Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm (39.37 x 31.89 in.)
Executed in 1978 – 1979
Signed, dated 1978 – 1979 and titled on the reverse

 Literature and references:

 Claude Lemand, Ed. Shafic Abboud, 2006, p. 141, illustrated color

 Exhibited:

What is wonderful about this painting when you see it in first hand is the fantastic dry surface and the immediacy here of the contrast between the light background and the dark face and the way the form jumps out at you with the warm color of the figure itself.
 
It is a sardonic caricature of a so called ‘belle Polonaise’ that results in a confused composition featuring a woman wearing her traditional Polish folk costume head dressed with a hat and a richly decorated vest.
 
Abboud drew upon the artistic movements of both abstractionism and surrealism to create this pioneering image a cartoon-like composition combining quasi-abstractionism and strident expressionism.
 
The burlesque figure and hallucinatory scene that characterize this work of Shafiq Abboud have earned the artist critical recognition as an expressionist and this oeuvre to be one of a kind.