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Ibrahim El-Salahi A VISIONARY MODERNIST

Salah M. Hassan

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Ibrahim El-Salahi A VISIONARY MODERNIST

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Ibrahim Et-Satahi RY M

Edited by Satan M. Hassan

With contributions by Sarah Adams Iftilchar Dadi Ibrahim El-Salahi Hassan Musa Chilca Olceke-Agulu

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Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by the Museum for African Art, New York.

Guest Curator: Salah M. Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor, Cornell University We are grateful for the support of the exhibition provided in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Sharjah Art Museum.

Warhol Foundation ShxjahMuseursDepartmert

This exhibition catalogue is published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

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The Getty Foundation

and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.

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Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs: Donna Ghelerter Text Editors: David Frankel and Kyle Bentley Design: Florio Design, New York Printed and bound in China by Global PSD Copyright 2012 C) Museum for African Art, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the Museum for African Art, 36-01 43rd Avenue, Long Island City, NY nun www.africanart.org All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936632 ISBN: 978-0-945802-58-7 Distributed by: University of Washington Press P.O. Box 50096 Seattle, WA 98145-5096 www.washington.edu/uwpress

Front cover: Cat. no. 39. Untitled, 1994. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, 2008.3.4 Page 6: Cat. no. 19. Vision of the Tomb,1965. Museum for African Art, New York, 2008.2.1

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CONTENTS 7 FOREWORD

Elsie McCabe Thompson 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE MAKING OF A MODERNIST 10 Ibrahim El-Salahi and the Making of African and Transnational Modernism So/oh M. Hassan 28 Ibrahim El-Salahi and Postcolonial Modernism in the Independence Decade Chika Okeke-Agulu 40 Ibrahim El-Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism in a Comparative Perspective lftikhar Dadi 54 In My Garment There Is Nothing but God: The Work

of Ibrahim El-Salahi Sarah Adams 68 El-Salahi, the Wise Enemy: Between the Artist of

the Authority and the Authority of the Artist Hassan Musa

EL-SALAHI ON EL-SALAHI so The Artist in His Own Words Ibrahim E/-Salahi 92 Prison Notebook: A Visual Memoir So/oh M. Hassan 104 Ibrahim El-Salahi Interviewed by Ulli Beier 112

CATALOGUE

188 ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHY 189 CONTRIBUTORS 190 LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION 191 DONORS 192 BOARD AND STAFF 193 PHOTO CREDITS

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FOREWORD African artworks are often bracketed into the categories of traditional and contemporary. Scholars have long debated the validity of these groupings, as African artists are no more bound to rigid rules of past and present than the rest of the world is. There are phases, shifts, and developments that are not necessarily tethered to a single time or place.

For example, there is not one African modernist period but, rather, multiple modernisms.

The Museum for African Art has always prided itself on challenging the limiting classification of African art practices. Through our pioneering exhibitions, we have sought to open up a space for discussing the extraordinary variety of works produced by artists from Africa and of African descent. We continue this tradition with our presentation of Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, which focuses on the work of a groundbreaking artist and true visionary.

Ibrahim El-Salahi is a deeply spiritual man. His work reflects a lifetime of study, meditation, and introspection.

Revered throughout Africa and the Middle East, he has inspired generations of artists with his meditative approach to imagery. This exhibition traces his lifelong journey to date—from his early years in Sudan to his self-imposed exile in Qatar to his current life in the United Kingdom. Through each phase of his life, El-Salahi's critically accomplished painting practice has been guided by his exploration of his Islamic faith. We are pleased to present this retrospective of his work and grateful that he has allowed us to join him in this phase of his journey.

The Museum was first introduced to El-Salahi's art in 2004 by Salah Hassan, guest curator of the exhibition and editor of this publication. We immediately knew that presenting this retrospective was imperative and have worked tirelessly to make the project a reality ever since. However, it is due to Hassan's constant dedication and determination that Ibrahim EI-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist has come to fruition. His rigorous scholarship and unwavering belief in the importance of this artist's work have brought us to this moment.

Many individuals have helped produce this retrospective and catalogue. I would like to thank everyone at the Museum for African Art who has contributed to the project over the years. Lisa Binder, curator of contemporary art, worked closely with the artist, the guest curator, and the Museum's registrar, Amanda Thompson, to organize the beautiful selection of works on view. The catalogue would not have been possible without Donna Ghelerter, associate director of curatorial affairs, and her dedication can be seen on every page. In addition, we are grateful for the exhibition support provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Sharjah Art Museum,and for the catalogue support provided by the Getty Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund.

Elsie McCabe Thompson President Museum for African Art, New York

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The exhibition Ibrahim EI-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist and its acccompanying publication have come to fruition due to the work of many devoted individuals. When we began our quest several years ago to bring Ibrahim El-Salahi's art to the world, he was already a well-respected figure in Sudan as well as in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among other countries where he has resided or exhibited over the years. A prolific artist committed to the journey of art making, El-Salahi has developed a significant body of work that is meticulous, articulate, focused, and challenging. The Museum for African Art is proud to present this career retrospective of a modern master.

Our deepest gratitude goes to Ibrahim El-Salahi for trusting the Museum for African Art with this retrospective of his life's work. It has been an honor working with Ibrahim, for he has always been extremely patient and kind. His stories have never failed to enthrall and energize us. To those who supported him in his early career, throughout his time in exile, and into the present, we thank you for recognizing the important contribution he has made to the history of art and to global modernism. Sincere thanks also go to Katherine Et-Salahi, who was essential to the organization and preparation of the publication and exhibition tour. Without her, this project would not have been possible.

In the beginning stages of organizing the exhibition, we were fortunate to gain the support of many individuals and institutions from around the globe. Their efforts helped lift the project off the ground and launch it to its current success. Iftikhar Dadi and Cheryl Finley, both colleagues and associate professors in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University, provided tremendous assistance in selecting, photographing, and documenting the artwork. The help and enthusiasm of Gilane Tawadros,founding director of INIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) in London, and her staff were crucial to the show's development. Damien Pwono,former officer of arts, media, and culture at the Ford Foundation (and current executive director of the Aspen Institute Global Initiative on Culture and Society), provided generous research support. Els van der Plas, former director of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, has been an avid champion of El-Salahi's creative output, ensuring that the artist receives the recognition he deserves. Okwui Enwezor and Manthia Diawara warrant special thanks for their enthusiastic support and encouragement, personal and intellectual, throughout the process of developing this exhibition.

The involvement of the Museum for African Art began with the tireless effort of Laurie Ann Farrell, the Museum's former curator of contemporary art(and the current executive director of exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design), who provided vital assistance in the planning stages. The Africana Studies and Research Center and Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University welcomed Ibrahim as an artist-in-residence first in 2007, and again in 2009 at the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM). Our profound thanks go to all the institutions and individuals who graciously lent their El-Salahi drawings and paintings to the exhibition. Skoto Gallery in New York assisted the Museum in securing integral works. Oxford Exhibition Services and Constantine, Ltd. in London showed great attention in their care of Ibrahim's art. Jeremy Johnston is responsible for the thoughtful exhibition design. Our sincere gratitude goes to JP Morgan Chase for gifting the stunning painting Vision ofthe Tomb (1965) to the Museum for African Art's permanent collection.

Many thanks to those who contributed essays to the catalogue: Sarah Adams, Iftikhar Dadi, Hassan Musa, and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Professor Mustafa Adam eloquently translated the essays by Musa and El-Salahi from Arabic. The scholar Ulli Beier (1922-2011) and novelist Tayeb Salih (1929-2009) provided much inspiration in their thoughts and words on their esteemed colleague and friend. Special thanks to Jerry L. Thompson and Andy Keate for their photographs of the artwork, Linda Florio for her elegant publication design, and David Frankel and Kyle Bentley for their insightful editing.

A number of individuals at the Museum for African Art brought their expertise to this exhibition and publication.

Thanks to Elsie McCabe Thompson, president of the Museum for African Art, and to the Board of Trustees for their continued belief in the importance of El-Salahi's work. Enid Schildkrout, chief curator emerita, and Donna Ghelerter, associate director of curatorial affairs, encouraged the project from the very start. The ongoing attention of Enid, Donna, and Lisa Binder, curator of contemporary art since 2007 contributed greatly to the project's realization. Lisa's many meetings with Ibrahim led to a thoughtful and insightful selection of works. The Museum's previous traveling exhibition coordinator, Brendan Wattenberg, and registrar, Kate Caiazza, passed the mantle to Ryan Dennis and Amanda Thompson, respectively. Ryan worked energetically to coordinate the exhibition tour, while Amanda's expertise is

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greatly appreciated in handling the show's complicated logistics. Carol Braide, publications manager, made sure that the catalogue images flawlessly reflect the artist's work. Eve Perry, assistant registrar, and Roger Arnold, curatorial assistant, kept the project organized and on track. Emily Crane and Emily Alesandrini assisted with many details during their internships. Thanks also to Connie Smith, research assistant, for her highly competent help both in New York and in the UK. The partnership with the Sharjah Art Museum, which we are very pleased to have as the opening venue for the show, was crucial to the success of this project. This collaboration would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of Sheikha Hoor Bint Sultan Al-Qasimi, president of Sharjah Art Foundation, and Manal Ataya, director-general of the Sharjah Museums Department. We are grateful to everyone at the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Sharjah Museums Department for ensuring that the exhibition opens in a cultural institution of such global reputation and reach.

We wish to thank all of the organizations that provided funds to make this project possible. The Prince Claus Fund was an early and constant supporter of the publication. The Getty Foundation also provided publication support.

Funding for the exhibition was provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Sharjah Art Museum.

Ibrahim is grateful to friends and family who have stood by his side and encouraged him to bring his message to life. In this regard, he would especially like to recognize Liza El-Salahi and Carina Ray, who personally helped him during his visits to New York to work on this retrospective. He wishes to mention the ICM group in Ithaca, Natalie Melas, Ramez Elias, Fouad Makki, Viranjini Munasinghe, Barry Maxwell, Shelley Wong, and Julie Moore, who have become part of an extended family that has made him feel right at home. His special gratitude goes to professor Cindy Hazan, dean of the Carl Becker House, and her husband, Rick Canfield, for hosting him and for making him a Baker Institute fellow, and to Dean Mohsen Mostafavi and Peter Turner for the generous studio space they provided during his residency at Cornell. Ibrahim is also grateful to several individuals at Cornell who have assisted him with this project, including Kimerly Cornish, Amanda Gilvin, and Cindy Telage. In addition, Ibrahim has asked us to offer his thanks in the following words: As long as I live, I will dearly cherish, with tremendous affection, the memory ofthe teachers who have contributed to my development with loving care and guidance. First among them are my teachers at Wadi Sayidna secondary school: El-Khair Hashim, Taloudi,and Mr. Davis; and then Shafig Shawgi,Osman Abdallah Wagel Allah,and Denis Williams at the School ofDesign, Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum,later affiliated with the Khartoum Technical Institute. lam also indebted and grateful to my instructors at the Slade School of Fine Art, University ofLondon: Ernst Gombrich,professor ofart history at the University ofLondon;Sam Carter,lecturer on the science ofperspectives and my supervisor at the Slade School ofFine Art; and Dr. Ulli Beier, who made it possible for me to show my work internationally. In this regard,I should also mention all the museums,galleries,and other spaces that have opened their gates to embrace my work,and have also given me the chance to enjoy and benefitfrom their exhibits and to attend seminars,debates,and public lectures on issues ofcontemporary art. I must also mention the artists, poets,and writers who are myfriends and acquaintances,and whose works and ideas I greatly admire—they have made the ordeal ofliving tolerable. May the almighty Allah bless those who have passed away and grant those still living longevity and prosperity.

Museum for African Art, New York and Salah M. Hassan, guest curator and Goldwin Smith Professor, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi and the Making of African and Transnational Modernism SALAH M. HASSAN "A picture is no more than a mirror,a vehicle that takes one back to one's self to turn one's sight inward to find the Self within and begin to meditate." —Ibrahim El-Salahi, 2005' OVER MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS of sustained productivity and intellectual engagement,the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi has been one of the most prominent figures of African modernism. Through both his extraordinary legacy as a writer and critic and the remarkable breadth of his artwork, in which he has deeply explored all kinds of painterly strategies, he has made foundational contributions to the modernist movement in African visual arts. Yet to understand those contributions requires a rigorous effort to transcend traditional Eurocentric dichotomies rampant in art historical discourse, dividing West and non-West and giving primacy to one and derivative status to the other.

El-Salahi's work must be located within local, national, and transnational spaces in ways that would unravel the fallacies inherent in binary articulations of modernity. This approach will open up an interpretive and critical space in which to resituate African modernity and modernism's inscriptions in local and global pasts, presents, and futures.

El-Salahi's accomplishments offer profound possibilities for both interrogating and repositioning African modernism in the context of modernity as a universal idea, one in which African history is part and parcel of world history. El-Salahi has been remarkable for his creative and intellectual thought, and his rare body of work, innovative visual vocabulary, and spectacular style have combined to shape African modernism in the visual arts in a powerful way. His contributions, while distinctive and unique, show striking resemblances to those of pioneer African modernists such as Skunder Boghossian, Dumile Feni, Ernest Mancoba, Gerard Sokoto, Malangatana Ngwenya, and other important figures whose decades-long journeys have transformed visual art in Africa. Like several of those artists, he has also had his share of an itinerant life, which has significantly molded his career.

The motifs and images, styles and forms of El-Salahi's work have drawn from a great array of classical and traditional African, Arab, and Islamic visual sources as well as from European ones.

His unique painterly language and praxis have left indelible marks on the arts scene today, serving as a formative influence on the work of a generation of artists in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. His experiments have also invited comparison with those of his contemporaries on the African literary scene—Chinua Achebe,Tayeb Salih, and Naguib Mahfouz, among others. El-Salahi's connections to these figures proved fruitful in the late 19505 and early'6os when he participated in the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, an experimental arts and drama workshop in lbadan, Nigeria, initiated by the German expatriate Ulli Beier and his British wife, the painter Georgina Beier. Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gerald Felix-Tchicaya, Jacob Lawrence, Denis Williams, and others who were integral to the Mbari club early in their careers have since emerged as artists and writers whose work has made a profound impact on modern African arts and literature.'

Fig. i El-Salahi in front of The Last Sound.

Mid-196os

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The development of the Mbari club's interdisciplinary orientation was among the most productive and provocative episodes in the history of modern African art. This emphasis obviously appealed to El-Salahi, whose characteristic modernist vision crystallized in his ability to interpolate Islamic, African, and Western expressions inherent in twentieth-century African modernism, a modernism at once transnational and cosmopolitan. The provision of new tropes of self-expression and

self-representation that traversed frontiers of environment and geography was one of this visionary artist's major achievements.

El-Salahi shares with many African artists of his generation a lack of recognition for his achievements. In historical texts on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, both systematic and systemic exclusionary practices have sidelined and ghettoized these artists' work.3 As Edward Said poignantly argued, the dominant history of Western modernism leaves out the massive infusions of nonWestern art and culture into the metropolitan heartlands throughout the twentieth century.4 These glaring omissions have contributed to persistent patterns of effacement of the paramount influences these artists have exerted on Western modernist art practices, as well as of their contributions to the host societies they adopted as their home. As Said also argued, their intellectual production, as it overlaps with that of their European counterparts, is essential to any consideration of what constitutes global modernity. It is no random act of kindness or charity to recognize their powerful intellectual and cultural production, which can in no way be analyzed "as merely reactive assertions of separate native or colonized subjectivity."5 The question remains: how can we account for and theorize the contribution of an artist such as El-Salahi within the largely exclusionary narrative of modernity and modernism etched in mainstream art historical scholarship? As I argued in a recent essay, postcolonial theory offers useful critiques of the dominant discourse on modernity by showing how the very terms of the debate are necessarily Eurocentric.6 Postcolonial theorists have shown how mainstream scholarship continues to emphasize Western social transformations and artistic experiments, relegating the social and artistic developments of other regions to secondary status.7 Most hopeful among their ideas is Stuart Hall's call to abandon the binary center/periphery model altogether in favor of a consideration of patterns of continuity and interconnection in modernism everywhere. Arguing for the inseparability of modernisms globally, Hall emphasizes that "the world is moving outwards and can no longer be structured in terms of the center/periphery relation. It has to be defined in terms of a set of interesting [centers], which are both different from and related to one another." He also points out,"If you think about where important movements are being made,sometimes they happen in the centre, but the most exciting artists are those who live simultaneously in the [center] and at the periphery."8 This understanding of representation is reinforced by Timothy Mitchell's emphasis on the ways in which modernity reinscribes itself outside the metropole through a translation that performatively incorporates difference. Like Hall, Mitchell urges us to attend to the modern not simply as a series of singular events but as it is staged through repetition. In this view, the modernity of the margin, through repetitions produced by successive acts of translation, attempts to stabilize the idea of the modern, yet simultaneously undermines it by constantly demonstrating its contingency.9 Hall and Mitchell agree on the need to extend the understanding of modernity without falling prey to simplified, prescriptive oppositional categories. This task is vital not only for capturing the historicity of representation but for expanding the production of knowledge of African modernism, a subject I tackle briefly below in the context of El-Salahi's art.

At this juncture it would be useful to mention the characteristics that have come to define our understanding of African modernism. This contextualization, albeit abbreviated, is fundamental to examining how El-Salahi's contributions have been effectively integrated within a specific genre of representational practices. To start, and for the sake of comparability, a word must be uttered with respect to the question of periodization. The period we refer to as modern in Africa is a markedly more recent and uneven phenomenon than it is in Europe. In Egypt and other parts of North Africa and in former settler colonies such as South Africa, spatial proximity to Europe or different kinds of traffic with it resulted in signs of modernism in art and society as early as the mid-nineteenth 12

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and early twentieth centuries. In Egypt for example the modernist project started in early to midnineteenth century with the radical reforms of the Europhile Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Governor of Egypt during the Ottoman Rule who, though not a modernist in the nationalist sense of the word, was

known for the transformation of Egyptian society in all spheres—economic, cultural, and social. These reforms led to establishment of industrial, agricultural, and educational bases which were credited as the foundation of modernism in Egyptian arts and cultural production. A stark contrast emerged in other parts of West and Central Africa, where modernism was a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon born out of colonial and postcolonial processes. There, the conscious claim to modernity implies a sense of the social, cultural, and artistic transformations related to colonialism and of the myriad struggles associated with decolonization.

In this complex context, the intersection of the visual arts and decolonization constitutes an important defining moment of modernism in Africa as a whole. Integral to this moment is the rise of national consciousness and the project of nation-building. As a cautionary note, however, one must emphasize that the African modernist experience is by definition transnational in that it epitomizes a particular sense of universality, especially when the nature of the political ideologies, and related programs and strategies, of the independence and liberation movements in Africa are taken into account—ideologies like Marxism and socialism or liberalism, which, despite their deployment within a nationalist framework, were mostly Pan-Africanist and internationalist in orientation. This dynamic becomes even clearer when we dissect the roles of the European expatriates, colonial administrators, liberal colonial educators, and missionaries who for various reasons contributed to the rise of the modern art movements in Africa.'° African modernity and its manifestations should be positioned within this historical milieu. Most relevant to the case of El-Salahi and the Khartoum School has been the creation of new movements in all facets of the arts and in social life, an effort primarily geared toward new imaginings and concomitant constructions of modern tropes of self-representation. It is an effort worth unfolding in the pages to follow.

THE KHARTOUM SCHOOL AND THE MAKING OF SUDANESE MODERNISM Born in 1930 in the historic city of Omdurman (the Arab Umdurman),Sudan, El-Salahi studied from 1949 to 1951 at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College, where he majored in painting.

Between 1954 and 1957 he studied painting and calligraphy at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Later, in 1964-65, he studied black-and-white photography in the Department of Journalism, School of General Studies, Columbia University, New York. In addition to his participation in the Mbari Artists and Writers Club in lbadan, in the early 196os, he led the delegation of Sudanese artists to the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 and was part of the Sudanese delegation to the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969. Both events contributed significantly to the formation of pan-African art movements, as well as to the evolution of a trans-African aesthetic among artists of Africa and the African diaspora." In a string of extraordinary events in which he was an active participant, El-Salahi attended the International Youth Festival in Warsaw in 1955, which evidenced his cosmopolitanism and openness during the period of ideological polarization that led to the rise of the Iron Curtain, which survived between West and East for more than fifty years. In the early 196os, he traveled to the United States on UNESCO and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships; he has lived in New York and has traveled across the United States, Mexico, and Brazil (figs. 2, 3). In the 197os, he taught and served as external examiner in the art department at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

El-Salahi's art has been exhibited widely. Major museums in Africa, the Arab world, and the West—including The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., which later became part of the Smithsonian Institution; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar—have acquired his work. Throughout his career he has held influential positions, advising the Sudanese and other governments on cultural policies in Africa and the Arab world. Most significant in Sudan was the role he played in expanding the government's Ministry of Information into the Ministry of Culture and Information, of which he served as undersecretary between 1973 and 13

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1976. The establishment of this department was a cardinal event in modern Sudanese history.

Though his tenure as undersecretary ended when he was unjustly incarcerated for six months in the aftermath of a failed military coup in 1975, El-Salahi's accomplishments were remarkably

Fig. 2 El-Salahi with Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art. 1965

multifarious. His advocacy of a supportive infrastructure for artistic and cultural production in Sudan has left an indisputable legacy, conservative contemporary politics notwithstanding.

While El-Salahi's tireless advocacy of Sudanese and African artists remains staunch, it is to his work as an artist that many remain most indebted. After graduating from the Slade, El-Salahi returned to Sudan in the late 19505 and taught for many years at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, one of the most active centers of creative talent in Africa at the time. At the college, Sudanese artists were exposed to Western artistic traditions in terms of techniques, materials, and forms. Here El-Salahi became a guiding light for the major art movement we now know as the Khartoum School, recognized for its distinct aesthetics and innovative artistic style (cat. nos. 4[P. 44], 6-9,13, 14, 17, 20-24).

Modernist Sudanese art is multifaceted and complex, but its history is deeply embedded in the British colonial educational system and specifically in the rise of higher education in that country.12 It is therefore worth emphasizing that a group of self-taught artists had worked diligently in the modern genre since the 192os, preparing the ground for the academically trained Khartoum artists who followed. Unfortunately, since they are viewed as nonacademic,"naive" painters, their history and contributions are scarcely studied and little documented. But certainly the expansion of urban living during the colonial period, particularly in the 1920s and '305, introduced new aesthetic needs and hence new genres in music, literature, and visual ert.'3 In the formal educational arena, the rise of the College of Fine and Applied Art can be traced to the early 1930s, when the Department of Art was established within Gordon Memorial College(now the University of Khartoum). In 1946, the Department of Art evolved to become the School of Design, and here British and other Western expatriates such as the late Jean-Pierre Greenlaw played a great role in establishing and developing a curriculum within which students could learn practical skills in carpentry, architectural drawing, surveying, and design.", In 1951, the Department of Art moved from Gordon Memorial College to a building within the Khartoum Technical Institute (which later became the Khartoum Polytechnic). In 1971, the Department morphed into the College of Fine and Applied Art. Today it is a semi-independent college affiliated with the Sudan University of Technology. Since its inception, the college's curriculum, fashioned after Western artistic traditions, offered basic courses including painting, sculpture, Arabic calligraphy, graphic design, ceramics, and textiles.

Theoretical courses in art history, aesthetics, and the history of design were added in the late 19705 and early '8os.15 Artworks produced by the pioneering generation of graduates of the Department of Art, many of whom traveled to study in the United Kingdom in 1944 and 1945, formed the seed of the modern art movement in Sudan. In form, style, and aesthetic sensibility, their art reflects a strict adherence to the Western academic schooling that they received in Europe. Although their subject matter was Sudanese, being largely drawn from their own environment and experiential knowledge, this European influence seemed inescapable. A unique exception was Osman Waqialla, whose early

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explorations of Arabic calligraphy led to the evolution of an exceptional style within the Sudanese modern art movement:6 Waqialla understood the aesthetic value of classical Arabic calligraphic forms and their balancing masses of light and dark. His mastery of the traditional skills and styles is

indisputable, as is abundantly clear in such works as his engraved calligraphic designs in marble on a tomb dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad in Medina,Saudi Arabia.

Waqialla's critical contribution lay in liberating Arabic calligraphy from its traditional association with sacred text through daring treatments of nontraditional, secular Arabic poetry and prose. This revolutionary experimentation proved highly influential among Waqialla's students, including not only El-Salahi but also Ahmed Shibrain, both men prominent figures in what had evolved by the late 19505 into the influential Khartoum School.'7 Indeed the real breakthrough in this new movement came under their leadership, in the late 19505 and early '6os. Later, these pioneers paved the way for a younger generation of artists including Magdoub Rabbah, Amir Nour, and Taj Elsir Ahmed, who forged their own distinctive achievements.

The name "Khartoum School" has been a subject of dispute in the emerging literature on modern art in Sudan. The artists' early patrons and publicists were expatriate Western art critics and collectors:8 Today, several of the school's founding members consider it simply a transient phase in their evolution as artists; others have dissociated themselves from it as a movement altogether, and several never wanted to be part of it as a "school," even though they were connected with it as a movement. The Khartoum School artists neither formed any formal association nor practiced together in a workshop. Its members issued no manifesto and felt no need to generate a critical literature to buttress their aesthetic claims. It is perhaps most fruitful to understand the Khartoum School as one manifestation of a complex, multifaceted, fluid modernist movement in Sudan. The school should be situated within the context of the discourse on modernity, and within the larger milieu of the postcoIonia' intellectual tradition in Sudan.

