A jubilee of the arts
Samir Sobhi celebrates the centenary of the Egyptian School of Fine Arts with a panorama of some of its most famous graduates
The centenary of the Egyptian School of Fine Arts falls this year, the institution having opened on 12 May 1908 thanks to the generosity of the aristocrat Prince Youssef Kamal. Three years later the school's graduates held their first degree show at the Cairo Automobile Club, and among them were some of the best-known pioneers of modern Egyptian art, including sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar and artists Mohamed Hassan, Ahmed Sabri, and Ragheb Ayyad.
Mokhtar in particular introduced national consciousness into his work, creating sculptures of ordinary Egyptians as well as of many of the pioneers of Egyptian nationalism. Mokhtar was the creator of a well-known statue of Saad Zaghlul, the nationalist leader, prime minister and leader of the Wafd Party, thereby providing, as it were, the "artistic fuel" for the 1919 Revolution.
His work, echoing the poise and grandeur of ancient Egypt, draws on deceptively simple materials, such as women carrying water jars and figures like village headman or agricultural guards. He brought his nationalist symbolism to a new level of achievement in his famous depiction of Nahdet Masr, "Egypt's Awakening", which represents a woman and a sphinx. This stature now stands in Giza outside Cairo University, and many artists since have tried to emulate Mokhtar's emotive yet restrained style.
The Fine Arts School's first magazine appeared in 1924, dedicated to photography, with a second issue appearing later in the same year that took a broader approach to the arts. This contained images of work by Mokhtar, Mohamed Hassan, Ahmed Sabri and Ragheb Ayyad, launching their careers and signalling the beginnings of the flourishing of the Egyptian arts scene.
However, in these early years it was difficult to attract collectors for the new works that were being produced, most of those buying works being large landowners wanting pieces they could display for prestige purposes. This gave the nascent arts scene an elitist flavour, and funding for the artists' work and for the new magazines that could show it off was a seemingly insoluble problem in these early years.
While the first exhibition of fine arts in Egypt was held at the Cairo Opera House in 1891, with further exhibitions held throughout the 1890s, the country's arts scene at this time was mostly the preserve of foreigners, and this was not really to change before the founding of the School of Fine Arts. Once established, however, the school quickly acquired new premises in the district of Darb Al-Gamamiz, later moving to Sayeda Zeinab, and it was placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Education.
The school was thus recognised as a national institute of higher education, and in 1927 it moved again to new premises in Shobra, followed by Giza (in 1931), before finally moving to Zamalek, where it is still housed today.
So important was the Fine Arts School in enriching the nation's artistic life that most of the names now associated with the Egyptian art movement of the first half of the 20th century were either students or professors at the school. The painter Ragheb Ayyad, for example, joined the school in 1908, before going to Rome in 1925 to study, holding his first international exhibition in Italy in 1929. In 1937, Ayyad became director of a section of the school and went on to found various art societies. Something of a non- conformist by nature, his work draws on rural themes, while at the same time evoking a strong sense of the artist's rebellious personality.
Another significant figure from the school's earliest years was Youssef Kamel. Following study in Italy, during which he developed an impressionistic style that he would retain throughout his career, Kamel was appointed director of the school, and the friendship between Kamel and Ayyad helped both of them in their formative years. One man would study, while the other worked, and then they would switch roles. Born in Cairo in 1891, Kamel met Ayyad while studying in Italy, and both of them met the Egyptian feminist and nationalist leader Hoda Shaarawi in Rome, travelling from there to Switzerland to meet the nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul.
Shaarawi and Zaghlul, impressed with the determination and talent of the two young men, arranged government scholarships for them. Kamel served as director of the Modern Art Museum in 1948-1949 and then as director of the Fine Arts School from 1950 to 1953. He died in 1971.
Further members of this generation were also closely associated with the school. Among these was Mohamed Hassan, an artist who worked in a variety of media, including sculpture, jewellery design and painting, and who became assistant director for the decorative arts at the school before going on to co-found the Decorative Arts School and become director of the Fine Arts Museum in Alexandria.
Painter Ahmed Sabri also entered the school in 1910, before studying in Paris from 1916 to 1919 and holding a teaching job at the school from 1929 to 1941. Sabri is known both for his portraits and for his fascination with ancient Egyptian culture. Among his students were two great artists of the 1960s: Hussein Bikar and Sabri Ragheb. An equally famous member of a younger generation, Ramsis Yunan, entered the school in 1929, before going on to pioneer surrealism in Egypt and become a well-known translator. He was the co-founder of the Art and Freedom Group in the 1940s, his contemporaries being Georges Henein and Kamal El-Mallakh.
Several books have recently appeared in Arabic to mark the 100th anniversary of the School of Fine Arts, among them Modern Egyptian Art by Mustafa al-Razzaz, in which the author traces the early organisation of the school. Originally there were four sections -- painting, sculpture, decorative arts and architecture -- with another section for engraving being added in 1933. The school also started with a perhaps surprisingly large number of students -- 400 -- many of whom went on, as has been noted, to become important members of the pioneer generations of modern Egyptian artists.
Like any members of an artistic avant-garde, these ambitious young artists soon arranged themselves in groups, gathering around common manifestos. Mokhtar co-founded the Imagination Group with Mahmoud Said, Mohamed Nagi, Youssef Kamel and Mohamed Hassan, for example, while in 1921 Mohamed Hassan created the Plastic Arts Society. Institutional support came in 1927 with the establishment of the Egyptian Arts Academy in Rome, and in 1935, Mohamed Nagi founded the Alexandria Atelier. In 1952, Nagi and Ragheb Ayyad co-founded the Cairo Atelier.
