Conclusion

This brief conclusion summarizes the contents of the book’s five chapters and restates the main argument: that Egyptian modern artists showcased a constellation modernism in their artistic approach and that they acknowledged their Islamic context, but refused to be defined by it. In an epilogue, Seggerman addresses the contemporary context of the book’s writing, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Arab Spring, and the growth of arts institutions in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. She ends with a call for an ethical art history with greater empathy.

Mahmoud Mukhtar’s Pharaonic Classicism and Pedagogical Nationalism

This chapter investigates the role of anticolonial Egyptian nationalism in the sculptural works of Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934). Government-funded schooling transformed this farm boy into a heroic nationalist artist. His monumental artworks reflect Egypt’s membership in transnational networks of nationalist ideology and post–World War I artistic classicism. Though distinctly nationalist on the surface, these forms are fundamentally international, echoing the synthesis of nationalism and classicism in parallel interwar modernisms. To explore this transnational phenomenon further, I establish connections between Mukhtar’s use of ancient Egyptian imagery, known as pharaonism, to trends in Egyptian literature as well as to histories of sculpturally depicting fabric. In Nahdat Misr (Egypt’s reawakening), Mukhtar pointedly references ancient Egypt through a monumental granite sphinx but pairs him with a proud female peasant who symbolically lifts her veil. He subtly adjusts the classical referents for a modern, transnational audience. The broad use of these forms exhibits the power of ancient Egyptian symbols as centerpieces for public formation worldwide.

The Be auty of Uncertainty

This chapter explores the postsurrealist paintings and drawings of Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–66) that “return” Islamic references to art. Gazzar’s early work indexes the Arab socialist concern for the urban poor and dispossessed, indicating Egypt’s postcolonial shift to transnational Arab alliances after the 1952 revolution. In The Green Man, Gazzar combines Islamic references of mystical talismanic imagery with European abstract oil painting. Gazzar’s later works lie between the opposing logics of social realism and abstract expressionism, and they parallel Egypt’s political status as a leading member of the Nonaligned Movement. Beyond national art and politics, this chapter connects Gazzar’s paintings with artworks from other postsurrealist turns to primitivism outside Europe in the postwar era. Seggerman argues that Gazzar heralds a new era of Egyptian modernism, which maintains its constellational nature, but with a dramatic shift in its main actors.

Introduction

This introduction defines the new term “constellational modernism” to describe Egyptian modern art. As opposed to the vagueness of global and the restrictive idea of transnational, constellational explains the finite nature of Egyptian modernism’s connection abroad as well as the way artists visualize these connections in their artwork. Second, Seggerman discusses the role of Islam in this constellation. These artists and artworks acknowledge Islam (as an idea and as a practice), but they refuse to be defined by it. Third, Seggerman positions Egyptian modernism as part of the rich intellectual framework of the Nahda movement, meaning that these cultural producers were deeply embedded within a wider movement that grappled with ideas of modernity, modernization, tradition, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Lastly, Seggerman defines what modern, modernity, and modernism mean in the context of this book. These redefinitions destabilize the ideas of both a singular modernity and easy plural modernities, and instead pinpointing the overlapping and dyssynchronous connections within a constellation of modernisms.

Lawyerly Luxury of Easel Painting

This chapter shifts focus from Cairo to Alexandria, away from the anticolonial nationalism of the former toward a deliberate cosmopolitanism observable in the latter. From the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1805 until Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in 1952, Alexandria was a veritable second capital to Cairo, and in many ways it was better connected with the Mediterranean world. The informal infrastructure of arts education and exhibition in Alexandria led to a subtler form of Egyptian modernism. Alexandrian artists visualized the multinational atmosphere of their coastal city rather than portraying an outward Egyptian nationalism. In the vibrant oil paintings of the aristocratic lawyer Mahmoud Said (1897–1966), I locate a visual code that echoes the transnationalism of the Mixed Courts, Said’s employer and a pioneering legal institution that adjudicated contracts between the international business communities in Alexandria. I employ this comparison to argue that late Ottoman representations of race repurpose Orientalist idioms to position the author as superior to both colonial powers and local subjects. Through this repurposing, Said visualizes multiple Mediterranean image traditions implicit in Egyptian modernism.

Future Publics

This chapter argues that late nineteenth-century satirical cartoons and portrait photography in Egypt created a public conversant in a shared visual language of art and politics, and thus laid the groundwork for a modern art movement. The increased availability of mechanical image reproduction technology in Egypt, in addition to the country’s strategic position in international politics, fostered a visual system for identifying and critiquing late nineteenth-century Cairene politics among a transnational elite. This public included Ottoman, French, Italian, Syrian Christian, and Jewish individuals in addition to “local” Egyptians. The shared visual language spoke to all these diverse groups. I trace the visual history of caricature embedded in the satirical, illustrated Arabic- and French-language lithographic journal Abou Naddara Zarqaʾ, published by Yaʿqub (James) Sanua (1839–1912), and the significations of the cross-dressing by Princess Nazli Fazil (1853–1913) in photographic portraits. Both interpellate a public by means of images that reference a wide network of histories. Through visual analysis, I plot a constellation of complex visual and textual connections that, I argue, forms the “future public” of Egyptian modernism.

Potent Flows

In chapter 5, Seggerman charts the image of the Egyptian peasant woman and water jug from eighteenth-century travel literature through Orientalist painting, ultimately culminating in the work of two female artists of the Nasser era—Gazbia Sirry (b. 1925) and Inji Efflatoun (1924–89). In isolating this one image, Seggerman explains how through the porous boundaries of Egyptian visual culture, potent images gained meaning through their movement through time, space, and medium. Through a feminist lens, the chapter reevaluates this pair’s ubiquity in colonial and national visual culture, arguing that the image embodies the sublime power of the Nile valley and the desire to control that dangerous resource. By the 1950s, Efflatoun and Sirry retooled depictions of the working female body to argue for active membership in society for Egyptian women. The fellaha and her jug represent how a single image moved through constellational modernism.