.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This rare work on glass by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra presents a full-face portrait of a woman against a background of vivid, fragmented colour. Jabra brings together bright arrangements of orange, yellow, red, blue and green with heavy black contours, creating a striking contrast between colour and line. The figure and the surrounding floral elements appear to merge harmoniously with the background, creating a unified composition that moves the work beyond the conventions of naturalistic portraiture. The choice of glass further transforms the appearance of the image, lending the colours a luminosity and subtle transparency distinct from the darker, more saturated tones of Jabra’s works on canvas. The choice of medium may also be considered in relation to Jabra’s connection to Bethlehem and the city’s longstanding traditions of glassmaking and stained glass. Here, however, he adapts the material to a modern figurative composition, incorporating its particular optical qualities into his treatment of the female figure.
The work belongs to Jabra’s wider engagement with figurative painting. Executed in 1947, this portrait was created a year before the Nakba, during a period of profound political and social change in Palestine. It consequently belongs to an important moment in the history of Palestinian modernism, when artists were engaging with international developments in modern art while working within a rapidly changing local context. The survival of works from this period is particularly significant given the loss and destruction of much Palestinian art and artifacts produced before 1948. In Jabra's case, a substantial body of his early work was lost when his Baghdad home was destroyed in an explosion, making this piece a rare surviving example from an important formative stage of his artistic practice. Notably, the work is signed G Jabra in the lower right; before changing his first name to Jabra upon moving to Iraq, the artist was known as Gabriel. The continued study and recovery of work from this period has contributed to a broader reassessment of Palestinian artistic production during the first half of the twentieth century.
The historical context is also important to understanding the female figure in Untitled. The representation of the homeland through the female body is a recurring theme within Palestinian visual culture, allowing ideas of land, belonging, continuity and identity to be expressed through the figure of a woman. In Jabra’s composition, this relationship is developed through the integration of the figure within natural imagery. Flowers emerge from and around her body, further connecting her to the cycles of the natural world. Rather than treating woman and landscape as separate subjects, Jabra brings them together within a single image, allowing the female figure to suggest both human presence and attachment to place. In this respect, the work can be viewed as an early antecedent to the powerful representations of Palestinian women that would emerge in the work of artists such as Sliman Mansour from the 1970s onwards, which cemented the female figure as a symbol of the homeland.
Painting occupied an important intellectual and psychological space for Jabra during the years preceding his exile. Although largely self-taught and working primarily in oil, he regarded artistic and cultural production as part of a broader project of Arab cultural transformation and modernisation. His engagement with art should therefore be understood alongside his wider intellectual aspirations and commitment to Arab cultural renewal. Yet this broader conception of Arab identity remained, above all, rooted in Palestine. As he stated in an interview with Elias Khoury, “if I were not a Palestinian, I would not be anything” (S. Mejcher-Atassi, The Arabic Novel Between Aesthetic Concerns and the Causes of Man: Commitment in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Abd al-Rahman Munif, 2019). Jabra’s Palestinian identity lay at the foundation of his sense of self and would remain central to his intellectual and artistic imagination throughout his life.
The present work originates from the prestigious Dalloul Collection, Beirut, founded by Dr Ramzi and Saeda Al Husseini Dalloul and now led by their son, Dr Basel Dalloul. With its roots in Palestine, the Dalloul family has maintained a particularly strong commitment to Palestinian art, reflected in the collection’s significant holdings of works by Palestinian artists. Spanning five decades, the collection reflects the artistic, political and cultural shifts of the Arab world and the family’s longstanding dedication to preserving and promoting Arab creativity.
Jabra was born in 1919 in Adana, then part of the French Mandate of Cilicia, into a Syriac Orthodox family. His family survived the Assyrian genocide before emigrating to Palestine, where he spent his formative years between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In 1939, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue his education in England. He studied at the University of Exeter before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he completed his degree in 1943. He subsequently taught English in Bethlehem, but the Nakba of 1948 forced him and his family to leave Palestine and settle in Iraq, where he remained for the rest of his career. Jabra established himself as a major literary and intellectual figure, producing novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism and translations. His writing frequently addressed modernism and the changing social and cultural conditions of Arab society. His interests extended into the visual arts, and in the 1950s he became a founding member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group. The group brought together artists and intellectuals seeking to develop a contemporary artistic language that could engage with Iraq’s cultural heritage while incorporating approaches associated with modernist abstraction.
