Amid ongoing celebrations of Mahmoud Saïd’s legacy 60 years after his passing, Vogue Arabia dives into the lesser-known aspects of the painter’s storied career: His evocative portrayal of women.
Dress, Armaia; shoes, Bulga x Mix and Match; earrings, Azza Fahmy. Photo: Omar Bairram
On display within the lush rococo interiors of Cairo’s Aisha Fahmy Palace – an aristocratic residence-turned-gallery filled with carved-wood fireplaces, stained-glass windows, and silk-covered walls – are 40 masterpieces by Egypt’s most acclaimed modern painter. In recognition of the 60th anniversary of his death, the exhibition titled In the Company of Mahmoud Saïd, on view until October 15, invites visitors to rediscover pieces by the artist whose canon continues to spark interest among public institutions and private collectors. In 2010, Les Chadoufs and The Whirling Dervishes broke sales records at Christie’s in Dubai, reaching almost USD $5 million. Saïd is also the first artist in the Arab world for whom a catalogue raisonné – a comprehensive, annotated listing of all known works – has ever been published in 2016. Among them are a series of portraits of women going beyond simple pictorial depiction as they tell the stories of a changing society.
Mahmoud Saïd
“In addition to his importance as a pioneering artist who has his own style that distinguishes him from those of his generation, he was the first to Egyptianize art. The importance of Mahmoud Saïd increases over time,” says curator of the Cairo exhibition Dr Ali Said, who is also a visual artist and the general manager of Arts Centers at the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. “He laid the foundations of Egyptian art and generations of artists followed him after that.”
Top, sherwal, Mix and Match; cuff, Azza Fahmy. Photo: Omar Bairram
Despite this lasting legacy, the “spiritual father of Egyptian modern painting,” as he’s come to be known among scholars, was not predestined to become an artist. Born in Alexandria in 1897 to a prominent local family of Turkish and Circassian descent, he was raised in a cosmopolitan environment. With a parent who was twice the prime minister of Egypt under the British protectorate and a niece who became a queen when she married King Farouk I in 1938, he was no stranger to high society. Valérie Didier-Hess, author of Saïd’s catalogue raisonné, describes him as a “highly cultured” person – reading French literature and listening to German classical music – with a “very humanistic approach” to life, being both multilingual and well traveled. While studying at the French Law School in Cairo as was expected of someone of his background, the young man couldn’t shake his curiosity about more creative pursuits, simultaneously exploring drawing and painting under Alexandria-based Italian artists Amelia Daforno Casonato and Arturo Zanieri in their private studios. Even as his legal career began to take off, Saïd’s passions landed him in Paris, where he enrolled in summer classes at prestigious art institutions between 1919 and 1921. But it wasn’t until after 25 years of working in the law, during which he continued to paint, that he bucked social convention entirely and devoted himself to his craft.
Femme assise à la melaya, 1950, oil on board. Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
Among the first Egyptian practitioners referred to as al-Ruwwad (the pioneers), Saïd didn’t receive formal training, nor did he affiliate himself with a specific art movement. This allowed for him to develop an eclectic style inspired by various practices he discovered during his trips around Egypt and museum visits in European cities. He was particularly captivated by the works of Flemish Primitives like Jan van Eyck, Venetian Renaissance visionaries including Giovanni Bellini, as well as ancient sculptural tradition, rendering his own oeuvre rich with technique and theme. Saïd captured busy quotidian vignettes, landscapes in southern Egypt, even scenes from Lebanon where he liked to spend his summers. He didn’t shy away from depicting nudity and, in his largest recorded composition, portrayed the historic inauguration of the Suez Canal. Free from convention, he challenged the hegemony of the European academism at the time, evolving in a way that was more authentic and relevant to the reality of his country. “Had he limited himself,” writes the art historian Fatenn Mostafa Kanafani in her 2020 book, Modern Art in Egypt: Identity and Independence, “he would have probably been forgotten from the annals of history.”
Abaya, Miz and Match; scarf, Fufa. Photo: Omar Bairram
In the first half of the 20th century, Saïd illustrated his compatriots during the sociopolitical upheavals caused by the rise of the nationalist movement against Britain’s colonial rule. He focused largely on women, starting with the westernized elite, many of whom were his relatives, seeking to translate how the taste of upper-class Egyptian women for Parisian fashion and coquetry demonstrated a superior social status. In Mme Ahmed Mazloum Pacha (1936), his maternal aunt poses with a 1930s finger wave hairstyle, thin and arched eyebrows like those of American actor Greta Garbo, and the use of pink blush called “cendre rose” produced by the French brand Bourjois in 1912. In Le dancing (1934), ladies whirl about in their best evening dresses in the kind of establishment where most others couldn’t afford to go. Despite the painter’s personal ties, little is known about the relatives he depicted. Assuming they had a certain power through birth or marriage, questions remain about how this was wielded in the context of a changing Egypt and an emerging feminist movement helmed by Huda Sha’arawi and Safia Zaghloul – both from important Egyptian clans themselves. Did the women in Saïd’s paintings ultimately follow that same path, or were they more willing to protect their privilege from the woes of the working class?
Mme Ahmed Mazloum Pacha (Hedayat Hanem Riad), 1936, oil on panel. Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
In a departure from these worldly Alexandrian echelons, Saïd shifted to painting people from far simpler backgrounds and did so, often to the shock of his peers, in a way that was dignifying rather than othering. In his La Fille à l’imprimé (1938), an anonymous fallaha – an Egyptian peasant – comes across as a woman of the people, wearing a traditional flowerprinted frock as she takes a rest after fetching water from the Nile River. Her broad nose and full lips are highlighted, her tanned complexion appearing in stark contrast to the painter’s familial subjects whose lighter skin tone indicated they belonged to a mixed-Mediterranean lineage. She is also portrayed laboring tirelessly in the countryside, as seen in Les Pêcheurs à Rosette (1941), collecting fish most likely to sell later on at the market. As of the 1920s, the figure of the fallaha personified the nationalist aspirations reflected in art and literature, and from which Saïd extracted the essence of the Egyptian cultural identity and traditions.
Shirt, skirt, Hoopoo. Photo: Omar Bairram
Understanding these contrasts within the Egyptian society, Saïd included ordinary women in the body of his work to acknowledge their existence and examine the tensions in a hierarchized society and his own place within it. “I think Saïd saw himself as part of a different class, and perhaps even different race, than these women, and he used painting to establish his community’s upper class, ‘white’ identity,” explains Alex Dika Seggerman, associate professor of Islamic art history at Rutgers University.
Le dancing, 1934, oil on board. Mahmoud Saïd Museum, Alexandria
The female portraits shone a light on the inequalities between the wealthy, ruling class, and the majority of the Egyptian population who had not benefited from Western modernization. Yet, Saïd put his models on an equal level, more interested in capturing their “inner beauty,” as Didier-Hess argues. The author adds that “in some ways, the contrast between his Plebeian female portraits and that of aristocratic Western women underlines the quality of each: Egyptian natural beauty versus dressed-up white female aristocrats.” There were few circumstances that would see these women crossing paths in real life. And so by bringing them together in his creative world, idealistic as it was, Saïd created a space where they could all embody the woman of modern Egypt.
Dress, Mix and Match; ring, Azza Fahmy. Photo: Omar Bairram
Kaftan, Frillu
Les Pêcheurs à Rosette, oil on panel, 1941. Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
Haguer, 1923, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a printed dress).
Originally published in the September 2024 issue of Vogue Arabia
Style: Maria Fathy
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