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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 Inspired from afar
I was very pleased to hear of the museum in Alexandria devoted to the works of the great painter Mahmoud Said. I had a wonderful relationship with him, although we never knew each other.
In the late 1920s, I was in my last years of school. I read an article by El-Aqqad about a painter called Mahmoud Said, and was amazed. Art, at the time, did not play a very important role in society, so it was surprising that the great El-Aqqad himself should devote an entire article to an artist.
I asked several people about this, and was told that men of literature are not concerned with belles lettres alone, but must study all the arts: painting, sculpture, music... From them, he may draw inspiration.
Mahmoud Said was the person who introduced me to the world of the plastic arts, the world of canvas and charcoal and paint. I later learned that one collective exhibition a year was held on Ibrahim Pasha Street in Cairo, but there were individual exhibitions as well that one could attend. At the collective exhibitions, which I began to frequent every year, I saw Mahmoud Said's work for the first time. That first vision is still imprinted on my mind, the colours as bright as they were when first I beheld them. Part of his genius lay in the fact that he found and uncovered beauty where no one else had seen it: in the splendid, statuesque working-class women whose portraits made him famous, for instance. No one had done that before him.
Mahmoud Said was truly a great man. I realised this when I saw his work, but also when I found out he had been a councillor, but had left the law and devoted all his time to art. So in other words, he had left one of the most respected positions in the society of the day to become an artist. That fact played a great part in my decision, many years later, to abandon philosophy, which I had studied at university, and make literature my main muse.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
