Gibran Khalil Gibran, the painter of celebrities…and paintings that are objected to for the first time

Gibran did not give up, but rather found in the fire a motive and incentive. In a letter to his friend, the poet Josephine Peabody, he says optimistically: “It is true, my love, that years of love were lost in the fire, but do not be sad, there may be something beautiful and unknown behind it.” Beauty flowed abundantly, so Gibran picked up his brush and plunged into his struggle with colors, to the point that “the number of paintings he painted exceeded 700 paintings, most of which are in his museum in Lebanon, and their number is 440 paintings. Of the paintings in the museum, only 170 have been displayed so far, and there are still 270 paintings not displayed,” according to what the director of the Gibran Museum, Joseph Geagea, tells us.
Returning to the current exhibition, Geagea explains that the paintings are “portraits of celebrities whom Gibran met and visited in his studio in New York, and some of whom influenced Gibran, his art and his writings. The most prominent of these figures are the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and Abdul-Baha, the son of the founder of the Baha’i faith, who is considered the ideal of the Baha’i faith and its guardian and publisher, and who was visiting New York to introduce people to the teachings of the Baha’i faith. The paintings also include portraits of the American poet Leonora Speyer, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book was decorated with a drawing of Gibran, and a portrait of the American writer Charlotte Teller, among others.” These paintings were painted during Gibran’s stay in New York between 1912 and 1931, noting that most of these paintings were painted between 1912 and 1918, and some of them were dated by Gibran himself.
The reason these paintings have not been displayed for all this time is due to “not knowing their owners. However, our ongoing research, and the organization of two exhibitions last year in New York, the first in the United Nations building and the second in the Drawing Center in Manhattan, on the occasion of the centenary of the publication of “The Prophet,” are all factors that combined and helped us discover the identity of the people in the portraits,” according to Geagea, who points out that the identity of a number of people painted by Gibran is unknown. “We still don’t know the owners of half of the portraits, and the lack of space and the need for additional rooms and halls, despite the Gibran Museum extending over three floors, are among the reasons that have not yet allowed us to reveal Gibran’s paintings that have not been displayed yet,” which, as we mentioned, number 270.