Lot 5: Abdul Hadi El-Gazzar (Egyptian, 1925-1965)

Abdul Hadi El-Gazzar (Egyptian, 1925-1965)
The Talisman Bowl
signed in Arabic (lower left); signed and titled in Arabic (on the reverse)
oil on card laid on board
27 1/8 x 14 7/8in. (69 x 37.5cm.)
Painted in 1951

Sao Paolo Biennale 1953/1954

Sobhy Al-Sharouny, A Museum in a Book: The Farsi Art Collection "The Egyptian Works" Owned by Dr. Mohammed Said Farsi, Cairo, 1998 (illustrated in colour, p.293 and illustrated p.282 ref 30/41).
Enas Hosni, Contemporary Art Group: A Surviving Wealth of Admirable Art, Cairo, 2009 (illustrated in colour, p.60).

"I respected the ideas and philosophy of Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar who interpreted his revolutionary ideas and his philosophy through strokes of his brush and by his choice of colors. His moods were expressed in black and white articulating the contradictions between night and day, depression and hope... In the works of Gazzar I admired the themes taken from popular legends. The symbolic representation of the beauty of the human body is encompassed in his use of form and distribution of elements and their relationship to color and size".
DR. MOHAMMED SAID FARSI

ABDUL HADI EL-GAZZAR (1925-1965)

"Let me live in the world of magic I admire. I do not want to know what things are. Knowledge renders life unbearable. This is because the interpretation of knowledge is attainable in the subconscious alone. We are destined to appreciate knowledge in its entirety because we are an inseparable part of the gestalt knowledge."
(Abdul Hadi El-Gazzar)

Abdul Hadi El-Gazzar is among the most important of all Egyptian artists and perhaps the most inventive. Although he died when young, his astonishing diverse works of the 1950s and 1960s are amongst the most compelling images of twentieth century Middle Eastern art.

El-Gazzar was a member of the Group of Contemporary Art, which included such artists as Youssef Kamel, Ibrahim Masuda, Al-Habshi, Mohammed Khalil and Ahmad Maher. He was among its leading proponents of surrealism, along with his colleagues Hamed Nada and Samir Rafi'. As in the 1950s work of Nada and Rafi', there is a strong social message in El-Gazzar's earlier painting. As subjects he would choose ordinary working-class people as well as those who lived on the edge- mystics, soothsayers and circus acrobats. Through his strong line and colour, these depictions were to give these characters a certain nobility, but a pervasive feeling of magic and mystery permeates the paintings.

His first, metaphysical, stage was between 1938 and 1946. This was the time of his Shells Period, based on the anthropological theme of man before civilization and his relationship with the wilderness. His works of this time attracted the attention of international critics and thinkers, including Jean Paul Satre, an early admirer. Satre had seen his paintings when visiting the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art with Simone de Beauvoir.
The second, so-called Folkloric period of El-Gazzar's career reflected the influence of Sayeda Zeinab disctrict where medieval traditions resisted all the winds of modern westernization. It was in this district that he witnessed the moulids and the religious festivals that have been celebrated since the Fatmid period. He began to associate the intuitive aspect of art (its soul) with the essential element in the popular magical art (the hidden and the unknown).
The subjects of El-Gazzar's later works were very different, influenced as he was by the politics of contemporary Egypt and with a focus on technology and progress. A period of study in Italy saw major stylistic changes in his work, namely a marked tendency towards abstraction. It was through this aesthetic that in the early 1960s he depicted the colossal works of engineering taking place at the site of the Aswan High Dam, a project which employed thousands of workers and was the nationalist project of the post-revolution era. This later work show him to have been both fascinated and repelled by scientific progress and the interaction (or lack thereof) between man and machine. He moved away from the irrationalism of folklore towards a surrealism that resembled ever more closely science fiction. This was really an extraordinary thing for an Egyptian artist of the time to do -amongst his contemporaries there were no parallels.

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DR. MOHAMMED SAID FARSI

In one of El-Gazzar's more enigmatic compositions from his Folkloric period, the face of this figure is covered by a blackboard which carries Qur'anic verse, whilst he stands on only one foot and a wooden leg. He is holding a small boy, whom he appears to be punishing. Such dense and impenetrable symbolism is rare even in the work of El-Gazzar from this period.