Fahrelnissa Zeid

Coinciding with a touring Tate exhibition of her work, this book is the first biography of influential abstract painter Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–91), a pioneer of Turkish modern art whose rich life spanned the first ninety years of the twentieth century. She was woman of commanding magnetism and dramatic originality who forged a unique artistic path. Trained in Turkey and France, she is best known for her large-scale paintings that combine Islamic, Byzantine, Arab and Persian influences with stylistic elements developed in Europe during the postwar period. Born into a prominent family in Istanbul – her father was the brother of the Grand Vizier – she had a lifelong compulsion to paint, throughout the upheavals and tragedies that marked her cosmopolitan life as a child of the Ottoman upper bourgeoisie, and later as a member of the Iraqi Hashemite royal family living in Baghdad, Berlin, London, Paris, Ischia and Amman. Marked by a nervous breakdown in her forties, she broke free from the expectations of her social status to emerge as a leading figure of Turkish modernism. She went on to become a prominent member of the 1950s École de Paris abstract art movement, praised by André Breton and André Malraux. In the same decade, she was also one of the first women to exhibit at London’s ICA. Her powerfully distinctive and energetic works are instantly recognizable and unique in twentieth-century modernism: large canvases covered by the dynamic intersection of colour fields, often superimposed with meticulous black grilling or kaleidoscopic coloured mosaics. These works reflect her conception of art as a ceaseless forward quest, driven by a spiritual inner need, to produce painterly renditions of cosmic journeys and psychic universes. Record-breaking sales at Bonham’s and Christie’s in 2012 and 2013 established Zeid as the best-selling Middle Eastern female artist. This book – which covers both her extraordinary peripatetic life and the evolution of her practice, as well as her reinvention in her eighties as a teacher – redefines her for the contemporary reader as one of the most important female modernists of the twentieth century.