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Great Women Artists of the Middle East
Sotheby’s Origins auction in Diriyah features the extraordinary cultural contributions of Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair and other women artists.
W hen asked in an interview whether it had been difficult to be a Lebanese woman artist in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, Etel Adnan responded with a grin that it was more challenging to be a woman artist than an Arab artist.
Despite the predominant influence of male artists during the 20th century – a tendency that transgressed borders and cultures – the contribution of female artists to the field of modern Middle Eastern art has persevered. With cultural production proposing a means of resistance, many female artists expressed their emancipatory spirit through the discourses of Abstraction, Expressionism and Surrealism, which could speak to both local and universal issues. Through innovative practices, their art bore witness to the social, political, and cultural transformations of their time, thereby offering a vital account of the region’s art history. Artists such as Etel Adnan, Samia Halaby and Juliana Séraphim, for example, had in common a shared experience of early life under French and British mandate and its reverberations of conflict and exile, which became uniquely manifest in their works.
Female artists found refuge in their friendships and artistic collaborations with one another; Helen Khal was the closest friend of Huguette Caland, with the two sharing exhibitions and a studio into their 80s. Saloua Raouda Choucair was yet another friend of Khal’s, and was a focus of her seminal monograph The Woman Artist in Lebanon (1987) alongside the aforementioned artists. Published by the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, the book formed a study into Lebanon’s prominent female artists and their gendered relation to their practice and environment, in an attempt to fill the perceptible gap in scholarship. At this time, Lebanon enjoyed the greatest number of female artists than any other country in the Arab world, though Khal remarked that while they enjoyed social freedoms and modernization more so than some of their Arab neighbors, the woman artist still attempted to resolve and project her identity – and thus her liberation – through her art.
Despite their unwavering dedication to their practices and prolific activity, many of these artists only achieved international acclaim towards the end of their careers or posthumously. Conscious of the historical gender disparity in the field, there has been much focus in recent years on female artists from the Middle East by institutional collections and exhibitions. Among these are Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond at the LACMA, Los Angeles (2023) and At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance at the Sursock Museum, Beirut (2019-2020), which centered around Khal’s career alongside that of Adnan, Caland, Choucair and others.
Highlights from Origins
Sotheby’s is pleased to present 10 lots by leading female artists from across the Arab world and Iran as part of Origins, our inaugural auction in Diriyah.
Etel Adnan
Born in Beirut in 1925, Etel Adnan is one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, writers and intellectuals, evidenced by her multifaceted career which spanned novels, poetry, journalism, criticism and playwriting, as well as painting, drawing, film, ceramics and tapestry-making. Her output was united under a profound and passionate engagement with the world around her, addressing subjects from the sorrow of war and conflict to the beauty of hope found in nature.
Remarking on her dynamic practice, Adnan explained, “If I want to express the spirit of a place, an emotion, an idea, I paint; if I want to describe or to comment on it, I write.”
In the artist’s own words, her experience of being a woman meant that her aspirations remained unrealized for a long time; it was only at the age of 33 that she began to paint and from thereon out experiment gradually. In 2014, seven years before Adnan’s passing, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors in recognition of her lifelong dedication to the arts: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. A testament to her diverse oeuvre, Origins features one of Adnan’s celebrated leporello works alongside the first ceramic work by the artist to ever be offered at auction.
Huguette Caland
One of the most influential female icons and modern artists from Lebanon, Huguette Caland’s dynamic and daring oeuvre is the manifestation of her bold spirit. Born in Beirut in 1931 to Bechara El Khoury, independent Lebanon’s first president, her public visibility arguably made things more challenging for the young and defiant Caland, who was known for her liberated character. On account of their close friendship, Helen Khal explained, “While her father strived for the independence of his country, she was concentrating on achieving her own independence.”
In 1970, Caland made a pivotal departure from Lebanon to Paris, where her work flourished irrefutably, adopting a new intensity of color and daringness afforded by her newfound emancipation. She claimed: “I wanted to have my own identity. In Lebanon, I was the daughter of, wife of, mother of, sister of. It was such a freedom, to wake up all by myself in Paris. I needed to stretch.” Liberated from the confines of societal norms, her works embrace humor and mystery in a fascinating pursuit of the female body.
Caland's appetite for life and adventure is evident in her curious exploration of painting, sculpture, drawing and textile. Her five-decade-long career attests to her fierce independence as both artist and woman in the 20th century.
Saloua Raouda Choucair
Saloua Raouda Choucair was born in Beirut in 1916, and is regarded as one of Lebanon’s leading female sculptors. In her refusal to be ironed into the turn of the century’s expectation of female conformity, Choucair offered a rare voice as she emerged ardently onto Beirut’s art scene from the 1940s. After attending a progressive new girls’ school that attempted to quell the tropes of a conservative culture, she began her formal pursuit of art under the tutelage of renowned impressionist painter Omar Onsi in 1942. It would be 20 years until she sold her first piece, and until she was nearing 100 years of age that she would enjoy global renown.
