Practice
Fahrelnissa Zeid’s single-mindedness allowed her to develop an innovative and prolific oeuvre over 50 years. She was a swift worker, deploying so much energy that she could quickly produce works requiring considerable intensity and explore new styles almost simultaneously.
Her output characterises an Abstract Expressionist approach. She transposed the turmoil of her shifting moods onto her canvas with intense all-overs. Her works are recognisable for their Fauvist colour choices, contrasts of forms, unique combinations of small jarring motifs with vigorous gestural dynamics, minute palette knife incisions on impastoed surfaces, pulsating black lines, and fragmentation of planes.
Zeid is also known for the monumental sizes of many of her works, realised by tacking the canvas onto the walls and painting them back and forth. She is the only mid-20th century painter to work on monumental canvases regularly. From the 1940s, Zeid favoured large formats, averaging two metres, and, until the mid-1960s, produced works over five metres in length. Her largest painting is her 1949 Voyage of the Man Moon 600 x 160 cm. Still, as art critic Terence Mulally noted, size seems irrelevant; it is so subtle in her actual practice of painting, persuasive in her vision, and extraordinary in her ability to speak through colour.
Zeid started her career as a prolific expressionist figurative painter in the early 1940s. Her works span symbolist tableaux, portraits, nudes, cityscapes, and busy flat perspective interiors, all rendered in saturated colours, thick impastos, black contours, and tightly controlled small motifs.
After a 1947 –1948 transitional period of mixed figurative and abstract symbolist scenes and landscapes suffused with diagonal black grids, she adopted abstraction exclusively for over a decade in mid-1949.
Her abstract period went through several stylistic phases: First, it was an experimental period of receding aerial views of geometrically abstracted agricultural fields traversed by black lines.
Between 1951 and 1953, Fahrelnissa Zeid experimented with a few abstracts of loosely undulating biomorphic vortexes. After gaining assurance, she transfigured her earlier terrain abstractions into mural-sized multicolour murmurations rhythmed by compositional subdivisions that foreshadowed Op-art.
This output owes much to her lifelong inspiration from Vassily Kandinsky’s spiritualist theorisation of abstract art, in which she recognised her approach and articulation of her exalted state of mind while working. This interest may be traced to the 1951 launch of a new French translation of his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), at the opening of her second Paris exhibition. Works she produced during that period illustrate some of Kandinsky’s prescriptions: Rhythm, ‘symphonic’ motion, repetition of notes of colour, seemingly antagonistic ‘melodic’ compositional subdivisions, and a concealed inner harmony.
This inspiration was noticed by Zeid’s contemporaries: in 1951, the critic Julien Alvard characterised her work as astonishing, melodic in the infinitely small, and symphonic on vast surfaces.
From 1953, she transitioned to a phase of looser, richly dappled large works of heavily impastoed patches of colour pulsating imperceptible sub-compositions.
Another early influence on her practice was the writings of colour theorist Charles Blanc (1813–1882), who inspired Post-Impressionists and the Divisionist and Pointillist movements. Blanc’s ideas on the separation of colours into individual patches are discernible in Zeid’s mid-abstract periods. With Zeid, they do not interact to represent a figurative scene but aggregate in pulsating multicolour abstract murmurations.
Between 1954 and 1955, Zeid reinvented herself with two subsequent shorter phases on smaller canvases. She produced primitivist motifs on dark canvases, followed by a period of dark painterly unfolding linearity from 1956 to 1957.
After suspending her practice in 1958, she returned to painting inspired by the Southern Italian skies and sea. She produced abstract gushing fireworks and serene maritime depths of blurred biomorphic shapes in muted colour ranges, all incised with palette knife markings, on both large and small formats. She also experimented with painting sea rocks.
In parallel, two immersive and selfhood-annihilating universes punctuate Fahrelnissa Zeid’s abstract oeuvre: maritime surfaces, depths, and astral scapes, with renderings of abstract nocturnal worlds represented in bi-colour grids and palette knife incisions, affirming her lifelong fascination with the cosmos.