One of the great patrons of the arts in the first half of the 20th century was Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil, whose collection of modern art can still be seen at the museum bearing his name in Doqqi. Khalil, however, not only bought art for his own collection, but also encouraged the government to buy it and to send students abroad to study, further supporting the development of the arts.
Significant numbers of women were involved in the early Egyptian art movement. Among them was Princess Samiha, daughter of Sultan Hussein Kamel, who was herself a sculptress. Other female patrons of the arts included Amina Shafiq, Iqbal Shafiq and Hoda Shaarawi, who worked with others to establish the Mokhtar Award for Sculpture.
A leading artist of the time was Mahmoud Said (1897-1964), the son of prime minister Mohamed Said. Sent by his family to Paris to study law, Said spent most of his time studying art instead (though he managed, somewhere along the line, to get a degree in law nonetheless), and when he returned to Egypt he was appointed assistant attorney at the mixed courts in Mansoura in 1922. However, Said never forgot his true vocation, painting, and the pictures he produced of Alexandria and of coastal scenes are part of the nation's artistic inheritance.
For the later artist Makram Henein, Said was finally unable to manage his "double life" as artist and lawyer and eventually judge, and he resigned from the judiciary in 1947.
Another important figure from the time was Mohamed Nagi, who, born in Alexandria in 1888, also went on to study law in France but soon abandoned it to study painting in Florence instead. Nagi's later work shows the influence of his life in Gourna, near Luxor, and his paintings feature evocative images of the Egyptian countryside.
Rather different artists in inspiration and career are the brothers Seif and Adham Wanli, two Alexandrian artists born in 1906 and 1908, respectively. They studied first with an Australian and then with an Italian artist, winning awards in 1935 at the Exhibition of Asian and African Arts. Seif Wanli went on to teach at the Alexandria College of Fine Arts, travelling to Nubia in 1959 on a government assignment to record the landscape of the area before the creation of Lake Nasser. He won first prize at the Third Alexandria Biennale in 1959 and was awarded the State Merit Award in 1969, as well as the keys to the city of Alexandria in 1973.
Dying in Sweden in 1979 Seif Wanli has been described by the artist and critic Sabri Hegazi as a "unique presence in the history of Egyptian art, a man who lived every moment of his life in drawing and a magician who turned painting into a constant adventure."
While all these pioneers were men, women did not only play the roles of supporters or patrons of the arts. Tahia Halim, for example, born in 1919 to an aristocratic family from Dongola in the Sudan, at first studied painting at home, as Sobhi al-Sharoni notes in his book Tahia Halim: Mythical Realism, before persuading her family to allow her to attend art classes run by Greek and Egyptian artists.
In 1943, Halim befriended, and later married artist Hamed Abdallah, who introduced her to aspects of ordinary life from which her upper- class upbringing had shielded her. She went with him to Paris in 1949. According to the critic Louis Awad, Halim studied with the best teachers of the time, her stay in France honing her sensibilities. She won a Guggenheim Award in 1958, and a Gold Medal at the 1960 Cairo Salon.
Like Seif Wanli, Halim travelled to Nubia before the building of the High Dam on a tour organised by the then minister of culture, Tharwat Okasha. It was probably during this tour that Halim rediscovered her Nubian roots, as Nubian faces henceforth began appearing in her paintings.
While Halim straddled the pre- and post-1952 worlds, Hamed Oweis (1925-1966) was an artist who belonged solely to the latter, and his work exhibits the kind of post-revolutionary idealism now associated with the 1950s and early 1960s. Oweis's paintings glorify the achievements of men, blue- and white-collar alike, who strove to change the face of the country, and the artist and critic Mustafa Abdel-Moati says that he "had no time for pure art," or for anything approaching art for art's sake. "He was neither a propagandist nor a demagogue," Abdel-Moati comments, "and instead he managed to balance an aesthetic with a social or political sense. His work is sane, intense and clear."
Other artists who to various extents straddle the pre- and post-1952 worlds are Hussein Bikar and Salah Taher. Bikar, a towering figure on the Egyptian arts scene in the late 1950s, was born in 1913 and studied, and later taught, in both Egypt and Morocco. In 1959, Bikar abandoned a teaching career to work in journalism as an illustrator and cartoonist: known for his sensuous, elongated lines, Bikar's work broke new ground in media art and was both accessible and sophisticated. He was also an outstanding musician, and during his career as an artist and critic at Al-Akhbar, he often sought out and encouraged young talents.
For his part, Salah Taher was born in Cairo in 1911 and entered the Fine Arts School in 1929, graduating in 1934. He became director of the Modern Art Museum in Cairo in 1953, general director of fine arts and museums in 1961, and director of the Cairo Opera House in 1962. In his early 40s, he was known to rail against abstract art. "What is the matter with these 'abstract artists'?" he would ask. "Do they think that what they are doing is so extraordinary? I can outdo them all in this form of random scratching of which they are so fond."
Taher's early work is precise and academic, but as time went on he developed a certain softness in his depictions of fishermen and coastal scenes. His paintings exhibit an elegance that borders on the elitist, a style that may remind one of Bikar's. Ironically, however, and despite his early disdain, Taher did not resist abstraction in his painting, and some of his later works resembled the paintings he ridiculed earlier.
All these men and women, from the earliest generation of Mahmoud Mokhtar, Youssef Kamel and Ragheb Ayyad to that of Hussein Bikar and Salah Taher and beyond, owe a major part of their success to Egypt's School of Fine Arts.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/893/special.htm