Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid

Biography

Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid was a Turkish modernist artist whose career lasted seven decades and stretched across several continents. Born Fahrünissa Şakir on December 6, 1901, on the island of Büyükada near Istanbul, she was among the first women to attend art school in Turkey at what is now Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, after finishing her studies at Lycée Notre Dame de Sion Istanbul. She created a wide range of art, including painting, collage, lithography, mosaic work, printmaking, and stained glass. Her most famous pieces are large abstract paintings with kaleidoscopic patterns. In 1920, she married İzzet Melih Devrim and had three children: Faruk, Nejad, and Şirin. They divorced in 1934, and she then married Prince Zeid bin Hussein from the Hashemite royal family of Iraq, with whom she had a son, Prince Ra'ad bin Zeid. Her royal ties gave her access to international cultural circles and allowed her to travel widely, which influenced her art. Her work went through different phases, from her time in Istanbul during the 1940s avant-garde movement to becoming part of the post-war Paris art scene and the new School of Paris. Her vibrant geometric works mixed Eastern and Western art traditions, drawing on both Islamic art and European modernism. Major exhibitions of her work were held at renowned institutions like the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1954, followed by shows in Paris and New York. In the 1970s, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she set up an art school to support local artists. Her artistic legacy gained international attention again in 2017 when Tate Modern organized a major retrospective, with curators calling her 'one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century.' Her pieces fetch high prices at auctions, with 'Break of the Atom and Vegetal Life' (1962) selling for $2,741,000 at Christie's in 2013, and 'Towards a Sky' (1953) reaching just under one million pounds in 2017.