6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Plain talk
How far can art be said to reflect nationality? Beyond the time-honoured home-grown artistic traditions of each nation -- some of the better known examples of this are Japanese silk, African masks and Chinese ivory and jade -- how far does a modern work of art bear the mark of its nationality? These questions recently cropped up in my mind as I read reviews of an exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery in London, "Vermeer and the Delft School." The first Vermeer painting I saw was The Milkmaid at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam years ago. Later, in Germany, I bought a number of cherished reproductions. Its genius aside, the Vermeer aesthetic invariably reflects a profound awareness of the local features of Delft where he lived through his 43 years.
The exhibition proved very popular in New York, with more than half a million visitors. More recently, in London, it has sold 30 times as many tickets as the organisers expected. The queues, according to a National Gallery spokeswoman, "are stretching out onto Trafalgar Square." That it should prove so universally popular is interesting in that, contemplating Vermeer's Paintings -- A View of Delft, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, and Woman with a Water Pitcher -- one feels the familiar objects of Delft bursting through the canvas: "the completed tables, the straight-backed chairs, and the white Delftware wine jugs."
One is reminded of yet another artist, John Constable, whose work incorporates a powerful sense of place. Indeed Constable, along with Turner, dominated English landscape painting in the 19th century. It is known that Constable painted the scenes that had delighted him as a boy: the Lake District, Hadley Castle, the River Stow, Hampstead and Brighton. I have had the pleasure of seeing many of Constable's oil paintings, alongside a great many, mostly watercolours, by Turner, at the Tate Gallery, at the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Tate received the bulk of Turner's paintings under the terms of the artist's will. I shall always treasure the impact of Constable's Hay Wain, The Lock and Salisbury Cathedral, as well as numerous other paintings. In fact, the book English Landscape Scenery, a selection of mezzotints made by David Lucas from Constable's paintings and sketches, can be seen as a guidebook to the English countryside.
What about modern Egyptian art, though? There is no doubt that some of it is truly national, in the sense that it contains clear indications of the artists' national identity. In Egypt the birth of modern art coincided with the 1919 Revolution. A large group of artists undertook the task. Contrary to popular belief, however, it was Mohamed Nagui, not Mahmoud Said, who pioneered modern Egyptian painting. Looking at Nagui's Fisherman, The Buffalo, Antoniades' Gardens, Boats on the Nile, Bread, or the work of modern sculpture's greatest patriarch, Mahmoud Mukhtar -- Bust of the Nile Bride, The Field Guard, A Peasant Woman Holding the Water Ewer and of course The Renaissance of Egypt -- one can feel the spirit of the Revolution throbbing beneath the surface. Such work, one concludes, could only have emerged out of Egypt. It was Mahmoud Said who became the symbol of national art, however. Just as Vermeer's paintings embodied Delft, Said's intimated Alexandria. One can almost smell Alexandria in his paintings -- the sea, the particular brand of female beauty associated with banat Bahari, who populated the city's alleyways and bazaars. So perhaps it is safe to assume that, notwithstanding the transnational imperatives by which they abided, the pioneers of modern Egyptian art remained strikingly faithful to the spirit of their nation and even locale.
One can argue that underneath the surface of even the most globally oriented artistic movements and schools -- the Romantics, the Impressionists, the Naturalists, the Realists etc. -- lay the compulsion to express a sense of place and an awareness of national identity. Here too are national artists who expressed the spirit of their respective countries and peoples.
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