Choucair at Tate Modern - The Pioneer of Abstract Art in the Middle East

The Tate Modern is currently showing a groundbreaking exhibition: the first major collection of Saloua Raouda Choucair’s works. Born in Beirut in 1916, Choucair has been acknowledged as Lebanon’s first abstract artist, having taken part in the first known abstract art exhibition in the Arab world, and today continues to work and live in her home city. Primarily dealing with painting and sculpture, such a collection of the female artist’s significant body of works has never before been seen as an entity. Although active for over five decades, she is now being recognised internationally as an important figure in the history of art, having her career illustrated in a catalogue raisonné in 2002.
Serving as a key figure in the Arab art world, Choucair took root as an artist initially studying with Lebanese artists Moustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi, after which she left Beirut to move to Paris in 1948. Working and studying at the renowned schools of fine arts, the École Naitionale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and La Grande Chaumière, she also occupied the studio of French artist Fernand Léger whose early works of Cubism and abstraction can be seen as influential to Choucair. Her works in abstract art were well received in Paris, and after some success here she chose to focus her skills on working in sculpture. It is these forms carved from wood and stone for which she has become most famous, winning several awards at the top salons during the 60s. Her later career saw her teaching sculpture in Lebanon in 1977 after which she became a lecturer at the American University of Beirut in 1986.
The Tate Modern’s exhibition is an impressive collection of Choucair’s works, honing in on her later sculptures, but also allowing the viewer to explore her use of shape and colour by showing earlier examples of her experiments with painting from the early 40s, such as Self Portrait (1943). Her later celestial sculptures of fiberglass, which explore the trajectory of line and movement, are displayed at the end of the exhibit, and illuminate a tranquil serene feel, which can be seen to highlight the spiritual aspect of her works.