"Painting is your own reflection. It is a handwriting, a peronsal speach, I paint because I have to paint and this is my only was of writing poetry."Lucia, 1948
In 1921, after ending a brief early marriage and giving birth to a son, Lucia left Beirut for Paris. Although her stay was intended to be short, she remained in the city and joined its vibrant art scene. At Café de Flore, she met Picasso and Léger and many young aspiring artists. Determined to pursue an art career, she studied at a Parisian academy—probably the Académie Ranson—and visited museums with the Fauvist painter André Derain, who became her mentor. After supporting herself first as a seamstress, she became a successful fabric and costume designer, playing a formative role in launching the Paris atelier of Elsa Schiaparelli. In 1938, with war looming, Lucia emigrated to the United States, sponsored by the wealthy American art patrons Gerald and Sara Murphy. Accompanied by Léger—whose passage was also arranged by the Murphys—she traveled on the S.S. Ile de France, reaching New York on September 28, 1938.
On arrival, she and Léger stayed at the Wiborg estate of Sara Murphy’s family in East Hampton, where Lucia would continue to spend summers in the years ahead. Art historian Phyllis Braff included Lucia among the modern artists who had developed an interest in Eastern Long Island as both a summer and year-round residence long before Surrealism took hold there (The Surrealists and Their Friends on Eastern Long Island at Mid-Century, 1996). In 1948, Lucia’s paintings were featured in a solo exhibition at the newly established Sidney Janis Gallery. Reviewed in the New York Times and other syndicated newspapers, her work was described as “a dramatic compound of Byzantine color, allegro fancy, modern treatment, and near mystic feeling.” Five hundred people attended the opening—including “a full galaxy of critics, artists, and friends [who] waltzed around the bright new pictures.”
By the time of the show, Lucia had divorced her second husband—the Italian Surrealist painter Francesco Cristofanetti—and married her third, artist and inventor Roger Wilcox. The couple renovated the ramshackle home in Amagansett that Lucia purchased in 1946. Their home became a gathering place for East Hampton artists, drawn by the salon-like atmosphere Lucia created and by her renowned cooking, in which she fused Lebanese and Parisian cuisines. In 1967, New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne published an article on Lucia in the New York Times titled “An Artist Divides Her Creativity between Palette and Palate,” including several of her recipes.
In the 1950s, Lucia turned to abstraction, creating gestural paintings in the Abstract Expressionist idiom, influenced by her friendships with artists including Pollock and de Kooning. With slashing brushwork, calligraphic marks, and stained color, she extended her central themes of spiritual immediacy and expressive freedom. During this period, she was featured in exhibitions at Guild Hall and participated in two of the four historic exhibitions held at Signa Gallery (1957 and 1959), established by Alfonso Ossorio. In 1961, she had a solo exhibition at Lefebre Gallery on East 77th Street in Manhattan.
After suddenly going almost entirely blind in 1972, Lucia adapted her practice, working in ink instead of oil. Displaying characteristic resilience, she told a New York Times reporter, “I see better than anybody. I have eliminated all the details. My mind is free of static. I don’t have any distractions.” These works were featured in her last lifetime show, held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Soho in May–June 1974. Although grateful for the recognition, Lucia felt she deserved it earlier in her career. She remarked to The Washington Post, “I am now making up for that injustice.”
When Lucia’s husband organized a 1980 exhibition of her work in East Hampton, art historian Franklin Perrell summarized her legacy: “Her work constitutes the singular achievement of a woman artist working through her own distinct path yet in full contact with the powerful art movements and artist personalities of the twentieth century.”
Collectors of Lucia’s work include Léger, Sara Murphy, Sidney Janis, Bertha Schaeffer, Dorothy Newman, John Graham, and Harold Rosenberg.