Surrealism in Egypt by Bardaouil Sam;

Author:Bardaouil, Sam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Figure 6.3: Ida Kar, Unidentified man, 1945.

I had just arrived.

“I do not think,” an honest art critic said to me while on his way out of the exhibition, “I do not think that there has been a moment where extravagance has been more pushed in Egypt […]”

And he returned to show me some works that he found “diabolical.”

“Look at this,” he told me with a provocative air. “You are not going to convince me, again, that this head speaks to you […]”

“You accuse it of Hermeticism,” I said to him, calmly, “because you have never made the effort to search and understand the preoccupations of the artist.”

“But this art is illogical.”

[…]

He stops in front of a work by photographer Idabel.

“And this…?” He asks with an air of irony. “Is this always the absurd or is it ‘pure’ art?”

We were in front of the head of a woman where half the face had been cruelly chopped off. Nothing remained but one strand of hair, one eye and the half of a mouth admirably mutilated. A triangle cut across the face: a classical triangle that was undoubtedly drawn by an architect of talent.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what? You know very well that there is no light without form […] and that there is no form that the artist cannot retouch if he cares to correct nature for the purpose of fixing the core of the human soul. […] Besides, why would you wish that the photographer left two eyes in the face when one is sufficient to give the desired expression? […] It is possible that you prefer deformations of the sensual kind and more sentimental nuances. But if you were not moved in front of a work like this, it is because you have bitten into the bait aimed by the photographers-watercolorists […] and, in this case, I pity you and ask myself, with slowness that astonishes me, what have you come to do here, today?”50

The kind of meticulous dissection of the Idabel photograph referred to in the polarized conversation above is exactly the type of profound engagement with the artwork that Art and Liberty hoped to instigate amongst their public. The locus has shifted from discussions centered on nationality, heritage and authenticity to become directly concerned with the formalistic elements within the work and how the artist has used them to put forward an oeuvre where the correlation between the medium and content, subject and object were resolved. The two contradictory viewpoints that one clearly discerns in the statements of the two critics are reflective of a dichotomy in taste that permeated the arts scene in Cairo at the time and that was being further highlighted, exposed and challenged through Art and Liberty. Consider, for instance, how on various occasions, the same artists or works who were praised by more conservative reviewers, would be the ones to receive lukewarm responses from Art and Liberty sympathetic writers, or group members who also reviewed some of the shows on occasion. Therefore, by way

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