 |
 |
|
|
Click on images for a larger view. |
||
|
|
||
 |
Marguerite Nakhla: 1908-1977 Nakhla was a talented artist who never received the recognition she deserved in her lifetime, but nonetheless, she left a deep and characteristic artistic imprint through her work. Although she belonged to the impressionist and expressionist era, she remained extremely unique for the way she dealt with her subjects. She showed deep human relationships as seen in the various paintings depicting human groupings like ‘The Turkish Bath’ and ‘The Stock Exchange House’. Both are considered to be the most famous of her works. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Youssef Sida: 1922 – 1994 Born in Damietta, Sida managed to travel and study outside of Egypt, mainly in the USA. He won a Fulbright Award to study art at Minnesota University and then at Columbia University in New York City. He exhibited in the USA, Paris, and in the 1953 San Paolo Biennale. Upon returning to Egypt in 1954, he became active in local and international exhibitions. In 1961, he was sent by the Egyptian government to receive his Ph.D. from Columbus University in Ohio. After which he started exhibiting his work in Columbus and in Washington DC. Sida’s early work dealt mainly with popular Egyptian themes. His work is distinguishable by his powerful use of primary colors directly applied from the tubes without being previously mixed. His works also portray a naive, child-like technique. In his later years, Sida began experimenting with Arabic calligraphy by concentrating on the forms and shapes that are dominant in popular Egyptian motifs and décor. One can notice the dynamism in his Arabic calligraphy work. Sida was also known for his huge murals depicting the political life in the early period of the revolution. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Zakaria El Zeny - 1932-1993 Zakaria El-Zeiny was raised in the suburban areas of Cairo and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts. He studied painting in Venice and graduated from the Academy of Pravana. Later he became a professor at the FFA and ended his career as head of the painting department. El-Zeiny is known to be an expressionistic artist using different symbols in his work and passing by several periods. The first period is the "Moulid" and the "El-Zar". His work has always been distinguished for having the human being (face or complete body) enclosed in a geometric shape of a square or a rectangle. Despite this rigid, enclosed portrayal, the viewer still feels the sympathy that the painter feels toward the human being living in a space in the form of a house, a door or a window. And it was through the "Moulid" and the "Zar" that Zeiny was able to enrich his imagination and find refuge in it, thus transmitting to us his message. In some early works when he featured women enclosed by bars, windows or doors, he was criticizing the passivity of women vis a vis her society. In his second period, came the concept of garbage "Zibala". El-Zeiny emphasized the garbage found on the streets of Cairo by dividing the painting in two and throwing garbage containers on both sides. In his last period, El-Zeiny focused on flowers introducing us to an alternative view of the subject by using geometric design and 3D shapes. Last, but not least, it is worth mentioning that El-Zeiny successfully experimented with lithography. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Shaaban Zaki: 1899 – 1968 Shaaban Zaki came from a lower-middle class family who were mostly government employees, but he diverted from them by becoming involved in the art and culture circles. He could not afford to study in art schools and so he studied by correspondence with an art institute in Chicago. Self-taught and self-made, he became involved in the art scene and was able to distinguish himself during the early 20’s and 40’s among his fellow artist colleagues. He contributed to the cultural life by writing articles and essays on early art education in the primary schools. Zaki left us a wide collection of work portraying Egyptian landscapes, whether from Upper Egypt with its culture and monuments or Lower Egypt with its traditions. He was preoccupied with many different aspects, from ordinary workmen to the great dignitaries of the time. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Ervand Demirdjian: 1870 – 1936 Demirdjian was born in 1870 in Constantinople where he studied fine arts. In 1893 he went to Paris and enrolled in the Julian Academy of Art becoming a student to painter Jean Paul Laurens and to the famous orientalist Benjamin Constant. At the same time he worked at the Louvre studying and copying classical works. After returning to Constantinople he was faced with the persecution of the Turks against the Armenians. In 1896 he fled with a group of Armenians and reached Alexandria and then Cairo. After a short time, Demirdjian was able to become a part of the local Egyptian life and started studying them. This led to an enormous quantity of drawings and paintings documenting everyday life. He participated in some of the annual exhibitions of the Circle of Artists which was the first artistic group in modern Egypt. In 1901 he began teaching at the Khorenian Armenian School where one of his most talented students was the known painter Diran Garabedian (1882-1963) who became his successor and one of the first avant-garde in Egypt. Demirdjian happily lived and worked on a rooftop flat on Mohamed Ali Street, not far from Islamic Cairo where he got most of his inspiration. Demirdjian was known for his orientalist subjects in which he excelled. Although Demirdjian began as an Orientalist, during his later creative years he became a truly Egyptian artist. Published Book: |
