Helen Khal

Helen Khal was born in Pennsylvania to Lebanese emigrant parents from Tripoli and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York before moving to Beirut in 1946 to attend the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). In 1963, with her husband, the poet Yusuf al-Khal, she co-founded Gallery One, Lebanon's first permanent commercial modern art gallery.

Khal's delicate, meditative color-field paintings explored the subtle emotional resonances of translucent geometric planes of color. She was also the foremost English-language art critic in the Middle East, authoring The Woman Artist in Lebanon (1987), the pioneering scholarly study documenting the central role of female artists in modern Arab culture.