This discussion of art and modernity cannot be isolated from a deeper knowledge of the cultural topography of Sudan, a culturally diverse country within which almost every major African ethnic or linguistic group is represented:9 For political and ideological reasons, this diversity has been polarized to two major cultural groups: in northern and central Sudan, highly Islamized and relatively Arabized cultures, fused with local pre-Islamic elements; and stretching south and into the peripheries of the northern region, strongly "African" cultural elements, represented by traditional religions as well as by a visible presence of Christianity. In July 2011, this polarization became official, with the secession of South Sudan as an independent country. Along with such milieus, a rich diversity of art forms has long coexisted with an artistic tradition that traces its beginnings to the ancient Kushitic and Meroitic traditions in today's Northern Sudan (approximately between l000 BC and AD 600).

In the modern period, the search for a common denominator—for a Sudanese national culture that would cut through this ethnic, religious, and cultural pluralism—became a focal point for a new national consciousness, expressed mainly in literature and art. In most cases, such efforts transcended social and political reality, stressing the creativity of hybridity and ethnic intermixture. Totalizing terms such as "Sudanese culture," "Sudanese identity," "Sudanese literature," and "Sudanese art" became central to such discourses, forming the basis for the vocabulary of a new social consciousness.20 In thei93os, Hamza al-Malik Tambal,the influential Sudanese literary critic and editor of AIFajr, proclaimed that "Sudanese identity is an ideal to which we should all aspire, it must be reflected in all our work."21 This ideal has evolved into intellectual movements characterized by conflict and by attempts at reconciliation of identities.22 The roots of the Khartoum School were intricately related to this larger quest for a shared Sudanese identity. Most germane to our understanding of the School's intellectual tenets is its relationship to the literary group Madrasat al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra', the "Jungle and the Desert School," which included major poets, literary critics, and intellectuals such as Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Muhammad Abdul-Hai, and Salah Ahmad Ibrahim. The main ideological and intellectual concern articulated by this group was the creation of a true "Sudanese" literature, art, and aesthetic.23 Their literary production clearly reinforces the symbolism behind the name: the goal of representing not

Fig. 3 El-Salahi making an etching with artist Winnie Bendiner at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York City. 1965

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only the geographical landscape of the country but its hybrid cultural framing of Islamic and African elements.24 As Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim proclaimed in his landmark poetry collection Ummati (My nation), from 1969: (both) the Water Buffalo of the forest and Onyx of the oasis are

(the symbols of) our nations.

Salah Ahmad Ibrahim had earlier expressed the idea of hybridity and racial intermixture in his collection GhabatAI Abanus (The forest of ebony) of 1958: Liar is he who proclaims: I am the unmixed,the pure pedigree.

The only. Yes!, a liar.26 Another poet, Al Nur'Uthman Abbakar, stresses the "return to roots" in his memorable collection Sah wu AI Kalimat AI Mansiyyah (The awakening of the forgotten words), from 1972: This is the deliverance of fire collect the roots of the sources in the rock in the depth of the nights of the forest and in the cellar of early legends.22 Another group of left-leaning Sudanese writers and artists, loosely associated with the Jungle and the Desert School, named itself after Apedemak, a lion-headed god in the ancient Sudanese kingdom of Meroe, believed to be the god of war, fertility, and art.28 In doing so they referred to an articulation of Sudanese culture and identity predating the preeminence of Islam and Arabism by hundreds of years. The overall ideology that guided such intellectual movements evolved into what Ahmed El Tayib Zein El Abdein has called "Sudanism"(al-Sudanawiyya), a long-term cultural process through which Sudan has developed a unique ethos based on principles of hybridity and cultural continuities within the Nile Valley. This process is the culmination of many layers of religious and sociopolitical realities and artifacts, accumulated over thousands of years in Sudan. Zein El Abdein understands these multiple layerings as the common denominator that distinguishes Sudanese cultures, despite their internal variations and differences, from neighboring localities in Africa and the Arab world.29 To return, then, to the Khartoum School: these artists, like the members of the Jungle and the Desert School, were members of a new elite class that rose out of the ashes of colonialism and found itself squeezed between, on the one hand, the masses of rural and urban workers whose culture and identity were intact and hardly assimilated, and on the other, their own modernist aspirations, embedded in a colonial system of education and a process of acculturation typical of the colonial condition.3째 In other words, as Amilcar Cabral argued, they were "prisoners of the contradictions of their social and cultural reality."31 Facing such paradoxes of identity, the artists of the Khartoum School attempted to construct a new ethos for what constituted Sudanese identity in the visual arena. Their main ideological and intellectual concern was the making of a "Sudanese" art and aesthetic. The pioneering members of the School were closely associated with the poets, novelists, and literary critics in the Jungle and the Desert School.32 Their main question was how far the artist should be obliged to shake off Western and other influences and produce art that was uniquely "Sudanese."33 It is important to stress that El-Salahi's style and aesthetic evolved within concerns he shared with colleagues in the Khartoum School such as Shibrain and Taj Elsir Ahmed. Shibrain, like Waqialla, sees letter forms as living figural elements. In his work, Arabic letters gain what he calls a plastic aesthetic value. As the vehicle of the Qur'an, the Arabic language is viewed as sacred, but 16 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

2.1011C 4... ).to.•

left: Fig. 4 Ahmed Shibrain. Calligraphy. Ca. 1960.

Pen and ink on paper right: Fig. 5 Ahmed Shibrain. Calligraphy. Ca. 1960.

Pen and ink on paper

considering the fundamental role calligraphy has played in the aesthetic and style of classic Islamic art, this does not necessarily forestall artistic use of it. Shibrain applies the aesthetic potential of calligraphy within an Africanized Sudanese framework. His work, he has said,"is a mixture of images, African-Arabic and Islamic."34 In his innovative pen-and-ink paintings (ca. 1960; figs. 4, 5), Arabic-like characters are arranged in a Kufic style on a plain background. Individual characters are hardly decipherable and letters are shortened or elongated, compressed or expanded, to become part of a larger abstract composition. The oil painting Message 4o (1966) includes traditional Islamic decorative motifs, such as the rosette, crescent, and semifloral arabesque designs, in addition to calligraphy. Like El-Salahi, Shibrain makes symbolic use of colors as encountered in the Sudanese landscape. For him, blue and bluish green are the hues of the Blue Nile; red, yellow and brown are those of the earth and of Sudanese traditional architecture.35 While the Khartoum School dominated the Sudanese art scene in the 19705 and early '8os, it faced challenges from younger groups of artists. Among those who tried to depart from its ethos, and to offer an alternative style and praxis, were the members of the Crystalist Group (al-jama`a al-kristaliyya), headed by Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq and her students Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and Nayla El Tayib. According to their Crystalist Manifesto of1978,"The essence of the universe is like a crystal cube, transparent and changing according to the viewer's position. Within this cube, human beings are prisoners of an absurd destiny. The nature of the crystal is constantly changing, according to degrees of light and other physical conditions."36 In a counter-narrative to the hegemony of "Sudanism," and to the "return to the source" ideology of the School of Khartoum,the Crystalist Group foregrounds change and the state of becoming as defining forces in art.37 A more serious challenge to the early generation of Khartoum artists came from another group led by Hassan Musa (an author in this book, see p. 68)and Abdallah Bashir (Bola), two well-known artists and art critics. Both are graduates of the College of Fine and Applied Art (Bola also studied under El-Salahi), both are known for a leftist ideological orientation, and both have been influenced

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by the ideas of Fanon and Cabral, especially in their critiques of the roles of the third world bourgeoisie and of the postcolonial intellectual. In a series of public debates and newspaper articles in Khartoum in the mid- to late 19705, Bola and Musa accused the early generation of Khartoum School artists of ethnocentrism and criticized their artistic production as merely reactive to the colonial condition.38 In their view, the Khartoum School should have been more proactive in response to the aesthetic demands of modernity and contemporaneity. Instead, in responding to the aesthetic demands of a Westernized gaze by borrowing from traditional Sudanese arts and crafts, it perpetuated an exotic image of Sudanese culture. For Musa,the Khartoum School artists' borrowings of traditional Sudanese motifs and decorative elements prevented them from creating new forms.

Moreover, by limiting themselves to certain color schemes and styles, they negated the diverse and dynamic sociocultural realities of Sudan. Musa and Bola were also critical of what they saw as the elitism of the Khartoum School, whose exhibitions were mostly held in places designed for Western patronage—first-class hotels, for example, which were accessible only to foreigners and native elites.39 Given Musa's and Bola's leftist praxis, the importance of catering to the artistic taste of the people has been a major concern for them, as articulated in a recent essay by Musa in which he traces the Sudanese history of the idea of the art exhibition in relation to modern political action.4° In the absence of real institutional patronage, the exhibition as a format opens up liberating opportunities for art in the service of progressive politics.

These critiques of the Khartoum School, and the responses they generated, opened up possibilities for rethinking Sudanese modernism. Arguing, for example, against the Khartoum School's prevalent visual forms and motifs and its use of color symbolism, Musa advocated a return to the essence of visual form (line, color, and mass or volume in space) as a vehicle of open-ended possibilities. His and Bola's assertion of the right of Sudanese artists to be open to what global art movements had to offer led younger artists to engage with the ideas of Western avant-gardes, as in the conceptualism seen in Shaddad's installations and performances.41 It also expanded the possibility of renewals of the aesthetic and ideology of the Khartoum School, as in the calligraphic abstraction work of the School of the One (Madrasat al-Wahid), which was genealogically related to the Letterist trend in North African art, as in the work of Ahmad Abdul 'AI.42 Musa's and Bola's critiques, however, did not generate the dialogue that might have been expected in terms of published writing. The only serious critical response it elicited from the Khartoum School came from El-Salahi, who engaged in an enlightening dialogue with younger Sudanese artists on issues related to identity, art, and criticism in Sudan. One of the most interesting instances of this exchange is his correspondence with Musa, which began in mid-1993. Over a decade of this correspondence, a rich discussion of art, modernity, and cultural life in Sudan, Africa, and the world at large is meticulously documented in a forthcoming book.43 Many practices of the Khartoum artists may be considered ethnocentric, or to involve some level of ideological, even nationalist romanticization of the past. This tendency, however, should not be dismissed as the kind of opportunism typical of national elites in postcolonial Africa. In art and literature, the response to colonialism, and to the identity crisis that colonialism created, was mostly expressed as a search for the common roots that might constitute a national culture, for a heritage of symbols, metaphors, and allegories that would transcend the ethnic tensions created by the arbitrary formations of Africa's postcolonial nation-states. This was a necessary and viable response to the unbridgeable, structurally determined gaps between a colonized society and a colonial power.

Postcolonial realities required each "indigenous" social stratum to define its position in relation to the West and to other global realities, as non-Western peoples had been relegated to a position of ethnic and national particularity within a colonial framework in which the West had claimed universality. This analytic framework is not an apology for the Khartoum School, but offers the only way in which its claim to create a "Sudanese" art and aesthetic can be properly understood.

Discussing the earthy colors in the paintings that followed his return to Sudan in the early 196os, El-Salahi said, "I find the color in particular looks very much like our earth, and maybe that's why I feel it's 'Sudanese.-44 Although he claims that it became more "Sudanese," his work is not 18 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

restricted to a particular sense of nationalism. He consistently credited the formative influence of "Sudanese" motifs as the point of departure for his work, but was quite at ease with the seemingly contradictory modernist and internationalist outlook. He argues,"Although I said my painting now seems Sudanese in locality,... I don't deal with it in terms of locality—that it should be Sudanese art, there is no such thing as Sudanese art. But I mean as a Sudanese individual coming from the Sudan could do something."45 El-Salahi was certainly at the forefront of the Khartoum School, and grew and developed within its matrix. In his search for a new aesthetic vision, he tried consistently to bring the various elements of Sudanese culture in his work in a balanced tension, and to create a visual counterpart for the literary claims of the Jungle and the Desert School. Transcribing morphologies and structures drawn from Arabic calligraphy and hieratic symbols from the region's ancient monuments and architecture, he fused them with modern forms. Tradition and modernity thus merge in El-Salahi's work, whether in color or in black and white. In both content and form, the productive tension in his modernism reflects a constant articulation and transformation of ancient and contemporary African, Arabic and Islamic, Nubian and Coptic, and Western influences on Sudanese art and culture.

Although El-Salahi was a founding and leading member of the Khartoum School, his work should not be judged by its parameters, for he outgrew the limitations of its narrow nationalist framework.

His visual repertoire has never been limited to Sudan, but transcended its national boundaries to include motifs and elements of continental African origins. In other words, El-Salahi has embraced a Pan-Africanist vision. Prescient enough to foresee the sweeping waves of globalization, and geography's loss of significance, he focused his energy on dissolving the paradoxes that encircled art as a central element to cultural production, developing a kind of Sudanese art and aesthetics that were both modern and relevant to his own society and the world at large. It bears stressing that his aesthetic and ideological concerns did not develop in isolation from the crosscurrents of global modernism. We still need to augment the extant, inadequate narrative of global modernism with an understanding of it as a practice inflected by a variety of visual vocabularies and aesthetic languages.

As I have argued throughout my effort to unpack the problematic conceptualization of modernity, the idea, embodied in El-Salahi's work, of an "indigenous" art that is also global and modern is centrally important to the overall scenario of artistic production in Africa today.

Fig. 6 Portrait ofa Model. 1956. Oil on plywood, of the artist

22 5 / 8 X 16 3/4 in.(575 x 42.5 cm). Collection

EL-SALAHI: AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD El-Salahi's work cannot be pigeonholed within a particular domain, or imprisoned within a singular, narrowly defined, or self-contained style. To restrict him to the aesthetic parameters of the early Khartoum School would scarcely do justice to his overall oeuvre. While his art and writing are certainly his foremost achievements, he has worked in other media beyond painting, for example in anchoring the TV show BaytAI-Jak(The house of Al-Jak), a social and cultural magazine-format program on Sudan National Television in the early19705. BaytAI-Jak was groundbreaking in terms not only of its content but of El-Salahi's decision to act out the different characters associated with the theme of each episode, in spontaneous, improvised performances and role-playing that marked him as an avant-garde artist. BaytAI-Jak was a daring program, breaking codes and taboos that dominated the psyche of a conservative audience. It provided a space that allowed him to demonstrate his abilities and to take risks at a time when television was a novelty in Sudan. (It comes as no surprise that the show became a casualty of censorship under the military dictatorship of General Gaafar Nimeiry.) El-Salahi's acting abilities also came in handy when he played Sheikh Al-Hanin, the Sufi saint in the 1976 film version of Salih's famous novel Wedding ofZein, directed by the Kuwaiti filmmaker Khalid Al-Siddig.

El-Salahi's art has undergone a number of transformations, and can be characterized as a series of overlapping periods. Though his career spans more than five decades of constant experimentation with styles, colors, and visual vocabularies, his trademark linear style remains a unifying device. Line expresses the intuitive mixture of spirituality and critical social consciousness that thoroughly infuses his work, which is distinctive in constituting a stylistic rupture not only from Sudanese and African art

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but from the modernist schooling he experienced at the Slade in London in the 19505, and during his residencies in Europe and the United States in the 196os and '7os. He explains: The years 1958-1961 were a period of feverish activity on my part in search of individual and cultural identities. I found myself quite restless, in spite of having a family, a wife, and three children, a secure job at the art school ..., and a reasonable studio to work in at school and at home. Those years, as it turned out, were the years of change and transformation that I went through as far as my work was concerned.46 Looking back, El-Salahi was struck in particular by two elements that had proven of great value to his work: Arabic calligraphy, and African motifs and decorations. He had grown up seeing these things, at home and in houses, shops, and other places, but until he returned from his studies in London, he had attached no significance to either of them as "the valid alternative that had captured the imagination of the peoples of northern Sudan and turned their minds toward a level of aesthetics that was more in line with their own culture and natural environment."47 Consequently, El-Salahi's post-Slade art stands in sharp contrast to earlier works such as Portrait ofa Model(1956; fig. 6).

This oil painting from his Slade period reflects his mastery of European training and is in many ways indistinguishable from the work of his European colleagues of the time. It is also exemplary of the work produced by a number of Khartoum and other African artists in the early stages of their training and development, representing the training in studio portraiture then typical of the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, or for that matter of art schools in the United Kingdom, where most of the early generation of Sudanese artists pursued their graduate training.

El-Salahi's works from the late 19505 into the '705 show a first phase characterized by subdued, earthy colors and by increasingly dominant elemental forms and lines. He explains, "I limited my color scheme to somber tones, using black, white, burnt sienna, and yellow ocher, which resembled the colors of earth and skin color shades of people in our part of the Sudan. Technically it added depth to the picture."48 These colors also symbolically mirror the Sudanese landscape, demonstrating his ideological and intellectual links with the Jungle and the Desert School and his conscious attempt to connect with the larger concerns of the era in the creation of a distinct Sudanese aesthetic.

El-Salahi divides this period of his career into two, and in the very short but intense second phase, beginning in the earlyi97os, his work grew more meditative and experimental, being characterized by warm, brilliant colors and by abstracted human- and animallike figures rendered through geometric designs. The squares and the circles that had dominated the structures of his previous compositions were subjected to fragmentation and improvisation in pursuit of what he characterized as open-ended potentiality.49 Throughout the period, El-Salahi resorted to the traditional patterns and decorative elements of Arabic calligraphy—an important tradition in northern and central Sudan—and to popular Islamic motifs such as crescents and arabesques. He was fascinated by the visual spaces created in Arabic calligraphy, whose influence on his work is inextricably interwoven with memories of his childhood and early schooling at the hands of his own father, who ran a Quranic school in his house for the children of the neighborhood. As El-Salahi has said,"My work has always been influenced by religious teaching and upbringing. I have always had it in the family and in me—it's something I don't think about because I just find it there."5° He also combined these forms of Islamic derivation with non-Islamic motifs—figures, natural elements, and masklike faces. In defense of these inclusions, and in contrast to popular perceptions of Islam and Islamic art as being devoted to an iconoclastic opposition to images, he states,"In a way, it is a kind of prayer, too, because you are appreciating God's creation and trying to think about it and meditate on his creativity."51 Like the artists of the North African Letterist movement known as Al Hurufiyyia, El-Salahi began by breaking down Arabic letters and abstracting their shapes,focusing on their decorative aspects rather than on their meaning and creating new and fascinating forms in the process.52 Through this

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Fig. 7 The Donkey I Remember in My Dreams. Early 196os. Oil on canvas, 29/ 1 2x 24 / 3 4 in.(75 x 62.9 cm)

Fig.8 Allah and the Wall of Confrontation. 1968.

Oil and enamel on Masonite, approx.17 x 19 in.

(43.2 x 48.3 cm)

process of experimentation, he revealed the abstracted rhythmic shapes of calligraphy, and was able to visualize in them the presence of objects, figures, and a fantastic world of imagery. The Last Sound (1964; cat. no. 13) and Allah and the Wall of Confrontation (1968; fig. 8), two representative works from the mid- to late 196os, show a striking predominance of Arabic-like characters, in addition to the prominent crescent motif. El-Salahi notes that his exposure to Qur'anic scripts in early childhood, as the son of a Muslim cleric, was reinforced through the study of Islamic manuscripts in the British and other museums while he was a student at the Slade.53 A concern with the abstract representation of human figures and calligraphic forms is apparent in El-Salahi's early masterpiece Funeral and the Crescent(1963; cat. no. 20). Under a crescent moon—a recurring Islamic motif in many of his paintings—a procession of mourners, with masklike facial expressions, carries a corpse. Skeletal, elongated, and emaciated, the figures cover the surface of the painting; points of articulation such as knees and elbows are emphasized and delineated in spirallike forms, and the male sexual organ is deliberately exaggerated, in a style recalling certain traditional African sculpture, including that of the Yoruba in Nigeria and of the Dogon in Mali.54 Similar figural stylization and intensity of facial expression appear in The Donkey!Remember in My Dreams (early 1960s; fig. 7), Poor Women Carry Empty Baskets (1963), and Death ofa Child (1965). In addition to their innovative style and aesthetic forms, these works, based as they are on El-Salahi's keen observation of daily life and his interest in his society and environment, are eloquent meta-commentaries on contemporary Sudanese culture. Fatima (1968; fig. 9) is an abstract composition created out of the organic and geometric shapes of natural forms. In this painting, textural variations project forms into low relief, creating a sense of three-dimensionality.

After the sudden interruption of his career in 1975, when he was falsely accused of antigovernment activities and spent more than six months in the infamous Kober (Cooper) Prison without trial or even a specific indictment, El-Salahi left Sudan and has since lived in exile, dividing his time between Qatar and the United Kingdom before settling in Oxford, England, in 1998. Not surprisingly,

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Fig. 9 Fatima. 1968. Oil on canvas, 23 / 3 4 X 23 / 3 4 in.(60.5 x 60.5 cm)

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his self-imposed exile considerably affected his aesthetic style, as his early experimental work gave way to a more philosophically oriented, more meditative approach. Over the years, the somber colors of his earlier period, and the brighter colors of the early 197os, have given way to a more assured exploration of aesthetic visions in black and white. This period—which El-Salahi describes as the third phase in his career,"the stage of being self-confident, satisfied, and more assured"—reflects

the accumulation of a turbulent life's experiences. He states, "I have started to see the meaning of things with more clarity than before. My thoughts are more organized and I have more mastery of the skill of painting. I am more concerned now with the internal structure of the work, which I prefer to express in black and white."55 El-Salahi does not subscribe to the traditional distinction between painting and drawing in the Western aesthetic tradition, which associates painting with color and shape, drawing with line: "There is no painting without drawing and there is no shape without line. ... In the end all images can be reduced to lines." He therefore refers to his black-and-white works in pen and ink on paper as "shades in black and white."56 In the 196os, El-Salahi began to spend time traveling, visiting artists, art educators and their schools, and as many places of cultural and historical interest as he could.57 His use of black and white, and his execution of his ink-on-paper compositions on a very large scale, so that they echo the Mexican muralist tradition, seem to derive from these travels and his ensuing exposure to artistic traditions beyond his training in Sudan and the United Kingdom. Visiting Mexico in July 1962, El-Salahi traveled across the country visiting museums and meeting artists, most crucially Rufino Tamayo. His unpublished memoirs include many reflections on the work of Mexican artists such as Tamayo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. In the United States, he met the Spiral Group of African-American artists, led by Romare Bearden and including such figures as Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos, Norman Lewis, and many others.58 El-Salahi recalls his fascination with the Spiral Group's idea of making works solely in black and white, and made canvases in black and white while he was attending the group's meetings.59 The marks of El-Salahi's love of the social realism of the Mexican muralists are very visible in his large-scale 198os paintings in black and white. These works were often made piecemeal, on medium-sized sheets of paper executed and framed as separate but structurally related. Assembled together, these units form large, unified works, monumental in scale and intensity. Described by El-Salahi as "open-ended, endless organic growth painting," they can grow into a single mural, as in The Inevitable of 1984-85 (cat. no. 42).60 This powerful commentary on a significant event in modern Sudanese political history is a masterpiece of skill and philosophical vision. It is important to note that such works have stylistic precedents in El-Salahi's early art; one can easily trace in them his enduring fascination with the rhythm and structure of Arabic calligraphy and letters.

In late 1998, at his base in Oxford, El-Salahi embarked on a new body of work characterized by a return to his earlier polychromatic approach, even while he remained engaged with his monumental black-and-white works. Most important among the new works is the series "The Tree" (figs. 16-20, 27; cat. nos. 54-59,62-65). The focus of this colorful and highly abstract work is the tree called the haraz tree, which grows in Sudan in the Nile Valley. In the rainy season, the tree sheds its leaves and stands bare. During the dry season, it blossoms. El-Salahi has recalled his fascination with this tree, and with its place in the Sudanese popular imagination: "I simply loved the story told about haraz tree. Tough and rough as it stands high by the riverbank, bare and dry where everything around is green, it is in my mind a symbolic reminder of what we always tend to forget within ourselves."6' "The Tree" recalls El-Salahi's signature linear style and the abstract experiment with calligraphic forms visible in his work of the 196os and '7os. For him, each individual work in the series starts with an image that resembles the tree, then gradually dissolves into a more simplified abstract form, sometimes in color and sometimes in black and white. Large spaces left completely white have a minimalism that recalls the artist's earlier, linear experiments with calligraphic forms and his cognizance of the modernist languages of painting. If anything, the unfolding of"The Tree" series, a visible priority in the most recent phase of El-Salahi's work, has demonstrated not only his resilience

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and productivity but also his ability to reinvent himself while remaining on the forefront of exploration and creativity.

My essay began with a call for transcending mainstream art history's exclusionary narrative of modernity and modernism to enable a fuller account of El-Salahi's contribution to modernism within a global perspective. This call demanded that his work be situated in the context of Sudanese modernism, with the rise of the Khartoum School one of its visual manifestations. This essay, and others in the present volume, has stressed El-Salahi's role as a modernist who introduced new aesthetic visions and vocabularies in terms of iconography, symbolism, and technique. These contributions helped to fashion the growth of the modern art movement in Sudan and in Africa.

One may speculate on the motives that led El-Salahi to play this foundational role in shaping Sudanese and African modernisms. As I ponder that question, I recall his rendering of a legend that has sprung up around the haraz tree, which he recounts in the following words: It is said that it kept fighting the rain. A Sudanese saying,"The war of al-Haraz and the rain," is normally reserved for an odd person. The one who stands out alone, not wanting to be counted with others or be taken for a camp follower. An obstinate one, an individual, that's what [the tree] reminds me 0E6 ' For me El-Salahi is like the haraz tree. Unlike some of his predecessors in the modernist movement in Sudan or elsewhere in Africa, he did not engage in art as an academic exercise, nor did he critically accept the lessons of the Western modernist traditions. A man of great integrity, morally and ideologically, he is exemplary among intellectuals of his generation for remaining true to his vision of a world free of injustice and limitation. He firmly believes in a free and democratic society that respects artistic and individual expressions, and adamantly refuses to bow to regimes of co-optation and corruption.

