Women Artists excluded from History 5; Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid

Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid: A Radical Vision Silenced by the Structures of Art History

Art history has long presented itself as objective. Neutral. Chronological. But when we look closely, we begin to see the architecture behind it. It was built largely by men, curated largely by men and written through a lens that privileged certain centres of power. Within that framework, many women were not simply overlooked. They were structurally excluded.

Princess Zeid with her children Princess Shirin and Prince Raad, in Berlin. 1937. Wikipedia Commons.

Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid is one of the clearest examples.

Born in 1901 in Istanbul, Zeid was educated, cosmopolitan and ambitious at a time when women’s creative lives were often confined to the private sphere. She studied formally at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and later in Paris, positioning herself within the heart of European modernism. She exhibited internationally in the 1950s, including in London and Paris. She painted at monumental scale. She was not marginal in talent or seriousness.

Yet she was marginalised in narrative.

Zeid’s paintings are explosive with colour and fractured geometry. Vast canvases composed of kaleidoscopic patterns that feel architectural, immersive and emotionally charged. They resist simplification. They do not fit comfortably into the tidy progression from European abstraction to American Abstract Expressionism that textbooks often outline.

That discomfort is telling.

The patriarchal structure of art history has historically centred innovation in specific Western male figures. Artists who did not align with those power structures were often categorised as peripheral, decorative or culturally exotic. Zeid’s cross-cultural identity, her position as a woman and her refusal to paint small or politely meant she did not fit the mould of how genius was expected to look.

Male abstractionists were framed as pioneers. Women abstractionists were framed as exceptions.

Zeid’s cosmopolitan life, moving between Istanbul, Paris, London and Amman, disrupted the narrow geography of modernism. Her work challenged the assumption that abstraction developed along a singular Western trajectory. Yet rather than rewriting the canon to include her fully, the canon often simply ignored her.

Only in recent decades have major institutions begun reassessing her place within twentieth century art. As feminist art historians have re-examined archives and exhibition records, it has become increasingly clear that Zeid was not on the margins. She was central to conversations about abstraction in her time.

The question becomes not why she was absent, but who benefited from that absence.

The Arena of the Sun. 1954. Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid. Wikiart.org

Her rediscovery is part of a broader feminist re-evaluation of modern art. It forces us to confront how authority is assigned and how history is shaped by those who record it. Zeid did not lack ambition, scale or intellectual rigour. What she lacked was institutional validation within a patriarchal system that defined artistic genius in male terms.

Today, her monumental canvases feel both timeless and urgent. They remind us that abstraction was never owned by one gender or one geography. It was always more expansive than the narrative allowed.

Reclaiming her story is not an act of generosity. It is an act of correction.