Helen Khal was born in 1923 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to parents Thomas Joseph and Salma Shayboub, originally from Akkar, Lebanon. She was a painter, an art critic, and an educator. A keen reader, Helen initially wanted to become a writer, but she found her passion for fine arts, at the age of twenty-two when she was treated for tuberculosis. Helen was bedridden for six months in a sanitorium. So, she took up drawing and painting. Upon recovery, she attended weekly afternoon classes at the Baum Art School in Allentown. Soon after, Helen traveled on her first trip to Lebanon. She enrolled at the Academie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in Beirut, where she studied painting from 1946 till 1948. Founded in 1937, by Alexis Boutros, ALBA was the first national institution of higher education in Lebanon, formerly known as Association des Musiciens Amateurs (AMA). In 1943, an art department was added to it co-founded and directed by late Lebanese painter Cesar Gemayel (1898-1958).
In 1947, Helen met the man who would become her husband, Yusuf al-Khal, a Syrian-Lebanese modernist poet. The couple first moved to New York in 1948, where Helen pursued her studies in painting at the Art Students League till 1949. They relocated to Libya for two years, then returned to New York in 1952. Eventually, they settled in Lebanon in 1955 with their sons Tarik and Jawad.
Helen and Yusuf founded the first permanent art gallery in Lebanon in 1963, called Gallery One. The gallery often hosted a literary salon, which included European luminaries such as the English poet and novelist Stephen Spender and the French poet and art historian Yves Bonnefoy. The first inaugural exhibition at Gallery One, organized by Helen, showed the artworks of emerging artists, such as sculptor Michel and Alfred Basbous and painters Nadia Saikali, Yvette Achkar, Hrair Diarbekirian, Assadour Bezdikian, and Mohammad Sakr amongst others. Helen exposed new talents that would later become some of Lebanon’s leading modernists.
Helen Khal was a figurative and abstract artist. Her art was informed by the casual teachings and the artworks of her professors at ALBA; the impressionist painter Cesar Gemayel emphasized light and color and Italian fresco artist Fernando Manetti stressed on form and structure. An essential staple of training at the academy was nudes. Khal’s daily sessions drawing a nude model by the name of Mariam left an impact on the burgeoning artist. Mariam was the first nude model in Lebanon who was discovered by Cesar Gemayel. For discretion purposes, he introduced her as his maid. Mariam became central to many students’ understanding of the female body and form. In 1948, Khal produced a sequence of charcoal on paper nudes depicting Mariam, one of which shows Mariam from a top view perspective. Illustrated in black against a neutral white background, Mariam lies on the floor with loosely crossed legs and arms lifted to her forehead, almost covering her angular face and black carré hair. Khal frequently revisited the theme of Mariam and nudes but in colorful paintings executed with oil on canvas.
Given her early maternal responsibilities, Khal produced little in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Nonetheless, it was the period she arrived at her quasi-cubist style. On relatively small-scale canvases, she painted still lives, fruits, flowers, and portraits, including those of her two boys and her friend's children. Khal ventured into pictorial deconstruction.
After her divorce and separation from her children, Khal vented her anger in some abstract expressionist paintings applying paint in thick gestural strokes by brush or knife. Khal was trying to find her way after a deep sense of loss. “The compositions were generally geometric,” she says, “which evidently meant I was seeking an oasis of order in my life.” From her quasi-cubist style of transparencies to a quick stunt in expressionism, Helen softened her canvas and shifted into totally blurred figurative-abstract depictions. She applied oil paint, which always remained her favorite medium, cautiously with a fine brush.
Progressively, Khal focused on the abstract emotive power of color. She quickly found her forte in meditative color-field abstractions – ultimately her signature style. Her colorful paintings, small or medium in scale, show simple geometrical forms such as circles, rectangles, squares, or merely bars and stripes. Khal’s forms bare no symbolic connotation; they serve as containers of color and navigate via color. They are a result of multiple layers of diluted oil paint softly applied on the canvas in different directions.
Khal was an inspiring woman. She was a committed cultural activist and an advocate for the arts in Lebanon. In 1975, she traveled to the USA on a two-month tour. Her trip was sponsored by the once-thriving fine arts department at AUB, just a year before the department closed down. Khal gave lectures on contemporary art in the Middle East in twenty-two universities all over the USA. Enthused by the omnipresence of women visual artists in Lebanon, Khal completed biographical research on thirty-nine female artists in 1976. Her study was put into a book entitled The Woman Artist in Lebanon, published in 1987. She focused on twelve artists in her book of whom Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, and Yvette Achkar were her friends.
Upon the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Khal left for the United States in 1976, and remained there for two decades, visiting Lebanon occasionally to maintain her presence in the art milieu. In the USA, Khal painted and participated in some exhibitions.
As a tribute to Khal, Her dear friend and art historian, Cesar Nammour, along with Gabriella Chaub, compiled the art reviews that she had written over four decades into a volume entitled Resonances, 82 Lebanese Artists Reviewed by Helen Khal, published in 2011. Her reviews covered the works of eighty-two Lebanese visual artists. In her professional capacity, Khal became witness to the evolution of modern art in Lebanon.
After a productive life, tireless artist Helen Joseph Khal suffered from a stroke and died in 2009 in Lebanon.
Her career and the broader cultural moment she helped shape are also documented in the 2023 publication Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s, published by Sternberg Press — a volume that traces not only her artistic output but also the network of artists, writers and intellectuals around her, and the Beirut art scene of that era.