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1. Ibrahim El-Salahi, Qabdatun min Turab: Sirah Zatiah [A handful of earth: An autobiography]. Expected publication in Arabic 2012.

2. El-Salahi illustrated the first edition of Brush Fire, a collection by the Congolese poet Gerald Felix-Tchicaya (a.k.a. Tchicaya U Tam'si, 1931-1988), published by Black Orpheus, a press established by Ulli Beier in Nigeria in 1957.

3. See, e.g., Rasheed Araeen,"Modernity, Modernism, and Africa's Place in the History of Art of Our Age," Third Text 19, no. 4 (july 2005): 416-17; and Olu Oguibe,"The True Location of Ernest Mancoba's Modernism," Third Text 19, no.4 (july 2005): 419.

4. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), p. 242. See also my and Iftikhar Dadi's "Introduction: Unpacking Europe," in Hassan and Dadi, eds., Unpacking Europe:A Critical Reader(Rotterdam: NAi and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), pp. 12-25.

5. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 242. Said also noted that an exploration of the history and sociology of the Western metropolis in the twentieth century reveals the strong presence of students, writers, and artists from previously colonized territories, including Africa, in Paris, London, Rome,and other European capitals.

6. Hassan,"African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse," South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3(Summer 2010): 451-73. For an excellent discussion of Eurocentrism and its intellectual limitations see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).

7. In working to counter these exclusionary narratives, I have found interventions by scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Stuart Hall, Timothy Mitchell, Said, and Naoki Sakai helpful in theorizing African modernity and repositioning African modernism within larger debates on global modernism. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Hall,"Museums of Modern Art and the End of History," in Hall and Sarat Maharaj, eds., Modernity and Difference(London: INIVA, 2001), pp. 21-22; Mitchell,"The Stage of Modernity," in Mitchell, ed., Questions ofModernity(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Said, Culture and Imperialism; and Sakai,"Dislocation of the West and the Status of the Humanities," in Hassan and Dadi, Unpacking Europe.

8. Hall,"Museums of Modern Art and the End of History," pp. 21-22.

9. See Mitchell,"The Stage of Modernity," p. 24. io. See Hassan,"The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expression of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics," in Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, eds., Reading the Contemporary:African Artfrom Theory to the Marketplace(London: INIVA, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 214-35.

An example of such movements is AfriCobra, led by African artists in the United States. See Jeff Donaldson,"AfriCobra and TransAtlantic Connections," in Clementine Deliss, ed., Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), PP. 249-51.

12. See M.0. Beshir, Educational Policy in the Sudan: 1898-1959(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp.

23-24.

13. In several major cities, including Khartoum, Wad Medani, and Al Obayid, self-taught artists exposed to Western traditions of painting and other art forms began to produce new types of artwork-mostly landscape paintings representing rural or urban modern life, or portraits of important Sudanese historical figures or of stereotypical rural or urban women with folkloric costumes or hairstyles. These pioneers included Ali Osman, who was active in the 19305 and '405; Uyun Kadis, nicknamed "Cat's Eyes" in recognition of his ability to copy portraits and draw figures; and Jiha, a skilled painter, sign designer, and magician. Most memorable was Ahmad Salim, who was active into the 1960s and who developed a style very close to those of the academically trained artists who followed him. Bought and sometimes commissioned by prosperous urban families, the works of these artists could be seen in private houses and in restaurants and cafĂŠs. Some of the artists also exhibited in public spaces, introducing a new culture of art and aesthetic appreciation directly to the public.

14. As I learned in interviews with El-Salahi (Oxford, England, 2003) and the Sudanese artist Osman Waqialla (London, July 1993), Jean-Pierre Greenlaw, the British founder of the College of Fine and Applied Art, was a liberal humanist greatly influenced by the ideas of William Morris, John Ruskin, and the British arts and crafts movement. A skilled painter, he was also a musician who played several instruments and became famous for singing and playing Sudanese songs. He was fluent in colloquial Sudanese Arabic and was very much admired by his students. Greenlaw's role in Sudan was similar to those played by Kenneth Murray in Nigeria, Margaret Trowell in Uganda, and Frank McEwen in Zimbabwe.

15. With the rise of the Islamist military government since 1989, the facilities of the College of Fine and Applied Art, and its standards of instruction, have deteriorated considerably. Many of the best artists and teachers were forced into exile or left the country, while others were terribly harassed and intimidated.

The Department of Culture is now headed by elements close to the ruling National Congress Party.

16. Osman Waqialla was a poet, journalist, and broadcaster as well as a visual artist. After studying at the Camberwell School of Art, London, in 1946-49, he went to the School of Arabic Calligraphy and College of Applied Arts in Cairo. Returning to Sudan in 1951, he taught at the College of Fine and Applied Art until 1954, when he formed Studio Osman in the center of Khartoum. After Sudan won independence, in 1956, Studio Osman carried out major art assignments, such as the calligraphic design on the first Sudanese currency, and served until 1964 as a meeting place for artists and others concerned with the arts.

17. Outside Waqialla's work, this early chapter in the history of African modern art produced no clear philosophical orientation or definitive aesthetic inclination, nor did it reflect any sociopolitical or intellectual issues. Perhaps his generation of pioneers felt the challenge of mastering academic skills; perhaps they were influenced by rather rigid, uninspiring British teachers who advocated "art for art's sake." Waqialla's noncanonical, creative treatment of sacred text, however, is clear in calligraphic variations on Quranic themes such as his "Prophets Series" ("Al Anbiyaa," 1982). His secular explorations are best exemplified in his series on Sudanese modern poetry. Until his death, in January 2007, he continued his explorations of these two themes, which he called the "third dimension" and the "fourth dimension."

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18. The term "Khartoum School," was coined primarily by the late Guyanese painter, archaeologist, and art critic Denis Williams, who taught in Khartoum's College of Fine and Applied Art in the late 19505 and early '6os. It has since been echoed by other art critics and historians.

19. The cultural diversity of Sudan and the relationship of its two major components-"Africa" and Islamhave drawn the interest of social anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, who have often tried to stress one element over the other or to reconcile them by claiming their synthesis.

See Abdal Magid Abdin, Tarikh Al Thaqafa Al Arabia fl Al Sudan (Beirut: Dar Al Thaqafa, 1967); Muhammad Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity: The Cultural Poetics ofContemporary Sudanese Poetry (Khartoum: IAAS Publications, Khartoum University Press, 1976); Mohammed Omar al-Bashir, Cultural Diversity and National Unity in Sudan (Khartoum: IAAS Publications, Khartoum University Press, 1980); Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim,Al Fikr Al Sudani Usuluh Wa Tatawurhu (Khartoum: Ministry of Culture and Communication, 1976); Ali A. Mazrui,"The Multiple Marginality of the Sudan," in Yusuf Fadl Hasan, ed.,Sudan in Africa (Khartoum: IAAS Publications, Khartoum University Press, 1971), pp. 240-55; Mudathir Abdal Rahim,"Arabism, Africanism and SelfIdentification in the Sudan," in Hasan,Sudan in Africa, pp. 244-39; and R. C. Stevenson,"The Significance of the Sudan in Linguistic Research," in Hasan,Sudan in Africa, pp. 11-25.

20. See Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, pp. 6-7. For a more recent survey of the development of Sudanese literature, including the formative years of the 19305 and the rise of literary clubs and groups, see Eiman El-Nour,"Nationalism and the Rise of the Sudanese Novel," in All Jimale Ahmed and Taddesse Adera, eds., The Road Less Traveled: Reflections on the Literatures of the Horn ofAfrica (Trenton, N.J.: The Red Sea Press, 2008), pp. 369-404.

21. Hamza al-Malik Tambal,"Maqalah hawl al Adab al-Sudani,"Al-Fajr 3, no. I(March 1937): 3.

22. Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, p.13.

23. For an excellent recent autobiographical reflection on the history of the Jungle and the Desert School see Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Fi Zikra al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra'(Omdurman: Abdul Karim Mirghani Center, 2007).

24. The poetry of Muhammad al-Fayturi is a good example of the addressing of identity crisis by stressing the African element within the Arabic component. See his poetry collection Ashiq min Efriqa (Bayreuth, 1970).

25. Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, from Ummati (Khartoum: Ministry of Culture, 1969), p. 123, trans. in Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, pp. 50-53.

26. Salah Ahmad Ibrahim, from Ghabat Al Abanus (Beirut, 1958), p.45, trans. in Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, p. 55.

27. Al Nur'Uthman Abbakar,Sah wu AI Kalimat Al Mansiyyah (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1972), p. 62.

28. Most members of the Apedemak group were Marxist or left-leaning in their ideological orientation.

Sculptural representations of Apedemak appear in temples in al-Musawwarat al-Safara' and Naq'a, built at the end of the third century B.C. east of the sixth cataract in northern Sudan. Text found in these sites refers to Apedemak as the Godhead of Nubia.

29. Ahmed El Tayib Zein Al Abdein,"Al-Sudanawiyya," Majallat Al Thaqafa Al Sudaniyya no. 15 (July 1998): 3o-35.

30. This marginality, and the accompanying claim of a "return to roots" that characterizes many third-world postcolonial intellectual movements, constitutes the sociocultural drama of the colonial elites or native "bourgeoisie." See Amilcar Cabral,"The Role of Culture in the Liberation Struggle," in Armand Mattelart, ed., Communication and Class Struggle, vol.i, Capitalism, Imperialism (New York: International General, 1979), pp. 205-12; and Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p.248.

31. Cabral,"The Role of Culture in the Liberation Struggle," p. 206. Cabral argues that this marginality "is felt significantly only at the vertex of the social pyramid-the pyramid colonialism itself created-and specifically affects a very limited number of workers in urban centers."

32. Examples of these close relationships between artists and writers include El-Salahi's illustrations for the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih's books Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Wedding ofZein (1969).

33. See Sondra Hale,"Musa Khalifa of Sudan," African Arts 6, no. 3(April 1973): 14.

34. Ahmed Shibrain, quoted in Evelyn S. Brown, Africa's Contemporary Art and Artists(New York: Harmon Foundation, 1966), p.109.

35. Shibrain is also a designer and interior decorator who has undertaken commissions for public spaces, including Jeddah Airport in Saudi Arabia, and for international hotels and companies in Sudan. His public works, mostly executed as low reliefs in painted wood, incorporate calligraphic designs as a basic element. See also Hale,"Musa Khalifa of Sudan," p. 14.

36. For more on the Crystalist Group and the Crystalist Manifesto see Hassan,"Khartoum Connections: The Sudanese Story," in Deliss, Seven Stories, pp. 117-18, 242.

37. Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, interview with the author, London, August 1994.

38. On criticism of the Khartoum School, see Salah Hassan Abdallah, Musahamatfi al-Adab al-Tashkili (Khartoum: Arwiqa Corporation for Publishing and Distribution, 2005).

39. See Hassan M. Musa,"Fi al Khalfiya Al ljtima'iyah lit Jamaliyah al 'Irqiya," Majallat AI Thaqafa Al Sudaniyya no.4(August 1977): 59,68; and Sarni Salim,"Hiwar Ma' Bola," Majallat AI Thaqafa Al Sudaniyya 5, no. 19 (November 1981): 102-15.

40. Musa,"The Party of Art: When the People Entered the Gallery," South Atlantic Quarterly, 109, no.

(Winter 2010): 75-94.

41. See Hassan and Olu Oguibe,"Authentic/Ex-Centric at the Venice Biennale: African Conceptualism in Global Contexts," African Arts 34, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 54-75,96.42. For more on the School of the One see Deliss, Seven Stories, pp. 244-46; and Abdallah, Musahamat fi al-Adab al-Tashkili.

46. El-Salahi, Qabdatun min Turab.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. El-Salahi, in conversation with the author.

50. El-Salahi, in "A Painter from the Sudan," pp. 20-21.

51. El-Salahi, in Robert Serumaga,"Conversation with Ibrahim El Salahi," Topic no. 24 (1967): 14-15.

52.See Sharbal Daghir,Al Hurufiyya al Arabiya: Fan wo Hawiya (Beirut: The Printing Company for Publishing and Distribution, 1990); and Shakir Hasan Al Said, al-Usu/ al Hadariya wa allamaliyya hI Khat al Arabi(Baghdad: Dar al-Shu'un al-Thaqafiyah al-'Ammah "Afaq 'Arabiyah," 1988).

53. El-Salahi, Qabdatun min Turab.

54. See M. Ward Mount,African Art: The Years since 1920.(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 110.

55. El-Salahi, interview with the author, Oxford, England, August 1994.

56. Ibid.

57. El-Salahi, Qabdatun min Turab.

58. On the Spiral Group see The Catalogue of the First Spiral Group Exhibition, 1965(New York: Spiral Collective, 1964); Jeanne Siegel,"Why Spiral?: Artnews,65, no. 5(September 1966): 50-51; and Floyd Coleman,"The Changing Same: Spiral, the Sixties, and African-American Art," in William E. Taylor and Harriet G. Warkel, eds., A Shared Heritage:Art by Four African Americans (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, with Indiana University Press, 1996), p.149. The Spiral Group was formed on July 5,1963, during the U.S. Civil Rights era, after Romare Bearden called a meeting in his New York studio to discuss the role of black artists and other issues of concern.

According to The Catalogue ofthe First Spiral Group Exhibition, the group's name derives from the Archimedean spiral, which "moves outward embracing all directions, yet constantly upward." This dynamic group of artists, ranging from abstract to realist, met biweekly to exchange ideas, debating aesthetics, artistic standards, and the relationship of social responsibility and artistic freedom. They sought points of intersection that would allow them to work together while preserving their individuality. They shared a concern for racial equality and the affirmation of black identity in a white-dominated art world. After two years, the artists came to feel that they had outgrown the aesthetic limitations and urgent concerns of the period, and Spiral ceased to exist.

59. El-Salahi, Qabdatun min Turab.

6o. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

43. This book, tentatively titled Ibrahim El-Salahi and Hassan Musa: Correspondences(1993-2007), is expected to be published in 2012.

44. El-Salahi, in "A Painter from the Sudan," African Arts 1, no. i (Autumn 1967): 26.

45. Ibid.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi and Postcolonial Modernism in the Independence Decade CHIKA OKEKE-AGULU

REVIEWING AN EXHIBITION of contemporary African art organized by the Mbari Mbayo Club, Oshogbo, Nigeria, and the Transcription Centre, London, in 1967, Dennis Duerden cited London critics who had found in Ibrahim El-Salahi's recent work a loss of the much-admired naiveté of his early-196os pictures and a concomitant deterioration in quality.' Writing in the first issue of the magazine African Arts, Duerden critiqued these European ethnocentrists—"Afrika-forscher"(African explorers), as he called them—who had refused to acknowledge the emergence of a new practice among African artists whose work could not be reduced to mimicry of Euro-American modernism. These Africans, though clearly at home with the rhetoric of modernism and its aftermath, had nevertheless gone beyond it through what Duerden called a "unilinear development in invention and discovery." The Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian, for example, combined "the animistic surrealism of African traditions of painting and sculpture with a wide experience of the images of the modern scientist," a tactic typical of the new, progressive, as yet ignored syncretism in contemporary African art.2 Unlike El-Salahi's other London critics, Duerden found in his new work a progression rather than a deterioration, seeing it, like Boghossian's, as sophisticated, multireferential, and unlike the work of his contemporaries in Paris and New York.

The Transcription Centre exhibition was remarkable, for it brought together on the one hand artists associated with the Mbari Mbayo Workshop (Muraina Oyelami, Prince Twins Seven-Seven, and Asiru Olatunde), established in Nigeria in 1962 by Georgina and Ulli Beier as a critique of formal art-school pedagogy, and on the other El-Salahi and Boghossian, who represented the type of formally trained artist Beier saw as offering a model for a robust, postcolonial contemporary art in Africa. In the context of the 196os debate about directions in contemporary African art, Beier's position, as exemplified by this show, was enigmatic bordering on paradoxical, for it sat within a caustic divide he had no doubt helped to establish through his early-196os criticism of formal art training and his simultaneous support of the Mbari Mbayo summer workshops for mostly semiliterate would-be artists.

In a 1968 essay, possibly conceived as a manifesto for workshop-trained artists under his tutelage at the National Gallery of Rhodesia, and published in the second issue of the magazine African Arts, Frank McEwen,echoing Beier, noted the disastrous outcome of African appropriation of the modern art traditions of Paris and New York, and the negative impact of Western-style artschool pedagogy in Africa. Yet the Transcription Centre exhibition showed, as Duerden surmised, the shortsightedness of critics such as McEwen,for whom only art that supposedly drew exclusively from some imagined African source stood a chance of determining the future of contemporary THE MAKING OF A MODERNIST 29 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

African art. It also made evident Beier's rather complex attitude toward art and African artists in the 19605: while he promoted workshop-trained, semiliterate artists protected from the supposedly negative influences of Western modern art, he also seemed to be in no doubt about the crucial role of formally trained contemporary artists in motivating new, authentic directions for mid-century modern art in Africa. This essay examines the conjunction of El-Salahi's art and Beier's criticism and

the crucial role of both in the elaboration of the aesthetic and critical practice that defined modern African art during the independence decade, despite the widespread European resistance to its form and argument.4 EL-SALAHI AND ULLI BEIER'S CRITICAL NETWORKS Among Beier's most enduring contributions to art and literature in postcolonial Africa was the cofounding of both the literary magazine Black Orpheus in 1957 and the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, in lbadan, Nigeria, in 1961. While the magazine resulted from his conviction that Anglophone Africa needed an equivalent of Presence Africaine, the influential literary magazine published by French émigrés in Paris, the club was necessitated by the emergence of a generation of African and Nigerian writers and artists deeply concerned with the discourse and practice of new expressive, literary, and theatrical forms that spoke to their postcolonial condition. Moreover, both the magazine and the club provided influential platforms for the work of artists in Africa, Asia, South America, the United States, and Europe—artists at the forefront of defining a modernism inspired by the experience of colonization, racial discrimination, and the encounter between (Western) modernity and indigenous cultures. With the emergence of a new group of exciting artists in Nigeria, the magazine and more particularly the club became important avenues for the exchange of ideas between Nigerians and their counterparts from other parts of Africa. The five volumes of Black Orpheus published between 1961 and 1963 bear witness to its role in the radical expansion of the discursive horizon of contemporary African art. Also during this period, the club hosted at least seventeen mostly one-person shows by Nigerian and international artists, several of them represented in Black Orpheus through essays or exhibition reviews written by Beier, Denis Williams, and Julian Beinart.

In November 1961, for instance, El-Salahi became the first African artist to have a one-person show at Mbari, or quite possibly at any art gallery in Nigeria. The exhibition was significant not least because it reflected Beier's belief that El-Salahi's work exemplified a rigorous and progressive modern art combining a deep reflection on African art forms and a mastery of the techniques of European modernists.5 Equally important, El-Salahi's work seemed to confirm for Beier that the new art emerging from Nigeria, exemplified by the work of members of the Art Society in Zaria (Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, 1958-61), particularly leading members Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, was part of an international postcolonial phenomenon that needed to be articulated, or at least acknowledged.

Beier first met El-Salahi in January 1961, when Donald Hope, a British art teacher in Zaria, advised him to go to Khartoum to visit Williams, a Guyanese artist, teacher, and art historian.' In Sudan, Williams introduced Beier to El-Salahi, Ahmed Shibrain, and Kamala (Ibrahim) Ishaq, who would become key members of an emerging "Khartoum School" based at the Khartoum Technical Institute.

Following this visit, Beier planned an exhibition of El-Salahi's work at Mbari later that year, and of Shibrain's in 1963. El-Salahi's exhibition, a rather modest affair, consisted solely of recent drawings on paper. In the exhibition brochure, Beier indicated that the club was financially constrained to present only a small collection of the artist's drawings, but was optimistic that a "larger show" including paintings would be possible the following year. That hoped-for show never happened, but the show of November 1961 nonetheless turned out to be significant in its influence on the work of some important Nigerian artists, including Bruce Onobrakpeya and later Obiora Udechukwu.7 Beyond the viewers who must have seen El-Salahi's drawings at the Mbari exhibition, his work received wide circulation through two reviews by Beier in Black Orpheus and West African Review(WAR)and through a small book of the artist's drawings published by the Mbari Artists and Writers Club in 1962, which together arguably constituted the first major critical attention given to El-Salahi's work.8 30

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In the Black Orpheus review, Beier painted a picture of an artistic genius emerging from a culturally and artistically arid area."Great artists turn up in unexpected places," he wrote."When going in search for new African artists I was certainly not expecting to find one in Khartoum."9 Sudan, Beier

stated (obviously erroneously, even if one discounted its ancient, rich Nubian heritage),"has no artistic tradition, except Arabic calligraphy," and Khartoum, with its alienated art school and without modern art exhibition venues,seemed a most unlikely place to "discover" El-Salahi,"one of the most mature artists of Africa."1° According to Beier, the artist's work evolved from the "dull" academic portraits and landscapes he painted while at the Slade School of Fine Art—"foreign conventions" that El-Salahi would later find "meaningless"—to an exciting new work based on his post-Slade experimentation with Arabic calligraphy. Beier thus argued that El-Salahi's mature work began with a partial disavowal of his formal training at the Slade, followed by research in and experimentation with indigenous artistic forms and ideas."

In reading El-Salahi's work, particularly the long-faced animal and human figures that populate his pictures, Beier argued that it is "so intensely African" because of the "formal affinities" between the figures and West African Senufo masks (fig.i.o). Nevertheless, given the work's undeniable originality, Beier was critical of any effort to seek its origins exclusively in West African sculptural traditions. The Africanness in El-Salahi's work, then, is at once obvious and fugitive, allusive, indirect.12 In explaining this ambiguous relationship with classical-African and European-modernist forms, Beier suggested that El-Salahi must have descended to the depths of his own soul to retrieve the imagery

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Fig. io One Ramadan a Scorpion Stung My Little Nephew. 1960. Oil on canvas, 22 X 30 in.

(76.2 x 55.9 cm)

in his pictures, because he could not find them in his native Sudan. In other words, his work—the product of a deep intuitive process—achieves a puzzling poetic mysticism and formal gravitas.

This modern interpretation of African classical heritage attains what Beier refers to as "universal significance."3 As El-Salahi describes it, what he did with Arabic calligraphy began with an initial inclusion of legible text in his compositions, then progressed to a disintegration and reconstitution of the abstract calligraphic forms. The result was an experience that one might describe as the opening of a mystical Pandora's box from which emerged haunting man-beasts and pathetic skeletal figures with large dreadful eyes and drawn faces.". The elegant sacred scripts, when formally unraveled, yielded a myriad of bewildering abstract and representational images. Unlike anything his earlier work could have presaged, the resulting drawings and paintings, at once poetic and mystical, were mistakenly read as manifestations of stylistic naiveté by some observers, including the London critics to whom Duerden referred in his 1967 essay.

At the same time that Beier was attracted to El-Salahi's radical formal experimentation with Arabic calligraphy and Sudanese folk art designs, as well as his stunning mastery of line and drawing, he was confounded by the mystical symbolism of the artist's imagery.'' In the WAR review, he noted that "the grace and elegance" and the formal rhythm evident in the drawings derive from the letters of the Arabic alphabet.'6 They depend, however, not so much on literal depiction of Arabic script—which is nonetheless present—as on adaptations of the calligraphic flourishes and structural principles of Arabic text. Combining these elements with non-Arabic graphic patterns and designs extracted from local baskets, mats, and gourds, El-Salahi's works become, in Beier's words, a "perfect and successful blending of cultures," in much the same way Sudan itself is at the nexus of Arabic and non-Arabic African cultures. Reviewing a 1963 exhibition of El-Salahi's work at the Galerie Lambert, Paris (a show no doubt facilitated by Beier, who seemed to have had a working relationship with the gallery), in Black Orpheus, Williams returned to some of the ideas already noted in Beier's reading of El-Salahi. With greater critical sophistication than Beier, for instance, he traced the formal complexity of the drawings to the confluence of Arabic and African sensibility, form, and iconography. El-Salahi's images, he suggested,"are disclosed with the lyrical clarity of the Arabesque in lines that enclose and release instinctively African myths.... His attitude is not that of the magician, not mental, not that of a mind capitulating on the secrets of nature. It is an argument with the myths of the ancestors: a subjection to myth, a fervour that is nothing if not mystical."17 In a sense, Beier's seminal analyses of El-Salahi's work laid the grounds for its critical reception in the 196os and beyond. In his writings and through exhibitions, Beier effectively proposed El-Salahi as a model of the contemporary African artist, the type of modernist artist who successfully sidestepped the alienation identified by Beier and critics like McEwen in the work of many formally trained African artists. In other words, by bringing El-Salahi's work into the Mbari and Black Orpheus ambit, he put the artist in the intellectual firmament of the emergent postcolonial and contemporary African art. He also introduced El-Salahi to his vast cultural networks of organizations, galleries, and patrons in Africa, India, Europe, and the United States.'s El-Salahi's work thus found in Beier a vocal, influential advocate and supporter, and this despite Beier's simultaneous and more controversial promotion of workshop-trained artists and his criticism of formal art education.

