Mohamed Naghi

Abstract

Mohamed Naghi occupies a central role in the history of modern Egyptian art. Bridging the colonial and post-independence eras, Naghi’s oeuvre bears witness to the country's artistic awakening. His practice evolved from European Academicism and Impressionism toward a synthesis of Pharaonic, modern, and rural folk aesthetics. Naghi’s career was characterised by the search for a novel Egyptian art language, exemplified by the School of Alexandria. Beyond his artistic output, Naghi was instrumental in professionalising the local infrastructure through his services as the first Egyptian director of the Cairo School of Fine Arts and the Museum of Modern Art, and as the founder of the Alexandria, Cairo, and Luxor Ateliers.

Biography​​

Mohamed Naghi was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1888, into an aristocratic, cosmopolitan family under British occupation. He died in 1956 in an independent Egypt, where Nasser's socialism and pan-Arabism were in full swing. Naghi's adventure coincides with "the arduous journey of the modern art movement in Egypt, from its birth to its adulthood", as the Egyptian critic and art historian, Ezz el-Din Naguib, puts it. An artistic and political awakening marked this period. Witness to all this, the painter participated in these changes with his brush but also in his capacity as a diplomat.

Mohamed Naghi is a leading figure of the Egyptian modern art scene. He was the first Egyptian director of the Cairo School of Fine Arts (1937), the founder of The Alexandria Atelier (1934), the first Egyptian director of the Cairo Museum of Modern Art (1939), the director of the Egyptian Academy in Rome (1947), the founder of The Luxor Atelier (1941) and of The Cairo Atelier (1953), and an author of many articles on art. The writer Édouard Kharrat (1926–2015) consecrated him as the "true plastic father of the Egyptian school" of painting.

Naghi's education reflected the customs of the Francophile aristocracy of the time. He was initially schooled at home by tutors who taught him French, history, geography and mathematics. His father, a landowner and director of customs in Alexandria, also instilled in him the Islamic faith and Arabic language, which were essential if he were to look after the family's estate. Artistic subjects such as music (oud and violin) and French poetry, as well as drawing, were not neglected either. It was the artist Alberto Piattoli who introduced Naghi to drawing and painting and encouraged him to pursue his artistic training at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. This Italian drawing teacher taught at the Swiss school in Alexandria. In parallel, he gave classes in his studio, which Naghi frequented from 1904 onwards.

In Florence, where he studied at his own expense from 1910 to 1914—which is why some historians consider him self-taught—Naghi received an academic education. The conventional curriculum included anatomical studies, still lifes, landscape studies, and painting. His apprenticeship in drawing was complemented by copying famous paintings, such as Veronese's The Holy Family with young St. John and Saint Catherine. In the body of work from this period, we already see an alternation between Egyptian and European themes.

His homecomings were spent partly in the studio of the artists' house in Darb al-Labbāna at the citadel, which he rented in 1912, and partly in Luxor, the mythical city where he regularly went to visit a family acquaintance, the Sheikh ʿAbd al-Rassul. He built a studio there in 1914.

His encounter with the master of impressionism, Claude Monet, in 1918 in Giverny, taught him three important lessons: to use colour boldly, to pursue the permanent and solid construction behind the ephemeral, and to find a connivance between pharaonic drawings, Islamic motifs and modern art. These travels back and forth enabled him to develop a critical approach towards both his Egyptian and his European heritages, and made him aware of the task facing him: shaping an artistic renaissance, one foot in tradition and one in modernity. Some critics of modern Egyptian art view Naghi as an Egyptian impressionist. While this movement has inspired his early works, labelling him as such reduces the scope of his artistic mission.

As early as 1918, he made a copy of a wall painting from Thebes. The same year, he created paintings with Pharaonic motifs: The Alley of the Rams, The Sacred Lake at Karnak, and View of the Colossi of Memnon. But it was with The Renaissance of Egypt or the Procession of Isis, a mural painted in the context of the 1919 revolution against British occupation, that he made a name for himself in Paris, where it was cited in two magazines (L’Œuvre and Revue moderne des arts et de la vie), and in Egypt. In 1923, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Egyptian Parliament, the Senate decided to hang the vast canvas in the Senate Chamber. This was Naghi's way of realising a cherished dream: to accompany his country's political awakening with historicist paintings.

