Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435793
Gerard Aching
In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature of their relationship to communism, André Breton published Legitimate Defense (1926), a pamphlet in which he described surrealism’s ideological and political stance and identified some of the principal debates and challenges that the group faced in Europe. What lie at stake in the surrealists’ effort to encompass metaphysical and dialectical methods are both the legitimacy of their claims on the term revolutionary and their insistence on a revolution of the mind. In this context, the author examines Breton’s concept of the “marvelous” that affirms the feasibility of equilibrium between the work of the mind and political engagement. He compares Breton’s stance to that of a group of Martiniquan students in Paris, who in 1932 published a legitimate defense of their own. Unlike Breton’s pamphlet, the Martiniquan publication wholeheartedly embraced the communist Third International organization and the universal application of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and associated surrealism with a form of human expression rather than with a radical revolution of the mind. Nevertheless, the Martiniquans embrace Marx’s dialectical materialism without questioning why Marx’s scientific explanation of universal history failed to account for the absence of a Black proletariat in Martinique. The author’s comparison between Breton and the Martiniquan texts concludes that the most evident difference between them is the ease with which the Martiniquan students embrace surrealism without sensing any possible contradictions, thereby perceiving ambivalence as a countercultural strategy.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435625
Salah M. Hassan
The 2015 Egyptian Surrealists in Global Perspective conference, and the companion 2016 exhibition When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938–1965), both held in Cairo, Egypt, explored the history and evolution of the work of Egyptian surrealists and their remarkable legacy within Egypt and in international surrealist circles. This article serves as a preview of contributions to this special issue of Nka, which serves as a followup to these two events, documenting the relationship of the Egyptian surrealists with Western counterparts, especially the French surrealists, and their contributions to internationalism, antifascist global protest, and decolonization, staged and performed outside the West. The artistic and intellectual output of the Egyptian surrealists was primarily centered around activities initiated by the Art and Liberty group (Jama’at al-Fann Wa al-Hurriyyah), the Contemporary Art Group (Jama’at al-Fann al-Mu’asir), and the artists who exhibited with one or both of these groups. In addition to more traditional artistic genres, photography played an important role in the surrealists’ artistic practices of the time, as is examined in this issue. This introduction, and the contributions to this issue of Nka that it surveys, affirm that the Egyptian surrealists, among other non-Western modernists, represent the multifaceted aspects of modernity and its global interconnectedness in the twentieth century. The strength of the Egyptian surrealists lay squarely in their theoretical underpinning that emphasized non-Western modernism, not as derivative or secondary to the Western modernism, but as a unique experiment in modernity that is worthy of its own investigation.
2015年全球视野下的埃及超现实主义者会议和2016年的展览“当艺术成为自由:埃及超现实主义者(1938-1965)”都在埃及开罗举行，探讨了埃及超现实主义者作品的历史和演变，以及他们在埃及和国际超现实主义界的卓越遗产。这篇文章是对Nka这期特刊的预览，它是这两个事件的后续，记录了埃及超现实主义者与西方同行，特别是法国超现实主义者的关系，以及他们对国际主义，反法西斯全球抗议和非殖民化的贡献，在西方以外的地方上演和表演。埃及超现实主义者的艺术和智力产出主要集中在艺术与自由团体(Jama 'at al-Fann Wa al-Hurriyyah)、当代艺术团体(Jama 'at al-Fann al-Mu 'asir)以及与其中一个或两个团体一起展出的艺术家发起的活动上。除了更传统的艺术流派之外，摄影在当时超现实主义者的艺术实践中发挥了重要作用，正如本期所考察的那样。这篇引言，以及它对《Nka》这一期的调查，肯定了埃及超现实主义者，以及其他非西方现代主义者，代表了20世纪现代性的多面性及其全球互联性。埃及超现实主义者的力量恰恰在于他们强调非西方现代主义的理论基础，不是西方现代主义的衍生品或次要品，而是现代性的独特实验，值得自己研究。
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435695
Bachir El Sibaei
Georges Henein was an important pioneer of modernism in Egypt, who played a critical role in the cultural and artistic movement of the country, despite critics who tried to distance him from contemporary Egyptian thought under the guise that he was a Francophone writer. This research presents Henein’s contribution to the historical, cultural, and national Egyptian trajectory, using some translated excerpts from his writings. The surrealist adventure Henein launched in Egypt was an important modernizing event in contemporary Egyptian culture. Although the influence of surrealist visions on Arabic literature was limited, the impact of these visions on the Francophone literature in Egypt was significant and evident in the work of poets such as Munīr Hāfez, Walid Munir, Horus Shenouda, Edmond Jabès, Mary Kavadia, and Joyce Mansour. In the field of fine arts, the impact of surrealism produced clear and essential modernist trends that have become characteristic of these arts.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435835
Salah M. Hassan