POSTCOLONIAL ARTISTS AND RADICAL SELF-AWARENESS Against the background of sustained criticism of the negative impact of Western education and culture on the arts and cultures of Africa, only a few critics, including Beier, equally recognized early on the significance of the work of a generation of artists most of whom became active in the 195os, having trained in some of the best schools in Europe as well as in pioneer art programs in their respective countries. As it happened, the political context of the period, which was marked by a tide of independence and liberation movements,shaped the ideological perspective of that generation to the extent that art became a platform for asserting cultural nationalism. This manifested in many ways, yet was anchored in the quest for new work whose relationship to the Western-oriented 32

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Fig. ii Uche Okeke. Birds in Flight. 1962. 20 / 1 8 x 15 in.

(51.1 x 38 cm). Collection of Asele Institute, Nimo, Nigeria

pedagogy of the art institutions paralleled the search for political independence from the European powers that had begun in earnest across the continent's' For the leading artists of the period—including the Nigerians Okeke and Nwoko, the Ghanaian Vincent Koh, the Moroccans Ahmed Cherkaoui and Farid Belkahia, and the Ethiopian Boghossian, as well as El-Salahi and Shibrain—academic training, circulation within elite intellectual and political circles, and the resulting exposure to the rhetoric of political decolonization compelled them to devise radically new formal styles. For the most part, though to varying extents, the process began with a disavowal of aspects of that academic experience, followed by a search deep within themselves or their native cultures for ways to invent a new aesthetic that meaningfully reflected their new identities as radically self-aware postcolonial African artists. The process calls to mind parallel developments in continental literature, and was the impetus for the founding of the Mbari Artists and Writers Club in 1961, and for the replication of its modalities in other parts of the continent during that decade.2° In the work of Okeke and Nwoko, an earlier tendency toward Fauvist and Symbolist painting gave way to the formal examination of Nok terra-cottas, for Nwoko, and of Igbo drawing, for Okeke (fig. 11). Boghossian shed academicism when he "discovered" both African art and the work of Paul Klee in Paris; Klee led him on a journey of exploration of the possibilities of line, and to a reconnection with "the roots of Africa."" Similarly, Cherkaoui and Belkahia (and Jilali Gharbaoui and Mohamed Melehi), upon their return to Morocco from France, began a process of developing work that would draw from indigenous arts and crafts traditions of the Berber and other Moroccan cultures. Specifically, Cherkaoui's early academism—followed by a fascination, while in Paris, with 33 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

left: CAT. 1 Portrait of Woman from Egypt 1950-54 Oil on canvas 14 3/4 x 12 / 3 8 in.(375X 31.4 cm) Collection of Eve El-Salahi right: CAT. 2 Portrait ofa Young Man 1950-54 Oil on paper 14 / 7 8 X 12 in. (37.8 x 30.5 cm) Collection of Eve El-Salahi

the primordial symbolism of Klee and Roger Bissiere—led him to the exploration of Berber mystic signs and graphic notations that would define his later style. On Belkahia's return from Paris to Casablanca, he was appointed director of the city's Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he established new programs focusing on the introduction of indigenous, folk-art techniques, materials, and forms, giving rise to what has been called the Casablanca Group.22 In his own work he adopted lambskin and henna as his standard support and material, and developed a formal style characterized by indigenous decorative patterns and the Tifinagh script—in other words he asserted the potential and relevance of indigenous Moroccan craft and art traditions for truly Moroccan modernist work.

In every instance, these African artists clearly realized a need to reimagine their work by bringing the critical sophistication acquired in the academy to bear on a questioning of both the colonial context of their earlier artistic practice and the value of Western modernist artistic forms and institutional traditions in the postcolonial situation. As the more complex artistic milieu of post-World War II Egypt makes clear, the work and ideas of these artists did not go unchallenged by their contemporaries.23 Yet the power of their argument, anchored in the assertion of an authentic and autonomous African, national, or individual subjectivity, propelled many of these artists to the frontline of contemporary art within the African continent during and after the 196os. Also, the simultaneity of the emergence of these positions among the artists of that generation, a phenomenon traversing Anglophone and Francophone Africa, strongly suggests that even when direct connections between contemporary art and the politics of independence are not immediately evident, the work by its very nature owes much to the pan-African political and cultural aspirations of the artists of the new postcolonial nations during the age of independence. By participating in the workshops, conferences, and exhibitions held around the continent between the late 1950S and the late 196os, these artists engaged in the dialectical process of outlining the scope and horizons of a

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distinctly African contemporary art and thereby constituted, along with their colleagues in literature, what one might call the postcolonial avant-garde.

EL-SALAHI: ART, IDEOLOGY, AND THE AFRICAN IMAGINARY The significance of El-Salahi's early work in the development of the postcolonial aesthetic and artistic ideology articulated in the work of his contemporaries from other parts of Africa lies in his bearing witness, earlier than many artists of his generation, to that distinctive experience of reversal, or, better, of the dialectical process whereby a new African subjectivity emerged from the critique of a mode of knowing and being defined by and through the experience of colonial, Western art and culture. But that is not all. The specifics of his early career, the depth of his engagement with and mastery of the crafts of drawing and painting, and the intriguing mix of exacting thought and confounding mysticism at the foundation of his work—all these marked him out as a leading postcolonial African artist, explaining Beier's attraction to his work early on.

By the time El-Salahi left Sudan for the Slade, then arguably the most distinguished art school in the Anglophone world, he had already demonstrated a mastery of mimetic representation. In his portrait drawings and paintings from the early 195os, however, he seemed to vacillate between staid academic naturalism and an airy expressionism (cat. nos. 1, 2); despite his manifest technical competence, he clearly had not found himself in terms of either formal style or thematic focus. At the Slade he was exposed to various modernist styles, from the rigorously constructed portraiture and restrained naturalism of William Coldstream to the post-Vorticist styles associated with David Bomberg and various other interpretations of the formal lessons of Cubism.24 These diverse currents manifested in his work, as in that of his contemporaries at the Slade, to varying degrees, but in the end he seemed to have settled for a style characterized by carefully placed rectangular colored

CAT. 3 Church on the Hill 1956 Oil on canvas 7 8 in.(49 x 58.1 cm) 19 1/4 x 22 / Collection of Eve El-Salahi

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shapes (cat. no. 3). The pixelated naturalism of these later paintings from the Slade period clearly announced his complete immersion in Western modernist formal traditions. He would soon confront the ontological implications of his training at the Slade, however, particularly the total absence, in this new aesthetic, of anything related to Africa or Sudan, both of which constituted the core of his individual subjectivity:25

Fig. 12 Rise Against Tyranny. 1960-61.011 on canvas

I left the Sudan and came back. Then suddenly I started to look around and I started to look for things, for patterns. I have always been fascinated with patterns in local Sudanese handicrafts and what simple peasants were doing and carving and decorating and painting. And suddenly I think that the beauty of it came to me and hit me—it's so strong. I lived with it all my life and yet I never saw it before, until I went outside and came back, with a different outlook toward things.26 While El-Salahi was at the Slade, he began to study Arabic calligraphy, using the massive collections of museums including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert. These studies had no impact on his Slade-period work but must have served to preserve his connection to the cultures and heritages of Sudan.22 And although he has acknowledged the radical transformation of his work that occurred after a crisis instigated by the popular rejection of his first exhibition in Khartoum, in which he showed work from the Slade era, I want to suggest that by familiarizing himself with traditions of Arabic calligraphy at a time when he was also striving to master modernist formalist techniques, he already, perhaps unconsciously, was anticipating the crisis he would face upon his return to Sudan.28 In other words, these two domains or traditions of image making—one Western, the other Arab/ African; one belonging to the colonizer, the other to the colonized—in some way reflected the nodal points of his identity, which at that time was yet to be renegotiated. Once he was back in Sudan, and immersed in the ideological and existential space of the postcolonial (imagined here as a dialectical space), the profound process of sublating the previously contrasting Western and Arab/African subjectivities gave rise to drawings and paintings based, in formal terms, on a combination of lessons and forms from modernist art, Arab calligraphy, and black African design (fig. 12).

I earlier mentioned the part played by El-Salahi's audience—with its negative response to his first, post-Slade show in Khartoum—in the formal transformation of his work. If his London studies of Arabic calligraphy implied a recognition of the potential value of this material as an artistic resource on which his art might depend in the future, the role of spectatorship in this narrative is significant in terms of our understanding El-Salahi's modernism. In an important essay on the powerful but vastly underacknowledged, active role of audiences in African artistic and literary invention, Zoe S. Strother has argued that what we often refer to as elite traditional African art is often a negotiated compromise between artist, patron, and audience, and therefore belongs in the realm of popular rather than elitist culture.29 By contrast, modernist art, because of its vaunted claim to authorial autonomy, more often than not disavowed the often equally important role of spectatorial expectations in the fashioning of the artistic imagination. Bearing this in mind, the fact that El-Salahi, an artist trained in the traditions of twentieth-century Western modernism, put substantial value on the expectations of his Khartoum audience, as he has acknowledged in a number of interviews, forces us to reconsider what type of modernist artistic vision he was then fashioning.

To be sure, despite his work's occasional incorporation of legible Arabic text, it still required what one might call specialized visual literacy to decode its often multireferential form, not to mention its metaphysical and sometimes indeterminate meaning. As such it does not belong in the realm of the popular. Yet I want to suggest that by investing critical value in his audience's expectation, El-Salahi distanced himself from an important aspect of modernist avant-garde practice: the idea that advanced art was produced by an artist-genius alienated from his society and unconcerned with popular criticism. Even more crucially, this gesture was clearly El-Salahi's way of convincing himself of the full implication of both his return to Sudan and his independence from a Western modernist construct of artistic subjectivity. He was reconnecting himself to his native audience and cultural 37 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

context by acknowledging both his own authorial license and the relevance of popular criticism, two factors, Strother argues, that drove artistic invention in Africa long before the changes brought about by the encounter with Europe. In other words, a process of recuperation of his African artistic identity led inevitably to the realization that a modernist practice in postcolonial Africa must recognize the peculiarity of its milieu, which includes the critical part played by audience participation in the shaping of artistic imagination.

Let me then return to the subject with which this essay began. It is anything but surprising that El-Salahi's drawings from the late 19505 and early'6os—with imagery, derived primarily from Arabic calligraphy and African decorative patterns, rendered in delicate lines to create enigmatic scenes and startling compositions—were misread by his critics as evidence of a naive impulse that they admired. The naivete ascribed to the work obviously reflected less a meaningful consideration of its formal conditions than the critics' fantasies about Africa's reputation as the home of uniquely primordial societies and simple, unsophisticated peoples. Deviation from this imagined state, producing the perception of a degree of sophistication in the African subject, elicited suspicion of an inauthentic, fatally modernized Africa.

Indeed, the technical and intellectual sophistication of these drawings, and their demonstration that an African artist, versed in the formal traditions of the academy and conversant with the rich heritage of Arabic calligraphy and African decorative design, could develop work that spoke to his postcolonial experience and identity, established El-Salahi as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Through a formal style and a conceptual attitude that testified to a convergence of histories, cultures, and geographies at a point when many African countries were finally emerging from the yoke of colonialism, El-Salahi gave powerful voice to the meaning of cultural sovereignty and contributed immensely to the critical debate on contemporary African art during the continent's independence decade. While his work may clearly have constituted what Duerden calls "unilinear development in invention and discovery," it also quite evidently manifested a compound consciousness, the positive philosophical disposition adopted by some independence-generation African artists faced with a new postcolonial reality.

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I. Denis Duerden,"Letter from London: The London Exhibition of Contemporary African Art/1967,"African Arts 1, no. i (Autumn 1967): 67.

2. ibid. Although Skunder Boghossian is discussed in Duerden's review, an announcement of the show published in the Transcription Centre's magazine does not include him in the list of participating artists culled from the exhibition catalogue. See Cultural Events in Africa 27(February 1967): 2.

3. Frank McEwen,"Return to Origins: New Directions for African Arts," African Arts 1, no. 2(Winter 1968): 2, 18-25, 88.

4. Independence decade here refers to the years between the mid-195os and the mid-196os when most African countries won their political independence from European countries.

5. Ulli Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi," Black Orpheus io (1961/62): 48-50. In his later, seminal study. Beier claimed,"No artist could create a more perfect synthesis of the cultural elements that make up the modern Sudan,the Islamic tradition and the wider all-African orientation of today." See Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 30.

6. Ulli Beier, facsimile letter to the author, October to, 2003. For a brief but very useful critical biography of Denis Williams see Carl. E. Hazelwood,"Notes on a Life: Denis Williams. 1923-1998," Nka:Journal of Contemporary African Art 9(1998): 14-15.

7. H. M. El Amin, Esq., the secretary for cultural affairs at the Sudanese Embassy in Lagos, opened the exhibition on November 15, 1961. It closed on December 9. Onobrakpeya discussed the enduring impact of El-Salahi's work on his own painting in an interview with me in Mushin, Lagos, August 7, 2002.

Udechukwu did not see the exhibition but saw its drawings reproduced in an ensuing book on El-Salahi that Beier published: Ibrahim El Salahi: Drawings (lbadan, Nigeria: Mbari Publications, 1962).

8. Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi"; Beier, "Artist from Sudan," West African Review, February 1962. 49-53; and Ibrahim El Salahi: Drawings.

9. Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi," 48. The Khartoum trip was part of multination tour during which Beier met artists and writers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe),South Africa, the Congo, and Kenya to promote and collect materials for Black Orpheus and Mbari.

10. Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi," p. 48.

11. In a taped interview that El-Salahi gave to me (Oxford, England, June 16, 18, and 19, 2003), he pointed to the outcome of his first exhibition in Sudan after his training in London as the signal moment in the evolution of his work. Believing that the Khartoum audience had ignored the show because of its foreignness, its non-Arab character, he spent the next two years researching local folk art and Arabic calligraphy in order to develop a new form and style acceptable to his local spectators. As such, were he only concerned with his own aesthetic preferences or with the internal logic of his evolving style, he might not have rethought his work the way he did.

12. Although Beier tried to locate El-Salahi's work within an "African" artistic tradition, in the same passage he also asserted his inability to define its "African qualities." despite his certainty that it was "intensely African." For his part, El-Salahi, as earlier indicated, sought a formal style that spoke to his Sudanese, African identity, but at the time he did not know of long-faced Senufo or any other West African masks. El-Salahi, interview with the author, June 2003.

13. Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi," p. 49.

14. See Robert Serumaga,"Ibrahim el Salahi Interviewed by Robert Serumaga," Cultural Events in Africa 27(February 1967): 1-4.

15. Confessing his inability to meaningfully comment on or explain El-Salahi's work, Beier opted to print the artist's explanatory notes on each of the published drawings and paintings, rather than do critical injustice to them. See Beier,"Ibrahim Salahi."

16. Beier,"Artist from Sudan," p. 49.

17. Denis Williams,"Ibrahim Es [sic] Salahi. Paintings at Galerie Lambert in Paris," Black Orpheus 12 (1963): 44. See also Williams's essay "A Sudanese Calligraphy: A Contemporary Interpretation of Mohammedan Art," Transition 9(1963): 19-20; here he attempts a deeper analysis of Islamic calligraphic tradition and the significance of the work of members of the Khartoum School, especially that of Ahmed Shibrain, within and beyond this tradition.

18. Gene Ulansky discusses the role the Mbari Artists and Writers Club played in creating an intellectual community and network of African and AfricanAmerican artists and writers in the 196os in "MbariThe Missing Link," Phylon 26(1965), no. 3: 247-54.

19. Referring to the impact of political independence on the work of his generation of Sudanese artists, ElSalahi has said,"Now we search for and interpret our past with confidence.... We hope that a new spirit of art with its own special flavor and color will emerge and reveal the beauty of meanings long forgotten and wrapped in fear and mystery." Quoted in Evelyn S. Brown,Africa's ContemporaryArt and Artists(New York: Harmon Foundation, 1966). p. 105.

20. Mbari was replicated at Oshogbo and Enugu in Nigeria and inspired the establishment of the Chemchemi Cultural Centre in Nairobi. Kenya. by Ezekiel (Eskia) Mphahlele, a founding member of Mbari. Chemchemi in turn inspired Elimo Njau's Paa ya Paa Gallery in the same city. See Ulansky,"MbariThe Missing Link." and Hilary Ng'weno,"Letter from Nairobi," African Arts 1, no. 2 (Winter 1968): 66-69.

23. In the post-World War II period, several groups of artists grew influential in Egypt, each asserting a particular artistic philosophy. The Art and Freedom group (established in 1938) aligned itself with European modernist art trends, while the Group of Contemporary Art (established in 1946) argued instead for the development of art styles based on Egypt's cultural and artistic heritages. See Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence ofa Notional Style (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988).

24. William Coldstream was the principal of the Slade for many years. In William Coldstream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), Bruce Laughton discusses in depth the major stylistic currents at the school in the195os, when El-Salahi trained there.

25. In an interview with Beier in 1990, El-Salahi discussed at length the Arab and African heritage of Sudan and the complex ways they defined his personal identity from childhood. See Beier, Identity and Exile: Conversations with Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: lwalewa-Haus, 1990). Excerpted in this volume, pp. 105-11.

26. El-Salahi, in Serumaga,"Ibrahim el Salahi Interviewed by Robert Serumaga." p. 4.

27. In Nigeria, the members of the Zaria Art Society also studied objects and ethnographic data from Nigerian museums,yet it was not until they left art school (the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology) that they made meaningful use of these materials in their work, resulting in the radical change of their formal styles. See my "Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Modernism in Nigeria: The Art of Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko,1960-1968," African Arts 39, no. i (Spring 2006): 26-37,92-93.

28. In his 1967 interview with Serumaga, he mentions that while studying the Victoria and Albert collection, "I kept wondering about the possibility of trying to bring [Islamic art] into my own work." El-Salahi, in Serumaga,"Ibrahim el Salahi Interviewed by Robert Serumaga," p. 1.

29. Zoe S. Strother,"Gabama a Gingungu and the Secret History of Twentieth-Century Art," African Arts 32, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18-31,92-93.

21. See Louise Atcheson,"Skunder Boghossian,"

Transition 9(1963): 44.

22. Ahmed

Irbouh,Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco,1912-1956(London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2005), p. 9.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism in a Comparative Perspective IFTIKHAR DADI

IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI'S painting The Last Sound (1964; cat. no.13), executed on a square canvas with a carefully limited palette of grays and earth tones, is organized around a central circular dynamic core. Radiant lines thrust outward from a barely perceptible African masklike form. Celestial bodies, elements of calligraphic geometric and animate shapes, and actual Arabic calligraphic prayers, appearing as palimpsests, surround the central form, creating a metaphoric universe in which the last sound is echoed. The title of the work refers to the Islamic practice of reciting prayers for the dead and the dying. In the work, El-Salahi renders the soul's passage from the corporeal to the celestial as it travels toward heavenly forms inhabiting the universe and beyond. The Last Sound is, however, not a narrative or realist work but a manifestly modernist one, in which the terrifying event is metaphorized in a dynamic formal composition. Here, the abstraction of African sculptural forms and calligraphy serves to universalize the event—no realist or academic visual language could obviously be adequate to the scope of the subject. The relation El-Salahi creates between African abstract forms and Arabic calligraphy that itself refers to Islamic discursive textuality invokes the gravitas of its theme.

The assured handling of the visual language with which The Last Sound is painted might lead one to imagine that El-Salahi is working from an aesthetic grammar already in place, perhaps developed much earlier. But it was only very recently that El-Salahi himself had articulated the linkage between Arabic calligraphic and African sculptural forms. The Last Sound was painted during the middle of an intense period of modernist experimental effort carried out by El-Salahi between 1958 and the latei96os. It is the working out of his concerns by praxis and the overthrowing of his academic training (1954-57) at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, that mark El-Salahi's intellectual concerns during that era. While El-Salahi's contribution is distinctive in developing an aesthetic of decolonization for Sudan and much of Africa—situated among Islamic textuality, African plastic forms, and transnational modernism—it can be usefully compared to that of other modernist artists from the Muslim world who were engaged with similar cultural problems in the wake of decolonization from the mid-twentieth century onward.

CALLIGRAPHIC MODERNISM IN CONTEXT Between 1955 and 1975, artists from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia reworked Arabic calligraphic motifs in entirely new ways.' Not only were earlier attitudes about classical Arabic calligraphy decisively modified, but also modern Western genres such as academic realism in portraiture, landscape, and still life (which were still in vogue in the 195os) were reshaped by a THE MAKING OF A MODERNIST 41 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

renewed concern with the abstract and expressive possibilities of the Arabic script. The Arabic script was not simply utilized in a classical manner to render beautifully a religious verse or endow it with ornamental form; rather, the script was often imbued with figuration and abstraction to a degree that resisted a straightforward literal or narrative meaning.2 The imbrication of modernist calligraphy with post-Cubist art represents a broad artistic movement, but my concern here is not to conduct a survey of its development, a task that has been accomplished by Wijdan Ali and by others in numerous monographs on various national modern art histories.3 Instead, this essay explores the reasons why these artists were compelled to grapple with aesthetic issues during the post-1945 period and how their experiments remain relevant to our globalized world today. Their groundbreaking artistic projects can be understood in a variety of ways: as individual and subjective expressions, as enacting a dialogue with nationalism, and as a critical engagement with metropolitan modernism and cosmopolitanism. In order to demonstrate how these works transcend the borders of the nation and gesture toward larger forms of affiliation, after first introducing key artists and their works, I will briefly trace the broad contours of decolonization and its relationship to the visual arts in the region.

As stated, between 1955 and 1975, numerous artists working in the diverse region from North Africa to South Asia contributed to a movement that transformed Arabic calligraphy into modern art—mostly without direct knowledge of one another's work. Ibrahim El-Salahi (1930—) in Sudan, Sadequain Naqqash (1930-87) in Pakistan, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (1937—) in Iran, Shakir Hassan Al Sa'id (1925-2004) in Iraq, and many others created a new aesthetic language of calligraphic figuration and abstraction. Zenderoudi worked out these possibilities in his paintings of the late 19505, inspired by Shiite talismanic designs and popular posters and shrines. He was one of the founders of an Iranian artistic approach to calligraphy that was named the Saqqakhaneh school in 1963 and included artists such as Parviz Tanavoli and Siah Armajani, who subsequently immigrated to the United States and became a prominent installation and conceptual artist.', Iraqi theorist and artist Al Sa'id was part of a group that discarded mimetic representation in favor of a "purer" calligraphic form. Al Sa'id was a key participant and theorist in the movement that mounted the One Dimension Group exhibition, held in Baghdad in 1971. This important exhibition also included artist Madiha Umar, who was a pioneer in developing modernist calligraphic paintings from as early as 1945.6 Working in Pakistan, Hanif Ramay in the early 19505, Anwar Jalal Shemza in the United Kingdom from the later 195os, and Sadequain explored calligraphy in relation to modernism.

Sadequain transformed calligraphy to figuration in a painterly manner during the late 195os, but his work became more linear and graphic by the mid-196os, leading him to visually explore the poetic subjectivity of the dominant Indo-Persian cultural milieu that characterizes South Asian Muslim culture/ During the late 19505 in Sudan, El-Salahi created a dialogue between calligraphy and figuration that introduced West African motifs to his multifaceted response to the heterogeneity of the linguistic, religious, and cultural landscape of the region, and his paintings acknowledged the persistence of Islamic influences in Africa and the Arab world.8 The Western avant-garde was clearly significant for this revival of calligraphy. For mid-twentiethcentury non-Western artists, the aftermath of Picasso's Cubism, Wilfredo Lam's Surrealist synthesis of Cubism with Africana religions in Cuba during the194os, and such mid-twentieth-century movements as lettrism, art brut, and art informel were far more compelling modalities than older perspectival and realist European academic styles. The Parisian avant-garde was extremely salient in this regard,9 but developments in Italy and the work of English artists such as Graham Sutherland and the American Abstract Expressionists were also important. A genealogy of European-inflected training was a common factor for many artists. For example,Zenderoudi studied in Tehran in the late 19505 with teachers who trained in Paris and Italy, and he has resided primarily in France since 1961.° Al Sa'id, who visited Paris on a scholarship in 1956, was a member of a group of Iraqi impressionist painters that maintained extensive contact with Western Europe during the 1950s."

Sadequain was self-taught, but after he won a prize at the Biennale de Paris in 1961, he spent the next seven years working mostly in Paris.'2 During thei96os, after his training in London, El-Salahi traveled extensively in West Africa, Europe, and Mexico, and held extended fellowships in the United 42

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States. The significance of the work of these artists, however, is by no means reducible to European and American prototypes.

ART AND DECOLONIZATION The challenges that decolonization posed for culture in Asian and African nations formerly under direct or indirect British rule were especially acute in the two decades after 1955.'3 A profound and intensive search for new artistic languages began at that time, which would seek to recover expressivity that had been repressed under colonialism but that would also actively produce a new modern culture. This growing awareness of national independence and sovereignty created a demand for a new aesthetic of decolonization, one that would remain in dialogue with metropolitan developments but would also account for regional and nationalist specificities. Artists attempted to find visual languages adequate to the aspirations of decolonization by creating work that appeared to fulfill the expectations of a national art; hence, it is no surprise that this intensive and fertile period of artistic creativity has been primarily understood as a nationalist undertaking. However,the demands put on cultural production in the mid-196os were highly overdetermined: the new culture was to be individuated, yet collective; it was to be completely modern in the sense of being in dialogue with artistic production in the industrialized world, yet it was also mandated to represent local histories and lived practices that were hitherto suppressed; and, above all, the new culture was to be emblematic of national specificity." The gap between academic art and postcolonial realities could be vast. El-Salahi, reflecting on the lack of interest among the Sudanese for an exhibition of his work in Khartoum during the late 195os, states: I understand that every artist has a message to deliver in his or her society.... By nature, to start with, one has to address one's Self, the satisfaction of which is initial and crucial in the creative process. Secondly, one addresses Others in one's own society and culture from which one has borrowed and absorbed a great deal that is to be repaid in kind. And thirdly, last but not least, one ultimately does address All, meaning humanity and human society at large.'5 Clearly the stakes were very high, as artists were expected to produce nothing less than the development of a new cultural language that would exploit the opening provided by decolonization—understood at the time as an opportunity to enact a truly world-historical shift in politics and culture—but these demands could not be reconciled easily.