In 1922, Egypt became a monarchy with the coronation of the first king, Sultan Ahmed Fuad. This marked the end of the British protectorate, at least formally. Naghi travelled to Gif-sur-Yvette, in the southwest suburbs of Paris, to paint two portraits of Madame Juliette Adam (1836–1936), whose literary salon played a political role, providing a free space for republican activists. This "political woman" of significant influence is considered in Egypt to be the spiritual mother of the leader of the Egyptian nationalist party, Mustafa Kamil Pasha, who died in 1908, and whose brother, exiled in France, was lodged with her. In 1922, Naghi also lost his mother to illness.

Naghi joined the diplomatic corps in 1924 and was sent on a mission to Rio, where the trees appeared to him, "like ferocious beasts, and where human life, the plant world and the animal kingdom mingle indiscriminately". He found himself unable to paint nature as he felt it, and instead, painted it as a European landscape. He understood the urgency of finding appropriate means for his subject. A 1932 mission to Ethiopia, set by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became a turning point for the artist. His use of colour took on a liberated approach. Postcolonial critics describe this process as decolonisation or unlearning, a subject of debate.

During Naghi's appointment as attaché to the Egyptian delegation in Paris in 1926, he and his sister Effat Naghi frequented André Lhote's studio, founded in 1922. For Naghi, cubism was no less than "the Rosetta Stone" that made it possible to decipher at once the so-called primitive arts, the otherwise esoteric and impenetrable ancient ones, as well as the avant-garde works. By finding this link with the past through Cubism, Naghi was equipped to embark on a personal artistic revolution.

Following a diplomatic incident that broke out at the First International Congress of Popular Arts in Prague (1927) between Naghi and Louis Hautecœur, the General Administrator of Fine Arts in Egypt, he lost his diplomatic status, something that remained a great regret in his life, as he would henceforth be deprived of the privileges associated with this status.

In subsequent decades, he became more interested in everything related to folk life as a marker of identity and worked on developing Egyptian subject matter. In the drawings he produced during his trips to Montenegro in 1930 and Athens in 1934, as well as in his writings, we can see a pronounced penchant for folklore, traditional costumes, the simple food of Montenegrins and country life, which he had the opportunity to discover thanks to an invitation from his friend Milo Milonovitch, whom he had met during his years in Florence.

From Athens, he brought to Egypt the idea of the Atelier, a group of artists, thinkers, and writers, which he founded with his friend and Alexandrian poet Gaston Zananiri (1904–1996), the famous Atelier d'Alexandrie in 1934 (and is still active today), with Zananiri appointed vice-president. The atelier's role was to become a platform for Egyptian and international artists. A few months after the inauguration, a Nude Academy was founded there.

In the 1930s, he pursued his painting career with a series on the theme of medicine through the ages, created especially for the Hospital Al-Moassa in Alexandria. Among the characteristic works of this period, we can also mention The Stick Players, in the Fine Arts Museum in Alexandria. The stick game, or taḥṭīb in Arabic, which dates back to Ancient Egypt, is a festive game played mainly in Upper Egypt, accompanied by traditional music. An in-depth study of the painting reveals an attempt to exalt rural life. It is the making of authenticity that is purely at work here. Naghi further develops this direction in other paintings, where he transfigures rural themes into something more ancient, more Pharaonic, flat, two-dimensional and monumental at the same time, far removed from the classical ideal.

