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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Seif Wanly, 1947, oil on burlap, 33 × 68 cm. Cairo, Museum of Modern Egyptian Art.

We would like to thank the following people for their precious help in providing information for the biographies in this book: Samir Abdalla (Hamed Abdalla), Dominique Bermann-Martin (André Lhote), Isy Brachot (Enrico Brandani), Federico Crimi (Arturo Zanieri), Hamida Demirdache (Khadiga Riaz), Laila Effat (Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar), Fairouz, Tayseer and Yasmine El-Gazzar(Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar), Khalda Ezz El-Din Hammouda (Zeinab Abdel Hamid, Ezz El-Din Hammouda), Igor Hilbert (Jaro Hilbert), Lily Jouve (Salah Yousri), Mehri Khalil (André Lhote, Samir Rafi, Salah Yousri), Andreas Meier (Irmgard Burchard-Simaika), Hrant Minas Keshishian (Herant Antranikian, Onnig Avedissian, Baruyr Bardizbanian, Joseph Egoyan, Diran Garabedian, Hagop Hagopian, Hampar Hampartsoumian, Vahan Hovivian, Rose Papasian, Godjamanian Puzant, Simon Samsonian, Arté Topalian, Ashod Zorian), Sherine Morsi (Ahmed Morsi), Helen Moussa (Marguerite Nakhla), Azza Naguib (Gazbia Sirry), Sis Nercessian (Hagop Hagopian), Seta Saroukhan (Onnig Avedissian, Alexandre Saroukhan), Alessandro and Daniela Sebasti (Giuseppe Sebasti), Anita Shahda (Ibrahim Shahda), Nadia von Maltzahn (Amy Nimr)

4 Abdalla, Hamed 14 Abdel Hamid, Zeinab 22 Amin, Hussein Youssef 26 Angelopoulos, Aristomenis 32 Antranikian, Herant 36 Avedissian, Onnig 44 Ayad, Ragheb 52 Badaro, Clea 58 Bardizbanian, Baruyr 60 Baroukh, Ezéchiel 64 Beppi-Martin Pierre Joseph 70 Bernard, Émile 78 Bicar, Hussein 84 Biessy, Marie-Gabriel 88 Boeglin, Charles-François 92 Bonello, Joseph 94 Boyrie, Maurice 96 Brandani, Enrico 100 Bréval, Alfred Roger 110 Burchard-Simaika, Irmgard Micaela 118 Daforno Casonato, Amelia 122 Da Forno, Renzo 126 Efflatoun, Inji 138 Egoyan (Ego), Joseph (Joe) 142 El-Arnaouty, Mostafa 146 El-Bakri, Mohamed Fathi 148 El-Bassiouny, Mahmoud 152 El-Gazzar, Abdel Hadi 166 El-Khadem, Saad 174 El-Telmissany, Kamel 182 Farid, Maurice (Morris) 186 Farid, Vessela 192 Forcella, Paolo 196 Garabedian, Diran 200 Green-Viterbo, Suzy 204 Hagopian, Hagop 212 Halim, Tahia 224 Hammouda, Ezz El-Din 230 Hampartsoumian, Hampar 236 Hassan, Mohamed 244 Hilbert, Jaro 252 Hovivian, Vahan 256 Innocenti, Camillo 262 Julien (Jullien), Louis 264 Kamel, Farid 270 Kamel, Fouad 270 Kamel, Youssef 276 Khalil, Mahmoud 280 Khamis, Hamdi 282 Khayatt-Plant, Dora 284 Kiraz, Edmond 290 Lhote, André

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Lotfi, Abou Khalil Maridel (Armand Bellanti) Massouda, Ibrahim Mogli (Salem Abdullah Al-Habashi) Morsi, Ahmed Nada, Hamed Naghi, Effat Naghi, Mohamed Nakhla, Marguerite Némès, Éric de Nimr, Amy Owais, Mohamed Hamed Papageorge, Aristide Papasian, Rose Pauty, Edmond Puzant Godjamanian (Kodjamanian) Rafi, Samir Raïf, Ahmed Maher Reiner, Lucie-Caroline Riaz, Khadiga (Riad) Richard, Paul Riz, Angelo De Saad, Nahmeya (Nahmia) Sabbagh, Georges Sabry, Ahmed Saïd, Mahmoud Salinas, Laurent Marcel Samsonian, Simon Saroukhan, Alexandre Sasson, Andrée Sebasti, Giuseppe Seddik, Rateb Shahda, Ibrahim Sida, Youssef Sintès, Juan Sirry, Gazbia Soliman, Hassan Suarès, Carlo Taher, Salah Terni, Oscar Topalian, Arte Veillon, Margo Wanly, Adham Wanly, Seif Younan, Ramses Yousri, Salah Youssef, Kamal Zaki, Lotfi Zanieri, Arturo Zorian, Ashod

