Forgive my ignorance, ladies and gentlemen, but I must confess that I had never heard of Saloua Raouda Choucair before the advance publicity of the Tate’s exhibition. She’s not in the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists (always a useful reference book, but by no means infallible) and I don’t believe I’d ever seen her paintings or sculptures before this show. But I may have overlooked one somewhere in a mixed exhibition, for her work does resemble that of a dozen other artists of international Modernism, and even of a number of the British variety.
So why does Tate Modern now devote a solo show to her? Could it be because she is Lebanese (and we don’t see the work of many Lebanese artists in this country), female and has reached the distinguished age of 97? The fact that the Tate has recently acquired six works by her may also have something to do with it: one gifted by the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, two presented anonymously and three purchased by the Tate with funds from the Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee. Suddenly Ms Choucair is hot property.
I have to say that I rather enjoyed her exhibition, which is not too large, but carefully arranged over four rooms. She was a pioneer of abstract art in the Middle East, but her work is rarely seen outside the Lebanon, and mingles indigenous influences with the inspiration of certain European artists. The exhibition begins with a tough-looking, schematised but not unbeguiling self-portrait dating from 1943. Around that time Choucair visited Cairo and discovered a new world of geometric pattern, calligraphic script and architecture that moved her deeply. Five years later she travelled to Paris to drink deep at Modernism’s fount, studying at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, and more particularly with Léger. Although her work does not closely echo his, he was undoubtedly an inspiration behind the gouache nude figure compositions hung here in the first room. Of these, ‘Nude with Iris’ (1948–9) is one of the finest, interestingly composed of stylised and overlapping forms with plenty of distortion, which makes for an intriguing arrangement of shapes and colours. It reminds me a bit of untutored Outsider art — the kind of thing you find in the work of Albert Louden (born 1943), for instance.
Choucair returned to Beirut in the early 1950s, and a group of bright and rather lovely abstract gouaches of arches and overlapping semi-geometric forms attest to her new researches in this period. Also in Room 1 are a couple of early sculptures, one in wood, one stone, both with the title ‘Trajectory of a Line’, in which Choucair investigates the space of a block of material by taking a straight line or curve into it. Room 2 is full of sculptures, interspersed with paintings. There’s a long bench display of small pieces in wood, fibreglass or stone with gouaches on the wall behind (two called ‘Visual Meter’ are especially notable). Many of the sculptures investigate embracing or interlacing forms and how a basic module may be combined or stacked. The parallels with architecture are evident, but Choucair varies and reconfigures her units in interesting ways.
In Room 3, a large wall cabinet contains a grouping of even smaller sculptures, maquettes mostly, in terracotta, white wood, or brass clasping aluminium. Parallels emerge: the minimalism of Carl André, the aluminium sculptures of Geoffrey Clarke (born 1924), the bronzes of Bernard Meadows (1915–2005) and Robert Adams (1917–84). I’m not trying to make an argument about who did what first, merely pointing out that certain ideas were in the air at a particular time and resulted in a comparable expression. At its least effective, Choucair’s small-scale work looks too much like a cross between jewellery and puzzle games. The final room, of sculptures from the 1970s in plexiglass and stainless steel, strung with nylon, is altogether too reminiscent of Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth to pack the punch it should.
A number of the paintings and wooden exhibits are slightly scruffy, knocked about a bit, not the usual perfectly presented modernist masterworks — as if to remind us that they come from what has been, after all, a war zone. Paint has been worn off a canvas or chipped from corners of wooden sculptures, edges are sometimes scuffed. This only increases their expressive potential and renders them more poignant, though the cynic might suggest that accidental damage has been deliberately left to achieve this enhancement. A handsome and substantial hardback catalogue (£24.99) accompanies the show.
Over in west London, at Piano Nobile, is a glowingly beautiful exhibition of figurative watercolours by Shanti Panchal. Panchal was born sometime in the mid-1950s in northern Gujarat (exactly when is not recorded), studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, then came to this country on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in London but returns regularly to India, and his work effectively mingles the traditions of East and West. He paints people almost exclusively, though this exhibition (his first ever in a commercial gallery) includes two serene still-life paintings of a watering can, one in blue and one in green. The show also features the greatest preponderance of nudes I have seen by this artist, exquisite studies of much grace and sensual delicacy.
One of the nudes is entitled ‘The Three Graces’, making an overt reference to Canova’s great sculpture, and this kind of referencing is a leitmotif of the show. For example, ‘Moore’s Three Points’ depicts a spiked Henry Moore sculpture, with a girl positioned in the background between two of the points. This is a brilliant and inspired way of articulating pictorial space, and makes for a striking image. The sculptural theme continues more obliquely in the rendition of the balloons in ‘Millie’, the main subject of which is a girl’s glance full of meaning across a room at a party. A more blatant reference to western art appears in ‘Frida at Tate Modern’, an imaginary portrait of Frida Kahlo demure in the foreground with Bankside chimney rising irresistibly phallic in the background.
Resonant colour and crisply precise drawing are the keys to this memorable exhibition. Panchal’s method of layering paint to achieve such delicately emphatic surfaces is time-consuming and involves much lifting off of colour, with blotting paper and brushes, sometimes to return to the white of the paper. (Look at the chef’s whites in ‘The Last Orders’.) Large paintings such as the magnificently lucid ‘River Bank, Maldon’, with its no doubt unconscious echoes of Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘Poor Fisherman’, alternate with smaller studies such as the gently erotic ‘Pelvis’, the first painting to sell from the show. In these splendid pictures, the passion is all in the succulent colour, ranging from richest burnt umber to orange and purple, lilac and lime. Highly recommended.
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