The life of Justina Tommaseo Sursock, known as Cici Sursock, embodies the cultural shifts, tensions and exchanges that defined the 20th century. She was the daughter of a diplomat whose career required frequent relocation. C. Sursock spent her childhood in Vienna before moving to Belgrade, where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in around 1938. Her studies continued in Ankara at the School of Applied Arts (1938–1943) and she later stayed in Tehran.

World War II upheavals led her family to settle in Cairo in 1944. There, she worked as a designer for the British Ministry of Information. She married Lebanese aristocrat Habib Sursock, and they resided at the prestigious Royal Gezirah Palace. However, in 1964, the palace and their assets were seized during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization programme, forcing the family into financial ruin. They relocated to Lebanon, where C. Sursock resorted to painting to support her household. In Beirut, she quickly became part of the city’s vibrant intellectual and artistic circles. ‘Sundays at Cici’s’, held at her studio, were a meeting place for artists such as Etel Adnan (1925–2021) and Helen Khal (1923-2009), art critics, musicians, poets and actors. Meanwhile, she collaborated with cultural centre Dar el Fan w-al-Adab [The House of Art and Literature], offering painting courses and contributing to the city’s cultural life.

Portraiture was a defining theme in her work, with her first exhibition held in 1963 at the Cairo Atelier. Her portraits, distinguished by the large eyes that became a hallmark of her style, also gained acclaim amongst Beirut’s elite, and she captured celebrities such as Egyptian actress Faten Hamama and poet Nadia Tueni. She realised the famous portrait The Three Faces of Fairuz (various versions, the final one dated 1980), of Lebanese singer Fairuz, alongside numerous portraits of local artists such as Juliana Seraphim (1934-2005) in 1965 and Odile Mazloum (born in 1945) in 1967. From 1966 to 1971, C. Sursock gained recognition for her bold nude paintings, which displayed her dynamic style. Her 1966 exhibition Corps et Âmes, at the gallery of the Hotel Vendôme, marked her as a major figure in the art scene of Lebanon. In 1967, at the gallery of O. Mazloum, she presented a body of collages, a technique that the artist would employ widely in her icons.

Throughout her career, she explored religious icons, creating interpretations that reflected her own artistic vision. She revisited Byzantine iconography, merging influences from Coptic, Melkite, Balkan and Russian imagery with a bold, almost surrealistic approach. In works such as Madone des mystères (1979), the faces and bodies of various Virgins and Childs overlap with each other. Unfortunately, her first icon exhibition in 1975 at the Hotel St. Georges coincided with the tragic start of the Lebanese Civil War. During the war years, she lived between Cairo, Beirut and Split, ultimately settling in her hometown in 1988. From 1991, she witnessed the violent ethnic and religious conflicts in the Balkans that resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia. As anti-Orthodox sentiment spread she shifted the aesthetic of her icons, adapting them to the Italian Renaissance styles to escape a hostile backlash.

Her work was shown in the Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (2022), the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022) and Mathaf in Doha (2023). The Portrait of Odile Mazloum (1967), damaged during the Beirut Port Explosion (4 August 2020) was restored at the ateliers of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In Lebanon, her work is part of the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum and the Beirut Museum of Art.