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List of group exhibitions

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Seif Wanly, 1947, oil on burlap, 33 × 68 cm. Cairo, Museum of Modern Egyptian Art.

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ABDALLA, Hamed

(top): Untitled, 1969, watercolour on paper, 58 × 68 cm. Cairo, Nahed Ghorbal Collection. (bottom): Cityscape, oil on canvas, 71 × 98 cm. Minia, Minia University (on loan from the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, Cairo).

ABDEL HAMID, Zeinab

(top): Sacromonte, 1996, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Cairo, Khalda Ezz El-Din Hammouda Collection. (bottom): The Busy Construction Site, 1963, oil on canvas, 79 × 100 cm. Beirut, The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

ABDEL HAMID, Zeinab

(top left): SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal. (top right): SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal, Issue no. 30, 4 November 1956. (bottom left): SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal, Issue no. 600, 8 October 1961. (bottom right): SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal, Special issue, 5 January 1958.

ANTRANIKIAN, Herant

SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal, March 1960.

ANTRANIKIAN, Herant

SAMIR Magazine, Dar El-Hilal, March 1960.

ANTRANIKIAN, Herant

(top): Landscape, 1930, oil on canvas, 76 × 120 cm. Private collection. (bottom left): The Armenian Church of Antelias, Lebanon, oil on canvas, 74 × 54 cm. Cairo, Hagopian Collection. (bottom right): View of San Marco campanile, Venice, oil on canvas, 53 × 39 cm. Cairo, Hagopian Collection. p. 39 (top): Scene with Two Minarets, late 1930s, oil on cardboard, 27.5 × 35 cm. Cairo, Pladian Collection. p. 39 (bottom): Entry to a Mosque, Nicosia, late 1930s, oil on cardboard, 27.5 × 35 cm. Cairo, Pladian Collection.

AVEDISSIAN, Onnig

BADARO, Clea (1913–1968) Clea Badaro was born in the Zamalek district of Cairo in 1913. When her mother, of Greek origin, passed away prematurely, her father, a lawyer and business man, took her and his other daughter Jeanne to Montreux in Switzerland, where they were brought up by their maternal grandmother. Clea attended school in Montreux, and when she was sixteen years old she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts of Lausanne, although her family were more convinced by her piano skills than her artistic talents. Concurrently, she spent four years attending courses on poster design and decorative arts. She was a star student of the great artist and decorator Jean-Jacques Mennet (1889– 1969). In 1932, during the final year of her studies, she was awarded the Grand Prize for her poster entitled L’Égypte, which was acquired by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications. Art critic Jean Moscatelli wrote an article on Badaro’s posters in 1932, praising her designs: ‘It seems that Clea Badaro’s remarkable skills will bring her a lot of success. One of her compositions, L’Égypte, has already been acquired by the Department of Tourism for the Egyptian State’s railways in view of it distributing copies of this poster in train stations around the world’.18 Badaro returned to Egypt in 1936 and settled in Alexandria, where she established her studio at the recently founded Atelier d’Alexandrie. During the 1930s, she regularly participated in the 18

Jean Moscatelli, ‘Affiches de Clea Badaro’, La Semaine égyptienne (Cairo), Christmas Issue, December 1932, p. 32.

