Saloua Raouda Choucair

Biography

In 1943 Choucair went to Cairo to look for art and did not find it: the museums were closed because of the war. She walked the streets and went into mosques instead. “It was thrilling! I thought this is real art! It endures,” she recalled in an interview.

Her later work with Islamic geometry can be traced back to that moment.

She was born on 24 June 1916 in Beirut, in the Ain El Mraisseh district, into a family that included doctors, lawyers and engineers. Her father, Salim Rawda, died in 1917, and her mother, Zalfa Amin Najjar, raised three children alone. Choucair began drawing in early childhood. At the Ahlia School, which she entered in 1924, she made posters and caricatures of her teachers, some of which were printed in the school newspaper. In 1934 she entered the American Junior College for Women (now the Lebanese American University) and graduated in 1936 in natural sciences. Her only formal art training before she left for France was three months of lessons with Omar Onsi in 1942; the rest she taught herself. According to some accounts, she had already studied in the studio of Moustapha Farroukh in 1935.

After seven months in Egypt, Choucair returned to Lebanon, worked from 1945 in the library of the American University of Beirut and attended courses there in philosophy and history. In 1946 she met Farroukh, who headed the university's art club, and began attending his classes; he published one of her drawings in the club's only issue of its journal. In 1947 she exhibited geometric gouaches at the Arab Cultural Gallery in Beirut. This show is often called the first exhibition of abstract painting in the Arab world, although some regard a show at Saint Joseph University in 1952 as the first.

In 1948 she went to Paris with her sister's husband, who had business there. Beyond Post-Impressionism, by her own account, she knew almost nothing about the art of the wider world. In Paris she saw abstraction for the first time: while her relative attended to business, she went round galleries and museums, and when it was time to go home she stayed and enrolled at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In 1949 she joined Fernand Léger's studio but left after three months: his ideas and methods did not match what she was looking for. In the late 1940s she also visited Marseille and photographed Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation while it was still unfinished; she kept returning to that building in her thoughts for decades.

In 1950 Choucair was one of the first Arab artists to take part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. In 1951 she had a solo exhibition at the Colette Allendy gallery, with works shown earlier in Beirut and new ones made in Paris. It was more successful than the Beirut show; the critic of the magazine Art d'Aujourd'hui compared her bold forms to the work of a “stonecutter” and wrote that the gallery walls were about to burst with the force of the paintings.

In 1959 she took up sculpture, and from 1962 it became her main occupation. Her first series, “Trajectory of a Line” (1957–1959), was carved in wooden blocks with recesses and openings cut through them and then cast in brass; according to some accounts, the structures drew on models of DNA strands. The “Poems” belong to the same line of work: modular sculptures built on the pattern of Sufi poetry. A stanza can stand alone and also be part of a whole, and in the same way the elements of the sculpture can be set up singly or stacked into columns. To my mind this is the most exact account of her method: geometry for her was always a way of composing, not ornament. She named the circle as the basis of form: “The essence of Arab art is the point – from the point everything derives.”

In 1963 Choucair received the National Council of Tourism Prize for a stone sculpture for a public site in Beirut. In 1974 the Lebanese Artists Association organised an honorary retrospective of her work. In 1985 she received the appreciation prize of the General Union of Arab Painters, and in 1988 a medal from the Lebanese government. In 1953 she married the journalist Youssef Choucair; their daughter Hala also became an artist.

Recognition outside Lebanon came late. Saleh Barakat organised a retrospective at the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2011, Tate Modern held her first international retrospective in 2013, and in 2015 an exhibition was shown at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. In 2014 the American University of Beirut awarded her an honorary doctorate. “Poem” is on loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Saloua Raouda Choucair died in Beirut on 26 January 2017, at the age of 100.