French art critic and curator Charles Estienne became a major supporter of Zeid's work. She was part of the founding exhibition of the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris organised by Estienne in 1952 at the Galerie Babylone. Over the next decade, living between London and Paris, Zeid created some of her strongest works, experimenting with monumental abstract canvases that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic universes through their heavy use of line and vibrant colour. Zeid exhibited at Galerie Dina Vierny in 1953, showing her most recent abstract works such as The Octopus of Triton, and Sargasso Sea. The exhibition travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1954, making her the first woman of any nationality to exhibit at the modernist showcase. At the height of her career, she became friends with a group of international artists such as Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Dubuffet and Serge Poliakoff, who experimented with gestural abstraction. Fahrelnissa Zeid also exhibited frequently alongside other members of the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris in small group exhibitions, as well as exhibiting at the Salon des Realites Nouvelles Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. 1958–1991 In 1958, Zeid persuaded her husband Prince Zeid al-Hussein not to return to Baghdad as acting regent as he usually did while his great nephew, King Faisal II, took a vacation. The couple went to their new holiday home on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. On 14 July 1958 there was a military coup in Iraq and the entire royal family was assassinated. Prince Zeid and his family narrowly escaped death, and they were given only 24 hours to vacate the Iraqi Embassy in London. The coup halted Zeid's career as a painter and hostess in London. Zeid and her family moved into an apartment in London and at the age of fifty-seven, she cooked her first meal. The experience prompted her to begin painting on chicken bones, later creating sculptures from the bones cast in resin, called paléokrystalos. The 1960s were a period of both renewal and looking back for Fahlrenissa Zeid. She immersed herself in renewing her portrait practice alongside her abstract work. At the same time, she had two large-scale homecoming retrospectives in Turkey in 1964, in Istanbul and Ankara. She prepared for a large exhibition in Paris in the late 1960 after meeting André Malraux but it never happened after the dismissal by Malraux of Jacques Jaujard