Huguette Caland, the late Lebanese artist known for her buoyant abstractions of body parts, had to wait until she was 33 years old to act on her desire to be a painter. Born in Beirut in 1931 to a political, pro–Lebanese independence family, she was expected to marry and have babies (which she did, though she married a Frenchman, the nephew of her father’s political opponent, and they both took lovers), and to generally play the part of the cosmopolitan wife. Being an artist? Impossible, she thought. But after the death of her father, Bechara el-Khoury, the first president of an independent Lebanon, she saw her opening for a new kind of life. She enrolled in the American University in Beirut, paintbrush in hand, and was hooked. She made her first painting, 1964’s Red Sun, a canvas soaked

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