Biography
Hamed Said was born in Cairo on 4 August 1908. He graduated from the Higher Teachers' School (Madrasat al-Mu‘allamin al-Uliya, Qism al-‘Ulum) in 1931. In this period, Said met influential art educator and education reformer Habib Gorgi (1892–1964) and became involved with the latter’s Art Advocacy Group (Jama‘at al-Di‘ayya al-Faniyya, est. 1928). The group aimed to increase popular access to and interest in contemporary art and was composed of students of Gorgi’s from the Higher Teachers’ School, including the Pioneer-generation artist Ahmed Sabry (1889–1955), as well as artist Ramsès Younan (1913–66), who would go on to help found the Art and Freedom Group (Jama‘at al-Fann wa-l-hurriyya/Art et Liberté) in 1939. Gorgi encouraged artists to exit the studio in favour of a practice in natural settings, or en plein air. The vitalist theories of arts and education espoused by Gorgi and the works of English reformers, such as John Dewey, would help shape Said’s own thinking on these topics.
Between 1936 and 1939, a fellowship from the Egyptian state enabled him to study with Amédée Ozenfant, the artist and co-founder of the Purist movement (1886–1966), in London. While there, he met and married Anne Said (born Anne Cobham) (1914–95). Saïd had studied at Queen’s College, London (1925–30) and, later, at the Ozenfant Academy in London (1936–1939). Fellow students at the Academy included Surrealist pioneers Stella Snead and Leonora Carrington. Likewise, Hamed Said’s paintings from the early 1940s reflect Surrealist influences while foreshadowing the emphasis on nature and Egyptian art history that would continue to inform his approach to art for decades. Rateb Siddiq (1917–94)—an Egyptian artist and close friend of Said’s studying at the Ozenfant Academy in the same period—Said experienced an existential crisis towards the end of his sojourn in London and was unable to continue producing art. Instead, he enrolled in art history courses at the Courtauld Institute. It was only upon returning to Egypt that he found himself capable of working again.
Said travelled back to Egypt in 1939 and took up residence in Cairo's historic al-Darb al-Ahmar neighbourhood. Inside the courtyard of his home was a long-lived buckthorn tree that became a consistent subject of Said's work. It was during this period that Said began developing his signature style, becoming recognised for his meticulously observed still-life scenes of the Egyptian natural world, rendered in pencil. Said also began teaching at the High Institute for the Education of Teachers (Ma‘ahad al-Tarbiyya al-‘Ali li-l-Mu‘allamin). However, finding himself without sufficient time to work on his own art, Said requested to be transferred to Luxor to teach art in a local high school. Once there, Said was enchanted by the beautiful yet austere mountain and desert landscapes surrounding the nearby Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. The experience also helped fuel his longstanding interest in Ancient Egyptian art and encouraged Said’s incorporation of related motifs in a new expression of neo-Pharaonic art.
He subsequently returned to Cairo and spent a year studying art independently before joining the faculty of the Higher School of Fine Arts (Madrasat al-Funun al-Jamila al-‘Uliya). In this position, Said lobbied for a new approach to arts education that would give students more control over their own course of study. He proposed and was successful in establishing a “free department” (al-qism al-hurr) at the school and a series of “free studios” (al-marasam al-hurra), each headed up by a different faculty member in the department—i.e., Ahmed Sabry, who taught painting, Hamid Said himself, and ‘Abdel Qader Rizk (1912–78): a professor of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts. Students in the programme were given the option to select the studio in which they would study. Following this initiative, Said was appointed as head of the newly established Luxor Studio (Marsam al-Uqsar, est. 1941) in the village of al-Qurna, which offered residencies to select students at the Higher School of Fine Arts. The programme was intended to encourage students to learn about and value Ancient Egyptian art. Back in Luxor, Anne Said moved to Egypt with her husband upon his return in 1939. Following their decision to leave Luxor and return to Cairo in 1941, they commissioned architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) to design a home in the al-Marg neighbourhood: at the time, a largely undeveloped area on the periphery of the city. Designed in 1942 and expanded in 1945, the house marked a turning point in Fathy's practice, representing one of his earliest attempts to work with the material. In 1946, Said established the Art and Life Group (Jama‘at al-Fann wa-l-haya’); his private home soon became identified with the group, which met regularly at the site. The house's design reflected some of the group's core principles: emphasising its integration into the surrounding natural landscape and the relationship of interior to exterior, as well as drawing on traditional Egyptian architectural forms and building techniques. Meanwhile, the inclusion of a gallery for displaying work in the house's design spoke to the group's interest in merging art and everyday life.
