In the beginning people did not take her seriously because she was a woman. She was a salmon
swimming upstream. She was not French. She was Muslim. She was a princess. She
was so generous and she loved life. She was such a great personality.
So colourful in so many ways. There was so much excitement.
So, I wrote down my ideas when I was working.
The most difficult thing is where the hell to begin with the paint?
After deciding on your approach,
you must go forward in the physical realm.
Reaffirm, solidify and shape your ideas.
My family from my mother's side were mostly artists and
painters and individuals who were very much prone to liberal arts.
For my father's side it was mostly to do with politics. At the age of 19, she joined the Academy of
Fine Arts in Turkey. For a young lady in her twenties to join fine arts, where
she was exposed to models, it was unheard of.
She got married. A businessman took her to Europe. Took her everywhere. Took her to museums,
to exhibitions. She was very much very proud of her Turkish
background. I think a lot of her ways and manners stemmed from that. But at the same time, she
loved France more than anything, I think. It was the beginning of the 30s when she met my father.
My late father-in-law was appointed as what
they called 'minister' at the time to Germany. And then as the Second World War was looming
and breaking out, he was recalled back to Baghdad.
She went into the abstract, once she went to Baghdad to live there when she got married.
And then she saw through
the latticework on the windows. She would look through them in the early
hours of the morning. She would see these peasant women coming from the horizon
with their colorful costumes. That inspired her to start her first abstract.
Working she was in a trance. She would just carry on for hours and hours and hours.
Sweating and no one could disturb her. No one could talk to her and she was oblivious to what was going on behind her.
And the concentration. Total concentration. After the war she had more or less a double life.
The life of a diplomat in London and also a life of an artist and a painter
in Paris. She did exhibit at the Colette Allendy gallery. Colette Allendy
used to show the most avant-garde work. She was at a turning point in the
development of art and she was part of it. Fahrelnissa Zeid Al-Hussein
came to Paris to show us her ideas.
Her work. Which is, if I dare say, a work of genius.
In the 50s she went into these very big canvases. When she started doing
My Hell, she said she was very depressed. A very
dear friend of hers passed away, and she was sitting watching a fly that was
moving on the wall. She was inspired by that. She said 'I want to do my big canvas
with this movements that represent life somehow'. She had a great big studio, I
think, in the Embassy residence at that time. But then with the terrible thing
that happened in Iraq in 1958, they had to move out of that beautiful
residence and went into a smaller apartment. So we had to leave the embassy
and we found a a small apartment where we settled.
So I had to start cooking. It's Christmas and I took on the task of cooking a turkey.
And then I think they had eaten it down to the bone and she was about to throw it all out,
but she caught herself and saw that it had a very interesting shape. And so she kept
it and then she painted it. Shortly after that she had a chance to meet the great
Minister of Culture in Paris.
I said to him, 'It's like something from Mexico'.
And he replied, 'Mexican, yes. But this is art!'
Those last few years in Paris, after my father-in-law passed away, her health was
not that great. So she decided to take this big leap and came to Amman,
where at the time there wasn't that much culture life or so much happening in the art world.
I believe few of us have the chance to meet extraordinary people who change the
course of your life and I was one of those privileged.
She chose women who were not trained in art, to teach them. She was teaching and
letting these ladies do their abstract work, while she made many many many portraits.
She felt maybe she had done enough of the abstract paintings. It just didn't
come to her anymore.
To make a portrait, I place my model a distance away from me so I cannot see the details.
To gain a general view. To see the presence of the person and perhaps their soul.
Lastly, I don't think there's a big difference between a portrait and an abstract.
Because one could make one hundred portraits and every time it would be different.
Because it is not a photo. It is the soul.
Her house was a kind of magic space. This combination of colours and
shapes and it was truly magic. To understand who is Fahrelnissa. She was
one of the first women to go to the Academy of Art in Istanbul in the 1920s.
She was one of the very few women in the 50s, that was part of this
circle of men artists. She came to Jordan and she transformed the perception of
what is art. She was one of these few women who was taken out of history because of
their gender and in her case because of her origin.
She was the East in the West combined in harmony.