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Articles on Saloua Raouda Choucair
ArteEast's 2008 Virtual Gallery Exhibits to call attention to this important history of modern art in the Middle East
Kirsten Scheid and Jessica Winegar introduce the first of four artists who were extremely important interpreters and translators of modernism in their time.
In the past ten years, contemporary visual art from the Middle East has garnered unprecedented attention worldwide. Many artists from the region are now sought-after participants in international exhibitions, and new publications have sprung up featuring their work, which has also enjoyed record sales. Yet while many art works and artists now circulate the globe, in-depth knowledge of local art histories does not. Art historians, critics, and artists living in the region produce and rework these histories, often in non-Western languages, yet their work has generally been overlooked in the excitement over contemporary art itself.
With the Artist Saloua Raouda
By Edvick Shaybub, a 1951 interview conducted for Sawt al-Mara' magazine, Volume 7, Issue 12, originally titled in Arabic, "Ma'a al-fannana Saloua Raouda".
Edvick Shaybub: Why did the modern school of art dispense with the subject, and also with the notion of dimensions, which necessitate light and shadow?
Saloua Raouda: It dispensed with the subject because we consider it outside the scope of the art of painting (“la peinture”), since the subject requires speech and speech belongs to the domain of literature. For although painting is not limited to colors alone, we focused our interest on highlighting the attribute of “color” itself, without associating other arts with it, like literature, psychology, sociology and so forth . . .
Saloua Raouda Choucair: Distinctiveness of Style and Individuality of Vision
By Samir Sayigh, originally published as "Tamayyuz uslub wa faruda ru'ya" in Al-Kifah Al-'Arabi, 25-31 July 2983, pp. 70-71. Archived material from the Saloua Raouda Choucair Archives, Beirut, Lebanon
What will give this sculpture its spirit is not the form or the volume or the formulaic or geometric unit; rather, it is the movement that this form or geometric unit undertakes in its accumulation, growth and repetition. That is, it is this empty space, this invisible, absolute abstraction. For the movement here is intangible and disembodied, even illusory, hypothetical, potential, and will not materialize or be seen unless the eye brings it to life, the eye that knows how to return the sculpture to its original state, that is, to its beginning as a unit, then follow along with it step by step.
The Press Dossier: Reception and production of an artist and her audience
By Kirsten Scheid, excerpted and revised from Painters, Picture-makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State (Princeton University, 2005)
A clear plastic bag, bursting with papers of various yellows and grays - this is what Saloua Raouda Choucair reached for in the cupboard next to her bed. She pulled out of it press reviews of her work and interviews conducted with her over the past forty years. Her favorites were at the top of the stack; below were the more objectionable ones, which she had scribbled over, sometimes in several different pens, crossing out “wrong” phrases and correcting “misinterpretations.” Interspersed were numerous photocopies which I, like other writers who had come before, could have to help me in my writing about her, along with copies of her own published writings. Sharing her personally gathered press dossier was the first thing that Choucair did when I informed the eighty year-old sculptor that I would like to focus my study on her career.
SENSORY EQUATIONS: Pure Visual Art According to Saloua Raouda Choucair
By Jack Aswad, excerpted from Saloua Raouda Choucair: Her Life and Art, pp. 17-35, Catalogue raisonné (Beirut, Lebanon, 2002). Translated by Kirsten Scheid.[1]
It was ignorance, I rather think, in the sense of lack of knowledge -- that Choucair’s art was unknown, not in the sense of not yet known but in the sense of not knowable. As for the recent unanimous recognition of the value of her gifts, it does not result, most of the time, from a new awareness of them, but rather only from an indirect testament to it provided unintentionally by contemporary art history.
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Bio:
Saloua Raouda Choucair is an artist who was born in Beirut in 1916 and continues to live there. Trained in art as part of a program to involve female citizens in the project of modernizing, civilizing, and beautifying colonial and post-colonial Arab societies, Raouda Choucair developed a form of sculpture based on Sufic and scientific principles she felt were best suited to the modern world.
After studying casually with two of Lebanon's pioneer painters, Raouda Choucair worked in Paris between 1948 and 1951 in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, La Grande Chaumière atelier, and Fernand Léger's atelier before participating in the establishment of L'Atelier de l'Art Abstrait led by Edgar Pillet and Jean Dewasne.
She returned to Beirut in 1951. For the next several decades Choucair's career was characterized by lone work in her atelier punctuated every decade or so with an extensive solo exhibition. Throughout the 1960s she garnered top prizes for her sculptures at the annual salons.
In 1969 she spent a year in France at the invitation of the French government, and starting in 1970 she was invited each year to send works to the Salon de Mai in Paris. In 1977 she began teaching sculpture at the Lebanese University, and in 1986 she lectured on sculpture at the American University of Beirut.
The last two decades of her life have been replete with local and national awards and a few public installations of her mammoth sculptures. In 2002 her career was documented in a catalogue raisonné produced by her daughter, Hala.
Links to other sites on Saloua Raouda Choucair's work: www.srchoucair.comMetropolitan Museum of ArtOne Fine Art
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