The artists who grappled with these challenges in their sweeping, highly charged careers became national legends. The importance of the national framework remains quite significant in the specific context of calligraphic modernism. Indeed, since the beginning of his career in 1955 and certainly after his return from Paris in 1968,Sadequain enacted the persona of the supreme Pakistani national artist, a role that was celebrated in a 2002 retrospective in a national museum, accompanied by a massive, largely congratulatory, catalogue of his career.th In Sudan, El-Salahi is regarded as one of the founders of the Khartoum School of art and through his teaching and artwork became a highly influential and dynamic exemplar for successive generations of Sudanese and African artists. In Iran, Zenderoudi's paintings were highlighted in a number of state-sponsored exhibitions, from the Tehran Biennial in 1960 to a 2001 retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.'7 Since 1958, the Iraqi government has been a major patron of the arts, sponsoring numerous public works,18 planning exhibitions of modern art within Iraq and in international venues,19 and encouraging scholarship and publications on ancient, classical Arab and modern Iraqi art and culture.2° The national framework is thus fundamental in situating these artists as eminent cultural figures who each developed schools of national artistic practice. However,the link between national art and the diaspora also needs to be taken into account. It is in the diaspora that many such artists encountered the range and strength of Western artistic practices firsthand. They were able to visit the great Western museums,filled with canonical works, which many had previously seen only in magazine

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CAT. 4 They Always Appear 1964-65 Oil on canvas 18 x 12 in.(45.8 x 30.5 cm) Collection of the artist

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reproductions. It is in the diaspora that many of these artists met with other artists—both Western and non-Western—and learned about one another's methods and concerns. Moreover, artists

frequently sought institutional support to develop their careers in the diaspora, as such support was not as well established in their own countries." El-Salahi's intellectual formation was forged during his study in London and became even broader during his travels in the United States during the early and mid-196os, when he had a chance to meet with artists, jazz musicians, political activists, and black intellectuals. He also traveled to Mexico to meet with artists there and to China to study its artistic pedagogy. As the example of Negritude shows, in an important sense, the experience of diaspora engendered transnational aesthetic movements, as well as new affiliations of identity and community.22 El-Salahi also facilitated the imagining of a broader Africanist aesthetic, not least by his participation in exhibitions in Nigeria in 1961 and in Senegal in 1966.23 It is worthwhile to look more closely at two figures here—El-Salahi and Sadequain—to understand the circumstances of their careers and their aesthetic choices. Both artists are considered heroic national figures in their respective countries. Metropolitan experiences were formative for both artists, who each evolved formal artistic languages influenced by Arabic calligraphy. They were born in the same year (1930), but their educational backgrounds differ sharply—El-Salahi was formally trained as an artist in Khartoum and London and has been a cosmopolitan intellectual with wideranging interests. Sadequain, self-taught, was not able to acquire much formal Western-style education and throughout his life felt most comfortable in the cultural milieu of Urdu. Both artists started their careers during the 19505 as modernist artists, although with the rise of Islamist politics, both artists also faced political crises in the mid-197os, which had, in different ways, profoundly transformative effects on both.

El-Salahi's rejection of the academic training he had received in England was prompted by his awareness, when he returned to Sudan, of his training's inadequacy and irrelevancy to the role that art ought to play in postcolonial Sudan. By the late 19505 and the earlyi96os, the failure of academic painting to break out of the narrow elite salon and gallery exhibition circuit of Khartoum and engage with a more democratic and vernacular visual culture impelled El-Salahi toward a radical aesthetic shift. As he describes it, this transformation demanded breaking open the Arabic letter and exploring the new aesthetic universe that emerged from the fragments and the interstices. Fracturing the Arabic letter also broke the classical calligraphic text as a repository of received meaning. This is evident in a series of paintings whose very title, "They Always Appear," signifies the emergence of figural forms among the spaces defined by the figure-ground relationship of abstracted calligraphic shapes (cat. nos. 4, 14, 17). The artist recalls: I limited my color scheme to somber tones.... In the next step I wrote letters and words that did not mean a thing. Then came a time when I felt I had to break down the bone of the letter, observing the space within a letter and the space between a letter and the other on the line. I wanted to see what was there and find out their basic components and origins.

There the Pandora's box opened up wide before my eyes.... In place of those broken-up letters I discovered animal and plant forms, sounds, human images, and what looked like skeletons with masked faces.".

El-Salahi's experiments thus resulted in an abstraction that was regional, yet modernist, and that indexed a vast ensemble of referential material, traversing the Arabic-Islamic discursive tradition and West African iconography.

Sadequain's explorations of modernist subjectivity in postcolonial Pakistan led him to articulate the Parisian avant-garde with abstracted constructions of artistic subjectivity in the Indo-Persian poetic tradition. During his years in Paris, Sadequain's figuration became more linear and more recognizably calligraphic. In a characteristic self-portrait from 1966, his contorted fingers spell the word Allah (fig.13).25 Sadequain's growing involvement with calligraphy culminated in 1968 and

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Fig. 13 Sadequain. Untitled. 1966. Ink on paper, 18 x 24 in.(45.7 x 61 cm)

1969, after his permanent return to Pakistan from Paris, when he illustrated the poetry of the famous nineteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib," published his own collection of poetry that he had himself calligraphed and illustrated,27 and began writing verses from the Qur'an for the first time in his career."

Sadequain also broadly shared many aspects of El-Salahi's artistic explorations in discovering possibilities of textuality and figuration, and indeed, both artists were exhibited at Galerie Lambert in Paris during the196os, albeit in separate exhibitions. The rise of repressive governments during the mid-197os, however, had a major impact on their careers. During their early years, both artists were mostly apolitical, but when both the Sudanese and the Pakistani governments turned toward the Islamist right during the mid-197os, the responses of the artists were quite different. El-Salahi was arbitrarily jailed for six months in 1975 and 1976 without charge. This traumatic event decisively shifted his career trajectory—his post-prison concerns achieved an even deeper aesthetic dialogue with calligraphy and figuration, especially in his black-and-white panels. By contrast, Sadequain publicly accommodated himself to the new political environment, while remaining nonconformist in

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his private life. Critics have accused Sadequain, who produced state-sanctioned Qur'anic calligraphy

in his later career, of aesthetic complicity with the regime of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and some observers see the coarsening of the artist's work after the mid-197os as the price paid for this unfortunate alliance.29 But even in his later years, however compromised,Sadequain never created works that function as instruments of propaganda for Islamization, and in this sense, it would be misleading to regard him as an artist merely working on behalf of the state.

The mid-197os crisis in the lives of both artists corresponds to a larger crisis in postcolonial sovereignty in many nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, which is clearly visible in the aesthetic realm. Wijdan Ali has noted a clear decline in artistic production, attributing it to the "amount of poor-quality work that has passed itself off as calligraphic art."36 However, the rise of political nation-based Islam and the general degeneration of calligraphic art are hardly accidental. By the late 19705, individual artistic achievement was subsumed under official state culture, especially with the rise of Islamist regimes in Sudan and Pakistan, the Iranian Revolution in 1978, and the consolidation of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq in 1979, and much calligraphic art became more instrumental, propagandist, and in this sense, degraded.31 The Iranian Revolution, for example, engendered an entire universe of posters and popular graphics in which calligraphy was deployed as an instrument of propaganda.32 With characteristic hyperbole in Iraq, Saddam Hussein (who increasingly turned to Islam after the 1991 Gulf War) was reported to have commissioned the complete Quranic text calligraphed in his own blood.33 General Zia's Pakistani state also promoted calligraphy during the 198os in accordance with his wider project of the "Islamization" of Pakistan.34 Many of the most gifted and creative artists who continued to work in calligraphic modernism without succumbing to ideological instrumentality ended up living in the diaspora—Zenderoudi, Rachid Koraichi, and Hassan Massoudy chose to reside in Paris, and El-Salahi went into lonely exile in Qatar, which nonetheless provided him with an inner space to explore his innovative linear monochrome works on paper.

During thei98os and 19905, political Islam came to denote internally dictatorial and oppressive regimes that are externally weak, and the effects of such a compromised politics are visible as symptoms in the national art of the contemporary period. However, this political and aesthetic crisis was not purely national in nature, for it represents a passing toward a "post-national" and global world in which the place of the nation-state has been further diminished by a range of developments. In general terms, the optimistic phase of decolonization in much of Asia, Africa, and other regions lasted only two or three decades, from around 1950 to the mid-197os. The naive understanding of decolonization as freedom itself was compromised by the growing awareness of the stubborn persistence of (neo)colonialism. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the initiation of new United States—led financial restructuring deeply impacted developing nations. Such nations had faced numerous difficulties in achieving sovereignty during the Cold War period, but these hurdles became virtually insurmountable after 1990 as neoliberalism became more intrusive. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the projection of U.S. financial interests became intrusively and blatantly global.35 It is now widely understood that contemporary globalization has largely obliterated the promises of the postcolonial nation-state and substituted little in its place. By this account, then, the "postnational" condition has rendered anachronistic the developmental project of the nation-state, along with its cultural and artistic symbols. For if the post-1945 developmental nation-state had represented itself through imagining a timeless and essentialist past, as argued by Benedict Anderson,36 it equally viewed itself through the idiom of "nationalist modern."37 The artistic projects of this heroic age responded to this array of forces by simultaneously claiming to be emblematic of individual meanings, of national traditions, and of modernist strivings for universal values.

The artists I have discussed were once applauded as emblematic figures embodying national specificity in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan, yet their aesthetics share many concerns that lie beyond the obvious relationship with metropolitan modernism. It needs to be recognized that even during the heroic age, the artists themselves took on a much wider canvas than the nation-state. For example, Zenderoudi's vernacular Shiite motifs extend across western Asia into South Asia; Sadequain's Indo-Persian world of poetry is certainly larger than the borders of Pakistan; El-Salahi is as much a

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West African and an Arab artist as he is Sudanese; and the salience and centrality of modern Iraqi culture provides paradigms for the entire Arab world. Clearly, the works of these artists constantly exceed national borders, even as they exceed their relationship to the metropolitan centers of

modernist art. These complex relationships are evident early on, when the careers of these artists led them to ceaselessly shuttle between the nation and the still-attractive metropolitan center, while also visiting other "horizontal" locations. For example, El-Salahi traveled widely to Nigeria, Mexico, China, Europe, and the United States, and Sadequain, apart from his stay in France, visited other European countries and traveled to Iraq before returning to Pakistan in 1968. During 1973, El-Salahi was invited to Baghdad to attend a meeting of Arab artists, where he met Al Sa'id and others and was able to compare his aesthetic explorations in calligraphic modernism with the more established explorations by Iraqi artists. Later, when El-Salahi was in a Sudanese jail in 1976, the brother of the deceased Iraqi artist Jawad Selim, who worked in the Iraqi embassy in Khartoum, quietly supplied El-Salahi with Iraqi cultural journals, notably Afaq Arabiyya and Al-Aqlam.38 THE DISCURSIVITY OF CALLIGRAPHIC MODERNISM For many artists from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, there were two main ways in which experiments with modern art were broadly undertaken: folkloric, figurative, and representational styles can be contrasted with practices that emphasize the textual and the calligraphic and those with figural absence. It is important to stress that rather than describing actual motifs these two modes are analytical categories that help us map the character of artwork produced in the postindependence era—one often finds that both modes are active in the works of a single artist and both are frequently present even within a single artwork. The folkloric/figurative mode consists of motifs that denote presence—village scenes, symbols from ancient civilizations, cityscapes, still lifes, portraiture, and so forth. But in the textual, abstract, and calligraphic modes, there is absence and an evacuation of iconic signifiers, and even calligraphy itself is often deployed in a highly abstract and largely illegible fashion. Rather than indexing specific meanings from a textual source, mutilated calligraphy indexes textuality itself The deferral of meaning that textuality enacts as a general phenomenon is further doubled by the difficulty in deciphering such calligraphic forms that lean heavily toward abstraction. If the folkloric/figurative mode, which was inevitably tied to nationalist iconography, no longer speaks to us in any tangible sense, the abstract/calligraphic mode pries open the boundaries of the nationalist frame. Unlike premodern calligraphy, the modernist experiments no longer render a sacred or wise quotation in beautiful and ornamental form but rather raise questions of legibility. In the hands of El-Salahi, Zenderoudi,Sadequain, Al Sa'id, and others, the illegibility of calligraphy—in its dialogue with post-Cubist figuration and in its non-ornamental renderings—opens up the phenomenon of textuality to refer to a constellation of identity in which elements from Africa, from Shiite vernacular culture, or from Indo-Persian poetry exceed the boundaries of nationality.

Such artists reterritorialize the Arabic script, foregrounding its discursivity, while also making its aesthetic permeable to the outside, thus problematizing a simple binary homology between art and national identity.

Calligraphic modernism draws new links among the shared conceptions of a vast region. By virtue of the Arabic script, it generates a form of textuality that indexes the force of discursive and institutional authority. This is not a "past" that was simply "lost" through the epistemic violence of colonialism, as the "past" was, to a significant degree, already text. Indeed, colonialism itself, by its reliance on discursive knowledge,further emphasized textuality. Unquestionably, this past does undergo a "discursive rupture" under the force of colonialism and modernity, but this is not a simple loss.39 Talal Asad has argued for a conception of an Islamic discursive tradition that problematizes existing temporal and affiliated notions of modernity (as simply characterized by empty secular time and limited to the horizon of the nation-state). In an interview, he states: In my view, tradition is a more mobile, time-sensitive, more open-ended concept than most formulations of culture. And it looks not just to the past but to the future.

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A tradition is in part concerned with the way limits are constructed in response to problems encountered and conceptualized. There's always a tension between this construction of limits and the forces that push the tradition onto new terrain, where

part or all of the tradition ceases to make sense and so needs a new beginning. And looked at another way: with each new beginning, there is the possibility of a new (or "revived") tradition, a new story about the past and the future, new virtues to be developed, new projects to be addressed.4° Summarizing some of the implications of Asad's approach, Ovamir Anjum notes:"The most fascinating questions about any contemporary Muslim society, those of reform, revival, modernity, and tradition, cannot even begin to be addressed until the mutual interaction of the Muslim world within the framework of a global Islamic discursive tradition is accounted for. And hence the idea of discursive tradition, which by definition is attuned to the idea of teaching and argument through time, becomes capable of transcending local dimensions and encompassing various Islamic spaces."41 Calligraphic experimentation accordingly acknowledges the persistence of the textual past, but under modernity, this is now abstracted, opened to a dialogue with metropolitan artistic languages and therefore more global in scope. However, as African artistic traditions were not primarily discursive while the Islamic discursive tradition largely did not attend to visual art, the modernist artist needed to work out the imbrications of textuality and Africanist forms through practice. El-Salahi notes: We had a problem then that separated the contemporary artist from the local public.

I personally felt that a bridge had to be built to close that gap between the two parties. Something work-wise had to be done. I said to myself,"Man, let us for a time forget about those archaic concepts of art for art's sake, and that unreal nonsense of the muse and ivory tower recluse that we read about, and get down to work that might solve our problem."... I worked like mad, introduced Arabic writing and decorative patterns in a corner of my works like a stamp on an envelope, and exhibited some of those works. People, recognizing something that they were a bit familiar with, took note and came a bit closer. I gradually spread the lettering with symbols, words from the Qur'an and Sufi poetry over the surface of the picture, mixing it with figurative work. They came closer, showing a greater degree of interest."

Here, the formation of a decolonized audience is seen as inextricably tied to experimentation and praxis.

Artists who have undertaken modern calligraphic works since 1975, from Indonesia to North Africa, are too numerous to mention here,43 although it is relevant to note that few modern artists deployed calligraphy before the mid-195os.44 Moreover, within the Muslim world itself, the broad artistic interest in classical calligraphic styles was largely absent until about 1955—books published on Arabic calligraphy before that date are very few in number, in contrast to numerous publications devoted to histories of calligraphy, and the presentation of samples of calligraphic styles in substantial albums, which date mostly from the mid-195os.45 In Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and other Arab countries during the heroic age, modern calligraphic art emerged together with scholarly and popular interest in traditional calligraphy, and the two should be viewed as constituting a wider discursive and aesthetic field.46 Emerging scholarship in the history of calligraphy thus provided a backdrop for Islamic art that was not easily congruent with the boundaries of postcolonial nationhood during the golden age of national sovereignty. Modern calligraphic experimentation, then, is as much a dialogue with this body of discursive and artistic tradition as it is with metropolitan modernism. The term cosmopolitanism indexes the fluidity of contemporary identity, in which affiliations are unmoored from fixed referents during a period of transition and where a new stability and synthesis of institutions and identity are not yet in place. For some observers, a (noncritical) cosmopolitan identification with metropolitan culture was precisely to be resisted by recourse to "national" formations. For

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example, describing Iraqi art from the 19505 through the 19705, the noted Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (who settled in Iraq in 1948) writes: One fact that has always to be recognized in understanding Arab art today is that however revolutionary Arab artists may be in concept and in aspiration, a spirit of

tradition hangs on to them which they cannot, will not, shake off. However much they may subscribe to the view of"internationalism" or "cosmopolitanism" in modern art, they will not give up the notion that their identity can only be shaped by rooting themselves in a tradition of their own, which helps to give a distinction to their work, marking them off as the creators and extenders of a national culture.47 Here, the idea of cosmopolitanism is aligned with metropolitan internationalism and with art whose paradigms are defined by work produced in Paris, London, and New York. In order to remain "national" and Arab, and thus retain a critical difference, Jabra argues that Iraqi artists consciously resist a facile cosmopolitanism in their artistic projects.

Jabra's conception of the nation contains multiple dimensions, however. In a 1986 text, he maps out how his idea of the "national" addresses the specificity of Iraqi (Mesopotamian) history while also referring to a wider Arab world, which is not necessarily geographic. Indeed, according to Jabra, the modern Iraqi artist's awareness of Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization—and the centrality of the Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate for the Arab imaginary—"has given an impetus to the idea that Arab tradition not only predates Islam but actually goes back some 5,000 years, and is still viable, Islam being simply one of its more recent manifestations."48 Thus, while the "nation" is a modern creation, it is also somehow an integral historical part of a wider Arab/Islamic identity, which is to be situated in multiple and overlapping modalities. Building on this approach, the recourse to "Arabness" today is best understood as a discursive process, since the boundaries of Arabic-speaking regions have shifted widely over the centuries. During the medieval era, for example, Spain, Iran, and Central Asia were all key centers of Arabic/Islamic literature and culture. Jabra's Arab "nation" clearly does not consist of a simple, fixed, and stable locus. At least four concepts are contained within his use of the term, which refers simultaneously to a geographically bounded modern state, a reconstructed and imagined ancient pre-Islamic past, a distinctive Arab character, and an Islamic identity. If the first two referents are delimited by geography, the latter two are emphatically discursive constructions. In much of the Muslim world, repressive governments were supported by Cold War ideologies, which largely succeeded in destroying the organized nationalist-leftist movements, especially in Pakistan and Sudan. Iran and Iraq (until recently) have remained "nationalist," but since 1979 their nationalism has hardly been optimistic or celebratory, at least for any artist of integrity. The attenuation of the national ideal has also diminished appeals to the ancient past, which was in any case a largely folkloric maneuver to invest the timeless past with the halo of national glory. In contrast to Jabra's readings from the 1970S and 1980s, when it seemed that Islam was subsumed into Arab nationalism, the relationship appears to have reversed, as now Islam is seen to overshadow and incorporate Arab nationalist sentiment.

The complex imbrication of various historical layers and the ideological battles within these nation-states were mostly invisible to the metropolitan gaze viewing the regions through nationstate-based and area studies approaches. However, the works of artists from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, who pioneered calligraphic modes of expression in abstract forms of art, reveal precisely the tensions between the "national" and the "universal-Islamic." Such artists as El-Salahi and Al Sa'id were as responsive to creating a dialogue with Western visual languages of the mid-twentieth century as they were aware of the glaring need for developing a new national culture.

But as this nation came to be imagined through the complex ensemble of concepts described here, these artists also re-created a dialogue with regional emblems (African, Arab, Shiite, Indo-Persian, and so forth) and thus with the discursivity of the Islamic tradition. From 1955 to 1975, their practices mapped local and regional referents together, and by sidestepping direct political motifs, their 50

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calligraphic modernism also performatively contributed to the rise of broader Muslim aspirations by furnishing it with aesthetic and affective templates. Even if modern and contemporary conceptions of the Muslim ummah (the idea of a translocal Muslim community) are invented and imagined, and

bear only a fictional relationship to historical reality, these imaginings nevertheless remain deeply constrained by discursive and textual referents. Having enacted textuality in pointedly "nonpolitical" articulations, the calligraphic modernist project has relayed its effects into the present, some two decades after the end of the heroic age of decolonization.

The rapid emergence of calligraphic modernism after 1955 was a result of a complex play of forces that included new conceptions of modernist subjectivity, the need for national culture during decolonization, and a desire for equal participation in transnational modernism. The wider cultural movement of this era projected a new visual aesthetic of pan-Islamism—although this may not have been the conscious intention of the artists themselves, whose aims were often misunderstood due to the dominant framing of their work as exemplifying national art or as a dialogue with metropolitan centers. The calligraphic modernist artists from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, by virtue of their mediation of the Islamic discursive tradition and by refusing national Islamist politics, have relayed aesthetic and affective potentialities across the heroic age of decolonization into the present. To seriously rethink the contemporary valence of the Islamic discursive tradition implies that artistic endeavors during the era of decolonization have retained critical affiliations and differences from metropolitan modernisms that were not merely local or national but gestured toward imagining a broader community of interests. In the case of El-Salahi, these include his commitment to a larger Africanist aesthetic, his participation in the imagining of a wider, modern Muslim aesthetic, and his affiliation with the universalism (in its best sense) engendered by transnational modernism.

This is an expanded version ofan essay, titled "Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism," that originally appeared in Kobena Mercer,ed., Discrepant Abstraction (London: Institute ofInternational Visual Arts and Cambridge,MA: MIT Press,2006).

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*All websites active as ofJune 6,2012 1. By Arabic calligraphy, I also refer to Persian and Urdu, which share the Arabic alphabet. Especially in artistic works, the slippage between a language that uses Arabic script, even for nonreligious ends, and the textual tradition of Islam is productive of multiple meanings. On the traditional role of the calligrapher in the Islamic world, including examples from South Asia, see Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture(New York: New York University Press, 1984)• 2. For an attempt at a taxonomy of modern calligraphic paintings, see Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), chaps. 15,16.

3. Wijdan All,"Modern Islamic Art," in Ali, ed., Contemporary Artfrom the Islamic World (London: Scorpion Publishing, 1990). A useful online resource is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, www.metmuseum.org/toah.

On the lettrists in the Arab world, see Sharbal Daghir, AI-Huruftyah arArabiyah:Al-fannwa-al-huwiyah (Arabic lettrism: Art and identity)(Beirut: Sharikat alMatbuatlil-Tawziwa-al-Nashr, 1990).

On the modern art of Iraq, see Maysaloun Faraj, ed., Strokes of Genius: Contemporary Iraqi Art(London: Saqi Books, 2001); Iraqi Art Today (Baghdad: Ministry of Information, 1972); Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Grass Roots ofIraqi Art(St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands: Wasit Graphic and Publishing, 1983); May Muzaffar,"Iraqi Contemporary Art: Roots and Development," in Shams C. Inati, ed., Iraq: Its History,People,and Politics (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003), pp.63-89; and Silvia Naef,A la recherche d'une modemite Arabe: l'Evolution des arts plastiques en Egypte,au Liban et en Irak(Geneva: Slatkine, 1996).

The art history of modern Iran is outlined in Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert, eds., Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Rose Issa, Ruyin Pakbaz, and Daryush Shayegan, Iranian Contemporary Art(London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2001); and Ehsan Yarshater,"Contemporary Persian Painting," in Richard Ettinghausen and Yarshater, eds., Highlights ofPersian Art(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 362-77.

On modern Pakistani art, see Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). The most comprehensive (but idiosyncratic) survey is

by Akbar Naqvi, Image and Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

4. Saqqakhanah/Saqqakhaneh (Tehran: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 1977); Fereshteh Daftari,"Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective," in Balaghi and Gumpert,Picturing Iran, pp. 39-87; and Rose Issa,"Borrowed Ware," in Issa, Pakbaz, and Shayegan,Iranian Contemporary Art, pp. 13-28.

5. May Muzaffar,"Iraq," in Ali, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, p. 166; Ulrike al-Khamis,"An Historical Overview 1900s-19905," in Faraj, Strokes of Genius, p. 29; and Rashad Selim,"Diaspora, Departure, and Remains," in Faraj, Strokes of Genius, p. 52.

6. Salwa Mikdadi Nashashibi, Laura Nader, and Etel Adnan,"Arab Women Artists: Forces of Change," in Nashashibi. ed., Forces of Change:Artists of the Arab World (Lafayette, Calif.: International Council for Women in the Arts, 1994), p. 33.

7. Dadi, Modernism and the Art ofMuslim South Asia, chap. 3; Naqvi, Image and Identity, pp. 364-436 passim; Abdul Hameed Akhund, Farida Munavarjahan Said, and Zohra Yusuf, eds.,Sadequain: The Holy Sinner(Karachi: Mohatta Palace Museum, 2003); Rasheed Araeen,"Modernism, Postcolonial Nation States Art Criticism: A Reflection on the work of Hanif Ramay and Sadequain," Nukta:An Art Discourse, no.

