Saturday, January 25, 2020

The Surrealist Movement in Egypt in the 1930s and the 1940s


Ondřej Beránek 

Introduction
In the past decade, the crisis concerning types of literary self-expression has made the latest generation of Egyptian artists turn to the past to look for new sources of inspiration. Among other things, these artists have discovered their heritage in the Surrealist movement. The basic feature of this revived interest was the publishing of reprints of the most important books written by prominent members of the Egyptian Surrealist group called
al-Fann wa’l-urrīya (Art and Liberty), which was founded in Cairo thanks to the initiative of Georges Hénein, the leadinG Egyptian poet and Surrealism theorist. 
It should be noted that this event was accompanied by a “suspicious silence”1 on the part of country’s best critics and contemporary Egyptian literature historians. After 1946, another group, La part du sable ,continued the group’s cultural activities. Anwar Kāmil (1913-1991), one of thefounders of the Art and Liberty group and the editor-in-chief of its Arabic review,at-Taṭ awwur (Evolution) should be credited for this revival of Cairo heritage. It was his contribution that made it possible to publish, between 1987 and 1991 and in a limited print run, a range of important Egyptian Surrealist works.This paper attempts to depict the genesis and the main features of the Surrealist movement in Egypt and will be primarily concerned with the movement’s heyday during the 1930s and 1940s. It is beyond the reasonable scope of this paper to give a complete historical and aesthetic analysis of Egyptian Surrealism. Instead,emphasis will be placed on the examination of the basic trends in its evolution. The organization of the article therefore follows the development of the main features of Egyptian Surrealism. Consequently one may ask to what extent it is possible to  transfer certain art forms that were created under specific artistic,and above all historical, conditions to a cultural environment that is markedly different.The Surrealist group in Egypt, one of the most active in the world, was officially established on January 9, 1939, sixteen years after the publishing of the first Surrealist manifesto in Paris. Georges Hénein played an important part in the process; during his studies in France he got acquainted with the key representatives of Surrealism and he and André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, even became friends. Besides Hénein, other people were important participants in creating the Egyptian group,namely Ramsīs Yūnān, Fu’ād Kāmil, and Kāmil at-Tilimsānī, all of whom were distinguished painters as well as writers. Hénein coordinated the Egyptian activities with the French group and other groups in the world, including Belgium, Great Britain, and the USA. The Egyptian Surrealist movement flourished during the first five years of its existence. The period 1940-1945 saw five Surrealist exhibitions in Cairo under the common label Macāriḍ al-fann al-ḥurr (The Exhibitions of the Free Art), where the Egyptian Surrealists tried to articulate all their theoretical concepts.

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