Biography
Leila Nseir was born in 1941 in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia to a family that valued culture. Her father, Moussa Nseir, was a Kaymakam (district governor) and encouraged her to study art. Due to his occupation, the family moved around Syrian cities. Leila spent part of her childhood in northern Syria in the rugged mountain village of Raju, adjacent to Afrin. There, she observed rural life and was affected by the manifestations of poverty, the scenes of barefoot children and peasant women and their hard work, and she admired their resilience. Her mother, Wadia Rabahiya, was fond of literature and philosophy and encouraged her to read Western and Arabic literature, such as Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Taha Hussein, and Gibran Khalil Gibran. Leila Nseir considered her mother to be her key to art.
As a teenager, Nseir volunteered at one of the public hospitals in Syria. She trained as a nurse for four months after the Tripartite Aggression on Egypt (the Suez War) in 1956 when injured Syrian soldiers returned from Egypt.
After completing her secondary education in 1958 and excelling academically, she obtained the opportunity to study in Egypt within the scholarship system between Syria and Egypt under the unity government (the United Arab Republic, 1958-1961). For the scholarship candidacy interview at the Education Directorate in Latakia, the Palestinian artist residing in Syria at the time, Ibrahim Hazima (1933-2023), interviewed her and noticed that she had remarkable drawing skills, and he accepted her.
When she moved to Egypt in 1959 to study art at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, she underwent a week-long entrance exam. One of her supervising professors was the Egyptian artist Hussein Bicar (1913-2002), who became her teacher and mentor during her years on the faculty.
At first, Nseir wanted to study sculpture, as she was very impressed by the sculptures of ancient Syrian civilisations, especially Ugaritic, and the art of Michelangelo. However, her teachers, including Bicar, saw in her ability to draw that she could become a painter, which led them to encourage her to enter the painting department.
Nseir trained primarily in realistic drawing style. She asserted that her artistic and intellectual influences originated from both ancient Egyptian art and contemporary Egyptian art, particularly the sculptures of Mahmoud Mokhtar (1891-1934). Nseir graduated in 1963, and for her graduation project, she painted a series in an expressionist style, depicting mentally challenged children whom she observed and sketched in one of the assisted living homes in Cairo.
Nseir returned to Syria the same year and worked as an art teacher in public schools in Latakia. She painted city scenes in an abstract expressionist style.
Nseir developed a humanistic worldview as she was profoundly affected by wars and injustices during the mid-sixties. This perspective is evident in her paintings like The Racism (1965) and Vietnam (1966). She was one of the founding members of the newly established Fine Arts Syndicate in Syria, known today as the Syrian Fine Artists Union, founded in 1969.
Between 1969 and 1972, she documented her thoughts in a notebook she titled the Notebook of Poetry and Sculpture. This collection includes free verse poetry, short stories, and sketches of sculptural works. Her designs reflect an artistic vision that merges elements from local historical sculptures, known for their solidity and durability, with modern concepts, such as arranging simple shapes on surfaces in a cubist style.
In the early seventies, Leila joined the Arab Plastic Artists Union. She moved from Latakia to Damascus, going against her father’s wishes during that period, where she lived in a 12-square-meter studio, which limited her practical options for making art.
After 1972, Leila worked as an art teacher at Dar Al Mou’almein (the Teachers’ College) in Damascus. In the early 1970s, she created a version of her Vietnam painting using only her bare hands, which caused harmful chemicals to seep into her body, resulting in significant health issues that Syrian medicine could not cure. Consequently, the Syrian government sent her to France for treatment in 1974. After she completed her treatment and returned to Damascus, she experienced health problems again in the early 1980s. Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999), the head of the Artists Syndicate at the time, submitted a request for her to go to France for treatment in 1981, and she was once again sent there.
In the early 1980s, she worked as a drawing teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus. In 1982, during the peak of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Leila travelled to southern Lebanon, motivated by her desire to “experience life,” as she put it, and to paint the resistance. Due to that journey, she created the Arnoun and Beirut Burns paintings, which she completed between 1982 and 1985.
After returning to Damascus, she lived there until the late 1980s. However, due to financial difficulties and her father’s illness, she was forced to move back to Latakia permanently, where she spent the rest of her life. Despite this, she maintained her studio in Damascus and visited it periodically. She continued her artistic practice in Latakia and worked as a drawing teacher at the Faculty of Architecture at Tishreen University during the 1990s.
In her work, she depicted women and expressed her feminism in her participation in significant exhibitions. These included Arab Women and Artistic Creativity in Damascus in 1975, the First Amman Forum for Arab Female Visual Artists in Amman in 1996, and the International Women’s Exhibition in Bonn in 1986. Additionally, she wrote about female artists, sharing her experiences and insights about herself and her colleagues. During a lecture at the Arab Eyes exhibition at the Sharjah Museum in 1995, she represented Syrian women artists. Furthermore, she authored a study titled The Contribution of Syrian Female Artists to Syrian Visual Art, published as part of an exhibition at the Baladna Gallery in Amman in 1996.
Despite receiving treatment from the government and being honoured with the State Appreciation Award from the Ministry of Culture in 2014, Leila felt neglected, especially in her later years. She consistently expressed a sense of injustice from the Syrian artistic community, feeling marginalised simply because she was a woman. Nseir died in a Latakia nursing home on August 15, 2023.
