Saloua Raouda Choucair

Abstract

Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916-–2017), a Lebanese pioneer in abstract art, explored universal structures and self-transformation. Her diverse oeuvre, from sculptures to jewellery, was inspired by quantum physics, Arabic poetry, and Islamic aesthetics, challenging conventional labels. Choucair passionately advocated integrating art into public spaces to provoke self-reflection and enrich daily life.

Biography​​

Art presented Saloua Raouda Choucair with a hyperreality in which to explore universal structure, cosmic meaning, and the transformation of the self and society. Following her holistic vision, she produced sculptures, architectural plans, fountains and pools, housewares, and jewellery. Fiercely intellectual, she read across quantum physics, Arabic poetry, molecular biology, and optics. Critics seeking to attach her work to schools in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo from the 1950s to the 1980s brandish the labels "abstract," "modernist," "geometrist," "neo-plastic," and "Arab-Islamic," but each misses an aspect of Choucair's drive to map the expanses of experience. Most importantly, she never pursued intellectual exploration merely for its own sake. She conceived of each artwork as containing possibilities for maturation and metamorphosis, as well as for social intervention, by provoking the audience's self-reflection. Her greatest goal—to install her work in ordinary outdoor arenas, especially in the Arab world, whose growth was so dear to her—was never satisfactorily realised during her career.

Saloua Raouda Choucair was born in Beirut on 24 June 1916. The third child of Salim Rawda, an urbane herbalist and rentier, and the well-educated Zalfa Najjar, she entered an unusual household. Even with the adversity posed by Salim's death while a conscript in the Ottoman army in 1917, Zalfa maintained a comfortable lifestyle for her family while partaking of the rapidly growing city's new educational opportunities and feminist and nationalist mobilisation. All three children would complete college and become prominent for their social leadership and activism. Choucair enrolled at the American Junior College for Women (currently the Lebanese American University), Beirut (1934–1936), and concentrated in the natural sciences. During this time, she met the artist and intellectual Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957) and frequented his Art Club at the American University of Beirut (AUB). After a hiatus when her family had to leave Lebanon due to her brother's visa status, she resumed her artistic training in Beirut with Omar Onsi (1901–1969), a leading local painter of landscapes, portraits, and, as Choucair later called them, "realist, classical" works.

Despite early recognition of her talent, masterful mentors, and relative material ease, Choucair refrained from professional art practice until she was in her 30s. Her long reticence may be related to her subsequent insistence on integrating art into public spaces and domestic life. After teaching in Kirkuk and touring Alexandria and Cairo in 1944, Choucair became a librarian at AUB. She joined the university-affiliated militant Arab nationalist group, the Arab Cultural Club (ACC). Including Constantin Zuraiq (1909–2000) and Georges Habash (1926–2008) among its members, the ACC was one of many local organisations systematically debating the meaning of independence (achieved in 1943) and the war in Europe. Choucair organised an art lecture series in 1947–1948, accompanied by exhibitions. She argued that art appreciation would enhance members' daily lives by fostering a greater care for harmony, proportion, integrity, and quality in all social interactions.

Clearly, from the very beginning, Choucair believed in using art to evaluate and elevate people. However, it is said that she ultimately decided to pursue art professionally to refute claims of Western cultural superiority made by professors of literature and philosophy at AUB. One probable antagonist, the philosopher Charles Malik (1906–1987), linked Greco-Roman anatomical realism, epitomised by classical nude sculpture, to rationalist inquiry and political self-determination. By contrast, he saw Islamic iconoclasm as a clear indication of Arab superstition and susceptibility to autocratic rule. Another, the literary critic Musa Sulaiman (1919–2008), made similar claims for classical Greek narrative fiction, holding that since Arab authors do not comply with the constraints of time and space, it is doubtful they could ever create socially useful and lasting art. In the context of decolonisation across the world, this type of ethnic essentializing and ranking was common. For most postcolonial subjects, it led to two options: isolation or assimilation.

Despite rejecting the assimilationist thinking of Malik and Sulaiman, Choucair did not succumb to stifling self-glorification. In a series of essays written between 1948 and 1952, she developed a culturally relativist approach that was both particularistic and progressivist in a Hegelian manner. For a 1952 essay on beauty, she explained that the social, ecological, political, and economic setting defines art's being and meaning:

Each civilisation had its own goal with the unfolding of its dull, daily life. The artist felt this goal without being aware of it, and thus his production was an annotated copy of this civilisation in its entirety.

Hence, the best artworks are those "noble forms" that most tightly integrate "the faith, sciences, and philosophy of the people."

