Beginning with the artist’s own words from what remain of annotated sketchbooks, this intimate volume journeys from Beirut through Paris to Venice, California, recording the impulses of an atypical, spellbinding character whose voice helped to shape mid and late-twentieth-century modernism.

Born in Beirut in 1931, the only daughter of the first post-independence president of Lebanon Bechara El Khoury, Huguette observed the blossoming of Lebanon’s creative and cultural scene as Beirut become a metaphorical jewel and the seat of many conjured mythologies. Following her father’s death, and now married to Frenchman Paul Caland and with three children, she completed her first painting in 1964 and informally enrolled in art and design classes at the American University in Beirut (AUB). During this formative period she began a lifelong friendship with the bold and brilliant artist, educator, gallerist, and author Helen Khal, one of the many notable friendships of her career. In 1970, Caland left Beirut for Paris and there began one of her most storied collaborations, with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin who invited her to design a series of dresses and caftans. Having relocated again to Venice, California, in 1987 she became a doyenne of the Los Angeles art scene, regularly hosting fellow artists at her home, including Larry Bell, Chris Burden, and one of her dearest comrades, Ed Moses.

For Caland, the body was an unceasing point of obsession and a centrifugal point of investigation. Lithe in outline, her art—erotic compositions on paper, expressive collages, layered self-portraits, and her celebrated ‘Bribes de corps’ paintings cumulatively manifest a composite image of a body in perpetual motion. Hers is a figure that refuses to be contained by logic or ideology, a self that is not prescribed by others but instead open to all of life’s possibilities, its people, and their interpretations.