|
|
|
||
 |
Effat Naghy: 1905 – 1990 Naghy is one of the most prominent Egyptian figures in art coming from an aristocratic family in Alexandria. She was tutored at home where she learned history, music, art and literature and excelled in mastering the French language. Her brother Mohamed Naghi was her role model and from whom she borrowed the love and passion for art. Under the tutorship of her brother and the famous French painter and professor, André Lott, she was able to master art after several visits to Europe mainly Rome and Paris. Later, when she married professor Saad El-Khadem who specialized in Egyptian folklore she began to show an attachment to the deeply rooted spirit of Egypt. Her senses were not only constrained to these aspects but to the art of magic and to important national issues. Naghi succeeded in translating great nationalistic events like the high dam and the drowning of Nubia into great works of art. Naghi was a pioneer in her artistic experiments especially in collage, assemblage and in the use of semi-precious stones, ivory tusks, dolls and folkloric antique wooden pieces. Naghi was prolific and is now considered to be one of the best women artists of her time, recognized for her wide range of creativity and her deep expressions. Naghi was the first woman in Egypt for whom the Museum of Modern Art acquired a painting. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Kamal Khalifa: 1926 - 1942 Kamal Khalifa is considered Egypt’s leading modern artist. He left the art world with separate categories of artwork: sculpture, paintings and black & white drawings. He produced his sculpture in a structured traditional way with a loose stylized form. It was important for him that his bronze or plaster sculpture should display flow and movement. And it is that feeling of movement that stays with one rather than the absolute form. While Khalifa was a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts and in his 4th year he quit claiming that his studies were not adding to him. Khalifa came from a modest background. He lived all his life in Bab El-Louk in one room on the roof top of an old house and it was in this small room that he produced all his great work and there where he died from tuberculosis. The black and white drawings demonstrated Khalifa's relaxed, less formal style which is not as evident as in his full colored work. Khalifa used two techniques in his still life colored paintings which focused on floral displays. The first involves interplay of color coupled with a flirtation with abstraction. The second establishes a rich variety taken from the artist’s esthetic research in his dramatic environment. To summarize his work we can say that his personal suffering he expresses in his sculpture and paintings reaches out universally. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Salah Abdel Kerim: 1925 – 1988 Born in Fayoum, Abdel Kerim became a student of the famous painter Hussein Bikar at the Faculty of Arts in Qena. He remained closely attached to his professor throughout his life. In 1940 he met Hussein Youssef Amin and the Group of Contemporary Artists where he was introduced to surrealism for the first time. In 1943 he became a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts and graduated with honors in. In 1948 he became an assistant at the interior decoration department at the FFA. He then traveled to Paris in 1952 where he became a student to Paul Colin and A. Marie Cassandre for publicity and theatre design. He then moved to Rome in 1956 to study design for cinema. In 1957 he received the international prize in painting from San Vito Romano, Italy and obtained his PhD from Centro Sperimental di Cinemato Grafia. Back in Egypt in 1958 he was appointed professor at the FFA where he started experimenting with his masterpiece sculptures in wrought iron. In 1959 he received the first prize for sculpture at the Biennale of Alexandria. In the same year, he received from the Biennale of San Paolo, Brazil an honorary merit award for his sculpture "The Fish". In 1960, he received the Guggenheim National award for his painting "Fighting Roosters". In 1961, René Huyghe included Abdel Kerim's sculpture "Cry of the Beast" in his book "Art and Man" together with the Pablo Picasso. In 1963, he received an honorary merit award for the same sculpture at the 7th Biennale of San Paolo. Published Book: |
|
|
|
||
 |
El Hussein Fawzy: 1905 – 1990 El-Hussein Fawzy became a student at he Faculty of Fine Arts in 1922 and graduated in 1926. In 1929 he won first prize over 60 contestants for best painting and received an award for studying in France graphic art and painting. In 1932 he graduated from Estienne School of Graphics in Paris. In 1933 he became a student at the high school of decorative art in Paris. He was the first Egyptian artist to establish the graphic section at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Fawzy is considered to be one of the pioneers in the domain of graphic art since he was the first to introduce graphic on linoleum which gave a unique effect and texture. In his work he succeeded in melding the esthetic value of ancient Egyptian art with a modern outlook. Moreover, Fawzy succeeded in documenting in watercolor all the mosques of Egypt (especially the Fatamid and Ayyubid periods) which were then preserved in two big portfolios preserved by the state. Alongside his exploration of graphics, Fawzy was a pioneer painter and his famous painting "El Dalala" is considered a cornerstone in modern Egyptian art. