فخر النساء زيد | Fahrelnissa Şakir (Spouses: Izzet Melih Devrim, Prince Zeid bin Hussein of the Hashemite Royal Family; Children: Nejad Devrim, Şirin Devrim, Prince Ra’ad bin Zeid) (1901–1991) was a pioneering modernist artist best known for her monumental abstract paintings that fused Western European abstract techniques with the intricate patterns of Byzantine and Islamic art. Born into an elite Ottoman family of intellectuals and artists (the Şakir Pasha family), she was one of the first women to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul.
Her life was as dramatic as her art; she lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and later became a princess through her marriage to Prince Zeid bin Hussein of Iraq. This royal status allowed her to live across major cultural capitals including Berlin, Baghdad, Paris, and London. Her early work focused on more traditional figurative painting, but her style underwent a radical transformation after World War II while living in Paris.
In the 1940s and 50s, Zeid became a prominent figure in the Nouvelle École de Paris. She developed a signature style characterized by massive canvases—some over five meters wide—filled with kaleidoscopic, geometric mosaics of vibrant color. These works, often described as “psychological abstraction,” were inspired by the shifting views she saw from airplanes and the intricate geometries of stained glass and mosaics.
Following the 1958 military coup in Iraq, which resulted in the assassination of her husband’s family, Zeid and the Prince were forced into exile. This period led her to experiment with new materials, including painting on turkey bones (the “paleocrystalos” series). In 1975, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she founded the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute of Fine Arts and became a mentor to a generation of young female artists. Her legacy was revitalized globally in 2017 with a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.
Active in others filds : Art Education (Founder of the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute), Diplomacy (Royal Consort duties).
