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Lot Essay
“She said: ‘in order to achieve a masterpiece, first you have to feel yourself within the picture, you must settle yourself in it with all your existence.’… She advised me to think of my beloved ones, the people whom I was longing for, whenever I wished to add sweetness to my colors, to my figures. She told me, ‘Think of my mother, think of Berger, think of me. Choose your colors that describe a world in which you wish your beloved ones could live.’”
(Zeynap Yasa Yaman, Fahrunnisa Zeid: An Artist and Explorer Beyond Ideologies in a Globalized World, Fahrelnissa & Nejad: Two Generations of the Rainbow, Istanbul Modern.)
Nympheas à Minuit is an ethereal and mesmerizing composition by the Turkish/Jordanian artist Fahrelnissa Zeid that demonstrates the artist's unique approach to abstraction, produced during a time in the 1940s-1960s when the artist created her most iconic works. The present work draws from her inspiration from living and interacting with a wide range of artistic overlapping cultural contexts, forging a unique visual vocabulary as the artist fuses European abstract art with aspects from Byzantine, Islamic and Persian art. Starting out her career within the avant-garde scene in Istanbul, she later continued her training in Paris and would become a prominent figure in the art world in Paris and London beginning in the late 1940s.
Christie’s is pleased to present this stunning visual piece that gathers inspiration from nature, readily indicative of the artist’s European influences at the time. The altering blue tones that ripple throughout the canvas invoke a sense of calmness and tranquility captured in slow movement. Whether drawing from a range of European movements from Expressionism to Fauvism, Realism to Cubism, Zeid placed a preeminence in colour as the foremost constituent of the composition. Exposed to a multiplicity of artworks in Paris at the time, Zeid portrays her own take of Monet’s Nympheas (water lillies), a subject that Monet devoted the last two decades of his career painting. Similarly, Zeid was as interested in painting the nature around her; here, the red hues of water lilies surface from the background and are met within an interplay of shading and gradations of light. The piece is well balanced, as Zeid achieves a sense of dimensionality and depth through bright and dim colours which fade in and out of each other.
More than this, Zeid must be viewed within her artistic milieu. She was educated in Paris, and her talents blossomed along the Parisian scene. There is a discipline, an education, training and dialogue that must be taken into account, all of which took place within the context of a European art movement, and which eclipse her extraneous passions of Mediterranean sunshine and Byzantine mosaics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Zeid was exhibiting with the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris artists while exhibiting in shows in London, under the tutelage of the influential art critic Charles Estienne. She was showcasing works alongside peers that would become masters of this movement, with those such as Arnal, Atlan, Dmitrienko and her own son Nejad among others. She exhibited at the Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, set up by Sonia Delaunay in 1939 and exhibited alongside artists such as Arp, Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger and Serge Poliakoff among others. In 1958, due to the shocking massacre of Prince Emir bin Zeid’s family and the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, Fahrelnissa moved out of the ambassadorial home in London and split her time between London and Paris where she would exhibit regularly. Later in the 1960s the artist would eventually return to portraiture, gradually shifting away from abstraction and making this work one of the last abstract works of her career before her move to Jordan in 1970.
(Zeynap Yasa Yaman, Fahrunnisa Zeid: An Artist and Explorer Beyond Ideologies in a Globalized World, Fahrelnissa & Nejad: Two Generations of the Rainbow, Istanbul Modern.)
Nympheas à Minuit is an ethereal and mesmerizing composition by the Turkish/Jordanian artist Fahrelnissa Zeid that demonstrates the artist's unique approach to abstraction, produced during a time in the 1940s-1960s when the artist created her most iconic works. The present work draws from her inspiration from living and interacting with a wide range of artistic overlapping cultural contexts, forging a unique visual vocabulary as the artist fuses European abstract art with aspects from Byzantine, Islamic and Persian art. Starting out her career within the avant-garde scene in Istanbul, she later continued her training in Paris and would become a prominent figure in the art world in Paris and London beginning in the late 1940s.
Christie’s is pleased to present this stunning visual piece that gathers inspiration from nature, readily indicative of the artist’s European influences at the time. The altering blue tones that ripple throughout the canvas invoke a sense of calmness and tranquility captured in slow movement. Whether drawing from a range of European movements from Expressionism to Fauvism, Realism to Cubism, Zeid placed a preeminence in colour as the foremost constituent of the composition. Exposed to a multiplicity of artworks in Paris at the time, Zeid portrays her own take of Monet’s Nympheas (water lillies), a subject that Monet devoted the last two decades of his career painting. Similarly, Zeid was as interested in painting the nature around her; here, the red hues of water lilies surface from the background and are met within an interplay of shading and gradations of light. The piece is well balanced, as Zeid achieves a sense of dimensionality and depth through bright and dim colours which fade in and out of each other.
More than this, Zeid must be viewed within her artistic milieu. She was educated in Paris, and her talents blossomed along the Parisian scene. There is a discipline, an education, training and dialogue that must be taken into account, all of which took place within the context of a European art movement, and which eclipse her extraneous passions of Mediterranean sunshine and Byzantine mosaics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Zeid was exhibiting with the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris artists while exhibiting in shows in London, under the tutelage of the influential art critic Charles Estienne. She was showcasing works alongside peers that would become masters of this movement, with those such as Arnal, Atlan, Dmitrienko and her own son Nejad among others. She exhibited at the Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, set up by Sonia Delaunay in 1939 and exhibited alongside artists such as Arp, Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger and Serge Poliakoff among others. In 1958, due to the shocking massacre of Prince Emir bin Zeid’s family and the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, Fahrelnissa moved out of the ambassadorial home in London and split her time between London and Paris where she would exhibit regularly. Later in the 1960s the artist would eventually return to portraiture, gradually shifting away from abstraction and making this work one of the last abstract works of her career before her move to Jordan in 1970.