Biography
Fouad Kamel was first exposed to the visual arts in the mid-1930s, while a secondary school student at the Sa‘idiyya Secondary School in Cairo, where he encountered artist and drawing teacher Youssef El Afifi. El Afifi had been a member of the Arts Advocacy Group (Groupe de Propagande Artistique/Jama‘at al-Di‘aya al-Faniyya, est. 1933) and helped inspire a generation of artists who would go on to define the Egyptian arts scene for decades. Kamel graduated from the Higher School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts, al-Madrasa al-‘Uliyya li-l-Funun al-Jamila), Cairo, and the Higher Institute of Art Education (l’Institut de Pédagogie Artistique, al-Ma‘ahad al-‘Ali li-l-Tarbiyya al-Faniyya), Cairo, in 1955, and worked for years as an art teacher in Egyptian public schools. As a young artist between his graduation from secondary school and his enrollment in the Higher School of Fine Arts, Kamel threw himself into the centre of artistic activity and debate in Cairo. He was a signatory of the manifesto, Long Live Degenerate Art (December 1938), which served as the Art and Liberty group’s inaugural gesture and contributed to all five of the exhibitions organised by the group between 1940 and 1945. In addition to his prolific artistic output, Kamel also contributed illustrations and texts to Arabophone publications associated with these groups, including al-Tatawwur (January–July 1940) and al-Majalla al-jadida (1942), as well as collaborating with Horus Schenouda to illustrate the latter’s collection of poems titled Phantasmes (Cairo: Les Amis du Livre Francais en Orient, 1942).
Kamel’s ink drawings and oil paintings from the 1940s feature a repertoire of stylised motifs, including female figures and horses, which appear to merge with the landscapes surrounding them. The women’s bodies are often depicted as fragmented; their skin is dusky golden-brown, and individual body parts are separated, acquiring a sense of weight. These broken, yet massive women appear to dominate the desolate landscapes around them, much like monuments or buildings. Often, their heads are bowed, their necks bent, and their eyes closed. Long, wavy, dark strands of hair seem to float around their faces as if merging with the sky. In a review of the Third Exhibition of Independent Art (1942), Art and Liberty co-founder Georges Henein described the artist’s work as being in dialogue with Picasso, whose oeuvre had helped inform the emergence of Kamel’s artistic idiom.
Kamel’s focus on the female body in various states of deformation also recalls the work of other artists associated with Art and Liberty whose work presented these contorted figures as avatars of the social and cultural violence inflicted by colonial rule in Egypt, of patriarchal and class-based violence within Egypt, and of the effects of a state-supported arts pedagogy based on the French academic system. In an early articulation of Surrealist thought and practice written in 1942, Kamel insisted on the need for artists to detach themselves from the harness imposed by elite patronage “to address a different type of subject matter, encompassing society's ills, problems, and contradictions.” Similarly, Kamel’s use of motifs such as lit candles, gas streetlights, and references to Cairo’s poorest quarters, as well as his choice of palette, point to a common artistic vocabulary and Trotskyist political critique adopted by key members of Art and Liberty.
In a short statement by the artist that accompanied the first exhibition of Independent Art organised by Art and Liberty (1940), Kamel asserted that: “Between death and everlasting life there is a fierce battle producing a most dreadful mutilation which I encounter in my paintings. There is a soul deep inside everything which pervades even inanimate things.” This belief in a continuity between the animate and inanimate, or between the individual and the natural world surrounding them, would be further elaborated in the 1940s and 50s as Kamel moved towards an increasingly abstract idiom stripped of all figurative elements. While this shift towards abstraction appears to represent a radical departure from his early practice, Surrealism played a crucial role in facilitating this transition. In 1947, Kamel participated in an exhibition of “automatic works” alongside Hassan El Telmisany and Ramses Younane and organised under the aegis of La Part du Sable in the Foyer d’Art of Cairo’s Lycée Francais, which had hosted exhibitions of the Art and Liberty group in 1944 and 45. Also in 1947, works identified as “automatic drawings” by Kamel and Younane appeared in the Paris exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947, curated by André Breton.
In 1959, Younane, Kamel, and associates organised two exhibitions that marked a growing interest in forms of lyrical abstraction. Titled Vers l’Inconnu (Nahw al-Majhul) and Encore l’Inconnu (al-Majhul La Yizal), the exhibitions featured artists such as Khadiga Riaz (Riad), Mounir Canaan, and Roland Vogel: all of whom sought an alternative to the figurative mode that dominated artistic practice in Egypt following the 1952 Free Officers’ coup. The subsequent year, Kamel began receiving a subvention from the Egyptian state to support his practice. He would go on to represent Egypt at the São Paulo Biennial (1961) and Venice Biennale (1964).
