We have become remarkably good at watching war. It floods our screens sandwiched between entertainment and advertisement, competes for the same attention as everything else, and loses. Never have we had such constant exposure to human suffering, yet it has become increasingly difficult for many to truly absorb it. Perhaps we need art to do what the news cannot: to put us inside the experience rather than in front of it.
Long before social media or the 24-hour news cycle, Lebanese-American artist Nabil Kanso dedicated his career to attempting to restore humanity being threatened by endless images of violence. He believed that constant exposure to war desensitised us to it, and his paintings attempt the opposite. Rather than documenting conflict alone, they immerse viewers in the lives unfolding within it.
Born in Beirut in 1940, Kanso dedicated his life to painting humanity at its breaking point. After studying in London, he settled in New York in 1966, earning degrees in political science and art history before committing himself entirely to painting. From there, and later from his studio in Atlanta, Georgia, he spent the next five decades building the monumental body of work that established him as one of the most important painters of the modern Arab world.
From Vietnam and Japan to Lebanon, South Africa and El Salvador, he confronted war in all its brutality, and all its light. Lebanon remained his deepest preoccupation. It was also the last place to reckon with his work.
It has taken Lebanon seven years since his death for Kanso to receive his first major solo exhibition in the country of his birth, yet his paintings feel less like history than a conversation with the present. Darkness and Light, presented by the Dalloul Artist Collective arrives at a moment when the world Kanso spent his life painting feels eerily familiar, almost as though he is still here and painted the world we are living in now. This is especially striking in Leaves from the Theatre of War, with drawings of grotesque leaders, indifferent power brokers, grinning newscasters puppeteering public opinion, political circus shows and ordinary people caught in the crossfire.
It sounds impossible that paintings filled with war, death and devastation could leave viewers feeling hopeful, but in Kanso’s work, there is always light. “Despite the darkness, despite the brutality – which he gives you fully and completely – when you look at the paintings, you see light emanating,” Daniel Kanso, the artist’s son, tells The National.
Daniel is co-curating the exhibition with Basel Dalloul, founder and managing director of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.
The Split of Life is Kanso's fundamental project, consisting of 88 oil paintings, created over a 20-year timespan; the works in the series move through Vietnam, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria and other areas of conflict, and in every one of them, without exception, hope persists. Whether it's his use of colour, symbols of regeneration, or female figures reaching towards a glowing white light of peace, there is always hope. “This is an artist who felt the effects of war himself very deeply, but who believed that we could overcome this,” Daniel says.
To describe Kanso as a war painter is to misunderstand his work entirely. In Daniel’s words: “It's not only the battlefield, it's also the elements that make us human, the things that compel us towards war, the cost of war, the effects of war and how we’re changed. We’re not the same as when we went in.”
The canvases are populated not only by soldiers, but also by mothers, lovers, musicians, children and the pregnant women who recur throughout Kanso's work. “The woman is the strongest figure,” Daniel adds. She is not a bystander but a force of resistance, often positioned as a guardian of life itself even as violence unfolds around her.
Some of Kanso's work collapses space and time, in another work in Leaves from the Theatre of War, he places Cain and Abel alongside modern conflict to suggest that war is not a series of isolated events but a recurring condition of humanity. But the true antagonist of his work was never war alone. It was indifference.
Kanso’s greatest fear was the human capacity to ignore and dismiss suffering as someone else's problem. “Because how can you see what's going on in the world and turn your back as though it doesn't affect you?” Daniel asks. Whether in the US, where war is largely viewed as happening elsewhere, or even in Lebanon, where proximity offered no guarantee of empathy, this was the greatest darkness to the artist.
“The message that he's sending is that you can't ignore this,” his son continues. “This is affecting us as humanity, and if we choose to see it as something that's not part of our lives, that is the darkness. And the light is that it's in all of us, that there is something that should reject this, that war is completely unnatural.”
Kanso’s tagline, “Producing art in the face of war, cruelty and indifference”, is what drove him to continue painting monumental canvases long after it became clear they brought little commercial reward. “He was working without selling his work,” Daniel explains. “He staged exhibitions for a purpose, not for a commercial idea.”
Kanso, he says, devoted himself entirely to painting and refused to compromise his practice for the market, a commitment that demanded significant sacrifices from both him and his family. After all, “you're not going to hang a mural like that in your house”, Daniel says with a laugh. “But you're not supposed to.”
When asked whether he ever felt resentment towards Lebanon for taking so long to give his father the stage he deserved, Daniel says: “When I was young, I didn't really understand it.” The Civil War had shattered the country's cultural infrastructure, and Kanso's monumental paintings required a space capable of presenting them as intended.
“Part of it was also a reticence to confront these things directly. You see that in so many societies after war and destruction, particularly civil war, you just want to move on. You don't want to address it. But if you do that, the wounds don't heal. You have to have this confrontation, this conversation, a dialogue that hopefully brings people together and allows you to actually heal.”
His father's love for Lebanon never broke, no matter what it put him through. “He had such a romantic view of it,” Daniel says. “He'd always talk about his childhood – coming from a Druze family, living between the Shouf and Beirut, the beauty of nature, the food, the warmth. The fact that when he grew up, it didn't matter what religion you were or where you were from. He always held on to that.”
Part of the delay was also his own doing. Kanso was uncompromising. “If you told him he could show just one of his paintings here, he would say no, and he did say no. He wanted to have the show the way that he wanted it to be, where you could have the immersive environment, and you could truly see his work. So he did hold out for that,” Daniel says.
“He believed that eventually he would be able to do it the way he thought it needed to be done.” And he was right. Through the Nabil Kanso Estate, which Daniel and his sister Lilly established following their father's death in 2019, that vision is finally being realised. “Lilly and I have the same mentality that he had of trying to do justice to the work.”
In Beirut, at last, they are doing exactly that.
Darkness and Light by Nabil Kanso is running at the Dalloul Artist Collective in Beirut until September 19
