Obituary:
Tahiya Halim (1919 -2003)
By
Nigel Ryan
In an interview dating from the early 1990s Tahiya Halim recalled that her most abiding memory of early childhood was lying on her back in the rooms of her father's residence in Dongola, Sudan, and endlessly following the swirling patterns that decorated the coffered ceilings. It was this experience, she told her interviewer in an understandable piece of post-event rationalisation, that fuelled her determination to become a painter.
The fourth child of Mohamed Ahmed Halim, an officer in the Egyptian army who would eventually be appointed chamberlain at the court of King Fouad, Tahiya was born in Sudan, where her father was then stationed. Her maternal grandmother, Yuzbashi Jultar, had played the violin with the Khedival Orchestra before marrying Abdel-Hamid Helmi, a Circassian army officer, while her mother was an excellent oud player.
On the family's return to Cairo Tahiya was educated at home by a series of private teachers including, for five years, the Syrian painter Youssef Taraboulsi, though by her own account she only began painting seriously in 1939, following the death of her mother. Between 1949-52 she enrolled at the Academie Julienne in Paris, determined to structure what she considered the necessary study of anatomy, though in the previous decade she had already begun to establish a reputation for herself in Egypt having sold her first painting, The Wheat Grinder, to Cairo's Museum of Modern Art as early as 1939 for the then respectable sum of 25 pounds. Her works were widely exhibited in Egypt during the early 1940s, with shows in Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said.
By the mid-1950s, as Liliane Karnouk notes in Contemporary Egyptian Art, Tahiya Halim was dazzling "everyone with her colourist vitality, her fresh and assured brushing, the free and unself- conscious manner with which she approached grand themes like Cairo on Fire or Demonstrations, events she witnessed in 1951". Most famously, perhaps, Tahiya Halim was among the group of artists sent by the Egyptian government to Nubia, between 1960 and 1961, to record their impressions of a land that would rapidly be submerged by the rising waters of Lake Nasser. Whatever the topographical and archaeological motivations of those missions -- and there was, too, a propaganda component, the magnitude of the High Dam project set as a subject of contemplation and record -- few could have anticipated the brilliance of the results of Tahiya's visit.
If the artist's take on the major events of 1951 had been idiosyncratic, a decade on and she had moved beyond history altogether: from henceforth it would be an ineffable sense of timelessness that would inform her work, that would become, indeed, her major subject to the extent that the titling of individual paintings, a stab at contextualisation, increasingly comes to stress what is least substantial within her oeuvre when it does not actively mislead the viewer.
Several years ago, in conversation with the artist, she explained a painting from this period in terms of a symbolism that had perhaps been intended at the time but which could equally have accrued around the image in the intervening years. This, she told me, pointing to the figure of a man standing on the prow of a golden barge, is President Nasser, and he is bringing prosperity to the people of Nubia. Such a reductionist iconographic unravelling was unnecessary not because the symbolism was obvious -- far from it -- but because it is entirely incidental to the impact of the painting. It diluted a powerfully resonant archetype in favour of a simplistic, propagandistic reading.
Throughout the 1960s Tahiya Halim's work increasingly broached points of dissolution. The shattered pantheism of earlier landscapes -- most notably Bread from Rock, a large canvas from 1964 -- is increasingly gilded as light is solidified into sheets of gold. Figures are resolved into animated hieroglyphs, into archetypes with archaeological credentials. Papyrus boats float across dazzling waters. Her paintings assume the status of reliquaries: the aspects of illuminated decoration, the resemblance to iconic objects glimpsed by candlelight in darkened recesses, are intended and well-made. These are images that are at times ravishingly, painfully beautiful. And they are about far, far more than recording how bread was brought to the people of Nubia.
Like Inji Efflatoun, a painter of the same generation, Tahiya Halim produced many pastoral scenes in her later career. Like Efflatoun light was increasingly consolidated as a major compositional device in her paintings. But by leaving the white ground to come through increasingly attenuated strokes Efflatoun's effects came to depend on a vacancy. Tahiya Halim takes another, a far more painterly route, depending on the layering of substance, of paint and still more paint, to build the flickering optical illusions. It is an approach at once more dextrous and convincing, an approach that eventually resulted in what may well, when stripped of inadequate polemic, come to be counted among the most consistent body of painting produced in Egypt in the second half of the 20th century.
That for so much of her life she remained dependent, following a short and unhappy marriage to the painter and teacher Hamed Abdullah, on state bursaries, says a great many unflattering things about the contemporary art market. "She was," noted Hussein Bikar, "haunted by the spectre of insecurity every time a grant approached its end."
"Europe played a crucial role in crystalising my identity. But my art stems from my own self. My art is emotional."
Tahiya Halim's own formulation of her aesthetic may not be original, but seldom have the emotions been quite this seductive.
Tahiya Halim, painter: b 9 September, 1919, Dongola, Sudan; d 24 May, 2003, Cairo; recipient of the Guggenhiem Award, 1958; State Merit Award, 1995; exhibited at the Venice Biennale 1955, 1960, 1970, Sao Paulo 1954.
