Tate Modern presents Zeid

Tate Modern is presenting the United Kingdom's first retrospective of Fahrelnissa Zeid, a pioneering artist best-known for her large-scale colorful canvases that fused European approaches to abstract art with Byzantine, Islamic and Persian influences.

This major exhibition, which opened on June 13, brings together paintings, drawings and sculptures spanning over 40 years from expressionist works made in Istanbul in the early 1940s, to immersive abstract canvases exhibited in London, Paris and New York in the 1950s and 1960s, finishing with her return to portraiture later in life.

Zeid was one of the first women to receive formal training as an artist in Istanbul, continuing her studies in Paris in the late 1920s. The show reveals her breakthrough moment in the early 1940s, when she championed experimental approaches to painting and exhibited with the avant-garde D-Group in Turkey.

The exhibition looks at how Zeid's work from this period, such as the tapestry-like "Third-Class Passengers" (1943), demonstrate her affinities with and divergence from international art movements, blending European painting traditions with Oriental themes.

Several works from her first solo exhibitions, held in her own apartment in Istanbul in the mid-1940s, are reunited, including "Three Ways of Living (War)" (1943) and "Three Moments in a Day and a Life" (1944).
In 1945, Zeid and her husband, Prince Zeid al-Hussein of the Hashemite royal family, moved to the U.K. where he had been posted as Iraqi ambassador. Splitting her time between London and Paris, Zeid's exhibitions were well received by critics and artists alike, cementing her position as one of the great female artists working at the time.

Two works from this period signal her...