Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

A lost master By Mohamed El-Assiouty Arab Café (1931), Nai Musicians (1940-1) and The Nubian Dancer (1939)

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Hussein Youssef Amin, painter and teacher, was the son of a Turkish government official. Born in 1904, to a socially privileged class, he was granted Egyptian nationality by the order of the Khedive.

In his childhood he displayed some interest in the arts. He drew and did watercolours of his surroundings -- the cooks, the maids, the marketplace, things from Egypt, though nothing remains from this period but a small watercolour entitled Girl by Water Well from 1924. A girl is standing by a water well holding a jug, dressed in a manner different from that of the Delta. The colours are in pastels and tonalities that relate to the Egyptian desert, but the form is still European. After he graduated from school, Amin finally went to Italy, in 1924.

After graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence he headed for Latin America, living mainly in Brazil. From the pictures he sent back home, it is evident that he had many fiestas. He was known as El Gordolo. In his travels he came closer to his identity as an Egyptian and experienced the alienation of the Egyptian artist from his culture. Egypt had lost its roots. It imitated Western ideas and styles.

The ancient Egyptians were gone. What remained were artefacts for tourists and a pagan culture of not much interest. The Graeco-Roman was hardly Egyptian. The Copts borrowed from the Graeco-Romans, developing a primitive and naive art, with some floral patterns from the ancient Egyptians, but the themes were Christian. Islamic art also relied on the Graeco-Roman, ancient Egyptian and Hellenistic arts, but often with the abolition of the human form.

Amin returned to Egypt in 1931, and in 1937 created with El-Afifi a union for art teachers. The need for an Egyptian art was urgent. As a pedagogue, in 1944, he created a circle of students, with artists Hamed Nada, Ibrahim Mas'ouda, Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar, Maher Ra'ef, Kamal Youssef, Mogli (Salem El-Habshi) and Samir Raf'i. He taught at the Farouq Secondary School in Abbassiya, and Helmiya Secondary School in Al-Helmiya Al-Jadida. He noticed young talents, and encouraged them to practice. Most of his students came from religious backgrounds, particularly El-Gazzar and Nada. Without Amin and his encouragement, most probably they would have been lost talents, or at least not as productive.

He made them paint murals on the walls of his house in Maryoutiya and they covered his garage walls with drawings in brown chalk -- images of nudes riding winged horses, a subject that would stay with them, especially El-Gazzar. The house, in Moorish architecture, was in the middle of the fields, and his students stayed there with Amin from time to time. They worked collectively, exchanging experiences. Through self-discovery and self-analysis he helped them penetrate into their subconscious and discover their own sensitivities and sensibilities.

Nada came from the Khalifa district. He felt the poetry and the poverty, the superstition of his own environment. El-Gazzar's scholarly religious background led him to draw dervishes and rituals of the different Sufi tariqas, in a poetic and metaphysical manner. Samir Raf'i painted the poor in a real manner, without pretense or poetry, but with an intellectual attitude.

Collectively, their attitude towards painting was expressionistic -- to paint in an intuitive and emotional manner, to work on both the detail and the whole picture, balancing the harmony of colour and volume. And the subject was Egypt. Amin taught them to paint rather than imitate or reflect, or do pretty paintings; hence the narrative and unflattering representations that emerged. Nada and El-Gazzar drew on their roots and also from ancient Egyptian images. However, the purity of the Egyptian line, the presence of sunlight, the religious, the political and the social implications present in the wall paintings of the temples of Egypt came later.

What is important in ancient Egyptian art are the mathematical and geometric measurements. It is a sense of astronomy and space that brought forth the form of ancient Egyptian art. What brought forth the form which the art of Amin's students took, on the other hand, were the cultural and social conditions surrounding them. Today, in an age of technological advance and the ordinary man, the artist's search is different. The contemporary art movement, then, had no technology to live with. Their dimension was decolonisation.

It is possible that sometimes Amin worked with his students. His painting Moqattam, 1946, is a crude drawing of the Moqattam Hills in impressionistic style. Around the same time Raf'i produced The Guardians of Moqattam, the first painting by him that was evidently Egyptian in spirit, exploring the hills and the shadow-like figures. As the young artists lived with the times, and discovered them, Amin gave more and more of his time and energy to them. Is it because Amin found himself at a dead-end as an artist, or did he sacrifice himself to create a future generation of Egyptian artists?

He organised the first contemporary art exhibition in 1946, at the Lycée Français du Caire. It created a commotion -- 190 works by young artists dealing with the popular life of Egypt -- poverty, superstition, magic, as well as their criticisms of it. In 1949 the group opened its second exhibition at the YWCA, and later in the same year took the same exhibition to Paris, to the Pavillion de Marsan, where El-Gazzar presented his most important work, The Theatre of Life, which created a great commotion. For a few hours he was taken to prison with Amin.

It is probable that Amin exhibited his work with his students. In his studies of The portrait of the Dancer (undated) and The Nubian Dancer (1930), the dancer poses like a Matisse figure. In Arab Café, 1931, painted on his arrival from Brazil, there are two boys in galabeyas, identically dressed. One smiles, the other smokes the shisha. It looks as if they complement and continue one another, though the manner is academic. But with such few works one cannot come to a conclusion about Amin. His presence is more clearly seen in the work of his students.

Liberal and open-minded, he knew how to direct them to their own philosophies and their own relationships to their environment. If nothing else, he at least developed talents of which Egypt should be proud.

The times in which Amin lived were very different to our own. There was an intellectual milieu, focused around George Henein and L'Art Indépendent and L'Art et la Liberté, with Ramsis Younan, Fouad Kamel and El-Telmisani. It was a time of awakening, started by Mahmoud Said with his Gama't Al-Khayal (Imagination Group).

In Amin's time the centre of the art world was shifting from Europe to America. Egypt was seeking its own routes towards liberation. Significantly, it was after the 1952 Revolution that the group's works were eventually dispersed, disappearing into cupboards or else locked villas. Some are still available for viewing in the museums of Cairo and Alexandria, but what remains of the life of Hussein Youssef Amin is practically nothing.

Aimée Azzar, a Lebanese known also as Habib, a professor of literature and literary criticism at Ain Shams University, was a close friend of the group, particularly El-Gazzar. He was able to document the activities of the group during the 1940s and 1950s. His book, La peinture moderne en Egypte (1961), gives a comprehensive summary of the works of most artists, Egyptian and non-Egyptian, who contributed to the plastic arts of the time.

Besides Azzar, there was Conte Phillipe d'Arschot, whom the group met in Paris. He wrote several articles on them. However, Azzar remains the main source of information. Yet he, too, like the rest of the artists, disappeared from the Egyptian art scene.

Amin's image is most accurately reflected, we must surmise, in the paintings of his students. When Amin died in 1984, his wife went to live in the United States, following their two sons. The house where Egyptian art was born, where the murals, pictures and writings of the master and his students were created has disappeared, as has much of their history. The villa was torn down. No one showed an interest in preserving the location or document what remained of Hussein Youssef Amin.

What remains is information from relatives, friends, neighbours, Azzar and my efforts at field research, using paintings as loci of insight.

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