Choucair's relativism not only explained cultural differences; it also allowed for the possibility of using art to develop a culture in line with its spirit. Accordingly, Choucair called on governmental officials to strengthen the public role of art through state sponsorship and pedagogy. She remained committed to this pedagogical investment in art throughout her career, teaching sculpture at the Lebanese University (1977–1984) and at the American University of Beirut in the 1980s.

More boldly, Choucair argued that Arab-Islamic civilisation best corresponded to global contemporary needs. In a 1951 attack on Arabic literary scholar Musa Sulaiman, she asserted that both the phenomenological tradition of Sufic scientists and the narrative tradition of pre-Islamic Arabic literature proved Arabs had developed a unique understanding of existence, exceeding commonsense reliance temporal and spatial coordinate, one that was recognisable in quantum physics and modernity's global amenities, such as sonic jets, gene therapy, organ transplants, and space travel. Her writings demonstrate that Choucair's desire to combine Arab nationalism, modernist developmentalism, and cultural relativism propelled her from the conventional level of "refinement" in art typically afforded to women in Lebanon's business class to the pinnacle of professional, universalist art.

Choucair relocated to Paris in July 1948 to undertake formal art training. The gouaches and sketches from this period trace a whirlwind of movement, interaction, and exploration. To master classicism, she enrolled in a life drawing class at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1948. To challenge realism, she studied with the Cubist master Fernand Léger in 1949. However, Léger's approach to moving from normal perception to stylised forms dissatisfied her. Choucair got to the essence of graphic elements—whether they were Arabic letters or geometric shapes—by changing their colours, sizes, or sharp edges in ways that showed the hidden range of possibilities inherent to their existence. This was the beginning of the "module" method she used later in her sculptural assemblages.

Following her "noble forms," Choucair moved swiftly from the bastion of conservative art to the outermost avant-garde. By October 1950, she had helped inaugurate L'Atelier de l'art abstrait, led by Edgard Pillet and Jean Dewasne. Among other members were Alberto Magnelli, R. Mortensen, Viktor Vasarely, and Jean Deyrolle. Reviving her role from Beirut's intellectual scene, Choucair organised the Atelier's bimonthly debates and contributed to its affiliated art publications, Art d'Aujourd'hui and Combat. In early 1951, she exhibited solo at Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris and with her atelier mates at the Salon des Réalitées Nouvelles.

A contemporary critic, Michel Seuphor, aligned the Atelier with Kandinsky's passion for plastic creation rather than Mondrian's quest for construction. For example, the artists asked how to paint a square—the epitome of a mental construction—that points not to an ideal, Platonic form but rather exists for itself in the context of its own painterly, aesthetic creation. Choucair's works, like Composition on Green Module (1947–1951), broke simple two-dimensional shapes, such as the rectangle, in a way that was both random and repeatable, leaving linear traces of the exposed interior. These lines, both of the original rectangle and yet out of it, repeat themselves seemingly incessantly but at varying angles and degrees of visibility to become the basis for a composition that decomposes the original form.

In the summer of 1951, Choucair returned to Beirut with hopes of founding a modern art institute in her hometown and of continuing to participate in a "global art renaissance," as she put it in an interview at the time. She adopted a pace of one major show per decade, during which she would make a statement about art's potential to shed light on life. Befitting her scepticism about teleological time, Choucair neither dated her production consistently nor worked programmatically. Therefore, historians have generally, following a practice established in the 2002 catalogue raisonné she supervised, analysed the bulk of her mature oeuvre into four thematic areas: 1) Trajectory of a Line; 2) Poems (Qasa'id); 3) Trajectory of an Arc; and 4) Duals (Muthannayat).

The questions about the nature of reality and universality that had spurred Choucair into art continued to animate her, prompting her to explore three-dimensional and even four-dimensional production. She was very interested in new developments in quantum physics and molecular biology. She used these new ideas in her art to explore the connections between stillness and movement, change and creation, and infinity and instantiation. For example, in the Muthannayat and Sharara series, she considered what a gene could be in art, where a principle of production is implanted into a fertile, shifting context (such as public space) with which it constantly interacts.

Continually inspired by both cutting-edge science and Islamic theology, Choucair sought principles of art form that could both generate universal interactions on a cosmological scale and account for minute, particular events in the viewer's immediate experience. The ability of quantum mechanics to explain unmeasured possibility and discrete actuality at once was critical to Choucair's self-formulation. Fashioning geometric-chromatic "equations," she worked like a mental chisel, carving out spaces that could invite people to experience majestically infinite possibility as a manifestation of divinity. Artist and critic Samir Sayigh (1951–date unconfirmed) has written of Choucair's "theological sculptures" as intellectual-optical exercises that leap into motion when viewed by an eye able to sense the piece's original state (the foundational visual algorithm) and mentally undo and rework its being by following the substitutions of scale, the shifts in proportions, or the compressions in tension.

