The apartment in which Raouda Choucair lives is a testament to her life. Her abstract paintings line the walls, and the cabinets are filled with maquettes for abstract public works she intended to have built. The drawers are crammed with notes, drawings and ideas documenting a career that now, with Choucair aged 97, seems to be finally taking off.

Until today, these objects seemed destined to be the preserve of a few people in the know. Often misunderstood by her Lebanese contemporaries, Choucair lived a solitary life, ruing the lack of recognition that her attempt to rhyme modernism with Arab art garnered. But now, over 120 pieces, many of them never seen outside her studio, have been shipped off to the Tate Modern in London, for the first major museum show of Lebanon’s first abstract artist. The show opens on April 17 and will run for six months [until Oct. 20].

The Tate exhibition is the crowning glory of a recent accession to prominence. Mathaf, the modern art museum in Doha, exhibited one of Choucair's interlocking structures she called poems in 2010. But it was the 2008 discovery of a similar work by Tate curator Jessica Morgan on a shelf at Beirut’s Agial gallery that would eventually catapult Choucair to fame. Morgan became “obsessed” with the artist after seeing the work, and visited her Beirut apartment. Astounded by the complex oeuvre she found there, Morgan pushed the Tate to start buying. “I felt very strongly that there was some fight that had to take place so that everybody else understood how important this was,” she says. The museum eventually acquired three works in 2011 and 2012: the painting "Composition in Blue Module" (1947-51) and two sculptures, "Infinite Structure" (1963-65) and "Poem of Nine Verses" (1966-68). Three other works were subsequently donated.

Choucair’s star had been on the rise. In 2011, a retrospective was organized at the Beirut Exhibition Center, bringing together highlights of a career spanning seven decades.