 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Obituary
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
Hassan Aziz Hassan
A quiet erudition
By Nigel Ryan
There could be few more delightful introductions to the history and architecture of Cairo than a gentle stroll through the streets of one of the city's older quarters with Hassan Aziz Hassan. He knew as much about the by-ways, cul-de-sacs, blind alleys and thoroughfares and the buildings that line them as anyone I have met, and with an unerring eye would pick out the most surprising details, pointing out the most exquisite panel of marble in Sultan Hassan or the serpentine twists of his favourite fanlight, surmounting an ancient door, half off its hinges in the dusty alleyways of Bulaq Abul-Ela. Invariably his tours would be accompanied by a stream of anecdote, colourful, learned, occasionally scandalous, but always delivered in a voice that intimated this was a confidence intended only for you.
Those who can pronounce, with absolute conviction, the most abstruse architectural detail ravishing, the furthest tree in an avenue perfect, the slant of the afternoon light breathtaking, without even a hint of the precious, are few indeed. Hassan was a member of that select, if not always happy, band.
Hassan Aziz Hassan, the youngest of four children, was born in San Remo, Italy, in 1924, during one of his father's periodic exiles, ordered this time by Lord Allenby, the British high commissioner. During an earlier period of exile, in Spain, Prince Aziz, a grandson of the Khedive Ismail, had met and married Hassan's mother, the daughter of a professional, middle class Spanish family, in a morganatic union that flew in the face of Egyptian royal conventions. Returning eventually to Egypt the family set up home in two villas in the grounds of the Shubra Palace, a period of tranquillity that came to an abrupt end when, with the death of Prince Aziz, it was decided that Hassan, at the age of eight, along with his brother and two sisters, should be taken from his mother and placed in the care of Princess Nemetallah, the last surviving daughter of the Khedive Ismail and the sister of King Fouad.
"Somewhere in the family... the idea got started that she would be a more suitable person to bring up Prince Aziz's children than their mother who, as a foreigner, could hardly be expected to know much of the family's ways," Hassan writes in his memoirs. "For years afterwards I was to deeply resent our having been wrenched away from my mother. It was only much later on... when the harsh realities of life were finally beginning to pile up around me like tombstones for my illusions, that I was able to understand our relatives' reasons for subordinating sentimentality to the observance of certain conventions."
Educated in Turkey, at the International College in Kizil ‚ulu, and then in England, at Leighton Park, a Quaker school near Reading, Hassan only returned to Egypt in 1939 with the outbreak of war. Evacuated from London on the SS Madura, he travelled around the tip of Scotland -- the Channel was considered too dangerous -- and across the Atlantic to the Cape, alighting, 44 days later, at Durban. SS Madura was sunk a few days later off the coast of South Africa, with the loss of all those on board. From Durban he travelled on an imperial flying boat to Mombasa, the Equatorial Lakes, Khartoum and finally Cairo.
Sent to the English School in Heliopolis, Hassan also enrolled at the Conservatoire Tiegerman, where he continued his piano studies under Ignace Tiegerman, "a person whose personal merits," he later recalled, "remain for me a wonder of human realisation." Much later, when in the nineties the extant recordings of Tiegerman were being collected, Hassan was instrumental in their being produced on two CDs, and contributed a moving tribute published in the accompanying pamphlets.
In the late forties, sensing revolution might be around the corner, and uncertain, should that be the case, whether or not he would be allowed to stay in Egypt, he commissioned a Russian photographer to produce photographs of his favourite scenes and buildings, a mordant souvenir that would not, in the end, prove necessary.
The revolution, of course, came, and the property of the royal family was confiscated in its entirety. After several moves Hassan finally acquired the apartment in Garden City where he lived until his death last week, concentrating increasingly on his painting. He received an annual visit from the confiscation committee, to make sure that the furnishings of his house, which after confiscation officially belonged to the government, were still intact. In the mid-70s the committee threatened to revalue these belongings, suggesting that he might keep LE2,000 worth. They later relented. "My dear," he told me, relating the tale, "even the sofa you are sitting on is worth more than that. To lose your fortune once is understandable but to have everything taken twice appears just a bit too much."
There is, perhaps, a peculiar irony that Hassan Aziz Hassan, born into the heart of Egypt's royal family, should be one of the few artists in Egypt who for four decades supported himself almost entirely on the proceeds of his painting. Immediately after the revolution there were, he would say, with a disdainful flap of the hand "cuff links and things," but they soon ran out, and the state pension he was awarded remained at its 1952 level. There were other objects too -- a Cordier bust of the Khedive Ismail, his great grand father, bits and pieces that he sold quietly, aided by his unerring eye. He had a particular fondness for textiles, Ottoman embroidery and carpets in particular, and his advice was regularly sought by those less expert.
Despite having only two public exhibitions in Cairo Hassan's painting attracted buyers from around the world. In the last ten years his paintings became increasingly dark and brooding -- Romantic, swirling, like glimpses of sky in the background of a late Turner or Martin. Perhaps the most accomplished colourist at work in Egypt, his difficult, mostly abstract works, pointedly ignored by the cultural establishment, had many admirers and, fortunately, buyers. While it is predictable that not a single painting by Hassan Aziz Hassan has been acquired by a public collection in Egypt, that predictability in no way mitigates against the scandalous nature of the oversight.
Though he spurned any kind of personal publicity, Hassan was nonetheless a fixture of the Cairo scene, a somewhat aloof figure who could, occasionally, be waspish, bitingly witty, and who refused to compromise on his own, impeccable standards of behaviour. He was a figure around whom rumours circulated, occasionally finding their way into print, the most recent being the spiteful and supercilious character sketch in Cairo: The City Victorious. Hassan thought such occasional lapses of taste the product of malice, though in all fairness they are most probably born of ignorance, of a desire to turn an extraordinarily complex character into just one more piece of local colour.
Cairo is famously careless of its treasures. Hassan himself despaired at the neglect, at the shoddy restorations, at the paintings that have disappeared, the heritage squandered, the buildings demolished and the coral pink paintwork on the ugly new buildings constructed in their place. He baulked at the savage pruning and felling of trees. Such affronts to the dignity of the city he loved offended him as much as the callousness towards the poor he increasingly detected in those who had assumed the reins of power. It was no more than vandalism, and tragic because unnecessary.
Few pleasures could be comparable to a long and leisurely lunch with Hassan, whose vast knowledge was lightly worn and willingly shared. His conversation sparkled, the shafts of light illuminating a vast array of subjects. I last saw him the afternoon before he died. He asked me to open the curtains of his hospital room. "Aren't those the ugliest chimneys you've ever seen?" he said. "I don't think even the Edwardians could beat that."
Once, he confided, he felt his least attractive quality was a certain folie de grandeur. It was not true. Cairo's most delightful guide, and one of Egypt's most accomplished painters, is now gone, sadly just two weeks before the publication of his memoirs. And with his passing the city itself appears somehow diminished.
Hassan Aziz Hassan, b San Remo, Italy, 22 February, 1924; d Cairo, 17 April, 2000
