Kahlil Gibran (sculptor)

Kahlil G. Gibran (`ka-lil jə-ˈbrän) (November 29, 1922 – April 13, 2008), sometimes known as "Kahlil George Gibran" (note the artist's preferred Americanized spelling of his first name), was a Lebanese American painter and sculptor from Boston, Massachusetts.

A student of the painter Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibran first received acclaim as a magic realist painter in the late 1940s when he exhibited with other emerging artists later known as the "Boston Expressionists".

Called a "master of materials", as both artist and restorer, Gibran turned to sculpture in the mid-fifties.

Gibran entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1940.

He was offered a full scholarship if he concentrated on sculpture.

However, he chose a partial scholarship given by the painting department where he studied with Karl Zerbe.

The experience shaped his career.

“It was an atelier", he recalled. “They let us develop our own vision while grounding us in the fundamentals – drawing, anatomy, techniques, and materials".

Winner of The Boit Summer Competition in 1942, the young artist soon was recognized as a master of diverse materials.

He was known as jittery Gibran for prodigious production fueled by an abundance of nervous energy and for his deep concern that he not be a burden to his family.

In 1943, shortly after his study for a mural Entrée á Paradis was awarded the Karl Zerbe prize, he left school in order to apprentice at several craft-related organizations.

For a period during World War II, he served as draftsman at Harvard's Underwater Sound Laboratory.

Later his carving skills led him to work for Martin Heiligmann, a gilder of fine objects and frames.

Finding a Joy Street studio on Beacon Hill, he also started to work for Boris Mirski whose Charles Street Gallery was attracting Boston artists and collectors.

Word of the young artist's talent spread, and Gibran briefly honed his skills at the Conservation Laboratory of Harvard University's Fogg Museum.

He finally located a studio at 15 Fayette Street in Boston's Bay Village, where he settled in as a freelancer, restoring and repairing fine art objects during the day, and painting at night.

Shortly after moving, he met sculptor and conservator Morton C. Bradley.

The two would maintain a lifelong friendship.

Gibran first displayed original creative work at Boris Mirski's Charles Street Gallery in 1944.

A January 1946 review of his pictures at the Stuart Art Gallery, introduced him to Boston's art world: “Mr.

Gibran is in his early twenties.

... He is a mystic and seeks a symbolism which can convey transcendent ideas... a romantic of the artistic clan of Redon.

In another Stuart Art Gallery exhibit, Study of a Head by Kahlil Gibran was described as “the tenuous enterprise of another young Boston mystic". Soon his paintings appeared at Symphony Hall, along with panels by his mentor Karl Zerbe in a selection of work by contemporary artists titled Fantasy in Art. One reviewer wrote: “There are also among these fantasts, visionary artists who perceive images in tenuous dreamlike mists... The portrait for example by Kahlil Gibran".

By June 1947, a New York Times review of paintings he exhibited at Jacques Seligmann's gallery in the group show, Artists Under 25, acknowledged his efforts with the brief but laudatory comment, “Kahlil Gibran works subtly and effectively in encaustic". Five months later, Boston's Institute of Modern Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) featured works “carefully chosen from the recent production of notable artists in Massachusetts".

Exhibitors included Karl Knaths, Edward Hopper and Edwin Dickinson along with younger Boston artists.

ART news published a John Brook portrait of eleven Boston painters including Karl Zerbe, Reed Champion, Ture Bengtz, Giglio Dante, Maud Morgan, and Lawrence Kupferman.

The photograph shows a serious and pensive Gibran in profile seated on a ladder near the painter Esther Geller.

In her review of this seminal show, Dorothy Adlow, wrote in the Christian Science Monitor: “Kahlil Gibran, who like Mr.David Aronson is 24 years old, paints a Pietà in oil with remarkable technical adaptation of pigment". And later, when the Pietà was exhibited in a March, 1948 Artists’ Equity show, this critic heralded it as “one of the more distinguished pictures painted in Boston in recent years".

Within a year, his identity as a “visionary” with great technique was spreading.

In 1972, in an effort to separate his identity from his famous relative and namesake, the author of The Prophet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, who was cousin both to his father Nicholas Gibran and his mother Rose Gibran, the sculptor co-authored with his wife Jean a biography of the poet entitled Kahlil Gibran His Life And World.

Gibran is known for multiple skills, including painting; wood, wax, and stone carving; welding; and instrument making.

Gibran aspired to be an artist since he was seven.

The third of five children, he was inspired by his namesake cousin and godfather, the poet Gibran Khalil Gibran.

Related to the author on both sides of his family, he was nurtured by his Lebanese immigrant family in Boston.

Gibran spent hours in his father's woodworking workshop.

From his cabinet-maker father, he learned about instrument making and helped fashion stringed instruments, including a miniature violin that he treasured all his life.

Gibran lived in what is now Chinatown, Boston, and attended local public schools.

As a boy, he frequented the Denison House where he occasionally would see social worker Amelia Earhart drive up in her famous yellow roadster.

He regularly visited the local public library and enjoyed crafting exotic objects like the scimitar in Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum or the guillotine from Tale of Two Cities.

At eleven, he received Honorable Mention in a national soap-carving contest, and during his senior year at English High School, was awarded the Lawrence Prize for Art.