BADARO, Clea

Cairo salons, sometimes exhibiting posters – such as Rouge Caméléon, Bières Stella and Parfums Charnay, which she exhibited at the 1933 Salon du Caire – or paintings, such as the self-portrait that she presented at the same salon in 1937. During the war years she worked in the hospitals and canteens which swarmed with soldiers returning from battle in the Northern desert. At that point in her artistic career, she was painting scenes of sailors and soldiers in cabarets, some of which ended up in the collections of the Guezireh Museum in Cairo and the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria. In Alexandria, she was introduced to the internationally renowned British novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912–90) at the beautiful Villa Ambron (19 Maamoun Street, Moharrem Bey). The villa was owned by the wealthy couple Aldo and Amelia Ambron, who often entertained the Alexandrian elite and who rented a space for Durrell to live in between 1941 and 1945. Amelia Ambron and one of her daughters, Gilda, were both painters and had their own studio in the villa, and they often invited Clea Badaro to paint with them there. Clea sketched Durrell during one of her visits to the Ambron studio, and he, in turn, later portrayed her as the character ‘Clea’ in his Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy of highly successful novels published between 1957 and 1960. ‘Clea’ was given a minor part in the first three novels, but the fourth and last book of the series was entirely dedicated to her character. In 1948 she spent the summer in the Dolomites, where, unusually for her, she produced a number of landscape paintings. Yet most often Clea’s preferred subjects were Bedouin women and Egyptian fellahins, as she enjoyed painting their graceful gestures, their proud labour and their flowing clothes. She also frequently painted motherand-child portraits, and sometimes animals, particularly cats, such as La Chatte which earned her a prize at the Salon du Caire of 1958, or horses, seen in some of her circus compositions. In 1950 Clea married the Alexandrian artist Giovanni di Pietro, who had exhibited at the 1948 exhibition of the Atelier d’Alexandrie. Being at the peak of her career, Badaro took part in several national and international exhibitions, including selected biennials of Venice, Alexandria and São Paulo, and various shows in Russia and Spain. In 1959 Badaro exhibited some of her works at the Galerie Lutétia in Cairo, following which she was praised for her portrayal of the human body by French critic Jean Moscatelli in Le Journal d’Égypte. In 1963 Badaro travelled to Ravenna, Italy, where she began to paint groups of Egyptian women set against a gold background which she modelled with a knife to create a mosaic impression, reminiscent of the mosaics she greatly admired in Ravenna. Later, these paintings were dubbed ‘icons’ by the Parisian press, while Bosnian art historian Prof Dr Hilde Zaloscer (1903–99), who taught at the University of Alexandria (1943–68), compared Clea’s fellahins to figures found in Pietro Della Francesca’s famous frescoes in Arezzo. In 1961 Clea’s husband passed away and her own health also started to decline. Her sister Jeanne Engalytcheff-

Café scene, oil on panel, 83 × 64 cm. Alexandria, Moharrem Bey, Museum of Fine Arts.

BADARO, Clea

Jean Moscatelli, ‘Affiches de Clea Badaro’, La Semaine égyptienne (Cairo), Christmas Issue, December 1932, p. 32.

BADARO, Clea

Café scene, oil on panel, 83 × 64 cm. Alexandria, Moharrem Bey, Museum of Fine Arts.

BADARO, Clea

Self-portrait, 1958, oil on canvas, 71.7 × 50.5 cm. Doha, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.

EFFLATOUN, Inji (1924–1989) Inji Efflatoun was born on 16 April 1924, in a small secluded palace in Shubra, Cairo, to an aristocratic family of Turkish origins. Although she was brought up speaking French, she truly represented the spirit of the Egyptian culture at that time. She learned Arabic at a young age and spoke it with a pure Egyptian accent. Her father, Hassan Efflatoun (Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and the famous entomologist) had to take her out of boarding school – the French Collège du Sacré-Coeur – and enrolled her instead in the Lycée français, where he could better oversee her education and have more control over her rebellious attitude. At the Lycée, she proved her artistic talent at a very early stage when she spontaneously illustrated stories, poems and fairytales written by her elder sister Gulpérie (born in 1923), which her uncle then published in a French magazine that he was issuing at the time in the 1930s. Inji’s mother, Salha Efflatoun, was an artistic, independent and intelligent woman with a strong personality. She had married Inji’s father at the age of fourteen, and divorced him when she was eighteen. She was a pioneer fashion designer in the Arab world, the first woman to open her own boutique in Cairo in 1936, Maison Salha, later managing a garment factory that employed hundreds of workers. In the early 1940s Inji started drawing lessons with

