Not on display
- Artist
- Huguette Caland 1931 – 2019
- Medium
- Ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Frame: 233 × 284 × 25 mm
support: 120 × 170 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the artist 2017
- Reference
- T15164
Summary
Flirt is a series of ten drawings in pencil on paper made in 1972. The drawings are sparse and simple line drawings, often with a single unbroken line of ink working across the paper. The drawings evoke the soft lines of the figure without identifying particular body parts. Most of Caland’s drawings are untitled and these drawings are a unique example within her work where a number of drawings are grouped under one title. They are also a rare instance in which the artist employed a more minimalist language in drawing.
The drawings were created in Paris, where Caland lived from 1970 to 1987. They anticipate the imagery of Caland’s Body Parts (Bribe de corps) series of paintings, made between 1973 and 1976 (see Body Parts 1973 [Tate T15164]). She has observed that this period was her ‘most productive time’ as a result of being socially isolated in a new city (quoted in Abillama and Tomb 2012, p.317). She has also stated that she created her most important works during these years.
Caland’s work is influenced by the Byzantine mosaics and rugs that filled her childhood home in Beirut. Her compositions are never planned ahead of time, otherwise, she has explained, ‘the emotion is gone. If a line is removed, it cannot be repeated. I cannot make drafts. I have no preconceived plans.’ (Ibid., p.318.)
Caland continued to depict the body throughout the 1970s, experimenting with colour, line and form. Her paintings are sometimes compared with the colour fields of abstract expressionism, but present a distinctive play on pictorial representation and personal abstraction. The Flirt drawings and Body Parts paintings sit within a tradition of closely cropped modernist images where unidentified body parts fill the frame with their smooth planes, creating anthropomorphic landscapes. This approach recalls the work of American photographers Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) and Edward Weston (1886–1958).
Further reading
Nour Salame Abillama and Marie Tomb, ‘Huguette Caland’, in Art from Lebanon: Modern and Contemporary Artists 1880–1975, vol.I, Beirut 2012.
Vassilis Oikonomopoulos and Clara Kim
September 2017
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