Jabra’s work is held in a number of significant public and private collections, including the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF); Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, and Dar El-Nimer, Beirut. His position across literature, criticism and visual art makes him an important figure for understanding the development of Arab modernism, while works such as the present provide a direct connection to the earlier Palestinian context in which his artistic practice first developed.
The work belongs to Jabra’s wider engagement with figurative painting. Executed in 1947, this portrait was created a year before the Nakba, during a period of profound political and social change in Palestine. It consequently belongs to an important moment in the history of Palestinian modernism, when artists were engaging with international developments in modern art while working within a rapidly changing local context. The survival of works from this period is particularly significant given the loss and destruction of much Palestinian art and artifacts produced before 1948. In Jabra's case, a substantial body of his early work was lost when his Baghdad home was destroyed in an explosion, making this piece a rare surviving example from an important formative stage of his artistic practice. Notably, the work is signed G Jabra in the lower right; before changing his first name to Jabra upon moving to Iraq, the artist was known as Gabriel. The continued study and recovery of work from this period has contributed to a broader reassessment of Palestinian artistic production during the first half of the twentieth century.
The historical context is also important to understanding the female figure in Untitled. The representation of the homeland through the female body is a recurring theme within Palestinian visual culture, allowing ideas of land, belonging, continuity and identity to be expressed through the figure of a woman. In Jabra’s composition, this relationship is developed through the integration of the figure within natural imagery. Flowers emerge from and around her body, further connecting her to the cycles of the natural world. Rather than treating woman and landscape as separate subjects, Jabra brings them together within a single image, allowing the female figure to suggest both human presence and attachment to place. In this respect, the work can be viewed as an early antecedent to the powerful representations of Palestinian women that would emerge in the work of artists such as Sliman Mansour from the 1970s onwards, which cemented the female figure as a symbol of the homeland.
Painting occupied an important intellectual and psychological space for Jabra during the years preceding his exile. Although largely self-taught and working primarily in oil, he regarded artistic and cultural production as part of a broader project of Arab cultural transformation and modernisation. His engagement with art should therefore be understood alongside his wider intellectual aspirations and commitment to Arab cultural renewal. Yet this broader conception of Arab identity remained, above all, rooted in Palestine. As he stated in an interview with Elias Khoury, “if I were not a Palestinian, I would not be anything” (S. Mejcher-Atassi, The Arabic Novel Between Aesthetic Concerns and the Causes of Man: Commitment in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Abd al-Rahman Munif, 2019). Jabra’s Palestinian identity lay at the foundation of his sense of self and would remain central to his intellectual and artistic imagination throughout his life.
The present work originates from the prestigious Dalloul Collection, Beirut, founded by Dr Ramzi and Saeda Al Husseini Dalloul and now led by their son, Dr Basel Dalloul. With its roots in Palestine, the Dalloul family has maintained a particularly strong commitment to Palestinian art, reflected in the collection’s significant holdings of works by Palestinian artists. Spanning five decades, the collection reflects the artistic, political and cultural shifts of the Arab world and the family’s longstanding dedication to preserving and promoting Arab creativity.
Jabra was born in 1919 in Adana, then part of the French Mandate of Cilicia, into a Syriac Orthodox family. His family survived the Assyrian genocide before emigrating to Palestine, where he spent his formative years between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In 1939, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue his education in England. He studied at the University of Exeter before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he completed his degree in 1943. He subsequently taught English in Bethlehem, but the Nakba of 1948 forced him and his family to leave Palestine and settle in Iraq, where he remained for the rest of his career. Jabra established himself as a major literary and intellectual figure, producing novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism and translations. His writing frequently addressed modernism and the changing social and cultural conditions of Arab society. His interests extended into the visual arts, and in the 1950s he became a founding member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group. The group brought together artists and intellectuals seeking to develop a contemporary artistic language that could engage with Iraq’s cultural heritage while incorporating approaches associated with modernist abstraction.
Jabra’s work is held in a number of significant public and private collections, including the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF); Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, and Dar El-Nimer, Beirut. His position across literature, criticism and visual art makes him an important figure for understanding the development of Arab modernism, while works such as the present provide a direct connection to the earlier Palestinian context in which his artistic practice first developed.