Saudi Arabia
After a friend’s invitation to visit Saudi Arabia, Wahbi Al-Hariri grew enamored with the Arabian peninsula's still pristine vistas and was inspired by the many facets of its little-known heritage. Consequently in 1965 he decided to move to the Kingdom.
In 1981, after an intensive period of research, travel, and on-site work in some of the Kingdom’s most remote areas, he completed an important collection of large graphite drawings illustrating Arabia’s significant architectural heritage. Subsequently, a full-size facsimile edition of this collection, entitled Traditional Architecture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was published in Florence, Italy, with the assistance of his son, Mokhless Al-Hariri.
Copies of the book can be found in Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Library at Buckingham Palace, the library of Emperor Akihito of Japan, at The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, as well as several other national libraries worldwide.
The publication of this hand-printed art collector's folio brought about worldwide recognition of his classical artistic work and culminated with a 1984 one-man exhibit of the collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. With it, he became the first living artist to be honored with a one-man show of his work at the Smithsonian. The exhibit subsequently went on a tour of several other American museums.
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