The art of Saloua Raouda Choucair: ‘She had that modernist sense of the future and wanted us to leap into it’

In 1951, a young Lebanese woman studying in Paris was provoked into writing to the literary critic Musa Sulaiman: ‘Having read your book and taken note of your personal opinions… I am prompted to make a few observations that may have some benefit.’ What followed was a five-page discourse on art from a Middle Eastern perspective. The text, titled ‘How the Arab Understood Visual Art’, became, somewhat unexpectedly for the writer, the basis of a radical Arab modernism.

Today, Saloua Raouda Choucair is considered a forerunner of abstraction in the Middle East. Back in the 1950s, however, she was an unknown painter working in the studio of Fernand Léger. Strong-willed and highly intelligent, she had arrived in Paris in 1948 ‘with a fully formed idea of the art she wanted to make’, says her daughter, the artist Hala Schoukair.

Born into a well-to-do family of Druze intellectuals in Beirut in 1916, Saloua Raouda Choucair was the youngest of three children. Her father, a pharmacist, died of typhoid when Choucair was a year old, so it was her mother, the headstrong Zalfa, who encouraged her children’s interests. At the American Junior College for Women (later the Beirut College for Women), Choucair studied natural sciences, and it is tempting to see traces of the geometry of nature and its rhythms in the interlocking forms and patterns of her later sculptures.

It was on a trip to Egypt during the Second World War that Choucair became absorbed by Islamic architecture and design, and these formed the foundations of her theory that the origins of non-objective art lay not in Europe, but in the Arab world. ‘Kandinsky’s studies of the point and the line,’ she noted, ‘are studies that the Muslim artist undertook in the first century.’

In Beirut, she took art classes with the Lebanese painter Omar Onsi, then moved to Paris to study at the conservative Ecole des Beaux-Arts. However, she was drawn to the Left Bank bohemia of Sonia Delaunay, Nelly van Doesburg and a group of ambitious young painters, such as Victor Vasarely and Jean Dewasne, who assembled at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait.

She met Le Corbusier and was taken by his scrupulous observance of the laws of perspective in his modular architecture. Inspired by his democratic approach to living, she resolved to shake off the last vestiges of her classical art education.

‘She returned to Beirut and really isolated herself,’ says Hala. ‘She experimented with every kind of material: wood, metal, enamel, marble, fibreglass, plastic — even carpet. But eventually clay became her favourite. It served as her notebook — she could play around with it.’

Watson and Crick had elucidated the three-dimensional structure of DNA in 1953, and Choucair reflected the double helix in her ‘Visual Meter’ sculptures. ‘She kept up with scientific discoveries,’ says Hala. ‘The Big Bang, quantum mechanics — these things fascinated her.’ And when Choucair received a travel scholarship to the United States in 1955, she demanded to be taken to a Ford car factory in Detroit, recalling with excitement the assembly line, the noise, the dirt and the unbearable heat of the foundry. ‘She liked to know how things worked. She always wanted to get into the mechanics of something,’ says Hala.

Offered in Silsila: Highlights from the Dalloul Collection including Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art on 6 November 2025 are two sculptures by Choucair, executed in the 1960s and 1970s. Both were gifts given to the late Belgian artist Francine Holley, who had studied with Choucair in Paris in the 1940s.

Poem (1966-68) is one of Choucair’s ‘Modules’: wooden sculptures of interlocking pieces that can be arranged in a set sequence, slotting together like a vertical jigsaw puzzle. ‘Think of them as mathematical equations,’ says Hala. For this work, Choucair took her inspiration from the structure of Arabic poetry, in which a verse or a stanza can stand alone as well as being part of a complete poem.

The small, thumb-like sculpture is from Choucair’s ‘Duals’ series, made at a particularly traumatic period in the artist’s life, between 1978 and 1980. The Lebanese civil war was raging, and the artist and her husband, the journalist Youssuf Choucair, were trapped in their apartment near the American University of Beirut. In the work, the brass and aluminium twist together in a rhythmic, wavy line, reflecting Choucair’s desire for a harmonious duality.

‘It was a terrible time,’ says Hala. ‘My mother’s face was grey with worry. Even in her nineties she looked better than she did then.’ To give some sense of the war, Hala mentions the painting Two=One (1947-51), featured in the Tate Modern retrospective in 2013, which was damaged by a shell explosion during the conflict and still contains shards of glass.

Choucair died in 2017, at the age of 100. In 2024, her daughter opened the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation in Ras El Metn, Lebanon. The museum contains many of the artist’s works, from paintings to public sculptures. Hala says visitors are always surprised at how contemporary Choucair’s work is. ‘When you think that some of the sculptures are now 70 years old, they have a timeless quality.

‘My mother was such a force of nature,’ Hala adds. ‘She had that modernist sense of the future and wanted us to leap into it.’

Offered on 6 November 2025, Silsila: Highlights from the Dalloul Collection including Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art is on view 1-6 November at Christie’s in London, alongside Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art: Online, which is live for bidding until 11 November