The Contemporary Art Group was initially composed of a group of artists who taught drawing in Egyptian public schools. Said convinced the Ministry of Education (Wizarat al-Ma‘arif) to allow teachers to undertake an experiment in arts pedagogy aimed at establishing a field of Egyptian arts grounded in the country's natural environment and arts history. The teachers were allowed to study with Said and to take complete control of their own teaching practices and curricula at school. Individual members worked in a wide variety of styles and media, while professing a shared set of values and goals. The group denounced the effects of industrialisation on the quality of human life, including a deep-seated alienation from the natural world, a loss of aesthetic quality in manufactured objects of everyday life, and the relegation of the arts to a superficial and decorative role. Instead, the group proposed a vision of nature as embodying the underlying unity of existence and truth, preached a total integration of human life and the work of art with nature, and strove "[t]o work in mental, physical, and psychic harmony with Nature as a whole." Because artistic practice had become alienated from society, Egypt, Said charged, it was necessary to return to a study of both historical works of art and elements of nature. According to Said, the act of looking at, or "seeing fully" the natural object, would allow the reintegration of both Egyptian society and its art. Rather than focus on the resulting art object, Said was most interested in the act of creation, which he understood as a form of meditation and communion.
The Contemporary Art Group also emphasised the need to look to Egypt's artistic past as a source of inspiration for their work, rather than relying on foreign art movements. A statue of Hathor—Ancient Egyptian goddess of love, fertility, music, and dance in her manifestation as a cow—located in Said's home in El Marg served as the group's emblem, combining both themes of a connection to nature and the past. In addition, members rejected modern art's emphasis on the artist as individual, focusing instead on what they saw as the historical significance of the collective and emphasising the role of art in the communal life of a society. Said criticised the Western art tradition for placing the individual at the centre of its project. In order to escape both the academicism and avant-garde tendencies that he associated with the West, Said believed that the artist should aim to transcend their individual character and harmonise with the universal order found in nature. Finally, members renounced established fine arts hierarchies of media and scale, with members embracing instead a variety of historical and contemporary forms of craft and art, including painting, sculpture, calligraphy, embroidery, ceramics, glassmaking, jewellery, furniture-making, and textile design.
Said had a significant influence on the development of the Egyptian state’s cultural infrastructure after 1952. He was a member of the state’s Plastic Arts Committee (Lajnat al-funun al-tashkilliya), founded in 1960, which oversaw the issuance of publications, national and international exhibitions, arts competitions, and artists’ grants, including a programme that allowed artists the opportunity to focus exclusively on their own work (al-Fannanin al-tashkiliyin al-mutafarrighin/Artistes Boursiers de l’Etat). The Art and Life Group enjoyed its most significant level of international prominence in 1954, when the work of Said and other group members was featured in the Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Said went on to establish several centres for the group that ultimately received state backing. These included a centre in the Ottoman-era Manasterly Palace on Rodha Island in Cairo (est. 1969), as well as Bayt al-Sinnari: an 18th century residence in Islamic Cairo that had housed many of the scholars who had accompanied Napoleon during his short-lived occupation of Egypt. Anne—who had played a critical role in establishing the Art and Life Group—returned to England with the couple's daughter, Safaya, in 1955, and she and Said divorced soon after. Hamed would go on to marry Egyptian artist and a member of the Contemporary Art Group, Ehsan Khalil (dates unknown), who served for a time as the director of the Centre for Art and Life at the Manasterly Palace.
