Fahrelnissa Zeid’s 118th Birthday

“I am a descendent of four civilizations,” wrote Fahrelnissa Zeid, describing her 1980 self-portrait Someone from the Past. “The hand is Persian, the dress Byzantine, the face is Cretan and the eyes Oriental, but I was not aware of this as I was painting it.”

One of the first women to attend art school in Turkey, Fahrelnissa Zeid went on to become a member of both the École de Paris (School of Paris) and D Grubu, a Turkish avant-garde group. Celebrated for her abstract paintings, Zeid also did representational work and even painted designs on chicken bones. Bridging western abstraction and eastern styles, her work broke down gender and culture barriers.

Born on the Turkish island of Büyükada on this day in 1901, Zeid was raised in a prestigious Ottoman family. In 1919 she enrolled at the Imperial School of Art in Istanbul, later traveling through Europe and visiting a variety of art and cultural sites across Spain, Italy, and more.. She continued her training at Académie Ranson in Paris.

In the 1930s, Zeid married into the royal family of Iraq and moved to Berlin until World War II forced her to move to Baghdad.  “I did not ‘intend’ to become an abstract painter,” she said of the bold abstract paintings she began painting between Baghdad, Turkey, Paris, and London—blending Eastern and Western influences.

In the  1970s Zeid moved to Amman, Jordan, where she founded the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute for Fine Arts . A 2017 retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern in London referred to Zeid as “one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century.”

Happy Birthday, Fahrelnissa Zeid!

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