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the great Marxist Egyptian artist Kamel El-Telmissany, who was spearheading the revolutionary Egyptian Surrealist movement at the time. Inji obtained her Baccalaureate in 1944 and Salha Hanem tried to convince her daughter to travel to France to pursue her studies in art, or to join one of the famous art studios in Paris, but Inji categorically refused. Instead, Inji worked as a drawing teacher and French language teacher at the Lycée français until 1948, and as a journalist until 1952. Inji Efflatoun’s 1940s paintings were characterised by the Surreal atmosphere that prevailed at the time. She transcribed her dreams and thoughts on a dark background in a narrative way. Works from that period include Monster and Bird (1941), Black Garden (1942) and The Bulging of the Tree (1943). With El-Telmissany’s support, Inji was very much involved in the activities of the Art and Liberty Group (1939–45), alongside fellow artists Fouad Kamel, Ramses Younan, Georges Henein, Albert Cossery and other members. She took part in the two first Art and Liberty Group exhibitions of 1942 and that of 1943. In addition, Inji was at the heart of a human-rights activist movement, when she joined a group of communist intellectuals in 1942, many of whom were Jewish (known as Iskra).78 One of her fellow members was the novelist Latifa Al-Zayyat (1923– 96), who published a seminal book The Open Door (1960) that explores a young Egyptian woman’s political and sexual awakening in the context of the British occupation. It was produced as a movie in 1963 directed by Henri Barakat and played by Fatenn Hamama, Saleh Selim, Mahmoud Morsi and Hassan Youssef. In 1945, Al-Zayyat and Efflatoun founded the League of University and Institute’s Young Women, which tackled issues of class struggles and gender politics, and, like many leftist organisations of that time, advocated the ousting of the British from Egypt. Yet it was a period of social, political and cultural complexity and uncertainty which had a considerable impact on Inji’s artistic creativity and personality. This stage in her life is defined by anxiety, tension and the search for her true self and identity, given the paradox of her French background versus her militancy for Egyptian nationalism. When her mother and close friends had encouraged her to go study art abroad, she recorded her reaction to this pressure in her memoirs, writing that ‘it was neither acceptable nor rational that I leave Egypt to go in the “khawagât” countries for several years, when I was thinking with all my heart of the tedious and painful process of Egyptianization for myself, for my personality, I, who spoke French and who had lived in a society wrapped up with cellophane. Until I was seventeen years old, my language was French and when I started being in contact with people, I couldn’t undo the knot that tied my tongue! How could I be cut off from the tree?’79 She even resented art, and stopped painting for 78

For more information on Inji Efflatoun’s political engagements and activities, see Didier Monciaud, ‘Les engagements d’Injy Aflatun dans l’Égypte des années quarante’, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, no. 126, 2015, pp. 73–95. 79 Saïd Khayäl (ed.), Inji Efflatoun’ Memoirs (Kuwait: Dar Suäd

Portrait of a Prisoner, 1963, oil on panel, 50 × 38 cm. Beirut, The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

EFFLATOUN, Inji

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Self-portrait, 1958, oil on canvas, 71.7 × 50.5 cm. Doha, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.

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EFFLATOUN, Inji

Portrait of a Prisoner, 1963, oil on panel, 50 × 38 cm. Beirut, The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

EFFLATOUN, Inji

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(top left): Landscape, 1934, oil on board, 44.5 × 41.5 cm. Cairo, Heliopolis, Nerces Papasian Collection. (top right): Riverscape, 1934, oil on board, 44 × 41 cm. Cairo, Heliopolis, Nerces Papasian Collection. (bottom left): Promenade, 1934, oil on board, 44 × 41 cm. Cairo, Heliopolis, Nerces Papasian Collection. (bottom right): Autumn, 1934, oil on board, 44.5 × 41.5 cm. Cairo, Heliopolis, Nerces Papasian Collection.

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PUZANT, Godjamanian

(top left): Night Landscape, 1945, oil on canvas, 64 × 86.5 cm. Cairo, Armenian Artistic Club Collection. (top right): Buffaloes, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 59 cm. Cairo, Heliopolis, Tchakedjian Collection. (bottom left): The Peasant, 1941, oil on plywood, 83 × 62 cm. Alexandria, Dikran Yerget Club Collection. (bottom right): Child with Ramadan Lantern, 1966, oil on canvas. Cairo, Heliopolis, Tchakedjian Collection.

