Ragheb Ayad

Abstract

Ragheb Ayad, born on 10 March 1892 in Cairo, Egypt, was a prominent painter belonging to a generation of Egyptian artists known as al-ruwwād or "pioneers." He was among the first students to join the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, from which he graduated in 1911. After receiving a scholarship to study in Rome, he was appointed head of the Decoration Department at the School of Applied Arts in Giza in 1930. In 1937, he was named director of the Free Section of the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. Between 1950 and 1955, he headed the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art. Throughout his career Ayad developed a folklorist style to depict scenes of daily rural life and popular traditions.

Biography​​

Ragheb Ayad was born in 1892 in the village of Shobra Qabbala in the Nile Delta to a Coptic family. He received his primary education at the École des Frères in Cairo before joining the École Égyptienne des Beaux-Arts (Madrasat al-Funun al-Jamila al-Misriyya) in Cairo in 1908, the year it was established by Prince Yousouf Kamal (1882–1969). Ayad was among the first students of the school, along with artists Mahmoud Mokhtar (1891–1934), Youssef Kamel (1891–1971), Antoine Haggar (1896–1962), and Mohammed Hassan (1892–1961). After graduating in 1911, he worked as a drawing teacher at the Coptic Secondary School in Cairo and made several trips to France and Italy. In 1925, Ayad received a scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma along with his colleagues, the painter Youssef Kamel and the painter, illustrator, and educator Mohammed Hassan. During that time, Ayad traveled around Italy visiting Florence, Sienna, and Venice, where he attended the 15th Venice Biennale in 1926 which was marked by the exhibition of the Italian Futurists. He received his degree from the Decorative Arts Department in 1928 and returned to Egypt the following year.

Ayad was the first to propose the idea of creating an Egyptian Academy in Rome modelled on other foreign academies established in the Italian capital. In 1930, He was appointed as the head of the Decoration Department at the School of Applied Arts in Giza, where he remained until 1937. Following this appointment, he became professor and director of the free section of the École des Beaux-Arts du Caire. In 1936, he married the Italian painter Emma Caly (1897/1906–1), who graduated from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin and the Instituto di Belle Arti in Rome. In Cairo, she taught at the Pedagogic Institute of Fine Arts for Young Girls in Cairo and exhibited. Ragheb Ayad also worked as a curator and played an important role in reorganising the Coptic Museum in 1941. From 1950 to 1955, succeeding Youssef Kamel, he was named director of the Museum of Modern Art (Mathaf al-Fann al-Hadith). During his tenure there, he created a special section in the museum dedicated to the work of the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar.

Ragheb Ayad is one of the leading painters of a generation of Egyptian artists commonly referred to as 'Al-Ruwwad' (the Pioneers), as they were the first to be educated in newly established academic institutions, such as École des Beaux-Arts du Caire. After graduating, Ayad broke away from his European academic training to create his original expressive style. Throughout his career, he depicted scenes of rural and everyday life, such as the marketplace, the labor in the fields, and the popular cafés, as well as traditional practices, such as the zār, a Nubian ritual trance dance, or the tahtib, an ancestral performance of stick fighting practiced in Upper Egypt. He also painted Christian religious scenes and views of the Coptic monasteries.

Ayad was a skilled draughtsman and besides his oil paintings, he produced numerous sketches and drawings enhanced with watercolors or gouache. His expressive style is characterised by the vivacity of his textured strokes, the dynamic of movement, and the use of bright colours. The arts of Ancient Egypt inspired him as a means to engage with the Pharaonic nationalist discourse of his time as well as with modernism. His study of the formal aesthetics of the decorative reliefs and paintings of the tombs and temples of Thebes led him to reinvent the ancient system of superposed narrative scenes by using horizontal canvas formats. He was equally marked by the Italian Futurists and his painting progressively evolved toward the purification of lines and the stylisation of forms. Ayad was moreover a decorator and painted several public and private buildings' interiors. In 1935, he painted a series of decorative panels for the old Shepherd Hotel which was unfortunately destroyed during the Cairo riots in January 1952. He also participated in the interior decoration programs of religious buildings such as the icons of St Mary’s Coptic Church on Mar’ashli Street in Zamalek, Cairo, built by the Egyptian architect Ramsis Wissa Wassef (1911–1974), the Coptic Cathedral of Sohag, and the Catholic Churches of Minia and Samalut.

From the 1930s, Ragheb Ayad exhibited regularly at the Cairo Salon and held numerous one-person and group exhibitions and biennials in Egypt and abroad.

Bibliography

Atallah, Nadine. Les femmes, l’art et la nation. Les engagements des artistes plasticiennes d’Égypte au mitan du XXème siècle. PhD Thesis, Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2022.

Ayad, Lara. Picturesque Peasants. Painting Egyptian Identity at the Fuad I Agricultural Museum in Cairo, 1934-1938. Ph.D. Thesis, Boston University, 2018

Abu Ghazi, Badr al-Din, Ragheb Ayad. Cairo: General Information Organization, Series: Description of Contemporary Egypt through Plastic Arts, 1984.

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

Ayad, Ragheb. Ahadith fi al-funnun al-jamila fi nisf al-qarn, 1908-1958 (History of the Fine Arts in Half a Century). Cairo: matba‘a misr, undated.

Iskandar, Rushdi, al-Mallakh, Kamal, al-Sharuni, Subhi. 80 sana min al-fann: 1908-1988, (Eighty Years of Art: 1908-1988). Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1991.

Didier-Hess, Valérie, and Hussam Rashwan. Mahmoud Saïd, Catalogue Raisonné. Milan, Italy: Skira, 2015.

Radwan, Nadia. 'Dal Cairo a Roma. Visual Arts and Transcultural Interactions between Egypt and Italy'. Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques, 70(4):1093-1114, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2016-0034.

Radwan, Nadia. Les Modernes d’Égypte: Une Renaissance des Beaux-Arts et des Arts Appliqués (1908- 1938). Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG., 2017.

Kanafani, Fatenn Mostafa. Ragheb Ayad and Emma Caly, ArtTalks Egypt, 2020.

Kanafani, Fatenn Mostafa. Modern Art in Egypt: Identity and Independence, 1850-1936. London, United Kingdom: I.B.Tauris, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Further Reading

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

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

Alex Dikka Segermann, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt Between the Islamic and the Contemporary, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019