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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Obituary:
Mounir Kanaan
Art and freedom
Ever since I can remember Mounir Kanaan was my favorite artist. He was right up there along with Hassan of Al-Masri, before that newspaper was closed down in the early fifties, and El-Hussein Fawzi who illustrated Naguib Mahfouz's Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk) when it was first serialised in Al-Risaala Al-Jadida magazine in 1954.When, in 1955, I entered the Akhbar Al-Youm building, at the start of my career in journalism, I had with me Sanaa El-Bissi, my closest childhood friend. As we were growing up, Sanaa exhibited an exuberant artistic talent that developed through primary and secondary school. On our way up the stairs she suggested we drop in on Bikar but I said let's go to Kanaan's office first.
We found Kanaan on the first floor, hanging up a painting of his on the wall opposite to the door of his office. We immediately felt comfortable in his presence: it felt as though he had been expecting us, as though our friendship with him had been ordained since birth. I said: "Kanaan, I love your work, but Sanaa here wants to go to Bikar's office."
Nudging me with her elbow, she protested. "However did you get that idea." I laughed as Sanaa entered Kanaan's office to become his student and inspiration, never to leave his side until that day on which God ordained that her teacher, patron, friend and lover was to part from this earth. That day was on Wednesday, 29 December 1999. May he rest in peace.
Kanaan and Sanaa got married on 11 October 1962. To our young coterie -- Sanaa El-Bissi, Sanaa Fathallah and myself -- he was the mentor who tutored, steered, disciplined, enlightened and refined his protegees in our civilization's authentic schools of art and culture. I still think of him as my professor and the consummate artist. It was he who gave me my initial store of training in how to view a work of art, lavishing untold hours in conversations that would hone my critical senses and ultimately push me towards the study of the theatre. I have never entered a gallery or opened an art book without first hearing Kanaan's voice asking, "Do you see it?" His insistent plea has always been sufficient to goad me into summoning my wits and rallying my critical senses in order to see the works before me.
Mounir Kanaan was born on 13 February 1919 -- how he rejoiced in that number 13. His career took off before he reached 20 -- when Dar Al-Hilal publishers took him on board as one of their in-house artists and illustrators. He quickly acquired a reputation for his portraits and lively depictions of scenes from daily life. He did not flatter or embellish. His sure and powerful brushstrokes brought faces to life, gave strands of hair the radiance of light rays, imbued eyes with the unfading glimmer of cognizance, imparted on the fingers of a subject's hand a breath of their own. However accomplished an illustrator he became, newspaper art, as Kanaan called, was too confining. He feared it would stifle his creativity.
Thus, with dogged persistence and indefatigable diligence -- two of his most vital qualities -- he began to experiment with new modes of expression, producing in 1946 his first abstract works. His innovative explorations first appeared in the Spring Exhibition in the Cairo Hall of Art 1947 and then annually from 1949 to 1953, in the National Culture Centre's Art and Freedom exhibition in 1956 and in its Towards the Unknown exhibition in 1959. Between 1960 to 1989 he had ten one man shows, which invariably aroused controversy.
Academic artists turned up their noses at his work, loath to abandon their first and last line of defence: stolid representation. Pedants to the core, they feared exploring new continents, that is until the maps had been drawn and criteria had been posted.
The academics snubbed Kanaan because he was not a product of one of their schools. Having, instead, grappled the cliffs of artistic formation on his own, he was not be counted among their ranks and certainly did not merit critical assessment. When Kanaan was awarded first place in the 1984 Arab World Plastic Arts exhibition the academics finally rebelled, producing a protest statement and threatening then head of the Artists Syndicate, Saleh Rida, that they would not reelect him because he had defended the presentation of the award to Kanaan for one of his "ugh!!!" abstractions.
The anti-Kanaan campaign was replete with such phrases as "social substance" and "imported critics" -- in spite of the fact that only three out of the 19 judges in the exhibition were non-Arab. It contrasted "futile abstractionism" with "earnest realism" -- the hackneyed term that has fettered the arts to the most literal rigidity and the most timeworn slogans, a passport for the crudest artistic talents. The statement remarked, in terms its authors must have thought scathing: "The first prize for painting was awarded to the most abstract work, which was nothing more than snippets from Arab and foreign newspapers pasted upon scraps of black or coloured paper conveying no meaning whatsoever." The statement also included out of context an excerpt from a speech of the Egyptian president, as though to intimate that the authorities should promulgate and extraordinary law providing for the arrest of all artists caught in the act of abstraction. At the time, I was not surprised at the heated attack against abstract art or against Kanaan as one of its exponents. Such are the seasonal storms that sweep the world of art criticism whenever the opportunity presents itself. However, I was taken aback at the vehemence of the condemnation of the well-known and widespread art of collage, as though it violated the most sacred laws of artistic creativity and, moreover, was tantamount to treason. Indeed, at one point the statement charged Kanaan's prize-winning painting with "blatant hostility against national orientations and objectivity".
Kanaan was scorned, too, by the secularist ideologues who hid their meagre talents behind sonorous rhetoric and peppered their works with ready-made symbols that quickly became hackneyed, producing, in the final analysis, nothing of worth. This tribe joined forces with the academics and together they marched to the tune of Kanaan's "frivolity, nihilism and irrelevance".
Kanaan remained, as he will always remain, alone, with only his abundant passion, piercing vision and resolute determination as his companions on the road beyond the bounds of matter and form towards the discovery of those hidden aesthetic values that continually emerge through the combined process of destruction and reconstruction.
Kanaan taught me that there is nothing ugly, except for stereotypes and derivatives: bodies, faces, birds that never escape the confines of form and never take flight beyond the surface of the canvas.
During my last visit to Kanaan, he looked beseechingly at his wife Sanaa El-Bissi and said: "The light has gone out, Sanaa." In one voice Sanaa and I responded to his urgency: "The light will never go out, Kanaan."
By Safynaz Kazem
