Raouda-Schoucair Salwa 

Beirut, 1916

​

Salwa Raouda-Schoucair was born in Beirut on 24th June 1916. Her work revealed one key characteristic: a union of the greatest versatility and the greatest rigidity, of geometry and sensuality, of the most stubborn conviction and the lightest impetus, of unshakeable belief and attentive listening to the first thing that came along.

​

Enrolled at Onsi’s studio, where she made several realist portraits, Raouda-Schoucair devoted herself to painting challenged by one of her professors, who alledged that an Arab artistic identity did not exist. After her Abstract period in the 1950s, she decided to take on sculpture, certain of finding a language as visual as it was tactile, and refusing to over-speculate about geometric abstraction, which seemed to block any debate.

​

Instead of several months, she spent several years in Paris (1948-1951), and returned more convinced than ever that she was right. Beirut failed to understand her work, made from her esoteric convictions about the logic of geometry. She followed the evolution of sculpture when it was linked to her own tendencies, not adding anything local but bringing a refined plastic reality that had nothing to do with folklore.

​

The integration of specifically Arab data in her work – such as calligraphic modules, and repeated motifs – was linked to mathematics more than to any atavistic ancestral roots, where internal speculation and explanation, reason and effect, come from the same source as life and thought.

​

Through sculpture, Raouda-Shoucair aproached the possibility of the material projection of her internal world, which painting only seemed to skim the surface of. In her works, rhythms took shape, as did colors, textures and light. Together with Rayess – who had travelled far more widely and stayed in England, the USA and Italy – she revealed the influence of Francophone culture on her sculpture in an interesting way, due to her one sojourn in Paris, and not to the European optic that was implied in her overtures to modernity.

​

A woman of several simple convictions, Raouda-Schoucair increased the dimensions of her reflections on the city and its approach to art, justifying the necessary reading of Abstract art in Eastern countries. 

​

Her interest was linked to the phenomenon of Druze acculturation, to the avant-garde relationship of form and to the geometricisation of her own reading of Arab calligraphy and its historic tradition. She also asked the question of how the language of European Abstraction was integrated into a different culture than the one in which it was initially conceived. After the 1950s, the evolution of her sculpture took over the development of her painting.

​

Her exhibitions always had a pedagogic turn, in the way that she intended to make the public aware of her objectives. She held exhibitions in 1947 at the Arab Cultural Centre in Beirut; in 1951 at the Colette Allendy Gallery in Paris; in 1952 at the Center for Higher Studies in Beirut; and in 1962 at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut. She had a retrospective in 1974 in the exhibition hall of the Council of National Tourism in Beirut.