FAHRELNISSA ZEID | Untitled

Collection of the Family of Fahrelnissa Zeid, Amman

Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a tiny spot of staining on the lower left extreme edge and a minor surface imperfection only visible upon close inspection on the centre left. There is no restoration apparent when viewed under the UV light. Colour: The catalogue illustration is very accurate; although the face deeper pinkish reds on the face of the figure are softer and a bit lighter in the original work.
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Sotheby’s is privileged to offer a rare family portrait from 1979 painted by the revered Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid.  Born into a family of intellectuals in 1901, Fahrelnissa Zeid was brought up on Buyukada, one of the Princes Islands in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire. Her uncle Cevat Pasha was the Grand Vizier to Sultan Abdulhamid and with her father Shakir Pasha, the two brothers were both historians, diplomats, skilled soldiers and amateur photographers with a command of six languages. Fahrelnissa’s brother Cevat Sakir Kabaagacli was to be widely known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus in the history of Turkish literature, her niece was Fureya, the first female ceramicist and her sister Aliye Berger, a well-known printmaker who have both decided to become artists with Fahrelnissa’s direct encouragement, her daughter Sirin Devrim, an actress, and her son Nejad Melih Devrim, a member of Nouvelle École de Paris. 

Initially practicing painting at an early age in the confines of her home at Buyukada, Fahrelnissa was among the few female students at the Imperial School of Art in Istanbul when she enrolled there in 1919. After marrying the well-known literary figure Izzet Melih Devrim in 1920, Fahrelnissa had the opportunity to travel around Europe and be exposed to its history, culture, art and architecture, closely studying everything from the Old Masters to the Renaissance, visit the iconic museums like Prado in Madrid to Uffizi in Florence and the famous sites like Doge’s Palace in Venice to the Alhambra in Granada. Following her trip to Paris in 1928 with Izzet Melih Devrim, Fahrelnissa decided to continue her arts education by taking lessons from Roger Bissière at Académie Ranson in Paris which was itself a free art academy that was part of the Nabis movement.

Returning back to Turkey, Fahrelnissa continued practicing her art alongside Namik Ismail in 1929-1930 and soon after quit the school of fine arts. It was her second marriage to H.R.H. Emir Zeid Al-Hussein, the only son of Hashemite Sherif Hussein bin Ali of Hejaz and Adila Khanum, a Turkish lady, which would open another exciting and at times turbulent chapter in Fahrelnissa’s colourful life. Emir Zeid was also the brother to King Abdullah of Jordan and great-uncle of King Faisal II of the Royal House of Iraq and he was assigned as a diplomat serving as a minister plenipotentiary on behalf of the Kingdom of Iraq to the Republic of Turkey in 1930s. This is how Fahrelnissa would meet Emir Zeid and following their romantic courting, the two would get married in Athens in 1934. Following Zeid’s diplomatic assignment to Berlin in the years of 1935-1938, the couple returned to Istanbul.

In 1958, after the military overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq on 14 July , Fahrelnissa and Emir Zeid left the Ambassadorial residence in London and moved to a new house in Holland Park. From then onwards until the passing of Emir Zeid in 1970, they would split their time between this house and the one in Paris. Despite continuing to exhibit in Paris, Fahrelnissa later moved to Amman to join the rest of her family where her son Prince Raad was living and continued to paint there while also teaching art to a group of students and founding the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute for Fine Arts. 

Although Fahrelnissa was teaching abstraction to her students at the Institute, she was mainly painting intimate smaller portraits during her time in Amman. These included portraits painted at the request of the artist of her close friends and their children, members of her own family, her cook, her doctor and the Turkish ambassador among many others and were mostly done in one or two sittings. These later portraits were meant as  gifts and as private personal possessions for the sitters to remember Fahrelnissa Zeid by in the future. Adila Laïdi-Hanieh who wrote the most comprehensive biography on the artist in 2017 explains; “The Amman portraits,…, reveal a purgation – an exercise in pure painting in her figurative expressionist vein that juxtaposes chromatic simplification with a subject’s character. Focusing her innovative and intellectual energies on her teaching, Fahrelnissa turned to portraiture as a pure exercise of painting ‘for itself’, and for her own sake.” (Exhib. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Fahrelnissa Zeid, 2017, p. 132).

