Woman and Head of Christ

Woman and Head of Christ was completed in 1921 by the renowned Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931). Drawn on paper with graphite pencil, it was exhibited at the Vrej Baghoomian Gallery in 1989 and was likely completed in New York or Boston, years after Gibran first emigrated to America to escape Ottoman-occupied Syria. It was donated to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1968 by the poet and translator Alice Raphael Eckstein, “A.R.E,” to whom Gibran signs the sketch on the bottom right corner. The 21.3 × 15.1 cm sketch depicts a woman, an idealized nude, seemingly seated in front of a head––resembling the figure of Christ––that looms over her shoulder. The woman sits with both legs angled towards the left, her torso erect and facing the viewer. Straining her neck upwards towards him, her expression is one of ecstasy. The sketch is undecorated, in line with Gibran’s essentially symbolist style. The woman’s non-finito quality and Christ’s own disembodiment creates the impression of unity between the figures. 

Working mainly in charcoal, pencil and watercolours, Gibran’s visual art is characterized by subtle gradation and soft, fluid forms reminiscent of sculpture. Creating a dreamlike atmosphere, Gibran’s gradation is notably darker around Christ’s obscure expression, his eyes only a vague impression on the page. The change suggests a metaphysical divide between the body of the woman and the disembodied head—a divide that recalls the mystical dialectic of truth and veil, concealment and revelation, existence and non-existence. In the fashion of the Mahjari poets, Gibran was deeply engaged with the Sufi poetic canon, lifting its allusive figures and romantic vocabulary out of a premodern past, and translating them into the living present. Emerging just before Gibran commits to finishing The Prophet (1923), Woman and Head of Christ provokes us to reconsider the reception of Sufi ideas in Gibran’s visual practice—a practice that retains a style of secular devotion. 

Sources:

Arslane, Ghazouane. Gibran Khalil Gibran As Arab World Literature. Edinburgh Studies In Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024. 

Bushrui, Suheil B, Joe Jenkins, and Kathleen Raine. Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet: a New Biography. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998.

Gibran, Kahlil, and Aram Saroyan. Kahlil Gibran: Paintings & Drawings, 1905-1930. New York: Vrej Baghoomian, 1989. 

Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Vintage Classics, 2013.