In the beautiful company of Mahmoud Sayeed – Sayeed Mahmoud

The Aisha Fahmy Palace in Zamalek, Cairo is witnessing a dazzling cultural event, and I personally hope that everyone has the opportunity to pay attention to this event is the exhibition of the artist Mahmoud Saeed organized by the Ministry of Culture to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of his death. The most beautiful thing about the event commemorating the anniversary of the death of the artist Mahmoud Saeed, the pioneer of modern Egyptian photography, is that it is not limited to the restoration of the artist’s works, because they have great value in the history of Egyptian and international art, but because he exhibits a group of important things. The first is the size of the plastic wealth that Egypt has, but unfortunately it is piled up in warehouses, most of which are no longer available for display for various reasons, including the state’s lack of interest in building new museums or in restoration and restoration. Re-equipping the old museums that were previously established, I think the new Minister of Culture can take important steps in this direction, especially since he is the director of the Academy of Fine Arts and has enough knowledge of these issues. On an artistic and historical level, this exhibition is of great significance in the history of the Ministry of Culture, because it includes 40 masterpieces of Mahmoud Saeed (1897-1964) and 75 works by foreign creative friends where he lived. The journeys of 13 foreign artists with whom he had working and friendship relationships, of French, Italian, Greek and Swiss nationality, are documented in the exhibition with the help of the collector and art historian Dr. Hossam Rashwan, who, together with the French critic Valérie Didier, compiled a catalogue on the work of Mahmoud Saeed, published in 2017.

Of course, the process of preparing and preparing the biographies of these people and their works requires painstaking efforts. Because information about them is almost non-existent. The presence of these foreigners or Egyptians reveals the value of cultural diversity and the meaning of pluralism reflected in the symbolic image formed in Alexandria. It has become a comprehensive phenomenon, the various manifestations of which can be recognized in many creative works, including those of Lawrence Durrell or Constantine Cavafy, whose presence in Egypt has recently caused controversy with the reflection of his novel Nobody. The great novelist Ibrahim Abdelmajid Fadl’s Sleeping in Alexandria remains the Egyptianization of consciousness, which Hala Halim analyzes and presents in a non-Orientalist image in her important book Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism / National Translation Center. The dimensions of this image are analyzed from different perspectives and presented in an important historical and cognitive context. It is worth noting that most of the foreign artists in this exhibition were either born in Alexandria or came there during what historians call the Renaissance, which lasted from the end of the 19th century to the mid-1950s. The interaction of the Suez War led most of them to leave.But the exhibition presents images of the contributions of these people and the interaction between their students who studied art in private schools, and it was in this atmosphere that the School of Fine Arts was founded in Jamamis, thanks to the efforts of Prince Youssef Kamel. The climate and its manifestations are revealed by Nadia Radwan, author of a very important book published by the National Translation Center, “The State in Form and Sculpture… Fine and Applied Arts in Egypt 1908-1938”. In those years, under the influence of the 1919 revolution, attempts to create an Egyptian identity in various fields of creativity also took concrete form, including the work of sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar and the paintings of Mahmoud Saeed, which was just one manifestation. This desire for a new national identity and an alternative to the Ottoman identity, becoming purely Egyptian, was expressed, but it was never disconnected from the surrounding influences. The exhibition also shows an important shift in the way the fine arts world works, represented by the emergence of research-based exhibitions. The old image of museums and galleries no longer fits the transformation that was taking place in the global art world. Since museums/exhibitions in the world have become research institutions fulfilling their mission of producing knowledge, rather than just containers of preservation or conservation of historical heritage, I think the process of documenting the works of these foreign artists and their biographies represents a huge step towards rewriting the history of Egyptian art and even international art, as Qanoush points out in the press release: The exhibition essentially contains an important historical and research display, and comes at a time when interest in the pioneers of modern and contemporary Egyptian art is increasing in academic circles, museum circles, and in major international auctions. It is certain that the work of the plastic arts community in the previous period deserves great praise, not only because it completes the process started in the era of the previous leader, but also because its activities have had an impact on the entire cultural field, which is a great positive factor. Because the controversy that accompanied the last public exhibition was a positive one, reflecting the level of interest in it, which confirms that this is no longer a traditional event involving only two paintings, just as it is worth revisiting the reservations of the critic Sara Bissar about the restoration of a painting by Mahmoud Said, because it reveals his concerns about the value of this painting as a treasure that we know. Mahmoud Said’s paintings are largely popular symbolism, and they have also been subject to numerous forgery operations, so even if they need further scrutiny, concerns about them are acceptable. For sure, the three-month Mahmoud Said exhibition needs a marketing plan to include it in the itineraries of tourist companies, and a short film about the exhibition should be prepared and shown on Egypt Air flights. I hope it will receive media support similar to the Alamein Cultural Festival and Exhibition, which deserves another attention, because they can also be a source of attraction, as is the case in other parts of the world.