Inji Efflatoun

Abstract

Inji Efflatoun, a pivotal figure in modern Egyptian art, uniquely blended her practice with fervent communist and feminist activism. Born into an affluent, Ottoman-descended family in Cairo, she rebelled against her privileged background, seeking to connect with the realities of Egyptian society. Her artistic journey began with surrealist influences and evolved through her political engagement. Efflatoun was a key figure in Egyptian feminist struggles, actively participating in communist organisations and international conferences. Her art reflected her political convictions, showcasing social inequalities and anti-colonial sentiments. Imprisonment in 1959, under Nasser's regime, profoundly impacted her art, leading to her "White Light" period after her release, marked by vibrant colours and dynamic compositions. Despite her radical past, she later benefitted from state support, achieving international recognition with exhibitions across the Eastern Bloc. Efflatoun's life and art reflect the complexities of 20th-century Egypt, navigating political upheaval and artistic evolution.

Biography

What distinguishes Inji Efflatoun, a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in Egypt, is her dual career as an artist and a politician. She was a communist and feminist activist. Her artistic and political activities were intertwined throughout her life, feeding off one another.

She was born in Cairo in 1924 into an upper-class family of Ottoman descent. Her father, Hassan Efflatoun, was a landowner and scientist who founded the entomology department at Cairo University. She was raised mainly by her mother, Salha Efflatoun, who trained as a dressmaker after her divorce and set up her fashion house, dressing Cairo's elite. Inji Efflatoun was very close to her sister, the poet Gulpérie Efflatoun-Abdalla. Her half-sister on her father's side, Zohra Efflatoun (1936–1978), was also a painter and lived in Alexandria.

The Efflatouns were French-speaking and had strong bonds with Europe, where they often travelled, particularly to Paris, where Salha's sister lived. Although she came from a Muslim family, Efflatoun attended the Collège du Sacré Cœur in Cairo, a school run by Catholic nuns, before moving on to the Lycée Français. There, she studied philosophy and gained knowledge of Marxism, finding the intellectual tools that would allow her to take a critical look at her class background. As she became increasingly aware of the misery most Egyptians lived in, she rebelled against the elites’ privileges. She sought to break away from what she called a “cellophane society,” a social environment impervious to the problems of the people, in which she felt suffocated by the weight of frivolous obligations. To connect with her country’s reality, she decided to learn Arabic at the age of 17.

Her art practice developed simultaneously with her political consciousness. In the early 1940s, she received private tuition from painter Kamel el-Telmissany (1915–1972), a member of the surrealist group Art et Liberté (Gamma’iyat al-Fann wal-Hurriya). This cosmopolitan group shared communist convictions and believed that art should be a means to resist fascism. Efflatoun participated in exhibitions with the group before leaving to focus on her political activities.

In the 1940s, she played an active role in accelerating feminist struggles in Egypt. In 1944, she joined the communist organisation Iskra (Spark), founded by Hillel Schwartz (1923–2007), an Egyptian of Jewish descent. At the same time, she helped set up the League of Young Women of Universities and Institutes (Rabitat Fatayat al-Gamiʿa wal-Maʿahid), which made women’s emancipation and class warfare the same fight whose adversary was colonialism. She was part of the Egyptian delegation to international feminist and communist conferences in Paris (1945) and Prague (1946, 1947). Between 1948 and 1950, she published three books explaining her feminist views and anti-colonial fervour.

In 1948, she made a love marriage with Mohamed Mahmoud Aboul Ela (1923–1957), a middle-class Marxist prosecutor, who encouraged her to take up painting again. She studied with the Swiss Cairo-based painter Margo Veillon (1907–2003) to further her training, renowned for depicting rural and folklife. She also attended the studio of the couple Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985) and Tahia Halim (1919–2003) and the free section of Cairo's Faculty of Fine Arts, which had opened its doors to women students at the turn of the 1950s. In addition, she often spent time on her family's farm in Kafr Shokr, in the Nile Delta, to paint in direct contact with the peasants. She also travelled to Luxor in 1953 to view the Pharaonic archaeological sites and Egyptian craftsmen and women’s practices, as evidenced by her painting Tisserands de Nagada (Nagada Weavers), 1953.

Reflecting her intense production during this period, Efflatoun organised a solo exhibition of her paintings almost every year between 1952 and 1959 in private venues in Cairo and Alexandria. The artist intended these exhibitions as “political and artistic manifestations.” “I wanted to reveal to everyone the exploitation of man by man. To reveal and highlight the backward status of women in Egyptian society,” she said.

During the Suez War, which led to Egypt's independence in 1956 following Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the British troops’ withdrawal, Efflatoun was a member of the Women's Committee for Popular Resistance, working with her friend, the famous feminist Ceza Nabarawi (1897–1985). She also reacted to the war in her paintings, such as The Girl of Port Said (1957), which depicts a terrified young girl facing the body of her murdered mother after the destruction of this port city of Northern Egypt by Franco-British air raids.

During the 1950s, Efflatoun was among the artists representing Egypt in the first national pavilions at the Venice Biennale (1952) and the São Paulo Biennale (1953). Her artistic career was in full bloom when she was imprisoned in June 1959 during Nasser's mass arrest campaigns against communists. She spent  four years in prison, painting frequently despite occasional restrictions on her art-making. She found her models and visual sources of inspiration around her, starting with her inmates and daily life in the women’s prison —Al-'Anbar (The Dormitory), 1960, and Prisoners, 1963. However, the most remarkable paintings from that period are probably her series of trees and flowers, which express her hope for freedom and the anguish of time passing through the repetition of the same compositions (see, for example, Flower Trees Behind the Bars, 1962, and The Tree of Freedom, 1963).

Efflatoun’s incarceration enabled her to go beyond the militant use of images. After her release from prison, she developed a new style that she coined as her so-called ‘White Light’ period (al-dau’ al-‘abyadh), characterised by a plain background revealing the blank canvas, over which short brushstrokes of bright colours give shape to dynamic compositions, setting the motifs in motion. With a consistent focus on labour in the countryside and the bodies of men and women at work, the white light paintings should be understood as part of a body of works by international realist painters who used figuration to express leftist commitments. Efflatoun indeed was connected to artists such as the Italian Renato Guttuso (1911–1987), the Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), the French Jean Lurçat (1892–1966), and the German Lea Grundig (1906–1977), who appreciated her work and wrote about it.

Another significant transformation occurred while Efflatoun was in prison: private galleries vanished as the Nasserite government tightened its grip on the arts. Although she never disavowed her communist convictions, Efflatoun was able to navigate the spheres of state-run art by benefitting from yearly state grants (menhat al-tafarrogh) during the second half of the 1960s. With the support of Egyptian cultural diplomacy, her career took on a remarkable international dimension with two travelling exhibitions across the Eastern Bloc: in Dresden, Moscow and East Berlin in 1970, then in Moscow, Sofia, and Prague in 1975-1976. These exhibitions materialised because of Egypt's geopolitical stakes during the Cold War and the persistence of Efflatoun's connections within an international communist network. She subsequently held two other solo exhibitions abroad: in 1979 in New Delhi and 1988 in Kuwait City. Efflatoun was also curator of the exhibition Visages de l'art contemporain égyptien, which was held at the Musée Galliera in Paris in 1971. It brought together about fifty artists from Egypt and was organised by the French and Egyptian ministries of culture.

Inji Efflatoun died of illness in 1989. The Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo holds many paintings, while her family donated watercolours and drawings to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. The Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, has the most extensive collection of the artist's works.

Bibliography

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