Biography
Established in Alexandria, the Naghis were a wealthy family of landowners. The father, Moussa Naghi Bey, headed the customs of the port city, while the mother, Nafissa Rachid Kamal, was the daughter of the governor of Sudan. Effat had an older brother, Mohamed Naghi (1888–1956), considered one of the pioneers of Egyptian modernity, with whom she maintained a close relationship. However, it was not with Mohamed that Effat Naghi was trained as an artist, even though he encouraged her talent.
Like many young girls from privileged backgrounds, she received drawing lessons from a private tutor. When she was a child, the family property in Abu Hummus, located about 50 kilometres south of Alexandria, offered her a first setting to practice as she made portraits of peasants and children from the village. At the same time, she also learned acting and music, which she continued to practice throughout her life. She composed several pieces, notably inspired by traditional Egyptian rhythms, and performed at concerts in the 1930s, including the Atelier d'Alexandria. Naghi was fluent in French, Arabic, English, and Italian.
From a young age, especially after her mother passed away, Naghi made numerous European trips with her father and sometimes her brother. In France, she became friends with the feminist writer Juliette Adam (1836–1936) and resided at her home in the former Notre-Dame du Val de Gif abbey. La vallée de la Chevreuse vue par une Égyptienne, published in 1924, testifies to her stay there through texts and drawings.
Effat Naghi volunteered with the Red Crescent during WWII and settled in Abu Hummus. There, she practised drawing and painting. A few years later, in 1947, in Rome, when her brother was appointed head of the Egyptian Academy of Rome, she began formal training in the arts. She studied fresco and sculpture for three years at the Accademia di Belle Arti with Ferrazzi Ferruccio (1891–1978), who was head of the Department of Pictorial Decoration. During her studies in Rome until 1950, she regularly stayed in Anticoli Corrado, a village on the capital's outskirts attracting artists from Europe and beyond since the 19th century. Her works from the 1940s are characterised by a classic style and subjects such as portraits, landscapes, and still life. Using limewash paint mixed with fine sand allowed for texture, as in the work Poissons de la Mer Rouge.
From the end of the 1940s on, Naghi had many individual and collective exhibitions that received public recognition. However, some early presentations of her work, such as her participation in the second Salon du Caire in 1925, can be noted. In Paris, she also attended the academy of the painter André Lhote (1885–1962) at the end of the 1940s, with whom she forged a friendly relationship. During this period, she developed the style with geometric compositions for which she became best known. Lhote travelled to Egypt in 1950 and 1951 at the invitation of Effat and Mohammed Naghi. Effat Naghi accompanied him to Luxor and Aswan with his wife, Simone Camin. Observing the Pharaonic heritage contributed to transforming Effat Naghi’s artistic practice. She was driven by the project of "finding vigorous art, expressing a form of new thought that would at the same time claim to be part of our artistic heritage, and which would support the constructive momentum of the country's renaissance," as she wrote in the catalogue of her exhibition at the Nile Hilton in Cairo in 1959. Studying popular traditions and occult sciences in collaboration with the painter Saad Al-Khadem (1913–1987), whom she married in 1954, she incorporated symbols, schematised shapes, and geometric writings but also found objects into her works (see, for example, Al-Maskhut, n.d.). These elements became her artistic signature. Effat Naghi gave numerous lectures on folk arts and art history. From the 1960s on, she produced works in volume from painted wood assemblages, such as Building for Peace (19652
To commemorate the building of the Aswan High Dam, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture sent Effat Naghi on an artistic mission to Nubia in 1963. Effat Naghi made numerous paintings in vibrant colours representing the typical architecture of the Aswan region, like Magic Times (1963). She also produced a series of paintings and assemblages inspired by the mechanics of the dam. These paintings, many of which show a geometric and almost technical line, reveal a fascination with the machine, which she perceived as a reminiscence of ancestral magic. Effat Naghi’s combination of figurative forms and non-representational components contributed to the spread of abstract art in Egypt.
Naghi died in 1994 in Alexandria. She had lived in a large villa in the Moharam Bek district since 1963, which was rented to her by the Italian sculptor Emilio Ambron (1905–1996), son of the painter Amelia Ambron (1877–1960). In Cairo, her villa in the Zaitun district, which she donated to the state, now houses the Effat Naghi and Saad Al Khadem Museum, with works by the two artists and part of their collection of folk art, jewellery, and clothing items.
Effat Naghi was also involved in promoting her brother’s legacy. She initiated several publications about him and helped create the Mohamed Naghi Museum in Cairo.
