Saloua Raouda Choucair

Saloua Raouda Choucair (Beirut, 1916-2017) was a Lebanese painter and sculptor widely regarded as the first abstract artist in her country, although she did not sell any work in Lebanon until 1962. Her long career places her at the centre of Arab abstraction and of the dialogue between modern art and Islamic art.

Born into a family of professionals, she lost her father while still young and grew up with a cultured mother active in women's associations. She studied Natural Sciences at the American Junior College for Women, today the Lebanese American University, and received only three months of formal art training under Omar Onsi; the rest of her learning was self-taught. In 1943, with Cairo's museums closed because of the war, she walked through the city and visited its mosques, an experience that deepened her interest in Islamic geometry.

After working at the library of the American University of Beirut, in 1947 she showed geometric watercolours at the Arab Cultural Gallery, regarded as the first exhibition of abstract painting in the Arab world. In 1948 she travelled to Paris, where galleries and museums introduced her to abstract art, and in 1951 she held a solo show at the Colette Allendy gallery that received favourable reviews. Around 1959 she turned increasingly to sculpture, which became her main focus from 1962. Her precise, geometric works draw on the principles of Islamic design and Arabic poetry rather than on the observation of nature.

She received recognition such as the National Tourism Council Prize in 1963 and a retrospective in Beirut in 1974. Her work has been shown at Mathaf in Doha and at Tate Modern, and she is now considered one of the leading figures of Arab geometric abstraction.