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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Focus Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Call it joy
By Nur ElmessiriYoussef Sida (1922-1994) belonged to the 1950s Egyptian Group of Modern Art which had among its central members Zeinab Abdel-Hamid, Gazbiya Sirry, Hamid Oweis and Gamal El-Sigeini and which, as Liliane Karnouk writes in Contemporary Egyptian Art (AUC Press, pp 15-16), "had an extroverted orientation, rejected surrealism, and approached folklore formally... The group's enthusiasm in accelerating the shift from preexisting local conventions to an art based on modernity, obtained by stylistic borrowings, caused a random adoption of pre-existing international styles."
The retrospective exhibition of Sida's work at Safarkhan shows him at a versatile best -- from the breathtakingly colourful figurative work of the late '40s-early '60s to the later calligraphic jeux d'esprit. Interspersed are paintings which, some might argue, have nothing "Egyptian" about them. These are so brilliantly executed, so carefully composed that to dismiss them would be a bit on the mean-spirited side.
An early (1949) painting by Sida (left), and one from the 1980s (right) One can get a sense of the essential quality of Sida's work by mapping him against Matisse, an artist by whom, together with other fauvists, Sida was clearly influenced. For both, a preoccupation with pattern and colour led to a near abandoning of the figurative. But whereas Matisse's cut-outs breathe a triumphalist, universalist "free at last", Sida's later work anchors itself unambiguously, at least at an intellectual level, in a particular tradition.
Which is not to say that the work Sida produced before completing in 1965 a PhD dissertation titled "Calligraphy in Contemporary Egyptian Wall Murals and Its Relation to Arab Art and Culture" is not Egyptian. The subject matter is often "the traditional, authentic Egyptian" so beloved of many a semi-intellectual endeavour to define "Egyptianness": the baladi washerwoman at her tisht; the sideiri-clad man making kunafa for two fellahin; the saidi with the imma; the statuesque women in mellaya laff. In terms of aesthetic idiom, the early Sida derived his vocabulary of colour, as did Matisse, from the Arab minor arts (mosaics, textiles, carpets and stained glass) -- though Sida's sense of line and form also has something in common with the epic proportions of the modern Mexican muralists.
Sida's earlier work is untroubled by the spectrum's complex, mystical dimensions -- its extremes of white or black. Matisse's aesthetic, on the other hand has an emptiness (albeit one mystical and lyrical) at its core. In Matisse's Red Room, for example, the woman and the things surrounding her are about to evaporate perfume-like into the thin air of colour which, when boiled down to purity, is white. In Sida we have something of the reverse: the pictorial space can barely contain the energy of the molecular particles of colour, because they are about, not to evaporate, but to coalesce, to solidify into a mass and volume which would spill out into three-dimensionality. In contrast to Matisse, for exuberant Sida white is not the mystical non-colour to which all colours return; it is another colour on the fecund palette of matter.
The zest with which Sida translates colour into form works against anything ideologically radical when it comes to representations of proletarians, peasants and soldiers. Sida the artist is interested in the beauty and dignity of the underclass, not in its oppression. Nothing dark, nothing dank or sweaty. But this does not mean Sida is unprofound. To each creative imagination its forte. Faced with Byzantine mosaics and icons, Yeats saw the power and the glory -- not the suffering and the martyrdom. Sida's Saidi-become-icon is, unpretentiously, first and foremost a portrait of an Upper Egyptian. True, it is an idealised face. But when the background suggests Byzantine mosaics (with a perhaps humorous nod, in the little white crescents, to the Islamic), it does so slowly and gently. Only gradually, discreetly do the halo-function of the turban and the echo from the Fayoum portraits become clear. No shrill proclamations here of a Pharaonic-Coptic-Islamic-Folkloric (i.e., "equals Egyptian") aesthetic status.
Between the 1980s and the early 1990s, Sida pretty much abandons the figurative. He discovered how Arabic letters (Islamic), Indian numerals (folkloric) and hieroglyphics (Pharaonic) can make pretty, khayamiya appliqué-like shapes which, in turn, can cleverly -- with or without an avant-garde element of collage or mixed media -- fill a pictorial surface.
But in spite of this at first glance dramatic shift, there is a stylistic continuity, an integrity of vision unifying the two halves of Sida's career. Both the early and late canvases create a similar energy field. In both, there is a strong centripetal force. What colour/shape was to mass and volume in the earlier works is, at a microscopic level, what the decorative unit (the letter, the number) is to colour/shape in the later. In many of the later, non-figurative works, Sida foregrounds this centripetal energy by covering the canvas with decorative motifs that, at the centre, converge like so many molecules about to bind into something residually figurative. In both the early and late Sida a strong centrifugal energy results from the excess of the centripetal hemmed in by the frame. The frame seems about to burst with what it contains. Not a transgressive, angry, revolutionary breaking of boundaries, but the same kind of energy that makes a person "break into song". Call it joy.
Sida must have had a glimpse of its power.