Highly aware of the importance of the Pharaonic heritage, he devoted himself to various ways of protecting, valorising, and integrating it into the teaching curriculum. In 1937, when he became the first Egyptian director of the School of Fine Arts, following in the footsteps of Guillaume Laplagne (French), Marie-Gabriel Biessy (French) and Camillo Innocenti (Italian), he introduced the study of ancient Egyptian art into the curriculum. The aim of the Luxor Atelier, the artists' residence he founded in 1941 in the village of Gourna, was to facilitate this learning. As Egypt's delegate to UNESCO's Fine Arts Commission in London and Paris in 1946, he campaigned to safeguard the Temple of Philae, threatened by the waters of the Aswan Dam. He raised his voice again in 1954 to save the Temple of Abu Simbel. He also advocated for the return of Nefertiti's head to Egypt.

In 1939, he became director of the Museum of Modern Art. He strove to create museum services like those in Europe and developed a strategy to acquire paintings by 19th century Egyptian painters. He held this position until 1947.

Naghi's ties to Greece were strengthened after 1939, when he married Lilika Tavernari, a Cypriot from Egypt, who was divorced and had two children. It seemed to be a marriage of reason as much as of love: Lilika Tavernari belonged to a prestigious Alexandrian family. From then on, Naghi visited Cyprus and Greece regularly. He quickly developed an interest in folklore and in ancient Greece. This body of work has rarely been studied. Yet it is of particular interest because it was created in parallel with what might be called the "rural" corpus, which epitomises Naghi's profound pictorial thinking. It consists mainly of portraits, genre paintings, semi-abstract landscapes and a history painting, including The National Union (Enosis). Enosis (Greek for union) is the term given to the movement fighting for the unification of Cyprus with Greece. As the painter did not have time to complete his painting project, we know of it only through four preparatory works.

It was during this period that he began working on The School of Alexandria, considered to be his masterpiece. The painting's theme is the city of Alexandria in Ptolemaic times, transposed to modern-day Egypt. The painting, which represented Egypt at the 1952 Venice Biennale, was commissioned by Taha Hussein, the first rector of the University of Alexandria, founded by Farouk I in 1938. Initially, it was to be featured in the University's celebration hall, with the idea of presenting the University as Farouk I of Alexandria, the heir to the Alexandrian school of the Ptolemaic era. This school was renowned for its astronomy, mathematics, philosophy and medicine. It also served as a meeting place for scholars from all over the world. For both men, Hussein and Naghi, Alexandria thus embodied the knowledge of the Mediterranean basin. This large-scale mural (seven metres wide and three high) sums up the painter's philosophy. The idea is to honour the Arabs and show the role they played in transmitting ancient Greek culture to the modern world, without which Europe would have remained in darkness. In this iconic painting, the lights of knowledge are passed from the Ptolemies to the modern Alexandrians, a mix of Arabs and Greeks.

While wishing to remain director of the Museum of Modern Art, he offered to act as "delegate director of the artistic mission", accompanying Egyptian scholarship-holders to Europe to ensure that they did not stray from their goal: to serve the country’s artistic rebirth. He proposed Spain as a new destination for scholarship holders. As a result of his efforts, artists such as Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), Hamed Nada (1924–1990), and Ezzeldine Hammouda (1919–1990), among others, took advantage of the state scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.

Naghi was appointed Director of the Egyptian Academy in Rome in 1947, a position he held until 1950. That year, he left to learn the art of mosaic in Ravenna, Italy.

In 1953, he created The Cairo Atelier, a group of artists and writers in Cairo, to revive the cosmopolitan atmosphere in art. He insisted that the committee be made up of both Egyptians and foreigners resident in Egypt.

On 5 April 5 1956, the painter Mohamed Naghi, a conservative aristocrat, the embodiment of a bygone era, died in his studio in the neighbourhood near the Giza pyramids. The Alexandria Atelier changed location after his death. The group moved to Rue Victor Bassily, where it stands today. His death coincides with the end of a period marked by British imperialism and cosmopolitanism.

In 1962, the Egyptian government purchased his studio near the Pyramids, and in 1968, the Mohamed Naghi Museum was inaugurated. It continues to preserve and transmit Naghi’s legacy to this day.

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