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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
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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 Focus Books Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Patterns of conviction
By Anna Boghiguian
In the 1950s and 1960s Cairo's art scene had a completely different flavour than today. Optimistic, it revolved around the possibility of creating a better Egypt. Politically and socially horizons were open. The Sha'b (people) was a crucial concept, and artists and intellectuals sought to raise both the people's standard of living and their sense of identity, eliminating class distinctions in the hope of creating social harmony.
Top: A Mother, oil on canvas by Ingy Aflatoun (early 1950s) Above: self-portrait (1970s)
Francophone intellectuals like Injy Aflatoun were influenced by existentialism -- an ultimate development of Platonic thought -- and/or by Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. Changing circumstances, and their possible effects on the nature of Arab identity, were the foremost issues of discussion. And Egypt being mainly an agrarian society with feudal landlords, the most pressing emergent questions concerned strategies to secure the liberation of the fellah.
The peasants and the poor of Cairo, Egyptian landscapes and Aflatoun's conflicts with the government which resulted in her prison series, produced while serving a five-year internment sentence, as well as the conflicts of Egypt and its wars in the 1960s, all lend Aflatoun's work a distinctive feeling.
Diligently, she painted on different materials -- canvas, glass and paper -- and the paintings from her days in prison are among her best. Not only do they afford a valuable documentation of women's prisons in Egypt, they are also rich in composition, colour and texture. The iron-rod bunk beds, and the innumerable female figures that occupy them; multicoloured clothing, hands and feet seen partially, with only some figures fully developed; the weight and dignity on the women's faces, as well as the texture of the clothing and the flesh it covers against the iron rods of the prison bars, all contribute to the powerful evocation of place and spirit. And the way the women socialise in their cells is treated in a very simple, and a very realistic, manner.
Following her prison experiences Aflatoun's showed an increasing tendency towards centralising the figure, and she produced a number of portraits. Utilising broad brush strokes, she used the same value hues for foreground and background. Her choice of colours, however, made it possible for her to penetrate the environment of ordinary Egyptian peasants, and her brush work was particularly suited to conveying the texture of the clothes which peasant women wore: the small, even brush strokes recreating the creases exactly.
While, in portraying individual women Aflatoun's feminism shines through, not least in her acknowledgement of hope and perseverance alongside suffering, her landscapes of Egyptian villages tend towards the decorative patterning of Persian carpets, despite being painted in the same manner. Her war paintings signalled a new departure, and new concerns. The body of the Egyptian soldier in the battlefield mingles with barbed wire and gun shots, all in a huge arena that, despite its size, remains overwhelmingly claustrophobic. And while all her work accords with a vision of Egypt that was never pretentious, and which shunned any academic screen, Aflatoun's art could never be categorised as naive.
In her latest work she began to define her compositions with dots of colour, creating fields inhabited by the whole gamut of rural characters alongside other, more straightforward landscapes. Yet in all her work Aflatoun remained a feminist and a Marxist. She organised and developed political movements in Egypt, and was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1986 by the French government.
Throughout her life Ingy Aflatoun was a source of paradox -- an upper-class Francophone who did not speak Arabic until late in her adulthood, but who nonetheless lived as an activist and a militant. Retaining her upper-class taste, she was nonetheless entirely devoted to the poor and the dispossessed. It is her art, however, that is likely to be her most enduring achievement, though even in her art Aflatoun remains a woman who lived out her convictions and contradictions to the utmost.