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435765
Ola Seif
When the Art and Liberty group launched its activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the young Levon Boyadjian (later to become the famous Van-Leo) and his elder brother, Angelo, were jointly debuting their careers as photographers in Cairo. Van-Leo’s archive of photographic prints, negatives, and documents reveals much about the imaginative experimental channels he explored to crystallize his inner self. The artist’s self-portraiture—“auto-portraits,” as he called them—constituted the core of his surrealist production, and his photographic knowledge was enriched while he implemented these early self-portraits. Self-taught, he often returned to photography books, from which he learned techniques of double and triple exposure, juxtaposition, sandwiching, solarization, and cutouts and thus triggered his imagination and sense of exploration. This article traces the arc of Van-Leo’s early surrealist phase, which lasted about a decade that coincided with the beginning of his career in the 1940s. Other than the surrealist self-portraits, his photographic archive also contains a few hundred more works that are just as eccentric, although they rely more on disguise skills, shadows, and contrasts, or constitute false personifications of characters in society, rather than a surrealist approach. Although Van-Leo’s work was detached from what the Egyptian surrealist philosophies called for, he was, it seems, a surrealist by accident.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8971229
Salah M. Hassan, H. Al-Qasimi
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435751
M. Golia
ABSTRACT:Over the course of three years researching thousands of old photographs for her 2010 book Photography and Egypt (Reaktion Books), the author came across few examples of what might be termed "surrealist photography" in Egypt and little evidence for the exhibitions organized by Art and Liberty, a group of Egyptian artists and writers who resisted the Nazi and fascist risings before and after World War II. Anchored by Samir Gharib's Surrealism in Egypt and Plastic Arts; correspondence between photographer Lee Miller, living in Cairo in the 1940s, and British artist and poet Roland Penrose; and Donald LaCoss's work and correspondence with Roland Penrose's son, Anthony, this article elaborates and adjusts some of the perceptions of the Art and Liberty group that appeared in Photography and Egypt. The group would eventually feel the wrath of the Anglo-Egyptian authorities for providing translations of Marxist-Leninist texts, condemnations of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist ideals and politics, and affirmations of social reform and freedom of expression. On the other hand, the author supposes that it may also be the case that only a few photographic works produced by artists associated with the Art and Liberty group can be called "surrealist" at all, as Egypt's surrealist moment left more prominent traces in painting and literature. Nonetheless, Art and Liberty's activities acknowledged photography as a creative medium at an early, experimental stage in its development, before it was derailed by the 1952 Officer's Revolution and, later, pressed into the service of the state. Despite the lack of access to the photographic record of works produced for or around Art and Liberty exhibitions, the author contributes contextual details for both those shows and the practice of photography around the time the group was active, illustrated by seminal images of works by Kamel Telmisany, Hassan El-Télmissany, Idabel, Hassia, Fouad Kamel, Wadid Sirry, Lee Miller, and others.
摘要:作者为2010年出版的《摄影与埃及》(Reaktion Books)一书研究了数千张旧照片，在三年的时间里，她在埃及发现了一些可以被称为“超现实主义摄影”的例子，也很少有证据表明艺术与自由组织的展览是在二战前后抵制纳粹和法西斯崛起的埃及艺术家和作家组织的。以萨米尔·加里布的《埃及超现实主义与造型艺术》为切入点20世纪40年代生活在开罗的摄影师李·米勒与英国艺术家兼诗人罗兰·彭罗斯之间的通信;以及唐纳德·拉科斯的作品和与罗兰·彭罗斯的儿子安东尼的通信，这篇文章阐述和调整了出现在《摄影与埃及》中对艺术与自由团体的一些看法。该组织最终感到了英埃当局的愤怒，因为他们提供了马列主义文本的翻译，谴责了反法西斯和反帝国主义的理想和政治，肯定了社会改革和言论自由。另一方面，作者认为也可能只有少数与艺术与自由团体有关的艺术家的摄影作品可以被称为“超现实主义”，因为埃及的超现实主义时刻在绘画和文学上留下了更突出的痕迹。尽管如此，艺术与自由的活动承认摄影在其发展的早期实验阶段是一种创造性的媒介，直到1952年的军官革命才使其脱轨，后来又被迫为国家服务。尽管缺少艺术与自由展览的摄影记录，作者还是为这些展览和该组织活跃时期的摄影实践提供了背景细节，并通过Kamel Telmisany, Hassan el - tassalmissany, Idabel, Hassia, Fouad Kamel, Wadid Sirry, Lee Miller等人的作品的开创性图像来说明。
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435723
Hisham Geshta
Author Hisham Geshta, literary and art critic and editor of Al Kitaba Al Ukhra (Other Writing), Cairo, Egypt, reminisces about his meeting and long-term relationship with writer and activist Anwar Kamel and their united efforts to publish established and emerging surrealist writers and poets in Al Tatawwur (Evolution) magazine in 1940 and after. Later, when Kamel is in his late seventies, in 1991, the author establishes and publishes Al Kitaba Al-Ukhra to continue the commitment. The author provides numerous excerpts from these and earlier publications that include the writings of Georges Henein, Ramses Younan, Kamel Telmisany, and era poets, illuminating the ideology and creative output of Egyptian surrealist artists and thought leaders across more than five decades.