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Hamed Abdullah: 1917 - 1985 A self taught man, Abdallah started painting and coloring since the age of ten. A son of a peasant, he lived in Manial district where it was surrounded by fields or the Nile. When he was in his 20’s he was already established and became a well known artist. He opened an art school and taught to some of the renowned Egyptian painters like Tahia Halim and Inji Efflatoun. Art critic Badr considers him as one of the leading figures of the 3rd generation of Egyptian artists. In 1952, Abdallah decided to leave Egypt and go to Paris where he continued his artistic career and remained there for the rest of his life. He became well known and was able to live from his art. In 1983, he returned to Egypt to make a retrospective exhibition of his work covering over half a century. The latest period of his work was experimentation with calligraphy. Here we see Abdallah’s uniqueness where his calligraphy was not static but a moving form that gave rise to a deeper meaning. He was the first to use silk and colored crunched paper in his calligraphy. An art critic in ‘Le Monde’ highlighted Abdullah by his use of tempra which coincided with the environment in which he was raised. Abdallah’s preoccupation with his roots is shown in his choice of subjects like "The Family" and "The Popular Cafés". Towards the end of his career, Abdallah demonstrated his affinity to the purity of popular Egyptian art and the children’s drawings on walls. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Georges Sabbaagh: 1887 - 1951 Sabbagh was born in Alexandria and died in Paris. He became the first Egyptian who belonged to the School of Paris. Though he got the French citizenship in 1930, he never forgot his roots and Egypt remained, with its light and landscapes the eternal source of his work. We discover in Sabbagh a representation of the sacrificed generation along with his counterparts Waroquer, Alix and Zingg after absorbing in the school of Nabis, Fauvism and Cubism at the beginning of the century. He was able to create in the end of his career a new attitude towards realism. He excelled in portraits, nudes and landscapes both in France and in Egypt and was enchanted by the old districts of Cairo. After his death, his children Jean and Monique Sabbagh were able to make a retrospective of his work and a catalogue raisonne. Published Book: |
|
|
|
||
 |
Ragheb Ayad: 1892 - 1983 Ragheb Ayad was born in Cairo in 1892 and inscribed himself in the School of Fine Arts at its opening in 1908. After graduation he taught art in the Coptic high school and made several trips on his own to France and Italy to complete his artistic education. He was the first to obtain a governmental scholarship to Rome where he stayed for five years studying art in the Superior Institute of Fine Arts. Since his return to Cairo in 1930, he was assigned as director of the decorative section of the Faculty of Applied Arts. In 1937, he was named professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts and director of its free section. He was in charge of reorganizing the Coptic Museum and since 1950 became head of the Museum of Modern Art where he made a special section in it for the great sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar. Since 1924 and for half a century he participated in most of the exhibitions of the ‘Cairo Salon’ plus 40 solo exhibitions. Ayad is considered one of the pioneers of Egyptian art in the 20th century alongside M. Mokhtar, Y. Kamel, M. Hassan, M. Said and M. Naghy. Ayad is the first to get rid of the western influences and to create an Egyptian art with its own solid identity. For the rest of his life Ayad was dedicated to the popular themes of Egyptian life whether it is cosmopolitan Cairo or Upper Egyptian villages and small towns. He visited all these places recording the pulsating life of the "souks", the "moulids", the cafes and the men and women dancers. He remained forever the painter of this true Egyptian universe. Ayad is considered to be the first expressionistic painter who influenced the second and third generation of artists. Aside from the local themes, Ayad was attracted to the religious themes where he portrayed the flight of the holly family in Egypt and the birth of Jesus. Moreover Ayad is known to be the first Egyptian artist to be influenced by ancient Egyptian art. The last period of his artistic life was his portrayal of the monks in the different monasteries of Egypt as well as capturing on his canvas the architecture of these monasteries that are considered to be the purest form of architecture. In 1965 Ayad was decorated with the highest honor of the Egyptian state and was also decorated by Italy in appreciation of his art. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Hamed Nada: 1924 - 1990 Nada was born in the Citadel district, one of Cairo's oldest neighborhoods. It was here that Nada as a boy became acquainted with superstition, belief in magic and the power of the supernatural. Nada’s paintings are essentially autobiographical. The images he depicted in his paintings originated in the atmosphere of the communal home where he was born. They evoke his neighborhood and its traditions with folkloric details like the water pipe or mischievous "jinn". At the same time, his paintings are allegorical. They tell stories inspired by the storyteller. During his first period Nada’s approach to art was marked by his association with the Egyptian literary society and their paper ‘El-Sakafa’. He also was influenced by his introduction in this period to Youssef Amin’s group of Contemporary Artists and by his school friend A. H. El-Gazzar. In his early drawings, Nada’s social realist themes are conveyed with a sensitive metaphorical use of space. His work was shown among other Egyptian artists in Paris in 1954. La Couture received his work by saying "his figures are encircled in a closed heavy universe symbolized by a concentric design." From daily life he extracts symbols like the chair, the lamps, the cat and the coque which are destined to make palpable “that other thing” not experienced by the character but apprehended by the painter. The extraordinary quality of Nada’s paintings allied with the research in his composition give his work a weight and an assurance which surprisingly came from an artist who was only 28 years old. In his later period, Nada, by systematically abolishing the third dimension distorts his figures according to the expressive needs of each element as they contrast on the flat surface of his canvas. |
|
|
|
||
 |
Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar: 1925 - 1966 Born in Alexandria, El-Gazzar moved with his family in 1940 to the Cairo district of Sayeda Zeinab. At the Helmeya secondary school, El-Gazzar joined the artistic club started by Hussein Youssef Amin, the great pedagogical figure who took Gazzar and Nada under his wing and followed them throughout their careers. Although El-Gazzar began studying medicine, after 6 months, he shifted gears and joined the Faculty of Fine Art. He obtained a scholarship to study in Rome. He exhibited in Rome, Palermo and the Bari International Exhibition where he obtained the Silver Medal. In 1964, he received the Medal of Art and Sciences and the National Encouragement Prize for his painting, "The High Dam”. El-Gazzar’s first series of drawings in 1946 when he was only 21 years old were based on the anthropological theme of man before civilization and his relationship with the wilderness. The second period of Gazzar’s career reflected the influence of Sayeda Zeinab where medieval traditions resisted all the winds of modern westernization. It was through this district that he witnessed the moulids and the religious festivals that have been celebrated since the Fatmid period. He began to associate the intuitive aspect of art (its soul) with the essential element in the popular magical art (the hidden and the unknown). In his last period, Gazzar was influenced greatly by politics in Egypt and the forces of change. He recorded his feelings in great works like the "High Dam", "The Charter" and "The Bandong Conference". El-Gazzar died at the early age of 41 but not before leaving behind a number of great paintings of modern Egyptian art. Published Book: |
|
|
|
||
 |
Hedayet Chiraz: unknown - 1952 Unfortunately very little is known in Egypt about Hedayet (as he is known most commonly) the great Turkish painter and watercolorist. His name is scarcely mentioned in the art books published at the beginning of the century with some photos of his art. Hedayet has become very well known and even his watercolors are sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Our knowledge about him is that he is of Turkish origin and studied art in England particularly watercolor. Early in the 1920’s Hedayet came to Egypt through Palestine to cure himself of the rheumatic fever from which he suffered. His settling in Egypt seemed to be his cure for he remained there until he died in 1952. It was the light of Egypt that gave him the incentive to practice his art. He produced hundreds or maybe thousands of Nile scenes and landscapes of the countryside as well as renderings of ancient Egyptian relics from all over Upper Egypt. Hedayet also became known as the painter to the royal family and the Egyptian aristocracy. During that time, it was these social milieus that most appreciated and understood art. And so Hedayet became very popular and usually he was commissioned to produce special paintings whether in oil or watercolor of definitive subjects. His watercolor is arguably the finest in the history of Egyptian art. He was able to faithfully capture the scene before him whether it was from old Cairo or Pharaonic Egypt with exquisite delicacy. His balanced, well studied effects of shadow and light permeated his works whether of natural sceneries or of men in old garments. He also rendered the activities of high society from the Gezira Club which was frequented by the aristocracy. Hedayet had a school in his downtown apartment where he taught art. One of his pupils that remained close to him was the late artist Fatma Rifaat. It was she who discovered that he had passed away, alone in his apartment, since Hedayet lived alone in Cairo without family. She immediately contacted the Turkish Embassy to attend to the necessary measures. The Turkish Embassy in Cairo now owns his remaining paintings and most are exhibited at the Residence of the Turkish Ambassador. There, one can see a large, marvelous oil painting of Old Cairo. Hedayet’s work also graces many a private home, a testament to the shear beauty of his work. |
|
|
|
||
|
Home | Current Exhibit | Past Exhibits | The Gallery | Collector's Corner | Exhibit Posters |
||