Fahrelnissa’s Amman portraits differed from her earlier portraiture from the 1960s to 1972 in the sense of that they were pure studies of form and colour and systematically featured a small error in perspective, volume or finishing, to underscore Zeid’s belief that portraiture ought to be free from reproducing physical appearance and should instead ‘give life’ (Adila Laïdi-Hanieh cited in Exhib. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Fahrelnissa Zeid, 2017, p. 137). “What Fahrelnissa gave up in textural layering in these portraits, she made up for in the stark chromatic contrasts. She eliminated three-dimensional spaces and linearity for a predominance of colour in the picture plane, achieving a sense of solidity with strong juxtapositions of highly saturated planes of colour in the clothing, hair and background of her subjects. Many of these portraits appear almost like colour studies than portraits.” (Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Fahrelnissa Zeid Painter of Inner Worlds, London, 2017, p. 267).

Untitled is a beautiful portrait of one of Fahrelnissa’s family members which offers the viewer a glimpse into the tender and intimate side of the artist. Painted when he was ten years old, the artist’s love for him is evident in the softer and more romantic colours she chose to depict him and the comfortable pose of her sitter. There is a beautiful and harmonious contrast between the orange flowers and the turquoise in the background against the light skin and hair of her grandson wearing a white sweater. It is essentially a portrait painted by an internationally established artist in a warm and intimate setting.

Sotheby’s is privileged to offer this rare portrait by this revered artist which would be a unique addition to any Fahrelnissa Zeid afficianados. Fahrelnissa’s works are in the collections of leading museums such as Tate Modern, London, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. Zeid was awarded the Star of Jordan for her contribution to the arts in the country she later called home and she was also made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. A large selection of Zeid's works were most recently exhibited at the 12th Sharjah Biennial in 2015 and at the 14th Istanbul Biennial the same year. She also had a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London in 2017 which travelled to the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin in 2017-2018.  

Sotheby’s is privileged to offer a rare family portrait from 1979 painted by the revered Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid. 

Born into a family of intellectuals in 1901, Fahrelnissa Zeid was brought up on Buyukada, one of the Princes Islands in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire. Her uncle Cevat Pasha was the Grand Vizier to Sultan Abdulhamid and with her father Shakir Pasha, the two brothers were both historians, diplomats, skilled soldiers and amateur photographers with a command of six languages. Fahrelnissa’s brother Cevat Sakir Kabaagacli was to be widely known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus in the history of Turkish literature, her niece was Fureya, the first female ceramicist and her sister Aliye Berger, a well known printmaker who have both decided to become artists with Fahrelnissa’s direct encouragement, her daughter Sirin Devrim, an actress, and her son Nejad Melih Devrim, a member of Nouvelle École de Paris. 

Initially practicing painting at an early age in the confines of her home at Buyukada, Fahrelnissa was among the few female students at the Imperial School of Art in Istanbul when she enrolled there in 1919. After marrying the well-known literary figure Izzet Melih Devrim in 1920, Fahrelnissa had the opportunity to travel around Europe and be exposed to its history, culture, art and architecture, closely studying everything from the Old Masters to the Renaissance, visit the iconic museums like Prado in Madrid to Uffizi in Florence and the famous sites like Doge’s Palace in Venice to the Alhambra in Granada. Later on in the same year, Fahrelnissa decided to continue her arts education by taking lessons from Roger Bissière at Académie Ranson in Paris which was itself a free art academy that was part of the Nabis movement.

