Biography
Mohamed Ezzeldin Naguib, better known as Ezzeldin Naguib, was born in 1940 in the village of Mashtoul Al-Souq in Egypt’s Sharqiya Governorate. Naguib boasts a distinguished career encompassing the multifaceted fields of novel writing, art criticism, and artistic practice.
The fifth son of an educator, Naguib completed his secondary studies in the cities of Bilbeis and Zagazig. With a penchant for poetry and Arabic calligraphy, he enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1958, specialising in painting. That same year, he began publishing short stories in the Al Masaʾ newspaper, reading and discussing them in the Rabitat al ‘Adab al-Hadith (Modern Literature Association) and the Shaqat al-ʿAgouza (Agouza Apartment), a cultural salon for intellectuals. He published his first collection of short stories in a book, The Glory Days. In 1960, Naguib participated in the short story collection “Bread and Salt.” In 1962, Naguib won three prizes for short stories from the Supreme Council of Arts and Letters in the Young Writers competition.
After graduating in 1962, Naguib received a scholarship from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo to study at the Luxor Marsam, the atelier founded by Sheikh Ali Abdel Rassoul (died 1983) and Mohamed Nagui (1888–1956) to allow Egyptian artists to study in Upper Egypt, and where Naguib engaged in deep exploration of ancient Egyptian culture and civilisation. Between 1963 and 1966, he worked in the Al Hay'a al ʿAmma li Quṣur al Thaqafa (General Organization of Culture Palaces), where he was appointed head of the Al-Anfoushi Cultural Palace in Alexandria and the Culture Palace in Port Said. In 1964, Naguib held his first exhibition, Inspired by the High Dam, at Al-Anfoushi Cultural Palace in collaboration with the artist Zahran Salama (1939– 2012). In 1966, he established the Culture Palace in Kar al-Sheikh and was appointed its director until 1968, when his second collection of short stories, The Turquoise Triangle, was published. In 1972, Naguib received a UNESCO grant to study painting restoration in London.
Naguib was appointed director of the Musafirkhana Palace and the Artists’ Studios in the Gamaleya neighbourhood of Cairo from 1968 until 1976. In 1975, he received a postgraduate diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts and became affiliated with Helwan University that same year. The Musafirkhana witnessed a clash with the security services, alleging he was engaging in communist activities, which ended with the destruction of Naguib’s studio and paintings and dismissal from his position until he returned to work by a court ruling in 1979. He then worked as director of the Cultural Development Project for the villages in the Dakahlia governorate from 1977 to 1979 under the auspices of the Ministry of Health and Populations. During the next decade, from 1980 to 1990, Naguib founded and worked at the Graphics Center at Wekalet al-Ghouri in Cairo.
In 1985, Naguib was one of the founding members of the Fine Arts Syndicate, and in 1987, of al-Jamʿiya al-Miṣriya li Nuqad al-Fann al-Tashkili (the Society of Fine Art Critics). In 1991, he became editor-in-chief of Al Shumuʿ Magazine. In 1992, he founded the Arts Complex on the 15th of May City and was appointed its general director until 1995. That year, he was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cairo Atelier after 18 years as an elected member (1976–1995). He established the General Administration of Traditional and Fine Crafts Centres at the Ministry of Culture in 1992 and was appointed general director until 1999. Naguib was nominated as deputy minister within the Ministry of Culture in the same field. In 1994, he founded and chaired the Board of Directors of the Jamʿiyyat Assalah li-Riʿayat al-Funnun al-Turathiyya wa al Muʿaṣirah (Assalah Association for the Care of Traditional and Contemporary Arts and Crafts) until 2004. He was also elected Chairman of the National Society of Fine Arts’ Board of Directors between 1996 and 1998. In 1997, he was awarded a one-year government grant to focus on his art practice.
Naguib was detained three times throughout his life. He was first arrested for publicly supporting a student uprising in late 1971 and was incarcerated for a short period in 1972 when he went on hunger strike for 14 days. He experienced two other incarcerations, one in 1975 for six months for being part of Jamaʿat Kutab al-Ghad (the Writers of Tomorrow group), coupled with demonstrably Communist beliefs, and again in 1997 after authorities found a pamphlet in a photocopy machine in Naguib’s workplace inciting farmers against Law no. 96 of 1992, which proposed giving evicted tenants compensation or reasonable housing, but in reality, no concrete action was taken. Naguib left his job two weeks prior and believed he was deliberately targeted. In his book Rusum al-Zinzana (Prison Cell Drawings), published in 2014, Naguib reflected on his time in prison and shared 30 paintings, sketches and black-and-white portraits created in that time.
Naguib published many articles in art criticism in Al-Taliʿah magazine since the beginning of the seventies, as well as in Rose Al-Youssef, Al-Hilal, Ibdaʿ, Al-Majalla, Al-Manar, Al-Hayat Al-Dawliyya, Akhbar Al-Adab, Al-Youm Saudi Arabia, Alam Al-Youm, andAl-Wafd, among others. His literary career counts hundreds of articles, as well as dozens of books on art criticism, most notably The Dawn of Modern Egyptian Painting, first published in 1982 and republished in 2007 and 2017, and for which he won the first prize in criticism from the Supreme Council of Culture in 1983, as well as cultural books, novels and short story collections (including The Doll’s Song published in 1975 and A Small Point Near the Sky in 2015).
As an artist, Naguib’s oeuvre consistently aimed to explore his definition of Egyptian identity. This was achieved through the recurring use of evocative imagery, including depictions of the homeland, the vastness of the desert and isolated Egyptian sites, the indigenous population, and social issues that resonated with the Egyptian experience. He often depicted Nubian women, with his style veering towards abstraction in the 1970s and 1980s, when he began fusing the Egyptian desert landscape with the human body. Starting in the 1990s, Naguib moved towards symbolism, exploring metaphysical themes.
In 2018, Dai Art Gallery (Cairo) published a 320-page book reflecting on Naguib’s life from the 1960s until publication. In 2021, Naguib published Al Musafirkhana, a novel inspired by his own experience, followed by Dabeeb Al Aqrab (The Scorpion’s Crawl) and The Egyptian Artist and the Question of Identity in 2022.
