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Book Description

This book brings together lesser-known works by the amazingly talented Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–91), one of the pioneering artists of Turkish Modernism in the 1940s and of post-war, avant-garde France. Daughter of Kabaağaçlı Şakir Pasha, niece of the grand vizier Cevat Pasha, and sister of fellow-painter Aliye Berger and writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı (aka the Fisherman of Halicarnassus), Fahrünissa Zeid took her surname from her husband Emir Zeid, brother of Iraqi King Faysal I; she changed the spelling of her name to Fahrelnissa in France.

Fahrelnissa is the first woman artist to have exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She joined the “d Grup” in Istanbul In 1942, by which time she had already started to create her own unique, hypnotic style. She then became increasingly focused on abstract painting. Monumental and dynamic abstract compositions engulf the viewer in fields of colour, light and energetic movement. Later in her life, she alsopainted slightly naive portraits of family and friends. In 1975 she moved to Amman where she founded Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute of Fine Arts there.

A Fahrelnissa Zeid Retrospective was held in 2017 at the Tate Modern London and travelled to the Berlin Deutsche Bank Kuntshalle in 2018.

Key to paintings illustrated: Abstract Composition, 1953, 131x182cm; Untitled (portrait), 1964, 150 x 100cm; Three Ways of Lving (War), 1942, 125 x 205cm