Christine

Born in Beirut in 1931, Huguette Caland is an artist who, alongside Shafic Abboud and Etel Adnan, helped shaped the artistic identity of today’s Lebanon. In the late 1960s she began to paint, with humour and sensuality, parts of the body that she enlarged and expanded to arrive at an almost abstract form. Painted in 1995, Christine pictures the same model three times. Set against a patchwork-like background of decorative elements, these frontally presented nudes seem as if tattooed with lines or dots of ink or gouache. Here, the artist seems to be offering us a contemporary, feminist take on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).