Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid (, Fakhr un-nisa or Fahr-El-Nissa, born Fahrünissa Şakir; 7 January 1901 – 5 September 1991) was a Turkish artist best known for her large-scale abstract paintings with kaleidoscopic patterns as well as her drawings, lithographs, and sculptures. Zeid was one of the first women to go to art school in Istanbul. She lived in different cities and became part of the avant-garde scenes in 1940s Istanbul, and post-war Paris. Her work has been exhibited at various institutions in Paris, New York, and London, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1954. In the 1970s, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she established an art school. In 2017, Tate Modern in London organised a major retrospective and called her "one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century". Her largest work to be sold at auction, Towards a Sky (1953), went for just under one million pounds in 2017. Her record is the USD 2,741,000 sale of her Break of the Atom and Vegetal Life (1962) in 2013 by Christies.
In 1920, Şakir married Izzet Devrim, with whom she had three children: Faruk, Nejad, and Şirin. Şakir divorced Devrim in 1934. The same year, she married Prince Zeid bin Hussein, a member of the Hashemite royal family of Iraq. They were the parents of Prince Ra'ad bin Zeid.
Biography
Early life
Fahrünissa Şakir was born in 1901 into the Ottoman Şakır family on the island of Büyükada in Istanbul. Her uncle Ahmed Javad Pasha served as the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire from 1891 to 1895 and another uncle, Cevat Çobanlı, was a World War I hero. Fahrünissa's father, Şakir Pasha, was appointed ambassador to Greece, where he met her mother, Sara İsmet Hanım. In 1913, her father was fatally shot and her brother, Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, was tried and convicted of his murder.
Şakir began drawing and painting at a young age. Her earliest known surviving work is a portrait of her grandmother, painted when she was 14. In 1919, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women in Istanbul.
In 1920 at the age of nineteen, Şakir married the novelist İzzet Melih Devrim. For their honeymoon, Devrim took Şakir to Venice where she was exposed to European painting traditions for the first time. They had three children together. Her eldest son, Faruk (born 1921), died of scarlet fever in 1924. Her son Nejad Devrim (born 1923) went on to become a painter, and her daughter Şirin Devrim (born 1926) became an actress.
Şakir travelled to Paris in 1928 and enrolled at the Académie Ranson, where she studied under the painter Roger Bissière. Upon her return to Istanbul in 1929, she abandoned her academic figurative practice and turned towards expressionist figurativism, and enrolled at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts.
Şakir's brother Cevat, better known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, was a novelist. Under her tutelage, her sister Aliye Berger became a major modernist painter and engraver, while her niece Fureya Koral became a pioneering ceramic artist.
1930–1944
Şakir divorced Devrim in 1934, and married Prince Zeid bin Hussein of Iraq, who was appointed the first Ambassador of the Kingdom of Iraq to Germany in 1935. The couple moved to Berlin where Fahrelnissa hosted many social events in her role as an ambassador's wife. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, Prince Zeid and his family were recalled to Iraq, taking up residence in Baghdad.
Fahrelnissa Zeid became depressed in Baghdad and on the advice of Viennese doctor Hans Hoff returned to Paris after a short time. She spent the next years of her life traveling between Paris, Budapest, and Istanbul, attempting to immerse herself in painting and recover. By 1941, she was back in Istanbul and focusing on her painting.
Zeid became involved with the D Group of Istanbul, an avant-garde group of painters working in the newly formed Turkish Republic. Although her association with the group was short-lived, working with the D Group from 1944 gave Zeid the confidence to begin exhibiting on her own.
1945–1957
In 1945, Zeid cleared out the parlour rooms of her apartment in Maçka, Istanbul, and held her first solo exhibition. In 1946, after two more solo exhibitions in İzmir in 1945 and in Istanbul in 1946, Zeid relocated to London where Prince Zeid Al-Hussein became the first Ambassador of the Kingdom of Iraq to the Court of St James's. Zeid continued to paint, turning a room in the Iraqi Embassy into her studio.
From 1947, Zeid's practice became more complex and her work transitioned from figurative painting to abstraction. She was influenced by the abstract styles coming out of Paris in the post-war period.