Twenty Drawings

"It is this blend of the poet and the painter which makes his work stand apart from the modern poetry of the East which we have come to know in the work of Tagore for instance, and which separates his painting from the traditional conception of Oriental art. For Gibran, in spite of his filial allegiance to Syria, is a citizen of the land of Cosmopolis -that ever moving realm, somewhat like the fabled island of Atlantis, which belongs to all times and to no particular place; so that Gibran, besides being the most widely read poet of modern Arabia, is also closely affiliated with Paris.""Kahlil Gibran is one of the artists who are engaged in the struggle between the old and the new, or as in other times, the conflict was termed, the oscillation between the classic and the romantic tendencies in art. As a poet, he is a Romanticist, moving abreast the times and incorporating the keenly analytic spirit of our age into the ancient parable or the simple form of rhythmic prose. But in painting he is a Classicist and his work owes more to the findings of da Vinci than it does to any of our modern insurgents. Thus Gibran is also caught in the struggle which is the besetting problem of the world today, the reconstruction of an era which will adjust the imperishable legacy of the old world, the classic traditions, with the ever evolving, fluctuating tendencies in art which constitute the essence of true Romanticism." -Alice Raphael