“This painting reflects my experience of speed while riding the train regularly between New York and New Haven to teach at the Yale School of Art. Two thin blue cylinders, like steel rods, do not extend to the top edge of the paintings as all the other strips do. Thus we are able to see them as leaning forward or backward, like a trap door, even though they remain parallel to the rest of the diagonal space.”
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby proclaimed she was born “to the marvellous noise of revolution” (Samia Halaby, Samia Halaby, Beirut 2006, p. 13). At the age of twelve, Halaby’s family was forced to flee and first sought refuge in the Lebanese mountains. Living primarily in Beirut, it was here that the artist experienced the forceful spirit of social change, and became enchanted by the sensations of her natural environment, motifs that would come to mark her discernible oeuvre. In 1951 the family relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, and, having demonstrated much artistic ingenuity from a young age, Halaby enrolled at the University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts for Design. She later obtained her Master’s degree from Indiana University, where she explored the German Bauhaus school of art as well as Cubism and Russian Constructivism. Particularly taken by their simplification of form and theoretical approaches, Halaby would later come to triangulate these styles through the prism of social progression. She took on a succession of professorial roles which enabled her to establish her own artistic voice, first at the University of Hawaii, where she held her first exhibition at Honolulu’s Gima Gallery in 1964, before transferring to the Kansas City Art Institute. With a grant from the regional council, Halaby embarked on travels to Türkiye, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, where her understanding of Islamic and Arab art and its principles of geometry was nourished. In the 1970s she assumed a position as the first female professor at the Replica Handbags s division of Yale University’s School of Arts. This decade, during which the present work was created, marked a number of milestones for the artist, including her prestigious professional appointment and a rise in her political activism. The friendships which she cultivated in New Haven, where she lived, encouraged her Marxist ideologies, which she found to be a mirror for her own desires for justice and equality as a Palestinian refugee.
Halaby’s career can be divided into several distinct phases, with the present belonging to what is regarded as her ‘Diagonal Flight’ period from 1974-1979. Halaby explains, “Late in 1970, I abandoned still life and began planning my paintings on graph paper” (ibid., p. 28). Taking a decisive shift towards geometry, she purchased several books on the subject intended for engineers and technicians and would deem an understanding of how to join forms essential. Adopting the parallel lines and shading techniques of her earlier Helixes and Cycloids period, she employed the diagonal line to mimic the rapid sensation of flight. Blue Trap (in a Railroad Station) was inspired the optical sensations of travelling at high speed from New Haven to New York to teach, though Maymanah Farhat notes that the concept also invoked early memories of the Mediterranean Sea, where Halaby felt an overwhelming sense of freedom (Farhat, Samia Halaby, p. 74). With her unique ability to synthesise the sensations of her surroundings through colour, she invokes the impression of flurried forms blurring into an indistinguishable mass. Much like the work of Carmen Herrera, Sam Gilliam and Judy Chicago’s abstract period, Halaby relinquishes single-point linear perspective to create a sense of infinite space. Through such subtle variations of colour, she creates the illusion of distant planes, employing abstraction to imitate nature through deceptions of the eye.
“I shaded with a formal idea based on medieval Arabic abstraction where both shape and background were treated in ways that pulled them to one surface, to the front. Thus, they vied for space on the frontal plane.”
Halaby embraced abstraction as a political tool, believing that overt, figurative political imagery was not necessary to reflect her experiences of exile and trauma. Opting for a more nuanced approach, she rendered her experiences with a certain subtlety and ambiguity. In a 2019 essay entitled The Political Basis of Abstraction in the 20th Century as Explored by a Painter, Halaby argued against the notion that abstraction is born of “inner necessity” or emotion, but rather is a product of social and economic circumstances, as in the Futurist and Cubist movements, which emerged from working-class revolutions (Samia Halaby, ‘The Political Basis of Abstraction in the 20th Century as Explored by a Painter,’ Manazir Journal, 1, pp. 77–90).
The palette of Blue Trap (in a Railroad Station) recalls the industrial hues and light of New York City, which Halaby later wrote creative prose on in the late 1990s. After ten years of teaching, Halaby eventually moved to New York, where the effervescence of the bustling city continued to play a major role in her perception of politics, religion, social structure, and gender equality. Halaby is a multifaceted figure, recognised not only for her painting but also for her activism and academicism.
Of remarkable provenance, Blue Trap (in a Railroad Station) hails from the distinguished Samawi collects ion; Khaled and Jouhayna Samawi began collects ing during their t.mes in Europe in the 1990s and upon their return to Syria founded internationally-established Ayyam Gallery in Damascus in 2006. Comprising over 3,000 works, the collects ion is one of the largest private collects ions of modern Arab, Iranian and Turkish art, in addition to featuring many international artists. Through their patronage, the Samawi Family is dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of the region’s prolific arts.
Halaby’s works have been acquired by many of the most reputable institutions worldwide, including the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Mellon Foundation, New York; Art Jameel, Jeddah/Dubai; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, to name a few. Halaby’s work was also presented for the first t.mes at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
Works by Samia Halaby in Distinguished Institutional collects ions