19. For example, the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London held such art exhibitions during the 19705 and 198os, including one by a traditional twentieth-century calligrapher, Muhammad Hashim (Hashem al-Khattat, 1978).

20. See Eric Davis, Memories ofState: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chaps. 5,6.

(2005): 22-29.

8. Ulli Beier,"The Right to Claim the World: Conversation with Ibrahim El Salahi," Third Text 23 (Summer 1993): pp. 23-30; Ulli Beier, Ibrahim El Salohi: Drawings (lbadan, Nigeria: Mbari Publications, 1962); Salah M. Hassan,"The Khartoum and Addis Connections: Two Stories from Sudan and Ethiopia," in Clementine Deliss. ed., Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York: Flammarion,1995).

9. For an anecdotal account of the life of diaspora intellectuals in Paris, see Es'kia Mphahlele,"Paris in the 1960s," in Deliss, Seven Stories, pp. 254-56.

10. Fereshteh Daftari,"Another Modernism," pp. 6778.Zenderoudi's Web site is www.zenderoudi.com.

Naef. A la recherche d'une modemite Arabe, pp. 250-53 passim; al-Khamis,"An Historical Overview," p. 29; Muzaffar,"Iraq," p. 162.

12. For a

description of his experience in Paris, see his letters in Sadequain Naqqash, Ruq'at-i Sadiqaini (Karachi: Matbu'at-i 'Irfani, 1979).

13. While Iran was never formally colonized, its intellectuals remained caught in many of the same perceptions as those from formally colonized areas, namely, of seeing the country as economically, socially, and culturally backward. In this sense, decolonization as an intellectual and cultural idea is applicable to Iran. See Vijay Prashad,"Tehran: Cultivating an Imagination," in Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History ofthe Third World(New York: New Press, 2007), 14. As an example of this outlook, the curator Fereshteh Daftari writes,"Zenderoudi embodies the 'authentic local' with whom begins a movement away from Western idioms and back into the depths of Shiite iconography, articulated not in terms of the miniature tradition, say, but rather of the local vernacular," adding that "Zenderoudi seemed to satisfy the thirst for a national modern art." Daftari, "Another Modernism," pp. 68,73.

15. Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ibrahim El Salahi: The Artist in His Own Words (2005). This text currently exists only in manuscript form, though publication plans are underway.

16. See especially the critical essay by Vazira FazilaYacoobali,"The Making and Unmaking of a National Artist," in Akhund,Said, and Yusuf,Sadequain, pp. 54-67.

17. See Daftari,"Another Modernism," pp. 67-74; and Two Modernist Iranian Pioneers-Hossein Zandehroudi,Mossoud Arabshahi, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001. www.artfacts.net/en/ exhibition/two-modernistiranian-pioneers-hosseinzandehroudi-massoud-arabshahi-i9o84/overview. html.

18. For a study of Jawad Selim's Monument of Liberty, see Lorna Selim and Ulrike al-Khamis,"Lorna Selim Remembers," in Faraj, Strokes of Genius, Pp. 41-46; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra,Jawad Salim wa-Nusb al-Hurriyah: Dirasah fi athorih wa-araih (Studies in Jawad Selim's Monument to Liberty)(Baghdad: Wizarat al-Ilam, Mudiriyat al-Thaqafah al-Ammah, 1974).

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21. In this regard, the governments of Iran and Iraq were able to provide better opportunities for artists during the period from the late 1950S to the late 197os. Mostly, national support meant showing in a limited number of galleries and in private collections, participating in a few official exhibitions and public art projects, and, on occasion, traveling for the purpose of providing national representation in international fairs.

22. Michael C. Lambert,"From Citizenship to Negritude:'Making a Difference' in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (April 1993): 239-62.

23. El-Salahi, Ibrahim El SalahL 24. El-Salahi, in Beier,"The Right to Claim the World," p. 29.

25. Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, 163-64. Many of these drawings were published in Sadequain Naqqash,Sadequain (Karachi: Editions Mystique, 1966).

26. Sadequain Naqqash, Ghalib (Karachi: Illit Pablikeshanz,1969).

27. Sadequain Naqqash, Ruba'iyat-i Sadiqain Naqqash (n.p.,1971), with illustrations; and Sadiqain, Tazah ruba'iyat-i Sadiqain Naqqash (n.p., 1971), without illustrations.

28.Sadequain Naqqash,Ayat Qur'aniyah (Qur'anic verses)(Karachi: Matbu'at 'Irfani,1979); Naqvi,Image and Identity, p. 408; and Akhund,Said, and Yusuf, Sadequain, p. 602.

29. Naqvi, Image and Identity, p. 43530. She also notes,"In thei96os the calligraphic movement in art gained momentum, reaching its peak in the 198os." Ali, Modern Islamic Art, pp. 158-59.

31. BBC,"Timeline: Iraq," www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldmiddle-east-145467332. Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art ofPersuasion in the Islamic Republic ofIran (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2000); and Peter Chelkowski,"The Art of Revolution and War: The Role of the Graphic Arts in Iran," in Balaghi and Gumpert,Picturing Iran, pp. 127-41.

Monumental propagandistic calligraphic inscriptions near highways in Iran are described in Vlad Atanasiu,"The President and the Calligrapher: Arabic Calligraphy and Its Political Use," in Studies in Architecture, History,and Design: Papers by the 2003-2004 AKPIA@MIT Visiting Fellows (Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, 2006), p. 13.

33. Sue Chan,"Saddam's Mosque of War," January 1Z 2003, vvww.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-537051. html. Also see "Emirate official: Saddam's writting [sic] of the Quran with his blood is prohibited," September 26, 2000, www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/ Day/000926/2000092622.html. On the instrumental use of art in Saddam's Iraq, including a painter who with his own blood painted Saddam portraits, see Samir al-Khalil/Kanan Makiya, The Monument:

Art,Vulgarity,and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 103.

34. See Iftikhar Dadi,"Visual Modernities in a Comparative Perspective: The West, and South Asian and Asian-American Art"(Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2003), chap. 4.

35. Prashad, The Darker Nations.

36. Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).

37. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).

38. Ibrahim El-Salahi, interview with the author, Ithaca, N.Y., December 22, 2005.

39. David Scott,"Appendix: The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad," in Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Powers of the Secular Modern: Total Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 289-90. On "discursive rupture," see Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 5.

40. Talal Asad, in Scott,"The Trouble of Thinking," pp. 289-90.

41. Ovamir Anjum,"Islam as a Discursive Tradition: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors," Comparative Studies ofSouth Asia,Africa,and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 670.

45. To get an idea of the limited number of studies on calligraphy in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship, see the bibliography in M.Ziauddin, A Monograph on Moslem Calligraphy, with 168 Illustrations ofIts Various Styles and Ornamental Designs (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Book-Shop, 1936), pp.

71-72.

46. Significant examples of studies of calligraphy are Naji Zayn al-Din, Musawwaralkhatt al-'Arabi (Arabic calligraphy illustrated)(Baghdad: al-Majma'allImi allraqi,1968); Muhammad Abdullah Chughtai, Pak o Hind men Islami khattati(Islamic calligraphy in India and Pakistan)(Lahore, Pakistan: Kitab Khanah-yi Nauras,1976); and Habib Allah Faza'ili, Atlas-i khatt: tahqiq dar khutut-i Islami(Atlas of calligraphy: Studies in Islamic calligraphy)(Isfahan, Iran: Kitabfurushi Shahriyar, 1971). Iraq, in particular, has published detailed albums and histories of calligraphy. For works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditional Iraqi calligraphers, see Walid A'zami, Torajim khattati Baghdad al mu'asirin (Contemporary calligraphers of Baghdad)(Beirut: Dar al-Qalam; Baghdad: Maktabat al-Nahdah,1977). Also see Sheila Blair's survey of calligraphy in modernity, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), chap. 13.

47. Jabra, The Grass Roots ofIraqi Art, p. 12. Also see Jabra,"Calligraphy and Modern Art in the Arab World," in A Celebration of Life: Essays on Literature and Art (Baghdad: Dar al Ma'mun,1988), p. 166.

48. Jabra,"Calligraphy and Modern Art," p.169.

42. El-Salahi, Ibrahim El Salahi.

43. Indonesian examples can be found in Pameran Kaligrafi Nasional,diresmikan oleh Bapak Wakil Presiden Republik Indonesia (National calligraphy exhibition, opened by the vice president of Indonesia) (Jakarta: Sagittarius Offset-Printing, 1979): Kenneth M. George, Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): and Kenneth M. George,"Ethical Pleasure, Visual Dzikir, and Artistic Subjectivity in Contemporary Indonesia," Material Religion 2, no. 2 (July 2008):172-93Rachid Koraichi from Algeria is an important secondgeneration artist interested in calligraphic modernism.

44. The Iraqi artist Madiha Umar was a pioneer in this regard. See Ali, Modern Islamic Art, p. 152.

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In My Garment There Is Nothing but God: The Work of Ibrahim El-Salahi SARAH ADAMS

EL-SALAHI CONSIDERS the process of coming to the canvas or paper as the meeting of two bodies and subjectivities—his own and the canvas's—and the work then grows from a conversation (and sometimes an argument) between the two. This negotiation takes place throughout his career at several levels—through prayer and meditation, media, compositional construction, and imagery.

Further, El-Salahi's attempts to link his own body(as a creator) to the work(as a creation) shift slowly over time from engagement with the exterior, physical body to representations of an interior, spiritual body. This transformation in turn mirrors his ongoing use of prayer and meditation as a means to bring himself closer to God. Rather than limit art historical engagement to the formal development of El-Salahi's works, this analysis of his oeuvre draws upon embodied models that are more often applied to the study of performance arts in Africa, such as masquerades.'The use of such models widens the scope of analysis and allows us to more thoroughly consider the artist's physical experience of creation in both the phenomenological and spiritual sense. Additional meaning is drawn from the artist's implicit bodily performances overtime. Within such a framework, the borders of what constitutes the "work" expand, and the drawings and paintings themselves are recast as fragments of a broader, equally significant, and ongoing embodied experience.

PRAYER El-Salahi is a Muslim of a Sufi sect and notes that he prays five times a day and will often pray again before he starts to draw or paint.' This has been true throughout his life, except for a brief period when he was enrolled in a British school in the Sudan. El-Salahi's definition of prayer and his discussion of its role in his work is significant. In one interview, he described the process of washing, preparing his body before prayer, the motions he goes through as he prays which distract him from his surroundings, the words he speaks, and what they mean. He then added: I find that when I come to paint I do exactly the same. I always wash. I have to come clean outside which leads to cleanliness within. And then I work. So for me, and for us as Muslims, any action we do is supposed to be in the name of Allah.3 Like many Sufis, El-Salahi sees prayer as a way to establish and maintain a direct connection between creator and created. It is a way to eliminate the separation between the divine and the human in order to achieve human perfection. For a Muslim, El-Salahi noted, Paradise is unity with the creator, the return of the particle to the whole, and Hell is the opposite—the inability to unite THE MAKING OF A MODERNIST 55 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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with the creator. To sum up the goal of prayer, he invoked the proverb "in my garment there is nothing but God"—that is, if one achieves this union with God,there will be a negation of self, of the physical body.4

Prayer is essential to El-Salahi's creative process because he realizes the work does not originate with him, it goes through him to the canvas from elsewhere:5 [M]any times I have said this to people—I realize the work comes through me. And I am not the originator. It is originated by someone else—which is Allah, which is my God. And I have little bits. Sometimes the window opens and I can see things. I can follow them if I am clean, if I am not the window is closed and I don't see it.6 Therefore it is important to keep his mind and body—conceived of here as a channel—open and clean, an idea that becomes increasingly significant in relation to his more recent work. El-Salahi's emphasis on maintaining a close connection between Allah and himself through prayer is critical to his work. Throughout his career he tries through various means to extend this idea to his work and create a link between his body and the works he creates.

MEDIA One of El-Salahi's earliest efforts to bridge the distance between his own body and the canvas was through the use of a medium he seems to have invented (cat. no. 15)7 In these early works from thei96os, he first put a heavy layer of oil paint mixed with enamel paint and titanium white powder on the canvas, then covered this first thick layer with a thin, earth-toned varnish, followed by another thin layer of enamel paint. The top layer dried quickly, but the oil, enamel, and powder mixture beneath remained moist and malleable for a bit longer. He then went back in with his hands and manipulated (he calls it "tickling") the surface of the canvas, pushing the pigments around to create a sense of deep texture. As he put it, the topmost layer of paint dries and wrinkles like "an old person's skin."' As the works dried and aged over time, those wrinkles deepened further.

When El-Salahi looks back on this period he often talks about how dense the imagery was in the pieces he created in other media, such as his line drawings (fig. 14). He notes that to his eyes now, the compositions of his early line drawings seem heavily worked, crowded, and slightly overdetermined. As he put it, he was desperately trying to control the unfolding image (without success in some cases, in his opinion).

It was almost like a fever [when I was younger] and I had so many ideas coming through me and I had to put them through. So the picture plane was covered, with objects, with figures, with shapes, near and far, big and small, it was packed. It was really overcrowded. There was no space—you cannot travel through it easily.... Lots of my old work is definitely crowded, El-Salahi's choice—or invention—of the enamel and oil media during this period reflects his urge to control this avalanche of imagery by physically connecting with the work. In these early works, he uses the enamel and oil media to physically connect his body and mind to the canvas. He literally leaves traces of his body on the canvas through touch. The paintings are as worked as the dense line drawings, not through graphic imagery, but through extensive touch and manipulation.

He redirects the energy of the crowded, detailed drawings through somatic intervention and an excess of materiality.

During my research on u/i painting, women's body and mural painting in southeastern Nigeria, I learned to paint murals in earth pigments on clay walls. As El-Salahi described his oil and enamel medium, I saw many connections between his descriptions of this media and my own work. When you paint with your hands, the directness of the experience and the physical pleasure often compete with and sometimes eclipse the mental exercise of organizing and planning the composition. ElSalahi's enamel and oil canvases from the earlyi96os seethe with the energy of this tense interplay

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Fig. 14 Untitled. Ca. 1960. Ink and whitewash on paper, 23 5/8 X 17 / 7 8 in.(6o x 45.4 cm)

Fig. 15 The Opening ofKhartoum. 1989. Ink on paper.

1 4 x17 / Three panels, each: 25 / 7 8 in. (64.1 x 45.1 cm)

between the physical and the mental. His interest in the pleasure of touch and bodily sensation (both his own body and the canvas as a body) outweighs interest in form, composition, or line. In short, bodily sensations drive this project, not necessarily an interest in the end product's visual aspects.

Roland Barthes's meditations on Cy Twombly's drawings resonate with and illuminate El-Salahi's early oil and enamel canvases. Barthes suggests that "we are not asked to see, to conceive, to savor [Twombly's] product, but to review, to identify, and,so to speak, to 'enjoy' the movement which has ended up here."bo He notes that in certain passages in Twombly's drawings, we are aware that his body is "close to canvas, not by projection but... by contact." Barthes suggests that in certain styles of painting, the artist's body is felr —this is the case in these works by El-Salahi. The work itself is not a visual end but a point of memory for the fleeting pleasure of touch, of pure bodily sensation. The artist's body is felt here.

COMPOSITION: NUCLEUS TO FINISHED WORK In the fall of 1975, El-Salahi was incarcerated in the Sudan after he was accused of antigovernment activities during General Nimeiry's military dictatorship. He was held for six months and eight days.

Prisoners could be thrown into solitary confinement if they were discovered with paper, so El-Salahi created drawings on tiny slips of paper in secret during this period. He started with what he called the nucleus, a founding image of sorts, and then created other separate but related works that grew from that initial image (fig. 15). He continued to work with this idea on a larger scale after he was released from prison and went into self-imposed exile. Each of these composite works has a nucleus, a kernel image, from which the rest of the work grew. Within each work, every section functions within the whole but is framed separately and can also stand alone.'3 In fact, El-Salahi has published single sections from these composite images as standalone images.

When El-Salahi talks about these composite images, he speaks of the work as a living entity.

The nucleus speaks and tells him how to build the rest of the work. The nucleus, or the "heart" as he once called it—which locates agency and selfhood in the heart, not the head—tells him if there is more to be added on the top, left, sides, and so forth. In short, the "nucleus-as-heart" presages the rest of the work—it directs the construction of its own body. These works are so alive, so active for El-Salahi that he feels compelled to frame the individual sections when they are completed in order to silence and control them, to quiet their demanding voices.'4

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This idea of the work as a living entity with its own subjectivity continues to the present. When he talks about his more recent work, he uses similar language: Now 1 listen to the picture.... I put my ears to it, and I put my heart to it and it tells me, when it's enough, it's enough. Sometimes I make a very simple thing and it says to me,"Leave me alone,1 don't want any more of you, just go away somewhere else." And I leave it and I find it's fine. Sometimes it will sort of beckon for me as if to say,"Come here, I need a little bit more here." I put a little bit more there and that's it. I find it works.'5 The philosophy behind El-Salahi's nucleus-driven compositions also links back to his idea of prayer as a way to return the particle to the whole, to unite himself, his body, with his creator, and thus a greater whole. This relationship between the particle and the whole is echoed in these compositions. The labor-intensive graphic detail work in his composite work again suggests the artist's body, not through actual physical contact as with the oil and enamel works, but through extended concentration and proximity.16 The sense of independent life within the nucleus-driven work, of the work as something active, with its own body and subjectivity that meets the artist and instructs him, also comes through in El-Salahi's discussion of his well-documented study of calligraphy, a study that underpins most of his career.

IMAGERY: CALLIGRAPHY, THE HARAZ TREE, AND EXPERIMENTATION WITH PURELY LINEAR STYLE El-Salahi's study of calligraphy is more profound than just deep formal analysis. Like the nucleusdriven compositions, calligraphy is discussed as something that is alive and active. His deep analysis over time brought the calligraphy to life: I took the calligraphy itself and took away the meaning from it.... Then I had to break the forms of the letters themselves and try to see the bones of the letters... starting to break [the letters] and reorganizing them in a different shape. It then became the beginning of a new pictorial idiom from which I started creating my pictures.17 When he talks about the "bones" of the letters, he breathes life into the calligraphic lines and the work. In 1992 he commented that as he studied calligraphy he felt he had "broken the symbol.

Characters which had evolved for centuries suddenly came to life and began roaming around....

I got very frightened sometimes." The calligraphic forms are, for the artist, abstract references to animated forms, each with their own histories and subjectivities. EI-Salahi's work was and is a negotiation with those subjectivities, the voices of calligraphy: [S]ometimes I even had things like ghosts come to me out of the written letter....

The letters themselves, they began to talk to you ... but as I said I am still leaning my back against calligraphy because I find it is something which is very very stable, it's almost like trees growing.[Looks outside the window to the tree in the garden] When I see trees growing, you can see the calligraphic shape in them. A bit of it is everywhere around us, and that's something you can really rest against.'9 HARAZ AND PRESENT LINEAR STYLE See unity, utter unity, know unity, In this is to be summarized the trunk and branches of the tree offaith (inri.an) —Master Sufi Mahmud Shabistari2°

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c .s

The link El-Salahi sees between trees and calligraphy brings us to his recent series of images of trees (figs. 16-20, 27; cat. nos. 54-59,62-65). In early 2000, El-Salahi began thinking about a special tree called haraz (Faidherbia albida), which grows along the banks of the Nile in the Sudan. He says of this period: It has been some time now,since I think the year 2000,that the idea came to me about this tree called haraz ...it's a huge tree with a very, very soft pulp—and there is a legend around it. They say that haraz tree fought against the rain. Because during the rainy season and the flooding of the Nile, it is completely dry, with dry leaves, nothing at all ... then during the drought it comes out with blooms and with fruit and everything. This is a definitive statement. Like saying "I am me! I am an individual!

I do not follow what everyone is doing!... When everyone is going to be green let them be green, I am not." It's individuality. I love that very much!'

There are two components to El-Salahi's meditation on the haraz tree. The idea that the tree represents going against larger trends relates to El-Salahi's concept of artistic identity. He sees the haraz tree, which goes against larger trends, as a metaphor for artistic identity within the context of the early twenty-first-century art market. Young, non-Western artists, he feels, tire of continually trying to convince people that they are individuals, that they are bringing something new to the table and are making a contribution. Too often, he notes, he sees young artists simply join larger art market trends so their work will be shown and sold. They allow themselves to be framed as "African artists," "Sudanese artists," or "Nigerian artists" rather than insist that their work be dealt with as the expression of an individual. The issue is, in fact, more complex than this—it is actually a struggle between many markets. El-Salahi himself recalled, for example, that one of the most satisfying moments of his career was when his work was exhibited and well received in the Sudan. For him this acceptance meant that his work relates to Sudanese people, which is very important to him. So while there is this declared resistance to being identified and therefore limited by ethnic or geographic frameworks, there is also a sense of artists trying to negotiate and frame themselves as artists at three levels—for themselves, against and within a place of origin, and also within a broader international market.

The other aspect of El-Salahi's meditation on this tree focuses on it as a channel that links heaven and earth—its roots reach down deep into the earth in search of water, while its branches extend up to the heavens. El-Salahi's meditation on this tree from 2000 to the present brings his earlier work's oblique references to the connection between the body of the creator and that of the created to attempts at direct representation of this concept. The focus becomes the use of an evolving, increasingly abstract image of the haraz tree, which links heaven and earth, as an iconic representation of the spiritual body, the Divine in the body, and the body-as-channel. These images, all titled The Tree, are simultaneously self-portraits and generalized representations of the spiritual body."

At the beginning of this period, the tree remains recognizable (cat. no. 56). El-Salahi divides the picture plane into three loosely defined zones, the branches and crown of the tree at the top, the earth below, and the trunk linking the two with a series of parallel, vertical lines. His palette is vibrant, rich with bold colors that are balanced by the attention he gives to delicate hatched lines drawn freehand. A thicket of parallel lines spring up from the crown of the tree, and this verticality is then compressed on either side with narrow clusters of horizontal lines. The tight spacing and insistent repetition of these lines once again give us a sense of the artist's body close to the image.

As the tree develops, the palette remains vibrant but there is a greater sense of geometry (fig.

16). He opposes the upper and lower zones of the image, heaven and earth, by changing the parallel lines' direction and color. At the bottom of the image, black horizontal lines meet at the center and are drawn into a channel at the base of the tree, only to meet abruptly with an empty sliver of clean white paper at the center of the composition. The top of this tree is given over to U-shaped structures that eventually become the focus of his meditation. In this work, there is an overall sense of organic line slowly giving way to a more rigid geometry.

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Fig. 16 The Tree. 2001. Colored ink on watercolor paper,14 x to 1/4 in.(35.5 x 26 cm). Collection of the artist

Fig. 17 The Tree. 2001. Ink and wash on Bristol board, 59 3/4 x i6/ 1 4in.(i51.8 x 41 cm). Collection of the artist

r Fig. 18 The Tree. 2001. Colored ink on Bristol board, 1 8 in.(102.6 x 76.5 cm). Collection of the artist 40 V8 X 30 /

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The central channel that appears in this work is further emphasized in later work, and alludes to his ongoing meditation on this tree as a body metaphor, a link between the heavens of the creator and earth, the created (cat. no. 55). El-Salahi slowly breaks the image down and isolates the essential

parts: the horizontal lines of the earth change direction as they meet at the center, rise vertically to the heavens, then turn again at the top and run roughly parallel with the lines at the bottom. This work, however, is still drawn freehand.

When El-Salahi pared the work down even further, he began to use a ruler. It was clear that the introduction of this tool was significant, exhilarating, and at the same time unsettling.23The first representation of the haraz tree El-Salahi made with a ruler included a narrow band of smaller, more detailed freehand patterning at the center of the circle—the physical body of the artist is still felt in this passage (cat. no. 63). As he developed the image, he experimented with the elimination of color, limiting his palette to India ink on white paper (fig. 17). The lines are once again drawn with a ruler, but he has gone back in with his hands and a nib to smudge the lines. This smudging evokes his earlier canvases in oil and enamel—once again El-Salahi works to bridge the distance between creator and created by physically connecting with his creation. This smudging also reflects some of his initial discomfort with the harshness of lines he made using the ruler.

However, as El-Salahi continued with this theme, he clearly became more comfortable with his methods (fig. 19). He notes that the series of images he created is much simpler than his earlier work: I don't know if it has to do with my age—I am an old man now.So now if I draw one line, it's almost like enough ...it's more airy, it has more space.... Later on now [the drawing of the haraz tree] became very, very simple. It just became vertical lines, lines as if joining the roots of earth and the branches of heaven, just between the two. I find it very restful because it goes along with my idea of meditation.24 Eventually he began to produce black-and-white images of the haraz tree drawn with the ruler (figs.

18, 2o).25 In this work he includes the lower register of parallel, horizontal lines as in the freehand drawings, but this time they are supported and framed with a thicker black base line. Like the freehand drawing's horizontal earth lines, these turn at the center and rise together as a powerful, vertical column of evenly spaced thin black lines. He trades the emphasis on a single central channel in the earlier freehand drawings for multiple channels of equal width in these works. There is a sharpness in the angle of that turn that is cool and bracing.

