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Al-Ahram Weekly 19 - 25 August 1999 Issue No. 443 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 19 - 25 August 1999 Issue No. 443
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Visions of the nation
By Khairiya El-Bishlawi
Painting and sculpture once constituted a way of life, both temporal and secular, in Egypt. The Old, the Middle and the New Kingdoms maintained a vast artistic production, and just as each period is particularised by its own styles and forms, they are distinguished too by their methods and organisation of production. With the Ptolemies art fell into decadence, despite the fact that it was during the Graeco-Roman period that the Fayoum Portraits were produced.
From top: Ibrahim Massouda; Hamed Nada; Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar; Samir Rafei
Yet the Fayoum Portraits cannot be considered a totally Egyptian phenomenon -- they were particular to the Graeco-Romans and flourished around the Mediterranean basin, in cities like Pompeii and Herculineum. Ancient Egyptian death masks are far removed from these later funerary portraits, and the Graeco-Roman style is freer, a subversion of the mathematical system used in ancient Egypt that allowed a more realistic image to emerge, closer to life and less idealised.
Coptic and Islamic art came later. In Coptic art the religious attitude towards portraiture, indeed towards visual perception, changed. With Islam, the decoration of walls in mosques with organic patterns in geometric form was developed. Very few presentations of the human form existed.
Following the Napoleonic and British invasions many orientalists passed through the country, bringing with them the visions that had been born in the various academies of England, France and Holland. Egyptian identity was once more in crisis as the country's ruling class borrowed from the west, and religious attitudes, as well as arts such as calligraphy, were put aside. Only the peasants remained faithful to the popular arts. In the city art was either imported, or else locally produced in imitation of foreign models.
Not until the emergence of Prince Youssef Kamal had anyone floated the idea of founding a fine art school in Egypt, which he founded with the help of others in 1908, although it is true that some artists kept ateliers with a small complement of students. But as a more nationalist political and social vision came to be articulated, the idea of imported European manners in paintings became increasingly alien to the Egyptian mind. A new feeling was in the air, and everyday Egyptian life became a necessity to be represented in painting.
Mahmoud Said and Mohamed Nagui are two of the pillars of modern Egyptian painting. In paintings like Mahmoud Said's The Girl in the Golden Earring (1933, private collection), The Zikr (1935, Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, Cairo) and Sheikh in Prayer (1941, collection of Faika Hanem) and many other portraits of peasants, we can trace the development of a new sensibility. The subject matter is approached as an Egyptian would approach his own people, by-passing the barrier of orientalism and academic painting.
In 1945 Hussein Youssef Amin, a diplomat and sometime school teacher by profession, gathered around him a group of artists that could convincingly be considered as a movement. They included Hamed Nada, Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar, Samir Rafei, Ibrahim Massouda, and Ahmed Maher Raef, who was to become in the 1960s the dean of the Alexandria School of Fine Arts, and who ironically lead a fierce campaign in the 1970s against live model drawing in art schools.
Their works share certain similarities, and if they cannot quite be codified into the kind of manifestos so frequently produced by the European avant-garde, they did produce a consistent and convincing body of work that reflected the existing metaphysical, social and political conditions of the country. The organisational structure of these artists' works are developed out of the spaces that are present in Egyptian life rather than the structural spaces imported from the west.
According to Ahmed Fouad Selim, director of the Zamalek Centre of Arts, this group of Egyptian artists had similarities with contemporary Mexican painters. Hussein Youssef Amin, certainly, served as a diplomat in Mexico, and he must have been familiar with the work being produced by Mexican artists. "And there are, too, a number of interesting parallells between social conditions in Egypt and those in Mexico, certainly in the manner in which it was the peasantry that preserved indigenous and authentic forms," says Selim.
He adds, "One can convincingly argue, the importance of the group of artists around Amin notwithstanding, that it is Ragheb Ayyad who provides the most fertile resource for later artists. With the Coffee House in Aswan (1933, Museum of Modern Egyptian Art) and Sudanese Dancing (1937, Museum of Modern Egyptian Art) he began to outline the aesthetic possibilities and formal vocabulary of a truly Egyptian contemporary art. Ayyad, though, received little recognition at the time, though Hussein Youssef Amin was quick to imitate him."
Ayyad, according to Selim, is then, like Mahmoud Said, a pillar upon which recent Egyptian art rests. But the concern here, and in subsequent articles, is to outline the role of those other pioneers, the artists gathered around Hussein Youssef Amin -- and to examine their work and its significance in shaping a coherent pictorial vocabulary -- one in tune with the times.
