The wild, wonderful life and art of Huguette Caland at the Hammer Museum

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Set us as preferred In Philippe Caland’s semi-autobiographical 2003 film “Hollywood Buddha,” his mother, Huguette Caland, plays herself.Wearing her signature white smock, inscribed with a flurry of painted swirls, circles, letters and cross-stitches, the Lebanese artist makes precise gray-blue lines on a canvas spread across her dining room table as her son laments a fickle movie industry.Filmed in her Venice home, the scene, her three children agree, was true to life.

Caland worked constantly: on stretched canvas, on fabric folded in her lap, on a children’s menu, on the wall of her kitchen, or the sleeve of her smock.Whatever was at hand.“Of course it could be frustrating,” said her daughter Brigitte, an elegant, soft-spoken scholar of Semitic languages who has managed Caland’s estate since her death in 2019.Sitting in that very home, which Caland had built in 1997, Brigitte recalled the many times her mother invited her over only to continue working as they talked.

“I’d go to leave, and she’d put the canvas away, beg me to come back, and as soon as I did, she’d start painting again.” Still, from early on, Brigitte understood the compulsion as evidence of her mother’s resolve.“She had this incredible drive to create.”“Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines,” opening Sunday at the Hammer Museum, traces that relentless drive across nearly 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, garments and tapestries.

Organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the show comes to Los Angeles as the largest Caland survey in the country to date.Spanning five decades and installed chronologically, it features work from the 26 years she spent immersed in Venice’s creative community even as her practice was largely ignored.It was Caland�...