Hamed Nada

Abstract

Egyptian painter Hamed Nada was one of the leading figures of the Egyptian Group of Contemporary Art (Jama‘at al-fann al-mu‘asir). After joining the Group, together with artists Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–1966), Ibrahim Massouda and Samir Rafi (1926–2004), Nada studied at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, where he graduated in 1951. Nada was appointed to the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. In 1961, he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo and became the head of its Painting Department in 1977. He introduced symbolism in his work and found inspiration from Ancient Egyptian art and popular traditions.

​​Biography​

Hamed Nada was born in the al-Khalifa neighbourhood near the Citadel in Cairo. Son of a Sheikh, he was raised in a religious environment and was profoundly marked in his childhood by the everyday life of al-Khalifa and Sayyida Zeinab districts. At the beginning of the 1940s, he was a student at the Secondary School of Hilmiyya (then King Farouk 1st School). There, he developed an interest in art, psychology, and philosophy. During that time, he met the painter and educator Hussein Youssef Amin (1904– 1984), teaching drawing in secondary schools. Amin had rejected the School of Fine Arts in Cairo's academic system and adopted a new art education method based on individual development and freedom of expression. This experience gave birth to the Group of Contemporary Art in which many of Amin's pupils such as Hamed Nada, Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar, Ibrahim Massouda, Maher Raif (1926–1999), Kamal Youssef (1923–2019), Salim el-Habashi (Mogli), Samir Rafi and Mahmoud Khalil (1929–1955) were included. The group held its first exhibition in May 1946 at the Lycée Français in Cairo, presenting around 200 works mostly portraying popular life in Egypt and touching on social concerns.

In 1948, Nada joined the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, where he studied under the painters Ahmed Sabry (1889–1955) and Youssef Kamel (1891–1971) and graduated in 1951. During his studies, he contributed as an illustrator and critic to the literary review Al-Thaqafa and prominent writers and poets such as Taha Hussein (1889–1973) and Louis Awad (1915–1990). In 1956, he became a member of the Luxor Atelier, which was established in 1941 by Alexandrian painter Mohammed Naghi (1888– 1956) to promote the study of ancient Egyptian art. Nada stayed in Luxor for one year, observing and studying the frescoes and reliefs of the temples in the Valley of Thebes. When he returned to Cairo in 1957, he was appointed professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria, the year it was founded by artist Ahmad Osman (1907– 1970). In 1960, Nada received a scholarship to study mural painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. After receiving his diploma in 1961, he was appointed professor at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo and became the head of the painting department in 1977. He continued to work part-time as a teacher after his retirement in 1984 and died on 27 May 1990, after a fall in his studio in the al-Ghuriyya district in Cairo during a power shortage.

Hamed Nada is one of the most prominent painters of the Group of Contemporary Art. Along with his colleague and friend, the painter Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar, he introduced superstitious symbols and expressed human unconscious imagery in his paintings. His early works are strongly influenced by the social environment of the popular areas of Cairo, from Hussein Youssef Amin (1904–1984), who encouraged him to draw his inspiration. Nada developed a symbolist pictorial universe nourished by legends of storytellers, popular beliefs and superstitions, and the magical and mysterious world of djinns (supernatural beings). His works from the 1950s depict interior scenes of poor communal households, expressing the intimacy of human resignation. As a metaphor for the human soul, the cat, the lamp and the chair are recurrent elements in his paintings. During the 1960s, after closely studying the arts of Ancient Egypt while a resident at the Luxor Atelier, Nada's work started to evolve into two-dimensional spaces animated by stylised and distorted human figures. He also used brighter colours to represent scenes of Egyptian daily life and political subjects. Nada brought the representation of popular culture to a symbolist level by painting poetic tales of the intimate lives of working-class Egyptians. His works can be seen at the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo, the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut, Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, as well as in private collections around the world.

Bibliography

Ali, Fatma. Hamed Nada. Cairo: General Information Organization, 1984.

Azar, Aimé. L'Éveil de la conscience picturale en Égypte: Le Groupe de l'Art Contemporain.Cairo: Imprimerie française, 1954.

Husni Inas. Hamid Nada: ra’id al-siryaliyya al-sha‘biyya (Hamed Nada: Pioneer of Egyptian Popular Surrealism). Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 2007.

Further Readings

Abaza, Mona. Twentieth-Century Egyptian Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet Shafei. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011.

Azar, Aimé.La peinture moderne en Égypte. Le Caire: Les Éditions Nouvelles, 1961.

Al Thani, Hassan, Modern Art in Egypt in the Twentieth Century, Doha: HBMHC, 2018.

Burluraux, Odile, Colnet, Madeleine de, Montazami, Morad, Présences Arabes. Art moderne et décolonisation Paris, 1908-1988, Paris : Musée d’art moderne de Paris ; Paris Musées, 2024.

Kane, Patrick. "Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group 1938–1951". Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 44, (no 4, 2010), 95-119.

Kane, Patrick. The Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation Building. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012.

Kanafani, Fatenn Mostafa, Modern Art in Egypt: Identity and Independence, 1850-1936, London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2020.

Karnouk, Liliane. Modern Egyptian Art (1910-2003). Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005.

Montazami, Morad (ed.), Monaco - Alexandrie - Le grand détour : Villes-mondes et surréalisme cosmopolite, Paris : Zamân Books, 2021.

Radwan, Nadia, Les modernes d’Égypte. Une renaissance transnationale des beaux-arts et des arts  appliqués, Bern : Peter Lang, 2017.