Kahlil Gibran came of age in Boston at the height of the American Pictorialist photography movement — and the encounter shaped his art in ways that are rarely discussed. This essay by scholar Eva María Ayala Canseco traces the profound influence of Fred Holland Day, the Boston philanthropist and photography pioneer who first opened the young Gibran's eyes to light.
By Eva María Ayala Canseco · Republished by the Kahlil Gibran Collective · 3 April 2014
The following essay was written by Eva María Ayala Canseco and originally published at gibrankgibran.org. We republish it here with acknowledgement to the author as an important contribution to the study of Gibran's visual art and its influences.
When Gibran Kahlil Gibran and his family arrived in the United States from Lebanon, they encountered a nation in the midst of an industrial boom. The city in which they would settle was Boston — the scene of great historical events in American life. Florence Pierce, the young Kahlil's teacher, recognised his exceptionally precocious talents and sought to guide his education. It was then that Gibran made the acquaintance of Fred Holland Day (1864–1933): philanthropist, publisher, and leader of the American Pictorialist photography movement, who took the young artist under his wing and introduced him to a world he would conquer with his charisma and talent — that of the opulent Boston intelligentsia.
In the "American Athens," master and pupil enriched each other's creative facets. Day helped the young artist financially and guided his reading in ways that would later shape his work profoundly. The young Lebanese artist soon became the subject of numerous portraits, and his drawings illustrated some of Day's best-known publications.
In the Gibran collection of the Fundación Carlos Slim there is a remarkable sampling of photographs by great artists including Day, Frederick H. Evans, Edward Steichen, and George W. Harting — executed in the noblest of Pictorialist techniques, the platinum print or platinotype. They recall a world in which the most revolutionary scientific and technological advances coexisted with currents of oriental and classical thought, and even with spiritualism.
"We take delight to-day in subtler gradations, in semi and quarter tones, the losing of forms in mystic shadows… Grey is the colour of modern life."
— Sadakichi Hartmann, The Whistler Book
In 1880, the first commercial cameras began to go on sale — becoming popular, owing to the cost of materials, only among the wealthier sectors of society. On both sides of the Atlantic, clubs of amateur photographers sought recognition for their artistic talents.
For the Pictorialists, the work was composition and study: the careful arrangement of the scene, the prolonged study of models, the search for symbolic representation, and exhaustive darkroom experimentation with techniques and supports. The initial academic style proved somewhat stiff and rigid. Among certain artists — especially in France and Great Britain — there developed a contrasting trend of evoking poetic impressionism. Rather than following the contemporary French movement, American photographers turned toward the pictorial tradition and added elements of symbolism: the exploration of inner life, and ornamental and allegorical aspects woven into the formal language of tonalism.
Pictorialism developed in open conflict with the advertising of the Eastman Kodak Company that led amateurs to acquire photographic equipment under the slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest." It was the first movement to attempt to distinguish artistic photography from that of amateurs.
Two publications were decisive in shaping its philosophy: Pictorial Effect in Photography: being hints on composition and chiaroscuro for photographers (1869), and Naturalistic Photography (1889). The latter drew on the most advanced studies in optics to offer advice on achieving out-of-focus effects. Its author, Peter Henry Emerson, recommended using special lenses, though he warned that "the so-called 'fuzziness' must not be carried to the length of destroying the structure of any object, otherwise it becomes noticeable… and is then just as harmful as excessive sharpness would be."
In the Mexican collection there are at least ten magnificent platinum prints. One of the works most appreciated by Gibran was the portrait of the poet and dramatist Josephine Preston Peabody (1874–1922). The young Gibran was enamoured of Peabody's beauty and drawn to her by intellectual affinity. The portrait is charged with the mystery and eroticism that characterised all the work of Fred Holland Day. The semitones of the subject's clothing are rendered with a sfumato effect that recalls the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Captured in a nighttime setting, the subject crosses her hands in front of herself as her face and right eye emerge from amidst grey tones. The form of her left eye can only be guessed at in the darkness. This sort of prophetic gaze was common in the work of the Pictorialists — as for example in Solitude by Fred Holland Day, which Edward Steichen (1879–1973) exhibited at the Salon du Champs-de-Mars in Paris in 1901.
In 1902, Gibran and Day met again in Boston. Gibran had returned from Lebanon owing to illness and the death of his sister Sultana, while the photographer was back from Europe where he had exhibited his work. Day had also brought an emblematic photograph with him: F. H. Day in Algerian Costume, taken by Evans — the most prominent English artist working in photography and a member of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, the most important British photographers' association of the era.
The photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn described the circumstances in which the portrait was made:
"Holland Day had been to Algiers to make some 'native' photographs and he returned with a number of Arabic costumes, and so one evening we dressed up in some of them and went to call on Evans. There were then, as always, many foreigners in their native costumes walking the streets of London, and so no one paid the slightest attention to us, but Evans's housekeeper nearly fainted away when she opened the door and beheld us. Evans however rose to the occasion and did the obvious and entirely correct thing — he photographed us!"
The story reveals Day's fondness for stage settings. The philanthropist, avid for universality, enjoyed re-creating different paradises: now the Middle East, now the Middle Ages, Africa, or utopian Arcadia. In spite of the fantastical ambience that surrounded Day, when Gibran returned to Boston from two years in Paris in 1910, he found the city too slow and "full of silences." He decided to move to New York City, where he met George W. Harting (1877–1958), a founding member of the Pictorialist Photographers of America.
The Lebanese writer posed for Harting on several occasions. The photographs capture him with an insouciant air: in a painter's smock, in Arab garb, smoking a cigarette, playing the violin. Gibran inhabited the mystical and spiritual world of Pictorialism with fascination, and his paintings reflect its motifs: ethereal nudes, nebulous faces, forms that in their very lack of definition offer glimpses of symbolic and subjective truths. Thanks to Fred Holland Day, Gibran's work represents the unusual case of painting receiving the influence of symbolism by way of photography.
The Boston philanthropist warned against the perils of technology and called on artists to remain outside "the bastions of materialism." His pupil shared with him a faith in the universality of humankind and, although Gibran constructed his own creative destiny, he addressed his mentor with lasting affection:
"You, dear Brother, who first opened the eyes of my childhood to light."
— Kahlil Gibran, in correspondence with Fred Holland Day
Kahlil Gibran in Middle Eastern costume with leopard skin and staff, photographed by F. Holland Day, ca. 1898. Platinum print.
F. Holland Day, ca. 1898. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Louise Imogen Guiney Collection. No known restrictions on publication.
Essay by Eva María Ayala Canseco. Originally published at gibrankgibran.org. Republished by the Kahlil Gibran Collective, 2014, with acknowledgement to the author.
All Rights Reserved © Copyright Kahlil Gibran Collective 2014