Choucair’s oeuvre came to be characterized by geometricity, harmony and repetition, as inspired by naturally occurring forms and yet governed by mathematical precision. Exploiting the endless potential of a singular block of material, Choucair’s sculptures achieved with mastery a unique ability to oscillate between manmade and natural, industrial and organic, static and fluid. Choucair was the first Arab female artist to have a major solo retrospective in the UK, entitled Saloua Raouda Choucair at the Tate Modern in 2013. Secret of the Cube hails directly from the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, which opened its doors in Ras El Metn in 2024 to preserve and showcase the artist’s work and archives.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian remains one of Iran’s most beloved modern female artists. Born in Qazvin in 1922, Farmanfarmaian studied at the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts College before traveling to New York, where she would befriend the likes of Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Louise Nevelson, and become adopted into the city’s vibrant avant-garde art scene. After 14 years, she returned to Iran in 1957 and spent the following decade traveling her homeland to visit its old cities, architectural ruins and mosques.
Between her experiences in the New York modern art scene and those of her native Iran, Farmanfarmaian’s oeuvre began to take a distinct shape, perched between Western abstraction and traditional Persian craft. At once modern and traditional, Farmanfarmaian’s works defy easy categorization, their beauty lying not in a juxtaposition of her two worlds, but in her ability to marry them unstirred by cultural differences. She emerged triumphantly at the forefront of the international modern art scene with a practice rooted in the historic mores of her homeland.
Farmanfarmaian has been exhibited extensively in recent years, including with solo exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022-2023) and James Cohan Gallery, New York (2021 & 2022). In 2017, the Monir Museum was opened in Tehran in her honor.
Samia Halaby
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby proclaimed she was born “to the marvellous noise of revolution.” Living primarily in Beirut after being forced to flee her native land, it was here that the artist experienced the forceful spirit of social change, and became enchanted by the sensations of her natural environment – motifs that would come to mark her discernible oeuvre.
Following the family’s relocation to the United States in 1951, Halaby took on a succession of professorial roles which enabled her to establish her own artistic voice, including as the first female professor at the Fine Arts division of Yale University’s School of Arts. After 10 years of teaching, Halaby eventually moved to New York, where the effervescence of the bustling city continued to play a major role in her perception of politics, religion, social structures and gender equality.
Halaby’s career can be divided into several distinct phases, with various artistic styles often triangulated through the prism of social progression. Halaby is a multifaceted figure, recognized not only for her painting but also for her activism and academicism. Her works have been acquired by many of the most distinguished institutions worldwide, and in 2024 she was presented for the first time at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Helen Khal
Born in Pennsylvania in 1923 to a Lebanese-American family, Helen Khal is recognized for her indelible contribution to the Lebanese modern art scene, owed to her work as an artist, gallerist, writer and critic. Having relocated to Beirut in the mid 1940s, Khal’s impact on the city’s burgeoning cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s was palpable; in 1963, she co-founded Gallery One, Lebanon’s first permanent art gallery, and in the following decades published her seminal monograph The Woman Artist in Lebanon (1987).
Khal fervently supported the visibility of women artists and greater creative purpose beyond perceived regional achievement, while believing it also capable of transmitting the country’s fluctuant history through the medium of abstraction. Khal’s most renowned paintings reflect an enduring exploration into serenity through deliberations of color and light, principles to which she became entirely dedicated from 1965 onward. Her distinguishable canvases are marked by their hazy rectangular hues, which create a world of escape for the viewer into one of pure tranquility.
Juliana Séraphim
Juliana Séraphim was born in Jaffa in 1934. After being forced to flee to Lebanon at the age of 14, Séraphim became swept up in the burgeoning metropolitan culture of Beirut, the thriving visual arts of which owed much to the prolific activity of women artists. Séraphim’s signature style confronts social issues that were particularly pertinent in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War; human rights, especially those of women, were at the forefront of global social commentary, and consequently her paintings are imbued with feminist symbolism.
Utilizing her craft as a platform for revelation and self-discovery, she channeled her emancipated imagination through the untethered vessel of Surrealism. Séraphim celebrates womanhood and sensitivity as empowering qualities; in this way, her life is inseparable from her art. She explained, “The images in my paintings come from deep within me; they are surreal and unexplainable. Consciously I want to portray a woman’s world and how important love is to a woman. Few men understand the quality of love a woman seeks. I try to show them.”
Bibi Zogbé
Bibi Zogbé is regarded as one of Lebanon’s most significant early modern female artists. Born in 1890 in the coastal city of Sahel Alma, Zogbé was an intrepid and liberal character who first pursued her love for art during her traditional French education at the Holy Family School in Jounieh. At the age of 16, she immigrated to Argentina to marry husband Domingo Samaja; however seeking an independent life they soon divorced, but Argentina would remain the artist’s beloved second home.
It was in Zogbé’s Buenos Aires studio that she would encounter artists, poets and politicians, and come to be treasured by both the Lebanese and wider South American art scene. Recognized most saliently for her joyous renditions of nature as inspired by her native Lebanon, Zogbé came to be known as la pintora de flores (“the flower painter”).
Maha Malluh
Born in Riyadh in 1959, Maha Malluh is renowned for her artistic investigation into the rapid modernization of the Gulf region, the tensions between tradition and modernity, as well as the preservation of cultural identity amid the process of globalization. Malluh often employs the readymade to explore notions of identity, memory and the passage of time.
In her renowned Food for Thought series, cooking pots, cassette tapes and other everyday household items are reimagined into captivating large-scale installations to form a critical commentary on consumerism and identity. The use of cooking pots also forms a reflection on the role of women and the significance of communal meals in Saudi society.
Malluh has been exhibited internationally, including at the British Museum in London, and her Food for Thought series was featured in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Malluh is regarded as a leading figure in the contemporary Saudi art scene.
