not quoting lightly in saying that “the works of the present generation are a lesson to posterity.” But Gibran the poet, who has been known to the Arabian world of letters as poet, critic and historian for twenty-four years, has already been introduced to the English reading public by his book “The Madman,” a collection of poems and parables, some translated by him for his own works in Arabic and others written directly in English with an admirable fluency and command of the Western tongue.

It is Gibran the painter whose drawings are now being brought to the attention of his American audience and the following interpretation of his art will perhaps serve as a clue to the ever entrancing mystery of the harmonies and dissonances which exist between the East and the West.

Kahlil Gibran was born in Mt. Lebanon and although he has deliberately chosen to identify himself with the new world and its surging problems, his affiliations with Syria form such a vital part of his life that in this instance it seems as if the links between the old world and the new were admirably forged and adequately tempered. Despite the fact that he feels himself to be essentially a Syrian and that he is acclaimed as the authoritative spokesman for the Arabic people in the allied arts, Gibran belongs to the world outside of nationalistic interests and his art is a product of a deep sympathy with the problems which constitute the moving current of life in all nations and throughout all ages. His poetry is a blend of ancient imagery coupled with the poignant irony of modern introspection, and his painting is also a product of the abundant phantasies of the Orient set forth with as scrupulous a perfection of technique as the West has ever produced.

It is this blend of the poet and the painter which makes his work stand apart from the modern poetry of the East which we have come to know in the work of Tagore for instance, and which separates his painting from the traditional conception of Oriental art. For Gibran, in spite of his filial allegiance to Syria, is a citizen of the land of Cosmopolis—that ever moving realm, somewhat like the fabled island of Atlantis, which belongs to all times and to no particular place; so that Gibran, besides being the most widely read poet of modern Arabia, is also closely affiliated with Paris. There he worked with Rodin and he exhibited at the Salon a series of portraits, which included Debussy, Rostand, Sarah Bernhardt, and Rodin himself, who said: “I know of no one else in whom drawing and poetry are so linked together as to make him a new Blake.”