Though Seyyed Hossein Nasr's discussion of the spiritual significance of the void in Islamic art was developed primarily through his study of Persian art, it nonetheless provides powerful insight into the channels in El-Salahi's series of drawings, especially figures 18-2o.26 Nasr explains that Islam's doctrine of Unity is expressed most directly in the testimony of faith in Islam,"There is no divinity but the Divine." Though there are many possible interpretations of this formulation, Nasr focuses on two in order to illuminate the idea of the void: The first [meaning of the doctrine] is the emphasis on the transient and insubstantial character of all that is other than God (ma siwa'Llah) and therefore the whole of the created order—of which the material is the most impermanent of all. The second is the emphasis upon the "otherness" of that which is Ultimate Reality, that is, emphasis upon the truth that God is completely beyond all that the ordinary mind and senses can conceive of as reality in the usual meaning of the term.... According to the first interpretation, if we consider God as the Ultimate Substance or Pure Being ... then there is an aspect of nothingness or void which lies in the very nature ofthe whole created order which is a direct consequence ofthe fact that,in an absolute sense,only God is real (author's emphasis).22 Nasr goes on to explain that according to a second interpretation, if we look upon objects as things in the ordinary sense, then the void, which is empty of things, becomes "a trace and an echo

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Fig. 19 The Tree. 2001. Colored ink on Bristol board, 40 / 3 8 X 30 / 1 8 in. (102.6 x 76.5 cm). Collection of the artist

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Fig. 20 The Tree. zoot Colored ink on Bristol board, 40 / 3 8 x 30 / 1 8 in.(102.6 x 76.5 cm). Collection of the artist

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of God in the created order."28 The void is at once the symbol of the transcendence of God and His presence in all things. Similarly, the white channels in El-Salahi's work point to that which is above things. As the interplay between line and void becomes increasingly controlled in this work, as the lines of the material are pared down and the space of the Divine begins to dominate the picture plane, the weight lifts from the material object and the spirit begins to breathe and expand.29 Ironically, at the same time that El-Salahi turns to iconic body and spirit imagery, not media or composition, to address the idea of Unity, the connection between creator and created, he imposes greater physical distance between himself and his work through the use of the ruler which negates gesture. If we place the oil and enamel paintings and the densely packed freehand drawings next to the ruler line drawings, it is clear that they are diametrically opposed methods of representing different aspects of the body. In his earlier work, El-Salahi bridges the gap between his body and canvas through physical contact, touch, and the use of media that invoke and preserve the artist's gesture.

The artist's body is felt. In his most recent works focused on the haraz tree, the physical body of the artist is no longer felt, but an abstracted spiritual body, a Divine presence, is seen; it is represented in the laser sharp, synthesized icon of the haraz tree. The use of the ruler negates gesture and by extension the physical body, imposes physical distance, and implies control. This is precisely what El-Salahi tries to convey—greater control over the ideas he channels. The question of connection to the work is the same, but the emphasis has changed from interest in the physical body to interest in interiority, or the spiritual body.

The proverb El-Salahi invoked,"In my garment there is nothing but God," illuminates the change of focus in his recent work. Ideally, prayer and meditation are used to bring oneself as close as possible to the Creator; ultimately, if one achieves unity with God, there is no distinction between self and Creator. In this state, there is truly nothing but God in one's garment. The physical body—the "garment"—is of no consequence as it merely contains a channel. We might imagine a person opening their garment, or even lifting off their skin, to reveal El-Salahi's restful, controlled black and white channels beneath. To represent this negation of the physical body El-Salahi takes up the ruler and, for the first time, imposes a physical distance between his own body and his work.

This is a slightly abridged version ofan article originally published in African Arts 39,no. 2(Summer 2006).

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1. See,for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory ofPractice, trans. Richard Nice(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

2. For more on Sufism, see Louis Brenner,"Sufism in Africa," in Jacob K. Olupona, ed., African Spirituality (New York: Crossroads, 2000). pp. 324-49; Titus Burckhardt,"The Spirituality of African Art," in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed., Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations (New York: Crossroads, 1990, pp. 506-27; Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala,1997); Ali Salih Karrar, The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan (London: C. Hurst, 1992); William Stoddart,Sufism: The Mystical Doctrines and Methods ofIslam (New York: Paragon House, 1986); Knut S. Vikor,"Sufi Brotherhoods in Africa," in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, eds., The History ofIslam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 441-76.

3. Ibrahim El-Salahi, interview with author, Oxford, England, April 2002. Hereafter cited as "Interview."

4. Stoddart,Sufism, pp. 62-63.

5. Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts discuss several Sufi artists in Senegal who make similar observations about the origins of their work. For example, the architect Serigne Omar Sy and his followers are engaged in the arduous process of building an elaborate compound,including exquisitely crafted domes and towers, using only straw, reeds, and sticks. Serigne Sy explained that God "dictated" the organization of the compound. Roberts and Roberts note,"It is significant that Serigne Sy should use the French verb dicter to explain how God has conveyed the plans for his compound to Serigne Sy" because dicter means "to pronounce words that another person writes down." Roberts and Roberts, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal(Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003), p. 221. As such, Serigne Sy has transcribed his building. See also discussion of Moustapha Dime in this same volume, pp. 208-11.

6. Interview. Here El-Salahi repeats almost verbatim comments he has made repeatedly and with increasing conviction over the years. In a1967 interview with Robert Serumaga he mused,"I honestly believe that I am almost like an agent for some other force which is working through me. It might sound funny but that is exactly how I feel." Serumaga, "Ibrahim el Salahi Interviewed by Robert Serumaga," in Cultural Events in Africa, no. 27(February 1967): 2.

To Ulli Beier in the early 198os El-Salahi commented that as he worked he "was being a medium for a spirit of some sort. Something was working through me....

I never made any attempt to stop it, or even to control it.... I am not the one who is doing these things. I merely prepared myself to accept what was coming."

In Ibrahim el Salahi: Conversations with Ulli Beier (Bayreuth, lwalewa-Haus,1983), pp. 32-33.

7. I would like to thank Chika Okeke-Agulu for drawing my attention to this technique.

8. Interview.

9. Ibid.

10. Roland Barthes."Cy Twombly: Works on Paper," in The Responsibility ofForms: Critical Essays on Music,Art,and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), P.164.

Ibid., p. 179.

12. Ibid., p. 171.

13. See,for example, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Research in African Literatures 22, no. 2(Summer 1991): 21, 119. I would like to thank Kimberly Cleveland for drawing my attention to these reproductions.

14. Interview.

15. Ibid.

16. El-Salahi has a long-standing interest in creating a sense of depth, of sculptural three-dimensionality in his work. Much of this interest came through early studies of Giotto's work. In El-Salahi's enamel and oil painting, this interest in the sculptural is expressed through use of heavy impasto. In his line drawings, El-Salahi uses very fine hatched lines to create a sense of three-dimensional forms.

25. Several colleagues have pointed out that at a formal level. El-Salahi's drawings toward the end of this sequence are similar to Frank Stella's "stripe paintings" of the late 19505 and early 196os, especially his Black Paintings. El-Salahi does not mention Stella as an influence on his latest work, and at some level such a comparison threatens to erase the very different intellectual and spiritual trajectory that brought El-Salahi to this imagery. Perhaps a more useful comparison would be between these works and formally similar pieces by Senegalese artist Viye Diba, who is a Mouride (Mouridism is a Sufi movement).

Diba creates canvases from strip-woven shroud material that he sews together, mounts vertically on to wooden frames, then paints over, leaving the seams between each strip bare. The final effect is a vertical interplay between line and color that resonates with El-Salahi's later drawings of the haraz tree. The formal relationship between their work is further supported by philosophical similarities between the two artists.

Like El-Salahi, Diba is interested in the dialogue between the medium and the one creating, and tries to cultivate a relationship between his work and the spirit of Mouridism. See Roberts and Roberts,A Saint in the City, pp. 196-202.

26. Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality, pp. 185-91.

17. Interview.

18. El-Salahi, quoted in Kaye Whiteman,"El Salahi at the Savannah," West Africa (September 14-20, 1992).

Reprinted in WestAfrica, Issues 3912-3928(London: Afrimedia International, 1992), p.1,562.

27. Ibid., pp. i8-86.

28. Ibid., p.186.

29. Ibid.

19. Interview.

20. Mahmud Shabistari, quoted

in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality(Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.191.

21. Interview.

22. What separates EI-Salahi's more recent images of the spiritual body from earlier work on similar themes (i.e., representations of spirits) is the absence of specificity, the level of abstraction, and the physical distance he imposes between himself and his later work. For example, in One Ramadan a Scorpion Stung My Little Nephew (fig. 10)from the early 1960s, ElSalahi evokes the memory of seeing his nephew's spirit three days after he passed away from a scorpion sting. El-Salahi writes,"We took him home cold and silent. We buried him. He came back. I saw him three days later at dawn. He spoke to me. I shivered, but I was happy. He is alive. But where." Quoted in Ulli Beier,"Ibrahim el Salahi," Black Orpheus, no. 10: 50. This earlier image, however, depicts the physical appearance of a specific spirit-it is figurativewhereas his recent work focuses on generalized representations of the spirit. See also Serumaga, "Ibrahim el Salahi Interviewed by Robert Serumaga," p. 3.

23. El-Salahi said that he usually feels nervous,"like a chicken trying to lay an egg," when he has an idea, or, in this case, uses a new tool.

24. Interview.

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El-Salahi, the Wise Enemy: Between the Artist of the Authority and the Authority of the Artist HASSAN MUSA

ACCORDING TO A POPULAR definition of Cubism, the ultimate intention of the Cubist venture is the representation of the world in all of its appearances simultaneously. This is why a Cubist picture shows the audience many faces of its subject. It is also the basis of the critical interpretation of Cubism as a possibility for realism in art, and of its justification of such iconographic accomplishments of Picasso's as showing two eyes in the same profile of a face, or drawing bodies dispossessed of the thickness of matter and transparently revealing what lies behind them.

As I was preparing to draw this written portrait of our ustaz(teacher) Ibrahim El-Salahi, I thought that the best way to present him would be in a cubistic image highlighting the multifaceted aspects of his complex creative presence. It would otherwise be very difficult to discuss him in a paper like this one. On the one hand, as a Sudanese and an African, El-Salahi has a complete, attentive awareness of the major events and historical indicators and milestones of the twentieth century, and this awareness has greatly influenced him and his work—in fact has been the driving force in making him an influential artist in the context of African modernism. On the other hand, as a non-European visual artist, El-Salahi stands as a living embodiment of what is considered "contemporary African art." I therefore decided to approach the task of drawing "our teacher" by using different, overlapping approaches, to reflect both his own, richly diverse social and artistic contributions and the aesthetic, political, and personal concerns of the Sudanese painters, male and female, of my generation. This cubistic rendering is indirectly a portrait of us as much as it is a portrait of El-Salahi, whom we regard as one of the most influential artists in making our own image.

I introduced El-Salahi as "our teacher," using the first-person pronoun, although I did not personally have the honor of being his student when he was teaching drawing and painting at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum. I entered the college in 1970, a year after he left it to go to England. Even so, the truth is that I learned a great deal from him by observing and contemplating his rich and diverse existential experience. I learned from him how the artist could stand as a new, independent cultural identity among others in the context of modern society. In El-Salahi we see a rational Muslim going about in the guise of the artist. As such he is fully accepted, even cherished, by the Arab-Islamic middle class—this despite the fact that in modern urban society the image of the artist is negatively influenced by the folklore of European romantic bohemianism,summarized by the popular saying "art is madness," and in Sudan by the example of the singers and musicians who have frequented the country's cities for decades and are seen as urban vagabonds. In addition, Muslim culture is suspicious of artists because of its religious history, carrying in its memory the idea that horrible tortures await the creators of images in Hell.' This context makes clear the long distance THE MAKING OF A MODERNIST 69 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

covered by El-Salahi and his audience, and the colossal, unprecedented effort they exerted to make the image and status of the modern artist respected, accepted, and even venerated by today's urban Arab-Islamic middle class.2 El-Salahi is a pioneer of the generation of"educated artists"— professionally trained artists who are officially and socially accepted. The term "educated artist" is used here to distinguish their work from the achievements of the "self-made" artists who preceded

them in taking up the adventure of modern creativity in Sudan—artists like Ali Osman,Ahmed Salim, 'Youn Kadeis, Al-Areifi Sr., Jiha, and the many other unknown artists who have and still do earn livings by selling their production within the framework of the craft market.

The prosperous middle class's acceptance of artists graduating from higher educational institutions took place in Sudan as artists were forced to define their social role in the context of the new historical period that began with the departure of British colonial powers in 1956. Sudanese society was in formation, facing internal material and spiritual disparities and political and cultural disagreements, clearly manifest as early as 1955 in the form of civil war in the south. Like others in the urban elite, artists were apprehensively aware of the new society's pressing need to establish a national unity, to safeguard the integrity of a country of diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic entities inherited as part of the colonial legacy. The Arab-Islamic middle class was actively engaged in drafting its own blueprint for salvation, endorsing Arab-Islamic ideology as a cultural framework and using as its principal tool the apparatus of the modern state. And this apparatus has fully and continually supported governmental educational institutions, which it correctly envisioned as crucial vehicles for modernizing the country's traditional society.

As part of its effort to modernize, then, the newly established Sudanese state put real effort into the College of Fine and Applied Art, one element in a grand scheme to develop educational institutions at large. For the Arab-Islamic ideologues, the college was a crucial platform for instilling modern ideas within the culture of the society that was being born. Needless to say, the concepts of modernity adopted by the new state were in complete accord with the Western certainty that material and spiritual progress toward utopian happiness is only possible within the workings of modern market society. The aim was to incorporate Sudan into the mechanisms of the capitalist market.

In the early 195os the College of Fine and Applied Art played a significant role in spreading the concept of"Sudanese cultural authenticity" among educated Sudanese. It was then the School of Design, and was run by the British artist Jean-Pierre Greenlaw (or "the green law," as El-Salahi, as his student, used to call him). Greenlaw's concern with notions of"Sudanese cultural distinctiveness" may be construed as part of the political strategy of the British administration in Sudan, which supported Sudanese political factions that used the slogan "Sudan for Sudanese." In this policy the British sought to mobilize popular opposition to Egypt, and to the Sudanese political forces that supported the idea of "Nile Valley unity" with Egypt after independence. The concept of"Sudanese cultural distinctiveness," then, was essentially a political one, an attempt to turn a local Sudanese "flavor" to advantage in the process of adapting to the structures of the modern market. Greenlaw was notorious for the enthusiasm of his attempts to institute curricula invoking both Islamic and African values.

It was within these conditions that El-Salahi, fellow artists of his generation, and their students at the College of Fine and Applied Art sought to establish a sort of ideological framework for Sudanese art. This framework was based on the idea of a cultural intermixing or hybridity between Arab-Islamic cultural components and elements of African culture that preceded the advent of Islam in Sudan. In effect, El-Salahi and his colleagues used the principle of hybridity in a thematic iconographic investigation of Sudan's folkloric heritage in its various forms. Arabic calligraphy was intermixed with African ornament to contrive expressive idioms from the realities of Sudanese life.

As a result of El-Salahi's aesthetic investigations, a number of his colleagues and students at the college engaged in artistic practice without critically alerting themselves to the problematic nature of the Sudanese cultural heritage, problems that he himself had correctly outlined. This involvement of followers in investigating "Sudanist" iconographic hybridization can be explained by the astounding success of El-Salahi's work abroad, where internationally recognized institutions sponsored it, and by the relative success of this hybrid art in Sudan itself, where it was endorsed by the political elite.

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International success and local political need combined to establish Arab-African hybridization as the trend in Sudanese visual art, a trend triggered by Et-Salahi and his colleagues and students.

This transformation was made possible within a political context that allowed the nation's middle class to envisage Sudan as a melting pot in which African ethnicities would merge, or as a bridge between Africa and the Arab world. This conceptual construct of Sudan as a mediator between Arab and black Africa was a popular idea in the literature on the question of identity that was produced by Sudan's Arab-Islamic middle-class intellectuals after independence.

This ideology, of the Sudanese people as a mediator or judge between Arab Africa and black Africa, issued from the political notion of a united Africa: Arab north of the Sahara, African south of it. It is a capricious hypothesis, belied by the historical, geographical, and social realities of the societies sharing the African land. The desert has never been a barrier separating Africans from each other; it has always been a populated land. Its peoples roam those vast open spaces in all directions and reasonably intermingle with neighbors of all sorts and levels. The seas to the east and north of Africa, similarly, are less natural barriers than heavily trodden bridges of beneficial exchange between Africans and their Asian and European neighbors. To say that African unity is preordained is to express a political assumption, and one that goes beyond the Sudanist intellectuals, finding its roots in the literature of Afro-European political thought that perceives Africa as a mythical entity outside history.4 Reducing the problems of the African continent to the disparity between its ethnic components for many people justifies an evasion of the problems of the continent's geopolitical reality.

Sudan is but one among many societies that constitute, within the sphere of colonial domination, an economic entity brought about by adopting the capitalist mode of production and at the same time denied the ability to exploit the fruits of capitalist advancement.5 If the multiethnic and diverse Sudan—beyond the pitiably false opposition between Arabs and Africans—ever hoped to assume a leading role in building a unified African continent, it first had to surmount the obstacles of backwardness and underdevelopment.

When Denis Williams, a British artist and critic of Guyanese origin (formerly British Guiana) who worked at the College of Fine and Applied Art in the early 1.96os, launched the name "Khartoum School" to describe the trend of hybridization in Sudanese art, the idea found immediate acceptance.6 Yet the members of this "school" did not meet to exchange their views on the social implications and aesthetic concepts of their work—did not engage in the kind of debate that could have made them an artistic entity and would have justified the idea of an artistic school. The critical literature that helped to define the basic guidelines of Sudanese art in the 19605 did not go beyond a few press statements and articles by the artists and by researchers such as Dr. Ahmed El-Zain Sagyroun and Ahmed El-Tayeb Zein El-Abdin.7 This scarcity may be explained by the fact that the central issues were nationalistic rather than artistic; the main debate was about national identity, so that artists talked more about patriotism than about art. Most of the artists involved were friends and colleagues of El-Salahi's, such as Ahmed Shibrain, Kamala Ishaq, and Mubarak Bilal, or students of his in the College of Fine and Applied Art, such as Ahmed Abd-Alaal, Ibrahim Alawam, and Musa Elkhalifa. Their involvement in the adventure of the Khartoum School came as a kind of impulsive solidarity with a national artistic project, for the concept of a culturally and ethnically hybrid country was enthusiastically embraced by the elites of the Arab-Islamic middle class. Indeed, during the same period there also emerged among literary circles an argument for the idea of a Sudanese Afro-Arab hybrid literature, different from other Arab literature in the "African blood" that permeated its literary styles.8 The trend of a hybrid literature in Sudan found its best embodiment in what is known as "The Jungle and the Desert School"—the poetry and theoretical writings of acclaimed poets like Mohammed Abd-Alhai, Mohammed Elmakki Ibrahim, and Elnour Othman Abbakar. Following the experiences of the Khartoum School in art and the Jungle and the Desert School in literature, the end of the 19605 and the early '705 witnessed further discussion of the aesthetic issues of hybridity in the diverse spheres of Sudanese culture. A vibrant discussion began in the Sudanese newspapers, for example, on the distinctiveness of Sudanese music, caught between Arab and African influences,9

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and likewise on Sudanese theater, caught between the modern European tradition and the African ritualistic heritage. This debate went even further to contemplate "Sudanese Islam" as a religion revised and hybridized by facets of African beliefs. El-Salahi strongly believes in the distinctiveness of Sudanese Islam, arguing on the occasion of an exhibition in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1983,"Islam has always taken elements from local cultures. Lots of little customs, which could be described as

paganism, have been carried on socially and been incorporated into the lives of Muslim people.

Many of the rituals we perform at weddings or circumcision are very, very old; certainly pre-Islamic."b0 El-Salahi, we have seen, played a crucial role in elevating the image of the Sudanese modern artist, whom he defined as more than a visual craftsman decorating furniture and rooms. Instead, the artist is preoccupied with the conditions of existence in modern society, which is a legitimate subject of aesthetic practice. That was the first lesson we learned from El-Salahi's legacy: like many men and women of my generation in Sudan, I see the modern artist as an integral part of his or her social context. Although we did not embrace El-Salahi's aesthetic and political choices, his experience as an artist preoccupied with the destiny of his society helped us to develop our concepts of the social role of art in a country like Sudan. This understanding came as an outcome of rigorous critical scrutiny of El-Salahi's aesthetic and political theses.

By the time I joined the College of Fine and Applied Art, in 1970, the concepts of Sudanese art expounded by El-Salahi since the earlyi96os under the umbrella of the Khartoum School were firmly instituted academic principles, indeed unquestionable ones. They were collectively honored by all, within and outside the College of Fine and Applied Art and at the level of Sudan's cultural and political elites. The tenets of this "discipline" were even recognized outside Sudan, in European and American circles interested in African art. I have noted the absence of any critical methodology attempting to explicate the conceptual and artistic structure of the Khartoum School's proposed project, which invited artists to establish a Sudanese version of artistic modernity through the suspect process of hybridizing the traditional (read: the Eastern) with the modern (read: the Western).

This invitation was accompanied by a claim for the modern artist as infallible arbiter, unconcerned with historicity, busily occupied with the large task of disentangling the opposites of the traditional East and the modern West.

Along the logic of hybridization, the Khartoum School artists put forward a series of unmerited, reductivist proposals with regard to the structure of the modern aesthetic phenomenon in Sudan.

In borrowing from the Arab tradition, for example, they reduced that tradition to the art of calligraphy, and the African they reduced to the possibilities of elementary ornament. The notion of ArabAfrican hybridization, as the Khartoum School contemplated it, seemed to our generation suspicious for more reasons than one, not least of these being that the idea of"pure" African and Arab ethnicities existing somewhere out there is not innocent of the suspicion of happy racism. The idea of the Arab-African hybrid presupposes the existence of a pure culture, be it African or Arab; only a culture free of corruption by alien influences is qualified to produce a hybrid culture by intermingling with another, distinctively different, also pure culture. Furthermore, the idea harbors an exclusivist ethnic classification that denies the Arabs of the African continent the possibility of being African as well —as though the term "African" were limited to Africa's black communities. Finally, reducing Sudan's cultural diversity to the duality of Arab and African impoverishes the notion of Sudanese culture altogether, and cuts it off from the collective cultural influences that lie outside this binary opposition, be they ancient or contemporary.

Yet the experience of El-Salahi, as the founder of this concept of the Arab-African hybrid, helped us in developing our own, different aesthetic concepts. It represented to us a living and ongoing example of how the relationship between art and ideology is created, and challenged us with questions whose answers demanded an integrated project of social critique that went beyond the realm of the visual arts. In responding to El-Salahi's experience, we developed and sharpened our critical tools and aesthetic concepts, both practically and theoretically. Issues such as cultural identity, the social role of the artist, and the relationship between theory and practice featured prominently in 72

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our project. It goes without saying that these issues are essentially contemporary, and are confronted

by Europeans whenever they see non-European contemporary art.

I remember my friend Abdallah Bashir (Bola) and I coming to France in the late 19705 to do graduate research under Jean Laude, a professor of African art history at the Sorbonne. Bola, a painter, was working on a Ph.D. dissertation titled "The Problematic Essence of the Questions of Art and Cultural Identity in the Sudan," while I was pursuing Memoire de mditrise research on the topic "Contemporary Art Patronage Institutions in the Sudan." Professor Laude had spent a great deal of time in Africa and had devoted his life to its art. Yet he was often bemused by the geopolitical critical approaches we were using in our work, and wondered how we were able to bring up these amazing ideas. One may attribute his bewilderment to his immense scientific curiosity about the conditions that had shaped us as artists and as students of art history. We on our side were equally bewildered by his bewilderment, and by his unresolved questions. To us, our position seemed to have grown naturally from our Sudanese experience.

If Professor Laude were still alive today, I would now answer his questions by saying that we had arrived at most of our critical ideas about art and identity in handling the problematic complexities thrown at us by El-Salahi. That answer might have been fair to both El-Salahi and us.

I suppose that one of the most significant lessons we learned from that prolonged debate with El-Salahi was the importance of intellectual challenge or disagreement. We realized that intellectual contention or difference was to be accepted and indeed instituted as an essential argumentative principle out of which creative openings would grow for artists preoccupied with the concerns of their society. In this context many Sudanese following the heated debates in the country's newspapers and magazines in the 19705 were troubled by the literary "violence" of our discussion of issues of art, cultural heritage, and national identity. Although El-Salahi, both practically and theoretically, had managed to secure a middle, neutral position in the debate between our group and his colleagues and former students in the Khartoum School, he could still accept the dimension of vitality and vigor in that debate, rather than being offended by its fierceness. I remember clearly his public support for our group in the mid-197os in a controversy over our criticism of the College of Fine and Applied Art, for us a defunct institution that fell short of its educational role.12 Although we could not win him over to our camp, his appraisal of some of our critiques was beneficial, and harbored a tacit admission of the legitimacy of intellectual disagreement, even when violently expressed. It is important to mention here that El-Salahi was by this point established in Sudan's mass media, and indeed in the society at large, as a national authority on issues of culture: he held a high position in the Sudanese Ministry of Culture and Information and hosted a popular TV program, BaytAl-lak(The house of Al-lak). He also enjoyed immense respect among Sudanese intellectuals outside the territory of fine art.

