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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The eyes have it
By Nigel RyanThe Museums and Galleries Sector of the Ministry of Culture has a seemingly remarkable ability to stick in its thumb and pull out at least a couple of plums, rummaging through its store-rooms to drag out an unexpected Manet, or Degas, a Rubens here and even, if the catalogue to the exhibition Portrait in Painting and Sculpture, running till at least the end of this month at the Gezira Art Centre in Zamalek, is to be believed, a Caravaggio and a Cranach there.
Given the astronomical prices any of these artists can command on the open market today -- we are talking, in many cases, six hard currency noughts -- it appears nothing short of miraculous that the ministry's store-rooms can still produce such treasures for an occasional exhibition, and that they can then be placed back in those same stores, disappearing to the back of whatever darkened room they are stored in, for another generation. It is not, after all, as if the country is awash with such treasures -- there is very little painting of the first rank in Egypt, so what possible justification can there be for hiding away a Manet, or a Rubens, or a Degas, let alone a Caravaggio. These paintings are held in public collections and there is a moral obligation for the concerned authorities to let the public have access to them, not for a month every 20 years, but permanently. Given the orgy of gallery building -- the Gezira Art Centre and the Palace of Arts in the Opera House grounds being two expensive and high profile examples -- in which the sector has recently indulged, could not a permanent home be found for the Gezira Collection, from which the European exhibits included in the Portrait show have been culled, rather than leaving them stacked in the back rooms and corridors of the old Planetarium, or wherever the Gezira collection is now kept.
An extended gripe, maybe, with which to begin a review but one justified by the interesting selection of items currently adorning the walls of the Gezira Art Centre.
The room devoted to the European contingent begins with two disappointing pastels, anonymous, and not in good condition, the paper badly foxed and the mounts on the point of disintegration. One might suppose, from the appearance of the subjects, that they are French, at the latest early 19th century, more probably mid-18th, but without more careful examination such cursory dating is no more than guesswork. A provenance would be helpful. Nothing, of course, is supplied. But do not be put off by the wishy-washy start.
Facing the two pastels is an elegant oil study of a head, by Auguste Ingres. One can just make out, in the bottom right hand corner, a note from the artist, dedicating the picture to a certain Monsieur Le Blanc. To contemporary eyes the portrait itself is curiously androgynous, the head rising from a neat little ruff, and far less flaccid in its depiction of flesh than Ingres' larger set piece oils the subjects of which invariably look as if they have been filleted. It is a touchingly delicate portrait, lent pathos by the anonymity of the sitter, though I dare say with a little research that anonymity could be broached. Again, no provenance, no other information, so no surprises. Is one supposed to believe that these things just materialised in the Gezira collection without a history, that they arrived in Egypt of their own accord?
Since many of these paintings would have originally been acquired by wealthy Egyptians abroad, and brought into Egypt as items to fit into domestic decorative schemes, passing one way or another into government hands -- how many, one wonders, came via post-1952 confiscations -- the smattering of meretricious, second-rate 18th century pieces in enormous gilded frames is only to be expected. Nicolas de Lavgilliere's plump sitter, swathed in ivory satin, is an example of this type, big, blowzy, decorative, the satin of the dress competently painted but the green velvet backdrop, which only partially conceals a column in the background, revealing the haste in which many commissions of this type were executed.
Clockwise from top: Santerre's lutenist, a piece of period soft porn; Ingres surprisingly androgynous head; Tahiya Halim and Hassan Soleiman
Santerre's earlier depiction of a woman playing the lute is an altogether different kettle of fish. She gazes down at her instrument, a look of rapt attention on her face: the identity of the player, though, as subject, hardly matters. This is no portrait of an individual but a piece of early 18th century soft-porn, a genre painting of a woman revealing as much flesh as is reasonably possible while playing her instrument. It constitutes a neat -- too neat to be comfortable -- little essay on the less endearing aspects of the 18th century male gaze, its objectification made pseudo-respectable by the decorative veneer of Art. Later examples of genre painting included in the exhibition, though, replace sex with a seemingly earnest interest in the plight of the deserving poor -- Bonvin's old woman spinning could not be less sensual, though in truth served only to make poverty picturesque rather than risqué.
The real surprises of this section of the exhibition, though, are the two Degas paintings -- one a monochromatic oil sketch that in a few swift strokes describes its subject in far greater detail than most artist's could achieve with gallon after gallon of paint -- and a startlingly modern study of a head by Eugene Carriere that seems, in its tortured, hollow-eyed gaze, to out-Munch Munch. There is, too, a portrait of Louis XV, in a terribly English red coat, which has a certain curiosity value, and a number of accomplished bronzes, including a Bourdelle bronze head of a figure I assume is Hercules, and an unidentified Rodin. Twice round the gallery, though, and no sign of the Cranach or the Caravaggio trumpeted in the catalogue. Despite a professional interest in such things, and a decade of gallery going in Cairo, I had heard not a rumour of the Gezira collection including these two giants of the cinqocento. Now we know they are there, when will we see them?
The Egyptian component of the exhibition, drawn from the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, also contains surprises in addition to the usual suspects. As with the European selection, several of the works included are not really portraits in any conventional sense, since the subjects, anonymous models mostly, tend to get buried beneath the symbolic weight they are expected to bear. So with Tahiya Halim's muted large oil, the beautifully modulated colours of the surface are enlivened by a faintly shocking streak of turquoise. Shows such as this, by placing Halim's work alongside that of her contemporaries, reinforce the impression that her oeuvre, seemingly narrow in range, constitutes one of the most consistent achievements of 20th century Egyptian painting. Kamal Khalifa too, emerges as a maverick but fascinating sensibility. Typically, the gouache and watercolour included in the exhibition present his female sitter on the point of disintegration, the form constantly mutating as the artist attempts the by now impossible task of description. Khalifa gives eloquent voice to a minor but important strand of modernist practice, and next to his shimmering, harrowingly honest attempts Hassan Soleiman's set-piece portrait, dated 1958-1975, is drained of life. The bravura painting of the dress, however decorative, fails to make up for the convenient, unconvincing schema of the figure.
For sheer bravura, pure delight in the plasticity of his medium, Ahmed Sabri's small portrait of a seated woman would take some beating, while his larger portraits, in the fashionable post-Impressionism of the 1930s, reveal an accomplished technician and colourist. They are perfectly counterpointed by the two Mahmoud Said portraits, one of which, a woman in a cloche hat, looks like a refugee from the Harlem renaissance, a jazz age baby cast adrift only to reappear, inexplicably, in pre-war Alexandria.
Amy Nimr's drawing of a woman's head, ink on paper, is an accomplished piece of archetyping, as is Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar's pencil drawing from 1949 in which the subject of the portrait implied by the exhibition's title becomes no more than a vehicle for an indiscriminate selection of folk symbols -- tattoos, beetles, beads, eyes.
When identity is not lost beneath the weight of portent it would have been nice to have been told something about the sitter -- his or her name perhaps? -- not least in the case of the large, formal portrait of a man in glasses by Mohamed Hassan. But once again no supplementary information is provided, a curatorial omission that, even if it is the norm, remains inexcusable.
Portrait -- even with its shortcomings -- is still one of those plums that crop up sporadically in Cairo's large public galleries. It would be a shame to miss it.
