Ahmed Maher Raef

Abstract

Ahmed Maher Raef (often referred to simply by his middle and last names, or Maher Raef) was an influential avant-garde artist whose career bridged the periods before and after the Egyptian Revolution in 1952 and whose work embodied critical artistic debates in both. In the late 1940s and early 50s, Raef was active as a member of the Contemporary Art Group (Jama‘at al-Fann al-Mu‘assir, Groupe d’art contemporain) (est. 1946): a self-identified revolutionary and anti-bourgeois association affiliated with the Art and Liberty group (est. 1939), while eschewing the latter's internationalist perspective and claiming to represent an authentically national art form. In 1956, Raef travelled to the German Federal Republic (West Germany) to study printmaking at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In this period, his work broke from the figurative and surrealist-informed style he had once cultivated ​ ​ and began developing an abstract style of printmaking that incorporated Arabic script or calligraphy. Raef returned to Egypt in 1961, where he became a critical figure in the development of a regional style of abstraction based on the Arabic letter and often associated with the Sufi spiritual thought and practice embraced by Raef and others.

Biography​​

Ahmed Maher Raef was born and raised in the affluent Cairene neighbourhoods of Shubra and Maadi. Biographies of the artist consistently refer to the early influence of his father: an artist for whom little biographical record remains. Raef was a member of the Contemporary Art Group: a circle of eight young artists including Abdel Hadi El Gazzar (1925–66), Mahmoud Khalil (1929–55), Ibrahim Massouda (dates unconfirmed), Mogli (Salim ‘Abdulla al-Habashi, or Salem el-Habschi) (1924–date unconfirmed), Hamed Nada (1924–90), Samir Rafi‘ (1926–2004), and Kamal Youssef (1923–2019). Unlike other members, however, Raef was not a former student of the group’s founder: the influential arts teacher, administrator and artist Hussein Youssef Amin (1904–84). The Contemporary Art Group advocated an anti-academic approach informed by the surrealist bent and Trotskyist tenets of the Art and Liberty group, while embracing a stridently national framework that the latter had vehemently rejected. Similarly, members of the Contemporary Art Group disavowed the Freudian frame of reference adopted by Art and Liberty as non-Egyptian, while continuing to draw on psychological discourse and terminology. Echoing the short-lived but influential Neo-Orientalist group (Jama‘at al-Fannanin al-sharqiyun al-judud, Les néo-Orientalistes)(est ca. 1937), the Contemporary Art Group identified a collective Egyptian folk subconscious as its subject, focusing primarily on local folktales, as well as popular religion and magic.

Like others in the group, Raef's work reflected a conflicted embrace of Egypt's underclasses. These artists expressed dismay at the reactionary effects of folk beliefs and practices, which they believed helped maintain class oppression, while also engaging these as reflective of an authentic Egyptian identity. His works from the late 1940s and the early 1950s consistently depicted scenes of human suffering, often featuring figures trapped under rubble, caught in fishing nets, entangled in preindustrial agricultural equipment or tethered to stakes. Other works feature scenes of Egyptian peasant men and women, sometimes rendered with a single eye in the centre of their foreheads, and rendered in bright colours inspired in part by the work of German Expressionist painters and the Der Blaue Reiter group (est. 1911).

Raef graduated from Cairo’s College of Fine Arts (Kulliyat al-Funun al-Jamila) in 1950 and went on to serve as a teaching assistant the following year. In 1950, he was also awarded the Mahmoud Moukhtar Award for Drawing. Subsequently, he was awarded a state-funded residency at the Luxor Atelier (Marsam al-funun al-jamila bi-l-Aksur) from 1952–54. In the same period, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Cairo University, graduating in 1954. Raef was also among a group of young artists, including Mohamed Taha Hussein (1929– 2018), who received state fellowships to study in the German Federal Republic (West Germany) in this period, where they would have encountered the work of the Düsseldorf-based Zero group (est. 1957), among other approaches to abstraction in postwar Europe. A fellowship from the state allowed Raef to relocate to Düsseldorf in 1956 to study printmaking at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, graduating in 1960. By the 1970s and 80s, the work of Raef, Hussein and others would become crucial to the emergence of a regional model of abstraction incorporating Arabic script and calligraphy.

Raef returned to Cairo in 1961 and began teaching in the Printmaking Department at the recently established College of Fine Arts, Alexandria (Kulliyat al-Funun al-Jamila bi-Iskandariyya). Upon his return to Egypt, Raef became a devout Sufi, which likely informed his decision to work in an abstract style for most of the remainder of his life, as well as the vociferous campaign he helped launch in the 1970s to have nude live modelling banned from Egyptian art schools. While working in Alexandria, he undertook in-depth research on the history of Arabic calligraphy, graduating from the University of Cologne with a PhD in the Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics in 1975 with a dissertation titled ‘The Aesthetic Foundations of Arabic Script in [the Work of] Ibn Muqla’ (Die ästhetischen Grundlagen der arabischen Schrift bei Ibn Muqla). He was promoted in 1968 to Assistant Professor at the College of Fine Arts, Alexandria, before being appointed in 1975 as full professor and head of the Printmaking Department. He would serve as Dean of the School of Fine Arts at Alexandria University between 1979 and 1986. Raef moved to the United States in 1986 and passed away in 1999.

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