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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Conjuring tricks
By Dahlia HammoudaMahmoud Said was born on 8 April, 1897 in Alexandria, the son of a wealthy, aristocratic family that consistently objected to his desire to become an artist.
"They simply could not relate to his art," said ex-Queen Farida -- a niece of the painter -- in a 1983 interview. "The closest they came to showing a sign of approval was when they acknowledged that it must be good because foreigners seemed to appreciate it."
Said was enrolled as a pupil at Victoria College and then continued his studies in Paris, in preparation for a career in the law. Following his return he was appointed, in 1922, assistant magistrate at the Mixed Court of Mansoura. His legal career continued, even after the death of his father, until he finally abandoned the law in 1947 to devote himself, at the age of 50, to painting.
It was a long haul -- 25 years in a profession for which he cared little. It was, though, typical of Said, whose paintings consistently dramatise the tension that exists between convention and personal freedom, between social obligation and a less restricted expression of self. And throughout the period he practised law he was painting. In 1927 he took part, alongside Ragheb Ayyad, Mohamed Nagi and Mahmoud Mukhtar, in the first exhibition of La Chimere, an informal group of artists, including Europeans and Egyptians, that had gathered around Mukhtar. The exhibition proved to be something of a publicity coup, owing mainly to the efforts of Hussein Heikal, then editor of Al Siyasa.
Three years before Said's untimely death, in 1964, Aimé Azar published an insightful commentary on his work in La peinture moderne en Egypte: "Opulence and sensuality -- these dominate in Said's painting. He is an Oriental lord, a man who paints for the joy of his exhilarated senses, who calls upon all the memories of a refined culture without overlooking the quotidian scenes, the spontaneous mood, the folkloric truth."
Almost four decades on Azar's analysis, when stripped of its by now disreputable orientalising, contains an important truth about Said's work. The vast majority of his output, and all of the most famous "set-pieces", exhibit a conscious play between stricture and the desire for a more uninhibited freedom, imposing formal constraints only to subvert them in an emphasis on the sheer corporeality of his figures.
Touring the museum: (clockwise from top) the centre's facade, an exhibition hall, a self-portrait of Said, Said's painting of the Suez Canal opening ceremony, Said's studio
photos: Gamal Said
The opposing plastic elements from which he constructs his paintings -- awkward perspectives, compositions based, more often than not, on sharp diagonals and the carefully modelled, rounded, solid flesh of the female figures, almost invariably foregrounded -- serve as an all too literal articulation of the tensions Said, with the bravado of a true virtuoso, manages to successfully contain. The delicacy of the balance in which the artist holds the conflicting imperatives of analysis and expression recalls, if anything, the highwire antics of a tight-rope walker. The spectator cannot quite imagine how he keeps aloft, and in the end can only marvel that the whole edifice does not come tumbling down.
Said, a consummate juggler of such seeming contradictions, throws one more ball in the air, allowing his too-fleshy figures to operate as archetypes, dragging from their particularity -- think only of the 1937 painting Banat Bahari or the 1939 Zar (Museum of Modern Egyptian Art) -- a greater significance. Occasionally, though, in what might be expected to be the most symbolically loaded situations -- Prayer, for example, a 1941 canvas showing rows of figures bent in prayer against a background of arches, again in the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art -- the human figures operate as an extension of the architectural elements.
Said's work might be considered "decorative painting in its baroque meaning" concludes Azar. Certainly Said simplifies mass as much as he identifies types, relishing solid effects while at the same time allowing the most obvious signifiers to disintegrate in a chromatic conjuring trick. He manages, too, to approximate a version of that peculiarly extenuated eroticism -- a complex mixture of repression and desire -- that informs a so much of the painting of the Italian baroque.
It is 36 years since Said's death, yet the strangeness of his paintings, and the conflicting impulses they contain, continue to fascinate. The reality he depicts is as contrived as any other -- it is a testament to his control of the plastic elements from which he constructs his paintings that the inherent contradictions remain frozen forever, fixed by his gaze.