Zeid’s maximalist works evoke the sublime in their teeming, unleashed boundlessness; they re-create it as a psychic experience. Facing her large abstractions, viewers cannot establish themselves to a recognisable visual experience. Fahrelnissa Zeid’s sublime is a projection of the exaltation she described while working. Her loss of self in painting is mirrored in viewers’ submersion in her works’ shapes, colours, and movement.
In the mid-1960s and 1970s, Zeid returned to figuration by painting portraits, where she stressed psychological depth over verisimilitude, with large-format canvases with static full-face planar representation, enlarged eyes, and extensive palette knife grooves on thickly impastoed paint. Making the textural quality of the faces and clothing of the sitters appear like abstract surfaces.
In the same period, she experimented with painting small animal bones from her kitchen leftovers. Then, helped by family friend and artist Issam Al-Said (1938–1988), she developed from 1968 to 1975 the process of encasing the coloured bones in coloured polyester and resin blocks, set on revolving stands, and backlit by coloured lamps. She called these sculptures Paléokrystalos .
In the 1980s, Zeid experimented with stained glass but did not continue the practice due to the physical effort needed. At the same time, her private portraits of friends and family grew simpler in composition and texture.
Throughout her career, Zeid also produced and exhibited abstract and figurative gouaches and painted beach pebbles called pierres ravivées (Revived Stones.)
Posterity
Despite her initially ambitious works surpassing those of her male counterparts, Zeid disappeared from Western post-war art histories. Art historian Sarah Wilson imputes this to the broader erasure of great female abstracts working in Paris mid-century.
In her lifetime, while acclaimed by critics and the press, Fahrelnissa Zeid was dogged by gendered orientalisation and nativist appreciations. First, some of her male colleagues dismissed her in 1940s Istanbul as a dilettante, then 1950s Paris critics applauded her for being a princess out of the 1001 nights, observing an ‘Islamic’ ban on figuration by reproducing ‘Byzantine’ mosaic and ‘Islamic art’ patterns. While an early pioneer of abstraction, her radically different oeuvre was interpreted by some Turkish and Arab critics as a recreation of a fetishised mythological past.
Fahrelnissa Zeid claimed spiritual and abstract sources of inspiration and distanced her art practice— but not herself— from cultural influences. In 1959, she told writer Edouard Roditi that she had not been a student of Islamic art and was unaware of being an artist in the Turkish tradition. Instead, she was conscious, at all times, of being an artist of the same generally ‘abstract’ school as many of her international friends and colleagues and as a painter of the ‘École de Paris.’ Zeid also described her practice as a quest for salvation and her work as a communion with the universe, with her paintings surging within her from depths beyond peculiarities of sex, race, or religion. When painting, she felt as if the sap were rising from the roots of a Tree of Life to one of its topmost branches, where she happened to be, surging through her to transform itself into forms and colours on her canvas. She saw herself as a medium that carries the vibrations of the world.
Retrospectives & Public Collections
During her lifetime, after her major 1964 retrospectives in Türkiye, Fahrelnissa Zeid had a retrospective in Amman in 1983 and in 1990 at the Ludwig Sammlung Museum. In 2017, she had posthumous retrospectives at London’s Tate Modern and Berlin’s Deutsche Bank Kunst Halle, after which her works were regularly exhibited worldwide. In parallel, she came to further prominence.
Zeid’s works are currently held by the Barjeel Foundation, Bradford Museum, Elgiz Museum, the French State collections, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Huma Kabakci Collection, the Institut du Monde Arabe, Istanbul Modern, the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, the Khalid Shoman Foundation-Darat al Funun, the Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum Ludwig, the Papko Art Collection, the Sharjah Art Foundation, Tate Modern, and the Wright Museum of Art.
