Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from the collection of Georges El-Zeenny, Beirut
Thence by descent to the present owner, London

'The way I organized my sculptural poems, for example, was inspired by Arabic poetry. I wanted rhythm like the poetic meter, to be at once more independent and interlinked, and to have lines like meanings, but plastic meanings.' (Quoted in Mulhaq al-Nahar, September 1995, page 10)
Bonhams have the rare privilege to present yet another major sculpture by the Lebanese female pioneer Saloua Raouda Choucair from the collection of one of Lebanon's most devoted and prolific patrons of 20th century Middle Eastern Art, the late George El-Zeenny.

Saloua Choucair was born in Beirut in 1916 and died in 2017 at the age of 100. In 2013, Choucair was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at Tate Modern, which brought together more than half a century of her work. In her youth, Choucair was tutored by the prominent Lebanese impressionist and realist painters, Omar Onsi and Moustafa Farroukh. She graduated from the American University of Beirut. In 1943, Choucair discovered her passion for Islamic art and architecture during her trip to Egypt. Between the years of 1948-1951 she spent three important years in Paris where she studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts as well as attending Fernand Léger's studio. There she encountered and absorbed the present themes, trends and philosophies of European modernism before she returned to her homeland to dedicate the rest of her life to carving out her personal vision. Choucair was one of the first Arab artists to participate in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in 1950.

This extraordinary sculpture is a superlative manifestation of her "Poems" series of the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1960s, Choucair left painting and shifted her focus towards sculpture, producing modular works that could be disassembled or reassembled into squares, rectangles and towers with an architectural feel. In 1949, Choucair visited Le Corbusier's modular housing project in Marseille which made a profound impression on the development of her ingenious variations on the modular principle in her "Poems" series. The line and curve persist basic elements of a visual language that preoccupied Choucair throughout her career, finding its way into a variety of mediums and forms including painting, sculpture, textiles, murals and other domestic designs.

Choucair's use of interlocking and connecting forms grew out of her interest in the religion Sufism and its related poetry, in which individual parts are recognized as having their own identity while contributing to the unity of the whole. Each individual unit is able to function as a unique sculptural form and the individual units can be rearranged in different formations. This potential for interaction and movement within this work also relates it to the sculpture of artists such as Lygia Clark (Brazil,1920–1988), whose 'Bichos' were similarly kinetic. However, the highly specific poetical reference in Choucair's work sets it apart from this Western lineage. Choucair used the term 'sculptural poem' for many of her works including this one, making explicit reference to the structure of Arabic poetry. She has stated:

"A critic once told me that my work has a European influence. I object! It is a universal influence, what I experience everyone in the world experiences, and in fact, all of the rules I apply to my sculpture are derived from Islamic Geometric design"
- Saloua Choucair