Biography
Ahmed Morsi first encountered the visual arts when he took figure drawing and painting taught by foreign artists in Alexandria. At the time, and unlike the Madrasat al-Funun al-Jamila al-Misriyya (the Egyptian School of Fine Arts), Alexandria lacked a formal art school during the early 20th century. In the 1940s, Morsi studied drawing from classical statues with the Italian artist Silvio Bicchi (1874-1948), whose brother, Ottorino (1878-1949), trained the Egyptian painters Seif Wanly (1906-1979) and Adham Wanly (1908-1959). Morsi was introduced to the Wanly brothers by Ahmed Fahmy, his English teacher, in 1949, when Morsi began his drawing studio in Alexandria.
Morsi was a member of the so-called Alexandria School, which literary scholar Hala Halim credits as a hotbed of surrealist activity in Alexandria during World War II. The term ‘Alexandria School’ was coined by the Egyptian novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat (1926–2015) to describe a group of artists who came of age in 1940s Alexandria. Halim claims that, just as his colleague Mounir Ramzi fulfilled his role as a writer at the Alexandria School, Morsi acted as the poet and painter there. Al-Kharrat and Morsi would later meet while working at a copyright company in Alexandria and form a close friendship that lasted until the former's passing.
Morsi combined his career as an artist with studies in English at Alexandria University during the early 1950s. By the time he obtained his degree in 1954, he had published his first book of poetry, Songs of the Temples/Steps in Darkness (1949). Morsi issued nine poetic diwans (a collection of poems), including Aghani al-maharib (Songs of the Altars, 1949), and designed cover illustrations for the novels of al-Kharrat and other prominent Egyptian writers. An unpublished book from 1958 included Morsi's poetry, accompanied by drawings created by the Egyptian artist Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–1966).
It was during his travels to other Arab countries that Morsi encountered the world of art criticism. After moving to Baghdad in 1955, he taught English to support his two-year stay and quickly became part of a thriving visual and literary arts scene there. The Iraqi playwright Youssef al-Ani (1927-2016) invited Morsi to write an art exhibition review for the Iraqi newspaper al-Akhbar, where he brought critical attention to emerging artists.
Morsi returned to Alexandria in 1957, when he reunited with another member of the Alexandria School, the Egyptian playwright Alfred Farag (1929-2005). Farag then relocated to Cairo, and Morsi and al-Kharrat followed suit. At Cairo's National Theatre (formerly known as Al-Azbakiya Theatre), Morsi helped Farag produce his play,The Fall of the Pharaoh, in 1957. Morsi was the first Egyptian to design stage sets and costumes at the theatre and drew inspiration for the Pharaoh's outfits from artefacts and paintings displayed in the Egyptian Museum. He then took on a design project for maʾasat Jamila (The Tragedy of Jamila), a play written in 1962 by the Egyptian playwright Abd al-Rahman Sharqawi to celebrate Jamila Bouhired, an Algerian nationalist who fought against French colonial rule. Morsi also worked alongside el-Gazzar at the Cairo Opera House to design a stage set for the production ofBury the Dead, written by the American playwright Irwin Shaw.
Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Morsi helped develop Arabic art criticism and bridged linguistic gaps between poetic readings from around the globe. With the Iraqi poet ʿAbdel Wahab al-Bayyati (1926-1999), he translated Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard into Arabic in the late 1950s. In 1968, Morsi co-founded the influential avant-garde magazine Galerie '68 with a group of ten artists, including al-Kharrat, Ibrahim Mansour, Gamil Atteya, and Sayed Hegab (1940–2017), while serving as its art director. Morsi also wrote French-language entries on ‘Art in Egypt’ and ‘Art in Iraq’ for the 1975 Grand Larousse Encyclopedia and criticism and translations of contemporary American poetry for the National Center for Translation in Egypt. When his wife, Amany Fahmy, secured work as a translator in 1974, Morsi moved with his family to New York. Fahmy eventually became chief of the United Nations' Arabic Translation Service, and she translated the English introduction of a book on the famous Alexandrian poet Constantine P. Cavafy into Arabic, while Morsi translated Cavafy's poems. Morsi also used his time between Egypt and the U.S. to publish art criticism in central Egyptian, Lebanese, and Kuwaiti periodicals, such as al-Watan and al-Hayat, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Morsi's most recent works include photography, which he uses to capture passersby among figural sculptures in New York City. Such candid images explore the human condition and isolation in urban settings by framing alternating moments of crowding and solitude. Morsi continually exhibits his works in the U.S., the Middle East, Europe, and Egypt, where he maintains his role as a key figure in Cairo's contemporary art scene.
In his early career, Ahmed Morsi engaged with larger concerns in Egypt about the meaning of ordinary Egyptians in culture and politics. The large size and central positions of subjects in The Fishermen (1956) attest to the artist's intimate and poetic approach to his native protagonists and a growing interest among Egyptian painters in the daily lives of peasants and the urban working classes. Artist and art critic Liliane Karnouk describes similar themes seen in the works of el-Gazzar as an early example of the folk realism in 1940s Egypt.
Morsi has played a significant role in marrying visual and literary practices in the Arabic-speaking art world. Scholarship in the modern art of the Arab world remains relatively new. Yet, one of its most fundamental debates revolves around the importance of the written word and representational imagery in defining modern Arab art. Through his dynamic approaches to oil painting, book design, and poetry, Morsi is one of the few artists in the region today to form a magnetic symbiosis between visual and text. The curator Sam Bardaouil identifies this practice in earlier Egyptian artworks as the product of a distinctly local Surrealism. Morsi describes his prose as al-sheʿar al-ramzy (symbolic poetry), which, he claims, was inspired by French poetry of the 1950s and the works of American poet William Blake. The figures of his 1969 painting, The Family, witness Morsi's life-long engagement with symbolism and surrealist practice in Egypt. Poet and cultural critic Ahmad Abdel Moity Hegazi affirms the surrealist qualities of Morsi's contemporary oeuvre by pointing to the subconscious origins of such pictorial elements.
Finally, Morsi impacted both art criticism and surrealism in the Middle East by stimulating lively debates in Arabic-language periodicals about the value and meaning of visual art. He wrote and published the first Arabic-language book on Pablo Picasso in 1966, less than twenty years after encountering the painter's work at an exhibition in Alexandria. His translation work also introduced people in Europe to the regional histories of modern art in the Arab world through his contributions to French encyclopedias, thus bridging linguistic and cultural gaps between art critics, art historians, and arts practitioners across the globe.
