Biography
Early years and move to Argentina.
Labibeh Zogbé was born in 1890 in Sahel Alma, a coastal town of the Ottoman Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon, north of Beirut. Known as Bibi among relatives and friends, she later adopted the nickname in her professional life, when she began exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s. Zogbé came from a comfortable Maronite middle-class background and received her education at the all-girls school of the Holy Family, established in 1898 by French Catholic nuns in nearby Jounieh, a central port city close to her native town.
Zogbé’s family maintained ties to the Lebanese diaspora in Argentina, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was one of the principal destinations for the thousands of migrants who left the Levant for Europe, Africa, and the Americas, seeking to escape economic hardship and political unrest. In 1906, Zogbé’s parents arranged her marriage to Domingo Samaja, an Argentinian businessman of Lebanese descent who lived in San Juan, where the couple settled. A few years later, Zogbé became a naturalised citizen.
In the early 1920s, Zogbé and her husband travelled to Europe, where they frequented avant-garde artistic circles. In Paris, Zogbé befriended Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980), an exiled Polish painter then on the cusp of her breakthrough, when she exhibited at the Salon of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the event that catapulted Art Deco onto the global stage. Two years earlier, Lempicka had painted a sensual portrait of Zogbé titled Il Fondo Rosa (The Pink Background). She captured her fashionable friend, lost in thought, her eyes staring into nothing.
First Exhibitions in Argentina and Travels to France and Senegal
Zogbé was initially drawn to study literature, but her affiliation with artistic circles sparked her interest in painting. In the early 1930s, after the death of her son at an early age, and her subsequent separation from her husband, she committed to becoming an artist. She left San Juan for Buenos Aires, where she would live independently for the rest of her career, and took painting lessons with a Lebanese-French female painter called Shehab, and a Bulgarian painter. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place in the Argentinian capital in 1934 at the prestigious Witcomb Gallery. Its opening was attended by Agustín Pedro Justo, who then served as President of Argentina, and Italian journalist and writer Francesco Ciccotti, a noted opponent of fascism who emigrated to Argentina. He dedicated a review to her, positioning Zogbé from the outset as an artist with access to influential circles.
This first exhibition also announced the emergence of a thematic focus on flora that would characterise her entire career. Zogbé’s early compositions often depicted bouquets, later broadening by the mid-1930s to include wild and cultivated plants from Argentina and countries she had travelled to, including Lebanon. Her prolific portrayals of botanical subjects earned her the title “La Pintora de las Flores” (the flower painter) in Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries. However, this association often eclipsed her significant contributions to different genres, especially portrait and landscape painting, with a notable series of Senegalese society and nature.
‘La Pintora de las Flores’: Zogbé’s Modernism and Thematic Foci
While Zogbé’s paintings reflect affinities with early 20th century European movements, particularly Cubism’s structural deconstructions and Fauvism’s chromatic intensity, she did not adhere to any particular artistic current. Instead, she embodies a broader Modernist ethos centred on the pursuit of personal expression and formal innovation. She developed a distinctive visual idiom defined by gestural brushstrokes, flattened spatial constructions, restrained contouring, and attention to detail, even when shapes are simplified. Zogbé often painted nuanced chromatic gradations over smooth monochromatic backgrounds, emphasising the untethering of her subjects from their original context to better accentuate their distinctive form and traits boldly and directly. She painted on a wide range of scales, going from close-ups of botanical details, such as leaves, pistils, and petals, to panels several meters long whose entire surface she crammed with detailed motifs, merging anatomical dissection and ornamental design.
Zogbé conceived vegetation as expressive and alive, infusing her works with rhythm and intensity that defy stillness. She fashioned herself “the painter of the soul of plants,” which suggests an intention to impart them with metaphysical resonance. Indeed, her paintings of nature imbue flora with personality: pine needles, thistles, and cacti, for instance, appear sharp or aggressive, while roses and leaves can be warm and tender and bushes in bloom evoke hope in a manner reminiscent of the Victorian symbolism of flowers, where each species corresponded to human emotion. Likewise, Zogbé’s portraits and scenes of rural life convey emotions, attitudes, and states of mind, such as the pride, composure, and melancholy of the Senegalese women who posed for her.
The artist visited Senegal in 1936, 1937, and 1947. She painted the country’s villages, nature, and society. She participated in collective exhibitions there, including the 1937 Salon of the Société des Amis des Arts (Friends of the Arts Society). Her first trips to Dakar coincided with a stay in Paris, where she relocated temporarily following her 1934 inaugural exhibition in Buenos Aires. The Paris art milieu rapidly embraced her: in 1935, she had a personal exhibition at Galerie Charpentier, a space devoted to ancient and modern art, located on the prestigious rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, and the event earned an encouraging review from the leading French poet, novelist, and art critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945).
Zogbé returned to Buenos Aires in 1938. That year, she had another exhibition at the Witcomb Gallery. The city’s Museum of Natural Sciences commissioned her to create a 6 meter-long floral panel, an instance of official patronage that underscores her recognition in Argentina. Zogbé’s visibility extended across the Americas, with exhibitions in Brazil, Uruguay, Cuba, and the United States.
Post-World War II Travels and Lebanese Homecoming
Zogbé spent World War II in Argentina and resumed intercontinental travels in 1947. She spent some time in Paris, where she exhibited at the Maison de l’Amérique latine, an institution founded the previous year by General de Gaulle in recognition of Latin America’s contribution to the fight against Nazi Germany. She also returned to Dakar to paint and exhibit, and made a resounding homecoming to Lebanon.
In October 1947, she was the guest of honour of the Cénacle Libanais, a society founded in 1946 to promote cultural and intellectual dialogue around national identity through literature, arts, and civic engagement. The club inaugurated their yearly cycle of conferences with an homage to her by journalist Rushdi Maalouf ahead of the opening of her exhibition at the National Museum of Beirut. (The institution, dedicated to archaeology, frequently hosted temporary modern and contemporary art shows.)
Zogbé enjoyed wide recognition in Lebanese arts and culture circles, which considered her an example of Lebanese success abroad. Her works were part of a major exhibition featuring historical and contemporary Lebanese painters and sculptors, held at the UNESCO headquarters in Beirut in November 1948. The firs monograph t about her was published in Beirut in 1951 by leading Francophone poet and entrepreneur Charles Corm (1894–1963). The painter’s appreciation in Lebanon extended to official honours, as she was decorated with the medal of the National Order of the Cedar, the Republic’s highest order of merit, in 1947.
A Painter at the Centre of Argentina’s Cultural Life
Despite Zogbé’s popularity and extended web of connections in Lebanon, where she exhibited again in 1963 at the headquarters of the L’Orient newspaper, her life and art remained firmly anchored in Argentina. Her studio, nestled in Buenos Aires’s Pasaje Seaver, where she frequently hosted Sunday gatherings, was a social hub for Argentinian and émigré artists, intellectuals, and politicians. Zogbé’s circles included dancer Margarita Wallmann (1901–1992) and painter Mariette Lydis (1887–1970), poet Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) and novelist Silvina Bullrich (1915–1990), who became intimate friends of Zogbé’s, as well as painters and sculptors such as Antonio Berni (1905–1981), Raúl Soldi (1905–1994), Enrique de Larrañaga (1900–1956), and Raquel Forner (1902–1988). At one of her Sunday parties, she met Benito Quinquela Martin (1890–1977), the renowned Argentinian port painter with whom she enjoyed a close relationship for decades.
Zogbé continued to exhibit in Argentina and internationally until the 1970s, with notable shows in Washington, D.C., Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro. She passed away in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1975.
