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Lot Essay
'The portrait is not only a figure, it is not an image, it is not an exterior, it is not an envelope, it is not a color, it is not a form… It is much more than these. It is love. It is pure spirit. My professor, the painter [Roger] Bissiere [,] had explained it to me in this way. It was my second week at the Academy where he was teaching and I didn’t even know yet how to mix colors.’ (Parinaud (ed.) Fahrelnissa Zeid, Amman 1984, p. 37)
Princess Fahr El-Nissa Zeid’s life was a rich interplay of Eastern and Western cultural traditions and diverse histories; her sense of place was seated between high society and the artistic community of the Paris Avant Garde and the Turkish art scenes. Although Zeid’s portraits were exhibited later in her life at the age of 72 in 1972, they were created as a way to commemorate her family members, relatives and friends that were inextricably linked to her upbringing and maturation. At the age of fourteen, Zeid’s earliest work was a watercolor portrait of her grandmother, delicately drawn yet in the facial characteristic with an uneven proportion that would harken towards her portraits she produced later in life.
Zeid’s realized the power of portraiture early in her art career, while studying under the renowned Paris-Avant Garde artist Roger Bissiere for nearly two months at the Academie Ransom. Attracted to his teaching methods that were synonymous with the upcoming cubist movement, she explored figurative studies that captured the overall atmosphere of the scene, liberating her vision to see simplified patterns in the figurative—undulating shapes and lines and carefully selected colors. She then was exposed to the multifarious nature of portraiture, opening a larger metaphysical exploration into incorporating elements of Fauvism and Expressionism with notions of philosophy inspired by her knowledge of Sufism and the Rufaiyah Dervish order.
Portrait of ClareMaria is a wonderful example of the late Princess Fahr El-Nissa Zeid’s portraiture, capturing the timeless and fresh quality of this genre, and showing her techniques in the bold outlines and color juxtapositions that inherently became psychological studies of the sitter. In her portraits, the subjects tended to resemble each other for their large eyes, intense gaze, three quarter busts on a monochrome background and with piercing thin eyebrows placed in front of a contrasting plane of dynamic color. Choosing not to focus on the naturalistic nature of the scene, choosing instead to display a small error in perspective with a visual continuity that ‘[gave] life’ to the sitter (K. Greenberg, Fahrelnissa Zeid, London 2017, p. 137). Zeid makes a clear dichotomy between the upper and lower registers of the canvas, whose attention to color, line and form produce a simplified effect. Her flatness of portraits was made possible by her use of cloisonnisme--shaping color fields with black outline, a modernist ideal to ignore the three dimensionality and visual harmony of the composition. In Portrait of ClareMaria, a stately woman with piercing blue eyes is complemented with the turquoise jewelry, while her intense gaze is muted by a busy pattern of decorative and vibrant flower, most notably inspired by her love of nature and Islamic art and architecture.
While producing these portraits, simultaneously artists like Bernard Buffet, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud gave further confidence in the continuity of the portraiture genre as they focused on reducing dimensionality to evoke the strongest emotions; this revival was widely accepted in the European art community for the artists’ attention to the psychology of the sitter. It was only in 1972 at Galerie Katia Granoff, Paris that Zeid publically unveiled her portraits, impressing the French community for their unexpected psychological take on the painted figure. She eventually moved to Amman in 1975, establishing a studio and renewing her portraiture in form and color, painting during this time Portrait of ClareMaria. Finding simplicity in the busy patterns and tightly assembled elements throughout the composition, the work is a stunning example and one of the more vivid and descriptive ones of her later period.
Princess Fahr El-Nissa Zeid’s life was a rich interplay of Eastern and Western cultural traditions and diverse histories; her sense of place was seated between high society and the artistic community of the Paris Avant Garde and the Turkish art scenes. Although Zeid’s portraits were exhibited later in her life at the age of 72 in 1972, they were created as a way to commemorate her family members, relatives and friends that were inextricably linked to her upbringing and maturation. At the age of fourteen, Zeid’s earliest work was a watercolor portrait of her grandmother, delicately drawn yet in the facial characteristic with an uneven proportion that would harken towards her portraits she produced later in life.
Zeid’s realized the power of portraiture early in her art career, while studying under the renowned Paris-Avant Garde artist Roger Bissiere for nearly two months at the Academie Ransom. Attracted to his teaching methods that were synonymous with the upcoming cubist movement, she explored figurative studies that captured the overall atmosphere of the scene, liberating her vision to see simplified patterns in the figurative—undulating shapes and lines and carefully selected colors. She then was exposed to the multifarious nature of portraiture, opening a larger metaphysical exploration into incorporating elements of Fauvism and Expressionism with notions of philosophy inspired by her knowledge of Sufism and the Rufaiyah Dervish order.
Portrait of ClareMaria is a wonderful example of the late Princess Fahr El-Nissa Zeid’s portraiture, capturing the timeless and fresh quality of this genre, and showing her techniques in the bold outlines and color juxtapositions that inherently became psychological studies of the sitter. In her portraits, the subjects tended to resemble each other for their large eyes, intense gaze, three quarter busts on a monochrome background and with piercing thin eyebrows placed in front of a contrasting plane of dynamic color. Choosing not to focus on the naturalistic nature of the scene, choosing instead to display a small error in perspective with a visual continuity that ‘[gave] life’ to the sitter (K. Greenberg, Fahrelnissa Zeid, London 2017, p. 137). Zeid makes a clear dichotomy between the upper and lower registers of the canvas, whose attention to color, line and form produce a simplified effect. Her flatness of portraits was made possible by her use of cloisonnisme--shaping color fields with black outline, a modernist ideal to ignore the three dimensionality and visual harmony of the composition. In Portrait of ClareMaria, a stately woman with piercing blue eyes is complemented with the turquoise jewelry, while her intense gaze is muted by a busy pattern of decorative and vibrant flower, most notably inspired by her love of nature and Islamic art and architecture.
While producing these portraits, simultaneously artists like Bernard Buffet, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud gave further confidence in the continuity of the portraiture genre as they focused on reducing dimensionality to evoke the strongest emotions; this revival was widely accepted in the European art community for the artists’ attention to the psychology of the sitter. It was only in 1972 at Galerie Katia Granoff, Paris that Zeid publically unveiled her portraits, impressing the French community for their unexpected psychological take on the painted figure. She eventually moved to Amman in 1975, establishing a studio and renewing her portraiture in form and color, painting during this time Portrait of ClareMaria. Finding simplicity in the busy patterns and tightly assembled elements throughout the composition, the work is a stunning example and one of the more vivid and descriptive ones of her later period.