Author(s): Adila Ladi-hanieh

Art and Photography

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 �cole de Paris abstract art movement, praised by Andr� Breton and Andr� 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.