Biography
Queen Farida was born Safinaz Zulficar on 5 September 1921 in the Gianaclis neighbourhood of Alexandria into a family from the Egyptian higher class. Her father, Yusuf Zulficar, was a judge and diplomat of Circassian descent who was passionate about playing the piano. Her mother, Zainab Said, was a friend of Queen Nazli Sabri and lady-in-waiting of the royal court. She was also the sister of the celebrated artist Mahmoud Said (1897–1964), who painted Farida as a child (Ma Nièce, 1927, Mahmoud Said Museum, Alexandria) and gave her advice and encouragement when she decided to make art in the 1950s.
Safinaz received a Western-style education, attending the Collège Notre Dame de Sion in Alexandria. French was her first language, as was often the case among the Egyptian elite of the time. In 1937, she and her mother accompanied the Egyptian royal family on a tour of Europe. It was on this occasion that she met the young King Farouk. Their wedding was celebrated on 20 January 1938 with great pomp and ceremony. She then took the name Farida to respect the will of her late father-in-law, King Fouad, that his descendants would bear a name beginning with the letter F.
Farida was interested in politics. Her husband initially promised her that she would be involved to help him in his duties, but this was not the case.: “Politicians, much older men around him, told him that a woman in the Orient should not be involved in politics”, she recalled in an interview with French journalist Jean Lacouture in 1977. During the Second World War, she witnessed Farouk’s power struggle with the colonial power, culminating in the Abdeen Palace incident of 1942, when British troops and tanks surrounded the royal residence and forced the king to form a coalition government with the Wafd Party. While her husband’s prestige and power declined, Queen Farida became involved in charitable activities, notably chairing the Women’s Committee of the Egyptian Red Crescent Society to support war victims and patronising feminist and women’s organisations.
Farida and Farouk’s divorce was announced on 17 November 1948. As the couple had given birth to three daughters, the lack of an heir was often cited as the reason for the decision. However, the queen declared that she wished to end their union despite her love for her husband, as she could no longer tolerate the excesses and debauchery with which he had been indulging since the early 1940s. Unwelcome by the people, the divorce further weakened the monarchy, which was finally abolished in 1953. It also marked the beginning of a new life for Farida.
Painting, initially a hobby for her, gradually became her main activity. In this way, the former queen sought to make up for the absence of her daughters, whom Farouk took with him into exile in Italy after the 1952 Revolution. Secondary sources report that in the 1950s, Farida attended artists’ studios such as Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985) and Ashod Zorian (1915–1970) in Cairo. Still, she essentially taught herself. Her uncle Mahmoud Said provided Farida with a studio in his palace in Alexandria, while she also painted in her house near the pyramids of Giza, overlooking the countryside. In her early years, she painted scenes of Egyptian peasant life and Nilotic landscapes, following traditional local iconography and borrowing from the style of the Impressionists she admired.
In 1963, she left Egypt for Beirut. There, she took painting classes at the studio of Lebanese-Armenian painter Jean Guvder (1923–2016), located in the Ain Al Mraiseh district. Important figures in modern Lebanese art, including both women and men trained with him, such as Assadour (1943–), Farid Haddad (b. 1945–), and Seta Manoukian (1945–). To support herself, Farida painted and sold portraits to the bourgeoisie. Four years later, she moved to Switzerland to be closer to her daughters, who lived there then. From there, Farida frequently travelled to Paris, where she benefited from the support of gallery owner Raymond Nacenta. She held her first solo exhibition in the French capital at the Hervé Odermatt Gallery in 1968. In the preface to the exhibition catalogue, poet and art critic Patrick Waldberg praised the artist’s experiments saying, “Using a process known only to her, in which gouache is treated according to the laws of enamel, she obtains a material of exceptional richness with brilliant accents, where the pigment flows have the mobile fluidity of flame.” Her technique, which combines paint and molten metal worked with a blowtorch, shapes the dense paintings in which faces and long silhouettes emerge from a magma of matter. A religious vocabulary emerges, combining Islamic and Judeo-Christian references, as in Cantique des Cantiques, Mon sang et ma chair, and Darwiche (1968)—the latter title reflects the queen’s interest in Sufism.
Farida moved to Paris in 1970. Keen to deepen her knowledge of art of the past, she studied art history at the École du Louvre, where she became familiar with Russian and Byzantine icons. She also studied lithography in Fernand Mourlot’s studio and engraving at the Ateliers Rigal in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Her exile ended in 1974 when she returned to Cairo after Egypt’s success in the Yom Kippur War.
Around the mid-1970s, she developed a figurative style in which enigmatic portraits of turbaned figures (Le Devin, 1978) sit alongside minimalist landscapes. Although she did not claim to belong to any particular school, her formal vocabulary comes close to that of the Hurufiyya movement when, under her brush, boat sails, tree trunks, and architecture shape the Arabic letterings of the words ‘Allah’ (God) or ‘galala’ (majesty). In the catalogue of one of her exhibitions in Paris (1978), she suggested that divine themes and spiritual references in her paintings synthesised her considerations about the act of painting and her awareness of the upheavals that shook the world. “It was through the repetition of God’s name that the notion of Creation came to me. This theme was undoubtedly bubbling up inside me, given that we live in an age where everything is called into question, where everything is upheaval, mixing and merging. There are things that destroy themselves, like at the beginning of the Universe when everything was in the process of becoming,” she said.
Beyond the themes addressed, her unconventional techniques and attempts to combine unusual materials and technologies make Farida’s art special. Light plays a vital role in her compositions, often featuring chiaroscuro effects and using metal to produce reflections. She also attached particular importance to the artificial lighting of her paintings, using electronic systems for the timed illumination of some of her works. She presented these experiments in 1978 at an ‘exhibition-performance’ organised with the Egyptian Cultural Centre in the 15th-century cellars of L’Hôtel, 13 rue des beaux-arts in Paris.
In 1980, a successful solo exhibition of Farida’s artworks was held at Le Méridien hotel in Cairo. However, her recognition as an artist remained limited, both in her own country and internationally. Although she belonged to a generation of women artists who achieved fame at the turn of the 1950s in a context of nationalist support for the development of the visual arts, such as Tahia Halim (1919–2003), Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) and Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), Farida entered the profession later in life, at a time when the art scene had become less favourable to women artists’ careers. Her discretion also probably contributed to keeping her out of the spotlight, as she lived in voluntary isolation on a meagre pension, ending her days in a small apartment in the Maadi district.
Farida died of leukemia in 1988. She was first buried with her own family before her remains were moved to the Al-Rifai’s mosque in Cairo among the royal tombs in 2022. To honour her memory, in 2017, her friend, the writer Lotus Abdel Karim, founded a museum bringing together artworks by Farida and objects that belonged to her in her former studio in Maadi, which they had established together under the name of Al-Shumu’a Hall. Many of Farida’s works are scattered and have disappeared due to the travels that punctuated her life. Although her political biography is better known, her career as an artist has yet to be studied to do justice to the diversity of her artistic research, which takes her beyond the amateur practices with which she is sometimes wrongly associated.
