Biography
Ramses Younan (1913–1966) was a founding member of the Cairo-based group Art et Liberté (al-fann wa al-ḥurrīya). Younan contributed to the group’s art exhibitions and French and Arabic textual discourse, engaging with Surrealism and other international artistic and political ideologies. His paintings of smooth humanoid forms in dreamlike perspectival space are perhaps the most successful artworks that emerged from the Art et Liberté group and have recently been included in major international exhibitions of Egyptian and global Surrealism.
Ramses Younan was born to a Coptic Christian family in 1913 in Al-Minya, Egypt. Younan enrolled at the Madrasat Al Funon Al Jamilah (School of Fine Arts) in Cairo. Still, he did not complete his degree, leaving in 1933 to teach drawing in the Egyptian towns of Tanta, Port Said, and Zagazig. Younan published his first book, ghāyat al-rasām al-ʿaṣarī (The Aim of the Contemporary Painter), in Arabic in 1938. This was Younan’s first published work of art discourse, in which he analysed French cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant’s theories of purism.
Younan was one of the leading members of the Art et Liberté group. He exhibited in the First Exhibit of Independent Art alongside Kamel Telmisany (1915–1972), Fuad Kamel (1927–1995), Hassia, Angelo de Riz, and Mahmoud Said (1897–1964). Unlike the agitated, expressionist style of fellow Art et Liberté members Kamel and Telmisany, Younan painted smooth, precise forms in desert-like settings, similar to artists like Salvador Dalí or Yves Tanguy.
The group published an Arabic-language journal,al-Taṭawwur, to which Younan contributed tremendously. In an article titled “The Future of Culture in Egypt,” he critiqued prominent Egyptian intellectual Taha Hussein’s conception of al-thaqafa (culture). Younan also edited al-majalla al-jadida (The New Magazine) from 1941 until the Egyptian government shut it down in 1944. In the early 1940s, Younan wrote about artworks or art movements and considered the broader philosophical and theoretical issues on the role of art and culture in society.
Younan lived in Paris from 1947 through 1956, working as an artist, writer, and, later, a journalist. He and Georges Henein (1914–1973) founded the journal and publishing house La Part du Sable, which was based in Paris and published in Cairo. Henein and Younan formally broke with Breton and mainstream Surrealism in 1948. Their essay “Notes sur une ascèse hystérique” (Notes on a hysterical asceticism) criticises surrealist “mythology,” striving instead to forge a new philosophy. In particular, Younan derides Surrealism’s belief in truth as a dependence on a bourgeois “mythology,” despite its dedication to the unconscious. This radical claim distinguishes Younan from other visual artists of his time but also initiated a brief hiatus from artmaking in his life.
According to art historian Badr al-Dīn Abū Ghāzī, Younan experienced a “crisis of expression” and found a “second profession” working in the Arabic department of France’s national public broadcaster, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF), until 1956. He also met and married a Polish woman, Jozéfa Drobnik, and had two daughters, Sylvie and Sonia, in 1949 and 1951. Meanwhile, Egypt experienced tremendous change when the 1952 Free Officer’s Revolution deposed the Egyptian monarchy. In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered the Suez Canal nationalised, sparking the Tripartite Aggression in which Israel, followed by France and Britain, invaded Egypt. Younan protested when two RTF colleagues were fired over their refusal to repeat anti-Arab sentiments on air in 1956 and was dismissed from his job. He was deported to Egypt in the same year. He never returned to France.
Younan returned to art completely after receiving a government stipend in 1960. His abstract canvases of the early 1960s pulsate with thick earth tones—greys, browns, ochres, and greens. Unlike his work of the early 1940s, these have no recognisable forms, perhaps rejecting decipherable truth or form, aligning with his denunciation of surrealist techniques and principles.
Younan represented Egypt in the biennials of Saô Paulo (1961), Belgrade (1962), and Venice (1964) and passed away at the relatively young age of 53 in Cairo in 1966. His work has recently received renewed attention through recent exhibitions of Egyptian Surrealism (two in 2016) and Global Surrealism (2022). In 2021, his daughter Sonia Younan published an authoritative catalogue raisonné in French and English, including reproductions of Younan’s artworks and writings and more than eight decades of art criticism about his work.
