One of Lebanon’s leading abstract painters, Yvette Achkar was born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, a twin and the second youngest of nine children. When she was ten, her family moved to Beirut. Passionate about music, Y. Achkar strove to become a professional pianist until she was told her small stature technically prevented this path. Deeply disappointed, she took up painting, encouraged by Fernando Manetti (1899-1964), a Beirut-based Italian artist and teacher at the newly founded art department of the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (Alba). In 1947 Y. Achkar enrolled at the school, part of a cohort – including Shafic Abboud (1926-2004), Helen Khal (1923-2009), and Jean Khalifé (1923-1978) – that was to shape Lebanon’s modern art world as pioneers of abstraction. There she formed life-long friendships and met architecture student Jean Sargologo, whom she married in the early 1950s; they divorced a few years later. The need to support herself as a single mother pushed her to prepare her first solo exhibition. Opening at Beirut’s Galerie La Licorne in February 1960, the exhibition was an immediate success.

That same year her practice moved more definitely towards abstraction, a natural progression for her – Still Life (undated) and the blue Untitled (undated) are examples of her earlier, more figurative works, which connect to certain cubist experimentations, such as Untitled (1965). At the same time, she felt that she had reached a dead end and wanted to leave Lebanon to search for deeper forms of expression. A few months after her second solo show (Galerie Alecco Saab, 1961), she left for Paris on a French government scholarship. Back in Beirut, Y. Achkar remarried (Zavan Hampartzoumian) and started teaching studio art, both at Alba – intermittently until 2005 – and at the National Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University, where she taught from its inception in 1966. As a teacher she influenced a whole generation of artists, such as Greta Naufal (born 1955), Aida Salloum (born 1954) and Rose Husseini (born 1952).

Yvette Achkar considered painting her great adventure; it was her means of expression and where she found harmony. She worked slowly, often taking more than a month to finish one work. She painted her emotions, her inner self, searching for a certain rhythm that corresponded to a moment in time. Rhythm is central to her work, as is the use of colour. Empty spaces become full of energy, and she often shifts the centre of her works. In the booklet of her 1970 exhibition at Gallery One, she wrote that our real homeland burns and shines within us. Beirut-based French artist Georges Cyr (1880-1964), whose influence on Y. Achkar is often cited, describes her work as combining two opposites, sensitivity and reason: intuition from one side, a sense of geometry from the other.

Y. Achkar has been widely exhibited since her first participation in the state-sponsored Salon du Printemps at Beirut’s UNESCO Palace in 1957. Apart from regular solo exhibitions in Beirut, she has exhibited at the salons of the Lebanese Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts (where she was awarded two prizes), the salons of the Sursock Museum, the biennales of Paris, Alexandria and São Paulo, and in group exhibitions in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, the United States, Lebanon and elsewhere. Her works can be found in major collections in Lebanon and abroad.