Nabil Kanso’s haunting Echoes of War exhibition is a reminder to learn from the past.
In recent years, few solo artist exhibitions have expressed such a fervent belief in the power of art as the work of artist Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). The exhibition Echoes of War, at the MSU Broad Art Museum in Michigan, USA includes a selection of Kanso’s bulging sketchbooks, pen-and-ink drawings and large-scale oil paintings for which he has become so well known. These paintings and drawings tell stories, express pain, incite emotion, elicit empathy, stir action and also teach lessons of the human kind. In them, Kanso depicts the action, misery, loss and gloom of conflict during the long civil war that beset his native Lebanon, while other works focus on the post-2011 Syrian refugee crisis. There are also large colourful canvases depicting imagined scenes and scenarios from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the 2003 Iraq War.
These are global events and yet Echoes of War is extremely personal and palpable. The artist chose similar colours and brushmarks to capture the similitude of global conflicts and he also highlighted the cyclic nature of violence and suffering. According to the exhibition texts, through his paintings Kanso is offering viewers hope of a world without war or conflict. The range of work presented in the exhibition expresses the versatility and verve of a singular artist. Visitors might be able to imagine him determinedly scrutinising his drawings or, brush in hand halfway up a ladder, in his massive Atlanta studio, expressing all that was in his mind and heart.
Photography by Chloe Kirchmeier/MSU Broad Art Museum. Image courtesy of MSU Broad Art Museum
Kanso’s son, Daniel, comments how “one of the most frequent observations from viewers is about the light that seems to emanate from the paintings… This light, along with the expressive style of the work, allows the paintings to communicate a message of shared humanity that goes beyond the subject matter that inspired each individual work, conveying a broader call for peace and a deeper exploration into the human condition.”
On the far wall of the gallery, Birds of Prey (1991) – from Kanso’s series on Kuwait – is almost four metres long and two metres high. It depicts a sailing boat, with a long stern of the kind found in the Arabian Gulf sailing against a round, setting sun. The calm, gold and pink beauty of the sun is partly hidden from the viewer by a flock of long-winged birds that seem to swarm around the boat, awaiting their prey. In the dark water of the foreground, a drowning man is waving his hands for attention – or is he keeping the swarming birds away?
The beauty of the scene is marred by its very tragedy. The massive scale of the painting draws in and seemingly implicates the viewer, who is made to feel the powerlessness and hopelessness of the man at sea. As Daniel Kanso explains, “The exhibition’s curation and design allow viewers to come as close as possible to transporting themselves into the scenes being depicted.” What makes the exhibition so special for him and his sister Lilly, who have been tirelessly organising and promoting their father’s work since his untimely death in 2019, is that it is the first time that many of the works in the exhibition have been shown to the public.
In terms of composition and structure, Kanso’s style recalls the paintings of the medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, whose mainly religious narrative scenes are also abounding with figures, movement and symbolism. They are filled with a vitality and darkness that recall the work of Edvard Munch and the unsettling, raw energy of Francis Bacon. Kanso’s Iraq series (2004), features dark, shadowy and contorted figures, surrounded by a moving and linear landscape of abstract forms in the deep, earthy tones and crimson, which is familiar in Bacon’s work from the 1940s. These paintings are not titled, yet they represent the horrors of war and echo the violence that took place. The act of not giving them titles suggests that Kanso might have seen these as unspeakable horrors and acts to which no one has accepted responsibility.
The exhibition’s curator, Dr Rachel Winter, explains that although Kanso painted all manner of conflicts (including the Vietnam War, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and apartheid in South Africa), she chose to focus the exhibition on the Middle East. By clustering works together in a concentrated and confrontational manner she is seeking to help viewers to access the artist’s vision and ethos. “These works speak in an interesting way to how an artist was watching crises unfold,” she says, “yet he’s living far away in a country that played varying roles in these different events. I think you see these complexities in the work itself.”
It may indeed be Kanso’s frenzied longing for his homeland, and the familiarity with which he saw events in the Middle East unfolding again and again, that helps make Echoes of War such a stirring and powerful exhibition.
