Written by NATHALIE BSAT

Hamed Abdalla was born in Cairo in 1917 to a farming family. As a pupil in Qur’anic school, he was initially trained in calligraphy and later enrolled at the tuition-free School of Applied Arts in Giza. His parents supported his decision to study wrought iron there, hoping he would become a skilled artisan, but 15-year-old Abdalla quickly realized that his interest in art went beyond the purely decorative. Skipping the classes he found dull, he frequented libraries and zoological gardens instead and read about history, art history, and philosophy. He grew more and more unsatisfied with the material being taught in his classes, as pupils were only encouraged to copy the masters rather than expressing themselves artistically. When Abdalla finally dropped out of the School of Applied Arts, his father wanted him to find a job, but the young artist kept drawing against his father’s will. Father and son opposed each other so adamantly on this issue that the former cut the latter off, refusing him food; this only pushed Abdalla to pursue his passion with greater conviction. When he was denied admission to School of Fine Arts in Cairo due to his lack of academic experience, he did not give up; instead, he became a self-taught artist whose successful career defied the norms of the overwhelmingly bourgeois Egyptian art world. 

Indeed, though Abdalla loved to learn and was constantly expanding his art historical knowledge, he sought to liberate himself from institutional constraints. 

He disliked the system of arts education so vehemently that he refused several university professorships, teaching only at the art school he established in Cairo. This school only ran from 1942 to 1948, but in its brief lifetime, several prominent artists were trained there, including Tahya Halim and Inji Efflatoun.

In keeping with his anti-establishment philosophy, the artist preferred technical experimentation to rigid classical formulas and has ultimately been credited by critics with the conception of a new school of Egyptian painting. His style bears many of the hallmarks of abstract expressionism yet remains figurative, in conversation at once with European modernism and Egyptian artistic genealogy. His work depicts Egyptian society in black, white, and bright earth-toned acrylic paint that, applied to paper, creates a distinctive crumbling on the work’s surface. This adds a unique third dimension to the work and blurs the boundary between painting and sculpture. Furthermore, it could be argued that this stylistic choice documented the transformation and urbanization of the Egyptian landscapes he portrayed, its crackling resembling cracks in walls, smoke-like textures, dirt, and soapy oil spills.

Having exhibited in Egyptian galleries throughout the 1940s, Abdalla began his international career in the 1950s, showing in Paris, London and Amsterdam. In 1956, he moved to Copenhagen, settling in Paris ten years later. Though he lived in Europe, the artist remained passionate about politics and ideologies of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism. After the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967, Abdalla refused to do business with many European galleries in protest of their countries’ stand against Egypt and the Arab coalition. Subsequently, years passed in relative isolation, and the break in his exhibition history led to his misleading reputation as a “marginal” artist that has been rediscovered. Contrary to how he is perceived today, he was very much a relevant artist of his time. 

Hamed Abdalla drew inspiration from personal research and travels, including a six-month journey to Upper Egypt in 1939. He emerged from this trip with a deeper appreciation for the artistic heritage of his nation, from antiquity through the twentieth century. He studied Islamic art passionately, particularly Islamic pottery:  his works reflect much of the trends seen in early Islamic pottery. For example, Le Chauve(1958) uses gouache on crumpled silk paper and cardboard to depict a male face whose lines and wrinkles spell out "the bald man" in Arabic. The lines are mostly black and brown, and patches of faded yellow, red and green are dispersed on the white surface, echoing the patterns of 12th-century Western Islamic ceramics as they developed through mutual artistic exchange with the T'ang dynasty of China. Abdalla used calligraphy for the first time in depicting humans, drawing from the distinctive use of calligraphy in medieval Islamic pottery. The use of calligraphy in the decorative arts, especially ceramics and glassware, has been a hallmark of Islamic societies since the birth of Islam itself; the Arabic language, as the language of the Holy Qur’an, inherently possesses a talismanic value that can bestow a mundane object with an apotropaic function. 

Many non-Islamic cultures throughout history adopted the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy, utilizing similar designs in pottery (as seen in T’ang dynasty China), metalwork (as seen in Catholic countries neighboring Umayyad Spain), and later into the abstract and cubist movements of Europe. Abdalla’s understanding of his place in artistic genealogy took this history of appropriation into account. The artist believed in two currents of art history: the Western, which originated with ancient Greek art and peaked first with the understanding of perspective in the Renaissance and later with Impressionism’s light-related innovations, and the Eastern, which is aesthetically rooted in the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, followed by Islamic calligraphic arts and abstraction. Abdalla considered his work firmly aligned with the Eastern current, and rejected attempts to explain his oeuvre in Western terms. When his paintings were likened to Klee’s, for example, he insisted they merely re-appropriated what had been appropriated from the East in the first place. The works in question include Scarcity (1959), which arguably resembles Klee’s Young Moe (1938), and Consciousness of Soil(1956) which harmonizes with Klee’s checkered cityscapes such as Castle and Sun(1928), themselves supposedly inspired by the German artist’s trip Tunisia. Scarcity, like Le Chauve, is a study of Arabic words as shapes that define the space on the artist’s canvas as well as borders between different bright colors on crumpled silk paper. Young Moe also contains forms that resemble Arabic letters but are devoid of their signifying function, with different patches of color in and outside the black lines.

Abdalla adopted the language as the backbone of his abstraction, given that it is the most cherished and unifying power in the Arab world. He molded Arabic calligraphy into organic forms, or bodies, confidently articulating them in symbolic compositions that would depict different abstract representations. He painted figures, revolutionary statements, and realistic cultural situations in different mediums, experimenting with unconventional materials such as tar, aluminum, airbrush painting and texturing techniques that included burning with a blowtorch. Abdalla believed in art as a tool of expression, rather than a didactic material – it indicates, it doesn’t tell – and thus aimed to raise awareness of cultural and political conflicts through his work without portraying forceful or propagandistic perspectives. 

Hamed Abdalla passed away in Paris in 1985.

Sources

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Cinemeteque. Vimeo. February 04, 2018. Accessed June 17, 2019. https://vimeo.com/144694478. 

Eigner, Saeb. Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran. London: Merrell, 2015.

Karnouk, Liliane. Modern Egyptian Art, 1910-2003. Cairo, NY: American University in Cairo Press, 2005.

Sharouny, Sobhi Al, Dr. A Museum In A Book: Selections From Dr. Mohamed Said Farsi's Art Collection. 1st ed. Cairo: Dar Al Shorouk, 1998.

Valenti, Paola. "Paul Klee's Journeys to Italy and Tunisia." Mediterranean Studies 15 (2006): 190-209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41166999. 

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Zein, Roula El. Abdalla: L'Oeil De L'Esprit: La Vie Et L'oeuvre De L'artiste-Peintre. Paris: Bachari, 2014.