OAKLAND, CA – The offerings in the Friday, August 16 sale at Clars Auction Gallery include three works by an artist who is finally starting to gain notice: Bibi Zogbé (1890-1973). The full catalog for the auction can be seen at LiveAuctioneers.
Born in Lebanon to well-heeled parents, Zogbé emigrated to Argentina in 1906, at age 16, to enter an arranged marriage to a Lebanese Argentinian named Domingo Samaja. For reasons that she did not care to record, Zogbé divorced him in the early 1930s and settled in the large Lebanese community in Buenos Aires. There, she began to paint.
She had attended Beirut’s Sainte Famille College before she moved to Argentina, but she does not appear to have taken any formal art instruction before picking up a palette. With neither a husband nor children to monopolize her attention, she was free to focus on her career.
Gallery owners spotted her promise quickly. Zogbé had her first solo show in 1934 at the Whitcomb Gallery in Buenos Aires, followed by exhibitions in Paris in 1935 and Chile in 1939. Though she did create a few figural images, her favorite subject was plants and flowers. Zogbé was dubbed La Pintura de Flores, which translates as ‘the flower painter’.
In a 2022 story, Saleh Barakat, a gallerist in Beirut who mounted a show on Zogbé in that year, said: “The way she paints flowers is very unusual. It’s not a classical or a European style — she seems to have jabbed the colors onto the canvas with her brush. She was not interested in nice domestic flowers, only in wildflowers, thistles, cacti, things that grow on their own. Nothing tame ever seemed to draw her eye.”
The three Zogbés to be presented at Clars on August 16 demonstrate how she earned her nickname. Otono (Autumn), an oil on board estimated at $7,000-$10,000, places brown, yellow, green, and rust-colored leaves against an aqua blue backdrop. It might capture her thinking about the passage of time and of things coming to a close; she painted it in 1972, the year before she died.
Helechos y Pensamientos (Ferns and Pansies) is more vibrant and colorful. In this work, she seems to be reveling in double meanings. The Spanish word for pansy is pensamientos, a word that translates as ‘thoughts’. The undated oil on Masonite is estimated at $6,000-$9,000.
Also undated is Chardons du Liban (Thistles of Lebanon), a signed oil on panel with a title that reflects the French education the young artist received at a Beirut Catholic school. Estimated at $5,000-$7,000, it is undated, but it is fun to think that she might have painted it in 1947, the year when her homeland celebrated her in grand fashion. Lebanon published works about three of its artists in that year. Zogbé was one of those three, and she was the only woman among them. She was also given the Lebanon Cedar Medallion of Excellence in 1947.
