Saloua Raouda Choucair (; June 24, 1916 – January 26, 2017) was a Lebanese painter and sculptor.
Life and career
Born in 1916 in Ain el Mreisa, Beirut, Lebanon, Choucair came from a family of doctors, lawyers, engineers and historians. Her father, Salim Rawda (1872-1917) was an expatriate in Australia trading herbs and writing manuscripts on their medicinal values. When he returned to Lebanon in 1910, he met and married Choucair's mother, Zalfa Amin Najjar (1891-1995), a Brummana High School student who was fond of reciting poetry. They had three children: Anis Rawda (1911-1988) was a businessman and a member of the Beirut municipality; Anissa Rawda Najjar (1913-2016) was a social activist, who was married to the late Fouad Najjar; and the youngest, Choucair, became one of the most prominent figures of Lebanese modernism. When Choucair's father was in Damascus as a conscript in the Ottoman army, he contracted typhoid and died in 1917. Widowed early on, Choucair's mother had to raise three children on her own and under difficult circumstances. Choucair found inspiration within her mother; aside from being well-educated, a skilled orator and a poet, Najjar had also belonged to various women's associations and was awarded a medallion from Brummana High School upon turning 100.
Art was a part of Choucair's life from the very beginning, and she believed that, for her, "art is innate." She produced numerous hand-crafted objects at a very young age. When she was enrolled into the Ahlia School in 1924, she designed a multitude of school posters and was known for producing caricatures of her teachers, some of which were published in the school's newspaper. She claimed to have been far more advanced than her actual art teachers and would roam the classroom to assist those who needed help with their art. In an interview with Nelda LaTeef, Choucair recounted her mischievous behavior in the classroom stating: "For my sociability, I spent most of my time out in the corridor!" After high school, Choucair attended the American Junior College for Women (currently the Lebanese American University) in 1934 and graduated with a degree in natural sciences in 1936. In 1942, Choucair took art lessons with Omar Onsi for three months, and that was ultimately the only formal art training she had received by that point in time, having learned most of everything else on her own.
Choucair's travels were also what ultimately ended up influencing her artistic production. In 1943, during World War II, the artist went to Egypt looking to find some art, but all the museums were closed as a result of the turbulent climate of the time. So, Choucair instead decided to walk around the streets of Cairo and visit the mosques she encountered, and the experience inevitably had an impact on her. "It was thrilling! I thought this is real art! It endures," she had exclaimed in her interview with LaTeef. In a world with a fast-growing technological industry, Choucair sought refuge in Islamic Art and found it to be a timeless form of art through which she could simultaneously develop her love of art and architecture. "It is my second love," she said to LaTeef of architecture, "I started out as a painter and then moved to sculpture." The combination of architectural and Islamic elements became central to Choucair's artistic production, and Chris Dercon, former director of Tate Modern, emphasizes the fact that the artist chose to call into question the one-sided, Western view people often have when looking at Islamic Art. Instead, she explores principles of Islamic design and Arabic poetry within a modernist, non-objective artistic lens. Her sculptures are precise and geometric, and she tells LaTeef that her geometry is based on the proportions of the circle: "The essence of Arab art is the point – from the point everything derives."