Returning back to Turkey, Fahrelnissa continued practicing her art alongside Namik Ismail in 1929-1930 and soon after quit the school of fine arts. It was her second marriage to H.R.H. Emir Zeid Al-Hussein, the only son of Hashemite Sherif Hussein bin Ali of Hejaz and Adila Khanum, a Turkish lady, which would open another exciting and at times turbulent chapter in Fahrelnissa’s colourful life. Emir Zeid was also the brother to King Abdullah of Jordan and great-uncle of King Faisal II of the Royal House of Iraq and he was assigned as a diplomat serving as a minister plenipotentiary on behalf of the Kingdom of Iraq to the Republic of Turkey in 1930s. This is how Fahrelnissa would meet Emir Zeid and following their romantic courting, the two would get married in Athens in 1934. Following Zeid’s diplomatic assignment to Berlin in the years of 1935-1938, the couple returned to Istanbul.

In 1958, after the military overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq on 14 July , Fahrelnissa and Emir Zeid left the Ambassadorial residence in London and moved to a new house in Holland Park. From then onwards until the passing of Emir Zeid in 1970, they would split their time between this house and the one in Paris. Despite continuing to exhibit in Paris, Fahrelnissa later moved to Amman to join the rest of her family where her son Prince Raad was living and continued to paint there while also teaching art to a group of students and founding the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute for Fine Arts. 

Although Fahrelnissa was teaching abstraction to her students at the Institute, she was mainly painting intimate smaller portraits during her time in Amman. These included portraits painted at the request of the artist of her close friends and their children, members of her own family, her cook, her masseuse and the Turkish ambassador among many others and were mostly done in one or two sittings. These later portraits were meant as gifts and as private personal possessions for the sitters to remember Fahrelnissa Zeid by in the future. Adila Laïdi-Hanieh who wrote the most comprehensive biography on the artist in 2017 explains; “The Amman portraits,…,reveal a purgation – an exercise in pure painting in her figurative expressionist vein that juxtaposes chromatic simplification with a subject’s character. Focusing her innovative and intellectual energies on her teaching, Fahrelnissa turned to portraiture as a pure exercise of painting ‘for itself’, and for her own sake.” (Exhib. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Fahrelnissa Zeid, 2017, p. 132).

Fahrelnissa’s Amman portraits differed from her earlier portraiture from the 1960s to 1972 in the sense of that they were pure studies of form and colour and systematically featured a small error in perspective, volume or finishing, to underscore Zeid’s belief that portraiture ought to be free from reproducing physical appearance and should instead ‘give life’ (Adila Laïdi-Hanieh cited in Exhib. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Fahrelnissa Zeid, 2017, p. 137). “What Fahrelnissa gave up in textural layering in these portraits, she made up for in the stark chromatic contrasts. She eliminated three-dimensional spaces and linearity for a predominance of colour in the picture plane, achieving a sense of solidity with strong juxtapositions of highly saturated planes of colour in the clothing, hair and background of her subjects. Many of these portraits appear almost like colour studies than portraits.” (Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Fahrelnissa Zeid Painter of Inner Worlds, London, 2017, p. 267).

Untitled is a beautiful portrait of one of Fahrelnissa’s family members which offers the viewer a glimpse into the tender and intimate side of the artist. Painted when he was ten years old, the artist’s love for him is evident in the softer and more romantic colours she chose to depict him and the comfortable pose of her sitter. There is a beautiful and harmonious contrast between the orange flowers and the turquoise in the background against the light skin and hair of her grandson wearing a white sweater. It is essentially a portrait painted by an internationally established artist in a warm and intimate setting.

Sotheby’s is honoured to offer this rare portrait by this internationally celebrated artist which would be a unique addition to any modern art collection. Fahrelnissa’s works are in the collections of leading museums such as Tate Modern, London, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. Zeid was awarded the Star of Jordan for her contribution to the arts in the country she later called home and she was also made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. A large selection of Zeid's works was most recently exhibited at the 12th Sharjah Biennial in 2015 and at the 14th Istanbul Biennial the same year. She also had a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London in 2017 which travelled to the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin in 2017-2018.  

We would like to thank Adila Laïdi-Hanieh for her contribution to this catalogue note.