Fahrelnissa Zeid moved to London from Istanbul in 1946. She had spent the War years painting expressionist figurative plein air and interior scenes, after living in Berlin, Budapest and Baghdad. 1941 saw her encounter with the Turkish Avant Garde artistic group the D Group with whom she began exhibiting immediately, until her first solo exhibition in 1945. In the following two years she took part in international group exhibitions of Turkish art at the UNESCO, and in London as part of an Arts Council touring exhibition.

Her move to London signified her return also to Paris after the War hiatus, and her discovery there of Post War abstraction. Her own practice had come to a plateau after four years of prolifically painting in the same dynamic figurative expressionist vein which had brought her national recognition in Turkey. Visiting Paris, she was encouraged by Alice Toklas to exhibit, and in London, was invited to exhibit by Lea Jaray –the former Viennese gallerist of Egon Schiele- at the St George Gallery in February 1948, where she showed her late 1940s figurative works from Istanbul, Bagdad and Budapest.

Fahrelnissa felt the need to exhibit again in London only three months later, in May, inaugurating her Gimpel Fils phase, because as a francophone and Francophile she felt comfortable with the French émigré newly founded gallery, and wanted to show her radically different new style, in their larger premises on South Molton Street. The gallery specialized in post-war British and École de Paris artists. Fahrelnissa exhibited thirty new works, oils and watercolours. She would exhibit again at Gimpel’s eight months later, in January 1949. No reproductions from those exhibitions survive, but the names of the works are named after places she had recently visited: Camping in Scotland, The Golden Ray of Baghdad, From the Eiffel Tower, Regent’s Park, Torquay Beach, Hyde Park, Excursion Boats at Brighton, High Seas at Eastbourne, etc.

Fahrelnissa Zeid attributed her late 1940s turn towards abstraction first to her experience of transatlantic air travel in 1949, and to her experiencing for the first t.mes rapidly receding colourful landscape from the airplane windows. She had in fact begun in 1947 her turn towards the abstract after a trip to Scotland, and numerous subsequent stays on the British sea side –Eastbourne, Torquay and Brighton- where she looked for appeasement of her depressive episodes. The cold and grey British coastal climate gave her instead a new visual focus: pebbles on the beaches and new seaside landscapes that she rendered in abstraction rather than figuratively. Trips to Brighton, Edinburgh and Loch Lomond were profusely rendered in her sketchbooks with semi abstract shards, severely geometric units of colour divided by broad back lines.

By 1949, she had conceptually embraced a conception of abstraction as a process of artistic maturity, of liberation from the limited world of recognisable objects and figuration. Her 1949 sketchbooks –pre and post her transatlantic travel- testify to this search, as they are rife with drawings, experiments with shards, triangles of colour painted on top of a tangle of meandering lines, experimenting with China ink and pencil for the lines, and with water-colour and gouache for the colours somet.mes using all four on the same page. These experiments were transposed into larger works on paper that she exhibited at Gimpel’s, at her first 1949 Paris exhibition and in 1950 at her first New York exhibition.

An exceptionally rare surviving example of this remarkable historic and innovative output is on display in this sale. These dense kaleidoscopic explorations were seen as bejewelled emissaries of centuries old civilisations by some Paris critics, whereas they bore prosaic names of locations she had visited and which therefore indicate that Fahrelnissa Zeid was developing a new visual language of her own by abstracting her realist visual experiences, on paper and canvas. This work on paper on offer in this sale is a prominent specimen of this historic period of Fahrlenissa Zeid, where the paper bears the trace of her quintessential gesture: A sharp rapid thrusting line that turns then returns, crisscrossed and swarms the pictorial plane.

The oil on canvas work on offer from this Gimpel phase is an exciting never seen before work, and also bears trace of Fahrelnissa Zeid’s experimentation with abstraction, before transitioning to her kinetic and dynamic monumental works in the 1950s. Here she is experimenting with distributing primary colours on the pictorial plane, still bound by meandering lines as she would throughout her subsequent abstract oil painting practice. Unlike her works on paper, the line is almost visible, privileging unmixed aplats of pure primary colour, allowed by the properties of oil paint.

In this work, we see Fahrlenissa Zeid’ liberation from shards and grids and exploration of undulating chromatic eddies. This work prefigures her subsequent monumental colour murmurations, in a quieter vein, but still driven by the vibrancy of the primary colours. Here the mainstays of the Fahrelnissa Zeid paintings appear: the bold juxtaposition of primary colours, but arranged here in six distinct floating compositional subdivisions, separated by azure, white and peach inlets. This extremely rare and unseen before early work prefigures all of the chromatic and linear compositional hallmarks of her monumental works to come, but distinguished here by an appeased, quiet mood and on a rare relatively smaller size that makes this a historic signpost of a boldly unique twentieth century practice.

Sotheby’s is grateful to Dr Adila Laïdi-Hanieh for cataloguing the present lot. Dr. Laïdi-Hanieh is a writer and academic specializing in Palestinan arts and cultural practices, and modern Arab intellectual history and cultural spaces and processes. Director General of the Palestinian Museum Non-Governmental Association in Birzeit since 2018, she published Zeid’s biography, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Painter of Inner Worlds, in 2017.