The Sea of Memory

The Sea of Memory is indeed waves of faces, arms, colours and patterns swamping story over story. While we don't have the narrative to every character up there, we do know that the only factor that knitted them into a single canvas was Zeid.

There are five distinct faces, and some arms and wrists — dominant yellow, green, white, and black, with a tinge of blue, red, and orange all blended between irregular stripes and checks, just like shards of glass put together to create a kaleidoscope. The faces do not carry peace. They carry the particular exhaustion of people who have witnessed something they cannot say out loud. The arms reach without arriving. This is not abstraction for its own sake. This is a painting about containment.

Fahrelnissa Zeid was a Middle Eastern princess who was in her diplomatic royal duties across London and Paris. She has stated that she did not start painting with a premeditated design. Instead, she allowed her subconscious to take over. For The Sea of Memory, the title hints at an internal landscape — a turbulent ocean of past experiences, Turkish heritage, and European avant-garde influences colliding together in a single window of time. The canvas was the only place the subconscious was permitted to speak. As a diplomatic face, one gets to hear problems, witness suffering, and act as a face of grin and guilt, but never gets to draw a solution or process it. The painting absorbed everything diplomacy forced her to suppress.

In 1953, the year this painting was made, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a covert coup overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddegh — Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister — while Churchill attempted to stabilise the ripples of collapsing empires and anti-colonial movements reshaping the entire map of the world. Zeid was in the epicentre of these high-stakes diplomatic and political shifts. Fancy state dinners where collapsing coups and crumbling empires were discussed in lowered voices while she sat at the table as part of one herself.

The world was stabilising after great changes because of war, hunger for power, and the reinvention of leadership. As she travelled through these countries for diplomatic reasons and witnessed the fractured system underneath the formal occasions, she returned to her studio not as a princess or a diplomat, but as a human being witnessing and being part of geopolitical reinvention. The subconscious took over because nothing else was allowed to.

For decades, the Western art world did not know what to do with her. Too Eastern for Western abstraction, too Western for Middle Eastern art history — she fell through every category and was largely erased from the canonical narrative. She was making large-scale kaleidoscopic abstraction in the same decade as Pollock and de Kooning, completely independently, and nobody called her a pioneer. It took until 2017 — a Tate Modern retrospective, sixty years after this painting was made — for the institution to catch up. MoMA has been building its holdings of non-Western modernism actively since. The sea of memory, it turns out, has a long tide.