PUZANT, Godjamanian

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SAMSONIAN, Simon (1912–2003) The artist Simon Samsonian was born in Samson, a small seaport in North Turkey located in the province of Trabizon. His exact date of birth is unknown, but is most likely around 1912, given that he vaguely remembered being two or three years old during the Armenian genocide of 1915. During that dark episode, 1.5 million Armenians (around 75% of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire) were murdered. Simon’s parents and most of his relatives were not spared. His older sister Anahid managed to save Simon by lining him up with children who were being rescued by Greek nuns. Consequently, Simon was taken into an orphanage in Smyrna, today known as Izmir, on Turkey’s west coast, but he was separated from Anahid and she disappeared from his life. As he only knew his first name and had been found in Samson, the orphanage allocated him the last name ‘Samsonian’. It was not until relatively late in his life, in 1960, that Simon found out his true surname (Klujian), when he was reunited with his sister Anahid in Alexandria, Egypt. Greek troops occupied Izmir on 15 May 1919, ensuring safety for the orphanage. However, Izmir fell into the hands of Turkish republican troops on 9 September 1922, and they set fire to the coastal town’s Greek and Armenian quarters. The young Simon, now aged ten, again had to flee, with thousands of others, and found temporary refuge in Constantinople (Istanbul); but within a year, on 6 October 1923, the Turks also took

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SAMSONIAN, Simon

control of that city. This time the orphans were whisked away by American warships to the beautiful Greek island of Syra, where they were housed in a temporary orphanage site founded in 1918 by the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE). After these traumatic episodes and displacements, Simon could finally enjoy the last few years of his childhood in peace, living in Syra between October 1923 and August 1928. Those were without doubt the most memorable days of his early life, yet the anguish he had experienced beforehand would permeate the rest of his life, soon becoming expressed through his art. Samsonian moved to Egypt in 1928 and lived on the top floor of Kalousdian Armenian National School at Boulaq, Cairo, along with thirty-two other orphans. When he graduated, he was awarded a scholarship by the Kalousdian Alumni Association to study at the local Leonardo Da Vinci School, an Italian art school, from 1932 to 1936. He won the first prize of his graduation year in 1936, and held his first one-man show that same year at the Armenian Artistic Club of Cairo, on top of taking part for the first time in the annual Salon du Caire, where the Egyptian state acquired one of his works for its newly founded Museum of Modern Art in Cairo. His first job was in an Armenian printing house, before quickly being appointed an art teacher in the Kalousdian Armenian National School (1936–39). In 1939 he married Lucy Guendimian, one of his students in Kalousdian: she became his lifelong partner and friend, and the mother for their three children. Thus, by the mid 1930s, this orphaned and displaced survivor of the Armenian genocide had established himself as an artist on the bustling Egyptian art scene. He found himself in the same circle as his peers Ashod Zorian, Hagop Hagopian and Puzant Godjamanian, and befriended pioneers of Modern Egyptian Art such as Mahmoud Saïd, Ahmed Morsi and Effat Naghi. Continuing to exhibit his works regularly at the Cairo Salons and other venues, he featured prominently with seven of his paintings at the first major exhibition of Armeno-Egyptian artists, held in Cairo in 1945 at the Société orientale de publicité, organised by Les Amis de la culture arménienne. In the wake of this success, another one-man show took place during the first half of March 1949 in Cairo, much praised by the art critic Dikran Antranikian. Yet the pivotal year in Simon’s artistic career was 1950, when he toured Europe, visiting Italy and travelling to both Paris and London, in order to study the great artistic heritage of Western Europe. That year he was also one of the artists exhibiting at the Egyptian Pavilion of the International Biennial of Venice. Although this journey drastically altered his aesthetic approach, Simon never fell under the direct influence of the great European masters – whether classical or modern – and remained true to the originality of his own personal style. As a result, when he returned to Cairo, his stylised Realism gradually integrated selected aspects of Fauvism and Cubism. The years 1950 to 1968, the period following his European trip, are often considered as the most brilliant of his artistic career, during

Cello-Player, 1957, oil on canvas, 119.3 × 78.7 cm. New York, Private collection.

SAMSONIAN, Simon

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Cello-Player, 1957, oil on canvas, 119.3 × 78.7 cm. New York, Private collection.

SAMSONIAN, Simon

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