Biography
Menhat Helmy was born in Helwan, a town south of Cairo, into a family of nine children. Her father was a legal consultant in the Ministry of Education, and her mother was a housewife. Encouraged by her family, she studied art at al Maʿhad al-ʿali lil funun al-gamila lil moʿalimat (the Higher Institute of Fine Arts for Female Teachers), where her teachers included Marguerite Nakhla (1908–1977), Kawkab Youssef El Assal (1909–2009), and Emma Caly Ayad (1906–1989). Founded in Cairo in 1939, the institute was Egypt’s first public institution dedicated to the artistic education of young women. As its name suggests, it was initially intended to train drawing and painting teachers, but the curriculum evolved to offer students the chance to train as artists, too. Like Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), her fellow student at the institute and her friend, Helmy graduated in 1948. She continued her education for another year to specialise as a teacher. When Helmy was studying there, the institute was in Bulaq, an underprivileged district of downtown Cairo, immersing students in the reality of everyday life in working-class areas. In Helmy's early works, Bulaq and its inhabitants were a recurring theme. Raaya Helmy (1923– 2014), Menhat’s sister, also studied at the institute; she did not become an artist but evolved in the cultural milieu and married Badr Eddine Abu Ghazi (1920–1983), who served as Minister of Culture from 1970–1971. The Helmy sisters thus witnessed and benefited from advances in the professionalisation of women's artistic practice in Egypt. Before the institute’s creation, this path was reserved for a socio-economic elite who trained in Europe at their own expense or with private tutors.
In 1953, Menhat Helmy received a scholarship from the Egyptian government to study in London. She entered the Slade School of Fine Arts in painting and etching (1954–1955). Gazbia Sirry joined her the following year. Both graduated in 1955. During her years at the Slade School, her tutor was the painter and draftsman John Aldridge (1905–1983). Her works from this period include nude paintings and portraits in an academic style. She also specialised in engraving and experimented with different techniques, using zinc and copper plates, as well as xylography and aquatint. Being a prolific draughtswoman, she travelled the UK with her sketchbooks. Her talent for drawing is evident in her etchings, characterised by their precision of line and well-developed sense of detail. Many works from this period depict urban spaces and natural landscapes, such as a view of Hyde Park and Landscape in the UCL Art Museum collection (London), which won her the ’Etching or Engraving’ prize at the Slade School (1955). During her time at the Slade, she was regarded as ‘an admirable student,’ according to her file in the UCL's archives.
In 1955, Helmy returned to Egypt, where she began a teaching career that spanned almost 50 years at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts for Female Teachers, which became the Faculty of Art Education (kulliyiat al-tarbiya al-fanniya) in 1973, attached to the University of Helwan since 1975 and located in Cairo’s Zamalek neighbourhood. In 1963, she was appointed Honorary Academic at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, Italy, upon designation of the engraving class and on the occasion of the 4th centenary of the accademia’s foundation.
From 1973 to 1979, she relocated to London to follow her husband, Abdelghaffar Khallaf, when he was appointed Medical Attaché for the Egyptian Embassy in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, she continued her training in printmaking at Morley College London. Some of her works produced after her marriage in 1957 bear the initials M. K., in reference to her husband's surname.
While continuing to paint, Helmy distinguished herself as one of the leading printmakers of Egypt, along with her colleague Mariam Abdel Aleem (1930–2010). She depicted everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the working classes. She travelled the country, documenting the labour of peasants and workers, market scenes, and popular gatherings. Her black-and-white engravings often deal with social and political issues, such as access to healthcare (Outpatient Clinic, 1958) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Many of them show the presence of women in public space and their participation in the country’s life, as in The Elections, produced in 1957, a year after Egyptian women won the right to vote and run for office. Helmy's works sometimes include textual elements like the posters and banners in The Elections. Her political concerns are also reflected in her paintings. For example, Procession to Work (1957) glorifies the collective effort of nation-building using an iconography characteristic of the years of Egypt's accession to independence. From the second half of the 1950s, and more significantly, from the beginning of the 1960s, Helmy exhibited widely in Egypt and abroad. In particular, she was a regular participant in the Ljubljana Biennale for Graphic Arts (ex-Yugoslavia); her career thus followed a non-aligned cartography of international artistic collaborations.
After the Egypt-led Arab coalition's defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, it seems that Helmy did not produce identifiable works of art for three years. At the beginning of the 1970s, she turned to abstraction. She once again shared a similar experience to Sirry's, who changed his painting style from figurative to more geometric after the defeat, which Egyptians and the rest of the Arab world perceived as a cataclysm. However, Helmy's abstractions retain a narrative value and often carry an assertive political discourse. In 1971, for example, she painted The Children of Bahr El-Baqar, depicting the 46 children who died when the Israeli army bombed a school in a village near Port Said in 1970. The children's bodies are represented by an accumulation of rectangles surmounted by a circle for each head, with no face. In the same year, she painted Exchange of Fire, depicting the confrontation between the Egyptian and Israeli armies through a network of lines and dots. In the 1970s, she took this formal vocabulary further: the artist's notebooks show how much she studied each composition, skillfully calculating each line’s position and the choice of colours. An etching with aquatint titled Red Line (1978) exemplifies the precision of Helmy’s compositions. It shows a cross of black branches growing out of a central red square. At first sight, the form seems elementary, though it is made up of layering of flat areas of ink that form a gradation of red and grey tints, each shade delineated by a rigorous outline. Nurtured by an interest in sciences—computer science as well as astronomy—during the period of space exploration, Helmy produced numerous works that refer to the cosmos and technology, such as her etchings entitled Rockets, or Planets (1976), the Universe series (c. 1974), as well as the oil on canvas Space Exploration (1973). The great technical rigour of her works from this period allows comparisons with concrete art, although the artist has never claimed this connection.
Helmy signed her last etching in 1983. Despite continuing to teach until she died in 2004, she had to stop practising because the toxicity of the etching chemicals had harmed her health. To promote her work and legacy, her family created The Art of Menhat Helmy, a platform holding a collection and archives and mediating her work through a newsletter and articles.
