This vibrant work, Composition in Yellow, demonstrates Saloua Raouda Choucair’s approach to abstraction: straight lines cut across the pictorial surface, dissecting geometric shapes and creating new ones, producing a magnetic composition that is balanced yet refuses stillness. Choucair’s use of three different tones of yellow further adds a sense of depth to the two-dimensional panel by creating the effect of layering and light. Choucair was one of the earliest artists in the region to work in abstraction and her unique, deeply intellectual and holistic approach that combines inspiration from mathematics, philosophy, science, Islamic art, architecture, and spirituality, and modernism renders her a critical figure in global art history.

Born in Beirut in 1916, Choucair was a prolific artist, producing architectural plans, fountains, housewares, and jewellery in addition to painting and sculpture. She studied the natural sciences at the American Junior College for Women from 1934 to 1936, graduating from the Beirut College for Women in 1938 and training in the ateliers of Lebanese artists Moustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In 1948, Choucair moved to Paris to pursue formal art training at the École des Beaux-Arts and trained in the studio of Fernand Léger. In 1950, her inclination toward geometric shapes and Arabic letters led her to organise L’Atelier de l’Art Abstrait with other avant-garde artists. During this time Choucair created her first non-objective works, showing early experimentation with repeated forms. She returned to Beirut in 1951. In 2011, the Beirut Art Center honoured her career with a retrospective as did the Tate Modern in London in 2013.