12 Apr 2022

Fahrelnissa Zeid and the Localization of Cubism in Mid-twentieth Century Turkey

Wendy Shaw
Paris, France
The École des modernités At the Institut Giacometti

Fahrelnissa Zeid's remarkable international career is exemplary of the development of abstraction in Turkey and of the exchanges between Turkey and Europe in the mid-twentieth century. One of the first women enrolled at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, Zeid travelled to Europe in the 1920s and studied with Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson in Montparnasse. On her return to Istanbul, she was the only Turkish woman to join the "Groupe D" in 1941, the first group of independent artists to be influenced by, but not limited to, Cubism. Her abstract work was widely exhibited, notably in 1949 at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and in Paris, where she returned, her work was noticed by such figures as André Breton and Alain Gheerbrant.

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Wendy M. K. Shaw (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) is an Art Historian. She has been Professor of the Art History of Islamic cultures at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her work focuses on postcolonial art historiography an on the Islamic world and the modern Middle East. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), and Loving Writing (Routledge, 2021). Her book What is "Islamic" Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has received the Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 Iran Book Award.

12 April 2022 at 6:30pm

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Wendy SHAW - Fahrelnissa Zeid and the localization of Cubism in mid-twentieth century Turkey

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