作家Hisham Geshta是文学和艺术评论家，也是埃及开罗Al Kitaba Al Ukhra（其他写作）的编辑，他回忆起自己与作家和活动家Anwar Kamel的会面和长期关系，以及他们在1940年及以后共同努力，在Al Tatawwur（进化）杂志上发表既有和新兴的超现实主义作家和诗人。后来，当Kamel七十多岁时，作者于1991年建立并出版了《Al-Kitaba Al-Ukhra》，以继续这一承诺。作者提供了这些和早期出版物的大量摘录，其中包括乔治·海宁、拉姆西斯·尤南、卡迈勒·特尔米萨尼和时代诗人的作品，阐明了埃及超现实主义艺术家和思想领袖50多年来的意识形态和创造性成果。
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-9435653
Alex Dika Seggerman
ABSTRACT:This paper contextualizes the Art and Liberty group within the scope of Egyptian modern art. In doing so, it argues that this movement does not simply translate "central" Parisian surrealism to so-called "peripheral" Cairo. Rather, Art and Liberty represents a pivot in a continuum of Egyptian modern art and an important node in the transnational expansion of surrealism in the late 1930s. To situate the movement in a larger arc, this article spans the 1910s to the 1950s. An analysis of famous sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) first represents the nationalist and classicist origins of Egyptian modern art. Second, an examination of the Long Live Degenerate Art manifesto explicates the complexity of the group's ideology in its early days. Third, Kamel Telmisany's (1915–72) shift from expressionist painter and draftsman to realist filmmaker signals how aesthetics and mediums adapted to new iterations of the Art and Liberty ideology. Fourth, painter Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–66) and the Contemporary Art Group epitomize the impact of Art and Liberty after World War II. This chronological progression illustrates how the Egyptian Art and Liberty group reacted vociferously against nationalism in politics and art, both locally and regionally. In doing so, they shifted the audience of modern Egyptian art and created a new, transnational public. For these reasons, the author calls this movement the "Beautiful Black Cloud" of modern Egyptian Art. It was violent, stormy, and did not always look "pretty," but it was beautiful in its legacy.
摘要:本文将“艺术与自由”组织置于埃及现代艺术的语境中。在这样做的过程中，它认为这场运动并不是简单地将巴黎的“中心”超现实主义转化为所谓的“外围”开罗。相反，《艺术与自由》代表了埃及现代艺术连续体的一个支点，也是20世纪30年代后期超现实主义跨国扩张的一个重要节点。为了将这一运动置于一个更大的弧线中，本文跨越了20世纪10年代到50年代。对著名雕塑家马哈茂德·穆赫塔尔(1891-1934)的分析首先代表了埃及现代艺术的民族主义和古典主义起源。其次，对“堕落艺术万岁”宣言的考察揭示了该组织早期意识形态的复杂性。第三，卡梅尔·特尔米萨尼(Kamel Telmisany, 1915 - 1972)从表现主义画家和绘图员转变为现实主义电影制作人，标志着美学和媒介如何适应艺术和自由意识形态的新迭代。第四，画家阿卜杜勒·哈迪·加扎尔(Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar, 1925 - 1966)和当代艺术团体是二战后艺术与自由影响的缩影。这个时间顺序说明了埃及艺术与自由组织是如何在政治和艺术上强烈反对民族主义的，无论是在地方还是在地区。在这样做的过程中，他们改变了现代埃及艺术的受众，创造了一个新的、跨国的公众。由于这些原因，作者称这一运动为现代埃及艺术的“美丽的乌云”。它是狂暴的，狂风暴雨的，并不总是看起来“漂亮”，但它的遗产是美丽的。
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