A01124 - Saloua Choucair, Lebanese Painter and Sculptor

 

Choucair, Saloua Raouda

Saloua Raouda Choucair (b. June 24, 1916, Beirut, Lebanon – d. January 26, 2017, Beirut, Lebanon) was a Lebanese painter and sculptor.  She is said to have been the first abstract artist in Lebanon although she sold nothing there until 1962.

Born in 1916 in Beirut, Choucair started painting in the studios of Lebanese painters Moustafa Farroukh (1935) and Omar Onsi (1942).  Her exhibition in 1947 at the Arab Cultural Gallery in Beirut is considered to have been the Arab world's first abstract painting  exhibition. In 1948 she left Lebanon and went to Paris, where she studied at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux Arts and attended Fernand Leger's studio. In 1950, she was one of the first Arab artists to participate in the Salon des Realites Nouvelles in Paris and had in 1951 a solo exhibition at Colette Allendy's gallery, which was better received in Paris than in Beirut.

In 1959, Choucair began to concentrate on sculpture, which became her main preoccupation in 1962. In 1963, she was awarded the National Council of Tourism Prize for the execution of a stone sculpture for a public site in Beirut. In 1974, the Lebanese Artists Association sponsored an honorary retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Council of Tourism in Beirut. In 1985, Choucair won an appreciation prize from the General Union of Arab Painters. In 1988, she was awarded a medal by the Lebanese government. A retrospective exhibition organized by Saleh Barakat was presented at the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2011.

Choucair's work has been considered as one of the best examples of the spirit of abstraction characteristic of Arabic visual art, completely disconnected from the observation of nature and inspired by Arabic geometric art.

Choucair received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut in May of 2014.

Choucair turned 100 on June 24, 2016 and she died on January 26, 2017, Beirut, Lebanon.