Significantly, her sculptures often begin as tiny line drawings that become contours of terracotta maquettes, which may germinate in any medium, from oak wood to bronze to polyurethane, and can grow in size. Such works explore principles of encounter between masses poised to grow in scale from intimate to monumental. Similarly, in revealing their seams, the conjunctions of her composite sculptures speak to the pressure and passion of intersection while suggesting alternative compositions. They thrive when they spark playful, curious public interactions, including actual reassembling by audiences. Given that particular instantiations are not the point of her projects, Choucair frequently commissioned the actual execution of her domestic carpets and monumental sculptures and delighted in expanding the array of possible public encounters.

Though Choucair refrained from exhibiting her work for long periods, she never lived in seclusion. Ever committed to art's integration into everyday life, her first post-Paris job was as a designer with the development agency Point Four. She married Yusif Choucair, a journalist, and had a daughter, Hala, in 1957. Still, at a time when 45 percent of Lebanese women were married by age 20, 85 percent had children by age 25, and few held extramarital jobs after marriage, Choucair's integration of domestic, professional, and artistic life was nearly unique. The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1992) impacted her work by prohibiting public implementations of sculptural projects and by the disappearance of one monument in 1983. Still, it did not directly preoccupy her. She addressed politics through civics, meaning that aesthetics demarcated a realm for enhancing interpersonal, international, and cosmological relations.

While thoroughly ensconced in her hometown, Choucair made significant contributions to world art throughout her career. In 1955, she toured American arts and crafts academies, including the Cranbrook Academy (Detroit, MI), the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School (Gatlinburg, TN), the Penland School of Crafts (Bakersville, NC), and the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY). Choucair's engagement with American modernism remains to be elucidated, but clearly, its expansion of art's boundaries and the commitment to merging form and function infused her subsequent sculptural work. In 1969, the French government hosted her for a year's residency, after which the Salon de Mai in Paris invited her annually. In 1980, the Iraqi government hosted her for a one-month residency. A 2002 catalogue raisonné provided the first comprehensive understanding of her work across its various media. An online retrospective by ArteEast presented Choucair's work in the context of "historical modernisms," coinciding with the global art world's nascent interest in "alternative modernisms." A retrospective in the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2011 initiated another at the Tate Modern (London, UK) in 2013.

Bibliography

Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. "Paris and Everywhere Else: Intercity Movements in the Lives and Works of Saliba Douaihy, Shafic Abboud, and Saloua Raouda Choucair." Manazir Journal, vol. 6, pp. 27–56., 2025

Taan, Yasmine Nachabe. "On Being Simultaneously Arab and “Modern”: Saloua Raouda Choucair’s Design Between Science and Sufism." Journal of Design History. 07 January 2025

Taan, Yasmine Nachabe. Saloua Raouda Choucair: Modern Arab Design, An Exploration of Abstraction Across Materials and Functions. Khatt Books. 2019

"Sanctuaries | Saloua Raouda Choucair." Selections Arts Magazine, 18 February 2019.

Choucair, Saloua Raouda. "An-Nashaat al-fanni fi an-Nadi ath-Thaqaafi al-`Arabi (The Art 

Activities of the Arab Cultural Club)." Al-Adib 7(1 January 1948): 59 - 61.

Choucair, Saloua Raouda. "Kayfa Fahima al-`Arabi Fanna at-Tasweer (How the Arab Understood Visual Art)." al-Abhaath 4(2 June 1951): 195 - 201.

Choucair, Saloua Raouda. "Al-Jamalu wa al-lawhatu al-fanniyyah (Beauty and the Artwork)." Sawt al-Mar'a 8 (7 July 1952): 24 - 25.

Metzler, Laura. "(And so on…): Genetics, Quantum Mechanics, and Transcendence in the late work of Saloua Raouda Choucair." MA thesis, the American University of Beirut, 2014.

Schoukair, Hala Gharzeddine, ed. Saloua Raouda Choucair: Her Life and Art. Beirut: Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, 2002.

Further Reading

Khal, Helen. The Woman Artist in Lebanon. Beirut: Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, Beirut University College, 1987.
Malhas, Thurayya. An-Nahhatah at-tajreediyyah Salwa Rawda Shuqair fi masaaraatihaa ash-shakhsiyyah wa al-fanniyyah namuthajan bi 'Imtiyaaz. Beirut, 2002.
Morgan, Jessica, ed. Saloua Raouda Choucair. London: Tate Publishing, 2013.
Scheid, Kirsten. Painters, Picture-Makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State. PhD dissertation. Princeton University, 2005.