From this perspective El-Salahi was to us a teacher of a different kind, a dissident who accepted, even cherished, the principle of challenging one idea with another. He was also an artist who made his aesthetic and educational mission a lifetime concern demanding all of his spiritual and material faculties. And while he seemed to argue his intellectual convictions without self-doubt, in his innermost self he always seemed to maintain a sort of Sufi precautionary mechanism—a refusal to rely entirely on the soundness of his logic or ideas. He would argue issues of painting and ideology tirelessly but would invariably shield his assertions with a phrase from the literature of Sufi wisdom: "Perfection is Allah's own.""Only Allah knows." "If Allah will." "I ask Allah's forgiveness." "All on the surface of the earth are mortals.""How much life has dispensed and how much it will." "Recanting to the truth is a virtue."3 It was as if he were spontaneously drawing a line of retreat, a margin of reservation, that would protect him from distorting the convictions on which he had built his artistic and intellectual project. This strong yet reserved way of sticking to his convictions kept him open and in fact perpetually attentive to the opposing voices of argument. I count myself among the many— including Bola, Hashim Salih, Fath El-Rahman Bardous, Abdalla Mohammed El-Tayeb,'Alaa El-Din El-Gozouli, Salah Hasan Abdalla, El-Bagir Musa, Kawthar Ibrahim, Ahmed El-Bashir El-Mahi, and Omer El-Amin—who have had the honor of expressing arguments contradictory to and critical of El-Salahi's aesthetic and political projects to his face.'4 We were amazed by the intelligence with which "our

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ustaz" tried to answer our criticisms of his aesthetic and political stands, especially given our bitter experiences in our critical and intellectual debates with other pioneering Sudanese artists, whose responses were very negative. Some of our opponents in the Khartoum School did not hesitate to accuse us of intellectual alienation, renouncing our national heritage, worshipping cultural values imported from the West, and, eventually, of surrendering to foreign forces. Under the Nimeiry

dictatorship, such accusations were code words for national treason and conniving with the banned Sudanese Communist Party.

I said that El-Salahi's response to our criticisms was intelligent because he was ready to hear all sorts of questions indiscriminately. He took answering these questions very seriously. He was also quite prepared to rectify or revise a faulty argument, promptly and suavely, whenever he detected one. Debating El-Salahi is very enjoyable, for at any moment in the discussion he will correct his argument, tighten up and consolidate his position. One might say that his stance in intellectual debate closely matches the way he works in art, erasing, adding, and adjusting, always aware of the multifaceted, complex, intricate nature of a pictorial structure, progressively moving the visual outcome toward perfection.

I think the principle of going back over what he has done before is a basic principle in El-Salahi's painting. Rarely satisfied with the first, spontaneous surge of creativity, he prefers to return to the work time and time again, revising, "scrubbing," pushing the formal handling as far as he can.1 also believe that the picture he sees in his mind's eye is an outcome to be arrived at only through a tremendous struggle on his part. It is only realized when the space between the idea of the image and its material realization is annihilated. One can go further and claim that El-Salahi is exceptionally capable of merging these two images into one, obliterating the qualitative difference between the essence of the conceptual idea and the material sign.

When El-Salahi talks about visual experience, he often recounts fables and anecdotes in which reality blends with fiction. He has an unusual, wonderful ability to imagine outlandish, dreamlike scenes that he uses to chronicle his daily life realities. In one anecdote, recounted in a public dialogue with Ulli Beier in 1983, he talks about seeing the dead: I used to see the dead. I saw my nephew three days after he had died....1 used to see ... a man galloping on a horse, coming in by one window and going out by the next. I had never told anybody about it.'5 The best of these anecdotes merging images of the real world and images belonging to the eerie world of vision and dream comes from the same dialogue with Beier, held on the occasion of his exhibition in Bayreuth: he was flabbergasted, he said, when a figure he had drawn in one of his paintings started to move about like a living thing. Years later he came across the same figure in an ancient Peruvian temple image in a New York museum:"And when I saw that drawing I could recognize my own work! I found that I had done that thing myself. Yet the little piece of paper underneath it said that it came from the ancient [Paracas] culture of Peru."'6 In all these ways, one can argue, El-Salahi is exceptional among artists of his generation: he is almost the only one still working to refine his aesthetic and political positions through continued involvement in debate on issues of art and identity, both on the local, Sudanese level and on the international level of contemporary African art.'7 His capacity to amend the theoretical convictions underlying his artistic practice is a clear indication of the priority of practice over theory in his mind: El-Salahi is primarily a working artist, who, however, given the geopolitics of Sudanese art, had to take on the responsibility of contributing to the national ideological effort of establishing the aesthetics of the Arab-Islamic middle class in Sudan. In this regard his works of the 196os were a kind of a visual manifesto explicating his theoretical doctrines. Built on the presence of Arabic calligraphy, his images also featured a type of geometric ornament claimed to be African (cat. no. 6). The colors—variations of gray, black, and brown—were the "colors of our land," or "the colors of the 74 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Fig. 21 Calligraphic Forms III. 1989. Ink on paper.

3 4 x 17 3/4 in.(45.1 x 45.1 cm).

Nine panels. each: 17 / Collection of the artist

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Sudan," as El-Salahi and others loved to say:"As a Sudanese individual coming from the Sudan ... I find the colour in it particularly looks very much like our earth, and maybe that's why I feel it's Sudanese."8 This statement, however, which catered to the national sentiments of the Sudanese audience, is given the lie by the natural geography of Sudan, and became imprisoning when El-Salahi exhausted the possibilities of earth colors and embarked on new creative prospects. By the early 1970S he had abandoned the "colors of homeland"; his artist's intuition had led him to embrace new palettes, with bright, strong colors very different from the browns, blacks, and grays turned into a trademark by the Khartoum School (cat. no. 30). In that period El-Salahi was very interested in Indian Tantric works, having seen an exhibition of them at the Hayward Gallery in London (cat. nos. 28, 29). He explained this point to Beier in 1983: I was very excited when I saw the big Tantra exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.... I found it a highly balanced form of painting.... I think it liberates you.

It lets you meditate.1 always meant to have painting as a platform for meditation. ... And that is what I found in the mandalas, particularly with the designs where the lines open up: with an entrance to them. It takes you in and you feel very much at ease with yourself.'9 The road paved for him by these Tantric works finally liberated EI-Salahi from the stylistic shackles of the Khartoum School to roam freely into new areas of artistic exploration. During the

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198os and well into the '90s, he abandoned color altogether to work in black and white, as in the ink-on-paper works published in the portfolio Painting in Shades ofBlackness: Ibrahim Salahi(1991) (fig. 21; cat. no. 42).7° Many of those interested in El-Salahi, whether critics or fans, have ignored his work in photography. Yet this is an area of artistic investigation that he has pursued steadily since the mid-196os.

Except for the few images published as illustrations in Ali AI-Makk's book Madina min Turab (A city of dust),2'his photographs are almost unknown, even among people interested in his work.

The best example of El-Salahi's ability to outgrow his old convictions appears in regard to his concept of the Khartoum School as oscillating between the poles of Islamization and Africanization.

According to El-Salahi's statements of the late 196os,the Khartoum School focused on Islamic culture and made Arabic calligraphy its central iconographic source. At the time, El-Salahi was strongly influenced by research he had done in the Islamic sections of museums including the British Museum. In a statement published in African Arts magazine in 1967, he said, "I was most fascinated by the treasures of wonderful Islamic art they have there, and I kept wondering about the possibility of trying to bring that into my own work. It was most valuable to me, and I thought, why not let it flow?""

That same year, El-Salahi contributed eight paintings to the exhibition The Modern African Arts, at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, organized in collaboration with the Transcription Centre, London, and the Mbari Mbayo Club, Oshogbo, Nigeria. In a brochure accompanying the exhibition, Beier introduced El-Salahi as an African artist from an Islamic society: Ibrahim El Salahi ... comes from an Islamic culture that knows no representational art at all. When he returned from England, however, Salahi found that many of the ideas he had acquired from abroad isolated him in his own country and that his work seemed meaningless and without character in Khartoum. He began to study Arabic calligraphy—the most important artistic tradition in Northern Sudan. His earlier pictures were simply decorative versions of Quranic verses. Later the letters began to sprout figurative doodles, and finally the image was disassociated from the characters and began to lead a life of its own. Even then the rhythm and structure of the Arabic alphabet underlies most of his forms.23 In the mid-197os El-Salahi's work shifted radically from this Islamic focus to including elements of African iconography. It is worth mentioning that by that point he was a high-ranking official in the Nimeiry regime's Ministry of Culture and Information, and that after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, in 1972, which put an end to the civil war in southern Sudan,the state had adopted a rhetoric of national unity within ethnic and cultural diversity. It was as an engineer of this ideology that El-Salahi evolved an accommodative discourse, maintaining that Sudanese art resulted from a hybridization of African and Arab elements. In this respect he went further than the artists of the Khartoum School, whose inclusion of what they called African ornamentation veiled an aesthetically patronizing sense of superiority. They thought it enough to introduce an African "tint" while ignoring the essential iconographic elements. By the early 198os, El-Salahi had set this indispensable African iconographic component at the center of an artistic practice in other respects inspired by Arabic calligraphy. His remarks in the dialogue with Ulli Beier in 1983 are revealing here: U: When you learned to write at the Khalwa [traditional Koranic school], was there an element of calligraphy in it already?

I: Oh yes, there was calligraphy and even decoration. We learned what is called the Sudanese hand ... and at the beginning of every section, you decorated your wooden writing board ... so the artistic part started quite early.

U: What kind of decoration was this, abstract designs, arabesques?

I: Strangely, it was African rather than Arabic in character. You know in the Koran, at the 76

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beginning of each chapter there is a decoration on top and along the side ... almost like a gate of paradise. It is the flowing kind of interlacing design, which is of an Islamic nature, of an arabesque nature. But what we did was much more African, because we used crisscross pattern and sharp triangles and squares.24 In the same conversation El-Salahi presents a "magical" account of the presence of African masks in his works. I say "magical" because El-Salahi and Beier were fully aware that African masks are not traditionally seen in Sudan, and El-Salahi himself has acknowledged that he did not visit West Africa until well after beginning to execute mask motifs in his works. He begins by saying,"What I am going to say right now might not make sense to a western mind."25 And he goes on to tell a fantastic story about being a spiritual medium, inhabited by strange spirits that speak through him and make him experience and succumb to weird events: I thought I was being a medium for a spirit of some sort, something was working through me....

So, answering your question about masks: I don't know if I was hit by a spirit from West Africa working through me. Because I had never seen these masks before.76 Those acquainted with El-Salahi as a researcher who knows his way through museums the world over will find it hard to believe that he had not seen African masks. What interests me in this story, though, is that he presents himself here as a kujour, for Sudanese people a sort of shaman. The kujour of the Nuba Mountains is a magician, a traditional doctor, a fortune-teller, a medium between our world and the world of the spirits and metaphysical powers. It is difficult for Muslims to accept ElSalahi's self-description as an African kujour, surrendering his soul and body to the service of spirits and magical powers, which express themselves through his mediation. The choice is quite incongruous with the traditional Islam advocated by Sudan's Arab-Islamic middle class.

But El-Salahi is not only a Muslim; he is also an artist with a visionary social program that can be summed up in one word: hybridity. It is neither trivial nor arbitrary that El-Salahi, a Muslim, should take the role of the African kujour, not as a conscious intellectual option but as a natural, spontaneous stand secreted deep in the innermost feelings of a typical Sudanese. The idea can be still better understood in light of the Nimeiry regime's decision, in the early 1.98os, to initiate a radical change in the law, which it switched from a secular foundation to that of the Islamic Shari'a. These Islamic laws were now to be indiscriminately applied to Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese alike. In adopting the role of an African kujour, El-Salahi seemed to be trying to reinstate the symbolic weight of his African heritage, to redress the imbalance that the political authorities had created in the equation of Sudanese hybrid culture.

Nor can El-Salahi's choice be isolated from the political and religious adjustment that took place among the supporters of the Khartoum School in the early 1.98os. As a corollary to the progressive buildup of fundamentalist-Muslim political authority in the inner workings of the regime, voices that had previously supported the project of Arab-African hybridization started to withdraw from the forefront of cultural and political involvement, or to change their focus. The high point in this process was Islamic Manuscripts and Aesthetics, a large exhibition held at the Sudanese Chinese Friendship Hall, Khartoum, in March through April of 1981. The show was organized by a group of pro-Islamist artists led by Shibrain, Ahmed Abd-'Aal, and Ibrahim EVAwam, who in the 3.96os, after El-Salahi, had been among the most influential partisans of the Khartoum School. The exhibition was organized under the slogan "there is no god but Allah." It was sponsored and financed by the Sudanese Supreme Council for Religious Affairs and Endowments and supervised by the national committee for celebrating the advent of the fifteenth Hijri century.27 Shibrain, the secretary of the show's organizing committee, wrote in the accompanying publication,"This exhibition is considered as a prelude, prepared in haste, for an extensive prospective

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activity with the ultimate goal of planning to establish an Islamic museum and Islamic library in the Sudan." In fact the show turned out to be the hasty prelude to a new political reality and to a rather more ambitious prospective activity than Shibrain had promised, beginning with the imposition of Shari'a laws in 1983 and eventually leading to the tragedy of raging civil war in the south, west, and east of the country.

The propagation of hybridity dwindled greatly in the 198os and '90s, giving way to the propaganda of Islamization and Arabization. But the fortunes of Islamist artists close to the authorities— Ahmed Abd-'Aal, Rashid Diab, Mohammed Hussein El-Fakki, and others—shone brightly. These artists together advocated a new conceptual framework for contemporary Islamic art, embodied in the manifesto of the so-called Al-Wahid School (Allah's school), issued in Khartoum in 1988. According to that manifesto, the Khartoum School was outdated and obsolete:"The Khartoum school emerged as a historical and cultural feature ... but it lacked sufficient theoretical clarity."

Today, the Sudanese people find themselves in a new political situation due to South Sudan's recent separation as an independent state. Rather than bringing peace between the two political entities of Sudan, this move most likely heralds a new period of border troubles, particularly in the areas rich in oil, and might also encourage other regions of the country (such as South Kordofan and Darfur) to secede. The Sudanese Arabic press adopted the neologism Sawmata (Somalization) to describe the foreseeable political disaster. Arab-Islamic intellectuals have returned to the hackneyed discourse of Arab-African hybridization, and the ideology of cultural and ethnic intermixing known as al-Sudanawiyya (Sudanism), as the only antidote to the evil of disintegration. But this time hybridization advocates in northern Sudan seem more egalitarian toward "the others" than in the period of General Nemeiry's regime.

In 2005, the NIF regime invited a number of well-known intellectual figures of the Sudanese cultural movement now living in Europe and the United States, including El-Salahi, to visit Khartoum, declared the capital of Arab culture for that year. On arrival they were celebrated at the highest levels of political power, being received by President Omar al-Bashir, Vice-President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha, and Minister of Culture Abd-albasit Abd-Almajid. During an official celebration, Abd-Almajid offered a formal apology to El-Salahi for the appalling treatment he had suffered in 1976, when General Nimeiry's security forces had arrested and beaten him.

The NIF actually bore no responsibility for the attack, which had taken place ten years before it came to power. The minister's apology, however, was part of a carefully worked-out political ruse.

One facet of the gambit was the tacit admission that the present, Islamic-fundamentalist regime preserves the authority of the Arab-Islamic middle class, as did the Nimeiry regime and all the other Arab-Islamic political regimes that have successively governed Sudan. It is only by sustaining the supremacy of the Arab-Islamic political establishment that the present regime administers Sudan's affairs. This regime seems to consider itself the self-appointed caretaker of a mission of national reunification that encompasses the entire political and cultural spectrum—which only means that it goes farther in the process of patronizing Sudanese culture, accepting diversity and pluralism only on the condition that they take place within the framework of Islam. It may apologize for the devastation it inflicted upon the country in the past, and may honor El-Salahi as being in the forefront of Sudan's cultural scene, but as a Muslim artist bearing the banner of Sudanist hybridization.

One wonders how El-Salahi will cope with this new status. No one yet knows, and the answer to this crucial question goes beyond El-Salahi himself to embrace the problematic geopolitics of visual art in Sudan—especially in the light of El-Salahi's extended experience with political authority in the country. It is a very complex problem, whether approached from the angle of the art of authority—the art condoned by political power—or from the angle of the authority of the artist, for an underlying political program is clearly discernible in the artist's work.

Translated from Arabic by Mustafa Adam

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1. In January 1981, the strict Muslim El-Tigani Sa'eed and the university lecturer Dr. Sid Ahmed Nugd Allah engaged in a fierce debate in a Khartoum newspaper on the issue of the Islamic prohibition of visual images. The controversy was triggered with Nugd Allah's speculation on the credibility of the attribution of a remark to the Prophet: "Angels do not tread in a house where there is a dog or a picture." See El-Ayyam, January 23, 1981. For the Prophet's remarks on the issue of pictures see Saheih El-Bukhori(Cairo), vol. 7: 214-17.

and Drama,and who declared in that interview that abandoning the pentatonic musical scale was tantamount to abandoning the national character.

El-Ayyam. April 11,1975. I also interviewed Jabir, who defended the concept that Sudanese music was richly diverse, giving as an example the Arab-influenced heptatonic musical scale used by some ethnic groups of western Sudan. El-Ayyam, April 17, 1975. See also Jabir, Our Heritage and the Concept ofPentatonic Scale, published by Sudan's Ministry of Culture in February 1979.

2. See my correspondence with El-Salahi in "Makateeb Elsalahi"(The correspondence of El-Salahi),Jahanam, no. 22(March 2002).Jahanam is a periodical pamphlet that I issue and distribute among friends, artists, and persons interested in issues of Sudanese culture.

10. El-Salahi, in Ibrahim el Salahi: Conversations with Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: lwalewa-Haus,1983), p. 26. See excerpt in this volume, pp. 105-106.

3. See Ahmed M. Ali Hakim,"The Historical Roots for Sudanese Nationalism from Ancient Times to the Rise of Islam," a paper presented at the conference "Sudanese Nationalism and National Unity," held under the auspices of the University of Khartoum and the Council for Regional Rule Studies, Khartoum, May 1984. Also see Abu Saleem, On Sudanese Personality (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1979), p. 19.

4. Even an intellectual as prudent as Arnold Toynbee was not immune to the temptation of this vision.

Toynbee considered the binary Arab/African division of Sudan a reflection of the problem of Africa at large in its binary division of Arab Africa and African Africa. Seeing the problem of the Sudanese people as a microcosm of the problem of all Africans, he therefore believed that Sudan held the keys of Africa's ultimate fate as much as of its own destiny. If Sudan managed to reconcile the camps of which its people were composed, it would posit a model to be followed in the reconstruction of all Africa. See Toynbee's Between Niger and Nile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

5. See Didar Fawzy,"La Republique du Soudan, 1955-1966," in Echec d'une experience de deco//age economique_dons la voie capitaliste (Algiers: Societe Nationale d'Edition et de Diffusion, 1975).

6. For information on Denis Williams(1923-1998), see Carl E. Hazlewood's article on him in Nka, no.9 (Fall/Winter 1998).

7. Dr. El-Zain Sagyroun submitted a Ph.D. thesis on contemporary Sudanese visual art to the University of Warsaw in the mid-1960s. I did not have access to its English translation. He also published many articles, of which "Contemporary Visual Arts in Sudan," published in Khartoum Journal in 1965, is the most quoted. Ahmed El-Tayeb Zein El-Abdin published an article in Khartoum Journal in April 1966 discussing issues of Sudanese art. In October 1968, Khartoum Journal also published a speech by El-Salahi on the notion of invoking Sudan's traditional heritage in the country's contemporary art.

Abdallah Bashir,"Art et identite culturelle au Soudan"(Ph.D. diss., Universite de Paris I, December 1984). Hassan Musa,"Le Patronage de l'art contemporain au Soudan"(Memoire de martrise, art history. Universite de Parisi, 1981).

12. See Hashim M.Salih,"A Critique on Elsalahi," E/-Ayyam, November 23,1974.

13. See "Makateeb Elsalahi."

14. Salah Hassan Abdalla offers a good documentation of the 19705 debate on issues of Sudanese visual art in his Contributions in Visual Art Literature: A Critical Analysis of Literature on Art in Sudan 1974-1986 (Khartoum: Arwigga for Culture and Science Publication House, 2004).

15. El-Salahi, in Conversations with Ulli Beier, p.34.

See excerpt in this volume, p.108.

16. Ibid., p. 33.

17. On November 17, 2002, El-Salahi wrote to me, "You are, to me, like a mirror. Your clarity and ability to truthfully reflect a genuinely true impression helps me to revise and adjust my movement as far as I can muster." See "Makateeb Elsalahi."

18. El-Salahi, quoted in "A Painter from the Sudan," African Arts 1, no.i (Autumn 1967): 26.

19. El-Salahi, in Conversations with Ulli Beier, pp.

37-38.

20. Norbert Aas, Painting in Shades ofBlackness: Ibrahim Salahi(Bayreuth: Boomerang Press, 1991).

21. Ali Al-Makk, Madina min Turab (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1974). The book was designed by the Sudanese artist Hussein Shareif.

22. El-Salahi, quoted in "A Painter from the Sudan," p. 19.

23. Ulli Beier, quoted in ibid., p. 24.

24. Conversations with Ulli Beier, p. 32.

25. Ibid., p. 33.

26. Ibid.

27. The Hijri calendar, a Muslim calendar, begins at the year 622 of the Gregorian calendar.

8. See Abdalla Ali Ibrahim,"Afro-Arabism or The Coalition of Deserters: On the Question of Nationalities in The Arabic World,"Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, no. 119 (January 1989).

9. The prominent Sudanese musicians Jumma'Jabir, El-Agib Mohammed Hassan, Anas El-Agib, Makki Sid Ahmed,and many others contributed to these discussions, published in a number of newspapers but particularly El-Ayyom. As the editor of El-Ayyam's cultural affairs page, I contributed to this discussion through an interview with Ahmed, who then headed the music department at the Institute of Music

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The Artist in His Own Words IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI

TIME FOR ME IS the span of my life on earth, with all life's sweet and sour experiences and accomplishments. It flows in a spiral track, starting from the day I was born, ascending through the phases of childhood, adulthood, and maturity up to the present, when I am in my eighties. During this flow of time, I have always observed that ascending activity of growing up, developing, and changing, returning spirally and recurrently to the place I started from, but on a higher plane than before.

Place, time's twin, has its own distinctive character: its origin, culture, and colors are inescapable. However one tries to outgrow, abandon, or deny place, seeking to free oneself from what its inherited traditions, norms, practices, and idiosyncrasies entail—however one tries to put on new attire, hoping it is one of a kind—the attempt is futile. Nothing comes out of nothing; in whatever forms the power to create is manifested, whatever various outcomes emerge through individual agency, they are but an addition to an uninterrupted series issuing from an ancient single origin.

They are freshly budding leaves on the highest branch of an ancient tree whose roots dig deep into the earth. This, in the eye of my mind, is the case of man.

I was born on September 5, 1930, in my family's house in El-Abbasyia, a neighborhood in Omdurman,the largest city in Sudan. I remember El-Abbasyia as a healthy community, its people equals whether rich or poor, young or old. The young respected the old and the old were kind and protective toward the young. People dressed simply and were honorable and supportive through thick and thin. They trusted in Allah, lived peacefully, shared what food was available, and were friendly and generous toward strangers, even when destitute themselves. Such was the milieu in which I was brought up, and whose tenets and values I absorbed.

My father was Sheikh Mohammed El-Salahi Othman, an Islamic scholar and—like my grandfather, Judge Osman Arabi, and my great-grandfather, Judge Arabi El-Hawwari, before him—a member of the Khatmyia sophist sect. My family was called "Ahl El-Jami"(the people of the mosque) back when my forefathers were still living in El-Obeid, the capital of Kurdofan province. My father arrived in Omdurman when he was eleven years old, with my grandfather Judge Osman and the rest of our extended tribal family, the Hawwara. Among the followers of the Mahdi, they had marched as part of his great army to besiege Khartoum, in 1884. My grandfather died a few years after the fall of the Mahadyia state, at the turn of the twentieth century. The shrine in which he was buried in the Kara neighborhood of Omdurman is still visited and venerated today.

My father taught at the Omdurman Islamic Institute and at a khalwa (Qur'anic school) right by our house, a spacious mud building. I entered the khalwa myself at the age of two. There I learned to read and write. My father was a fine transcriber of the holy Qur'an, using a distinct Sudanese script EL-SALAHI ON EL-SALAHI 81 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Fig. 22 Untitled. 1954-57. Gouache on Masonite, 35 7/8 x48 in.(91 x 122 cm). Collection of the artist

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in many ways similar to the Moroccan calligraphic tradition, of which it may in fact be an offshoot. I used to watch him drawing on a whitewashed surface with date-palm kernels, some lines faultlessly straight, others fine, interlacing geometric forms in an Africanized arabesque style. He taught me to mix amar,the homemade ink used for transcribing—a recipe of soot, gum arabic, and water left to ferment until it turned richly dark. He also showed me how to sharpen tumam grass and reeds into pens. And finally I learned to design and paint sharota, tablets used for transcribing verses of the Qur'an. I would ornament my tablet by drawing a frame of intersecting vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, making triangles that we usually filled in with contrasting colors. In the center of this frame we would write the opening verses of a chapter of the holy Qur'an that we were to learn by heart.

It must have been at this early stage of my life that I began to be interested in art, as part of my khalwa studies, which were full of aesthetic possibilities—possibilities inherent in both the abstract lettering of Arabic, as drawn by Sudanese hands, and in the rhythm of African ornament, abundant everywhere around me. At the time, of course, I was unaware of the value of these riches from an artistic point of view.

After the khalwa I began my formal education, in primary and preparatory schools where art was not on the curriculum. But I used to color the pictures printed in some of the schoolbooks, which the school would retrieve at the end of the academic year. The bright colors I used attracted the attention of one of my teachers, who was also a poet, and he took an interest in what I was doing.

Art classes were taught at secondary school, fortunately, and one could take an examination in art as part of one's graduating certificate. The secondary school I went to for four years offered drawing studios, crafts workshops, and qualified teachers who carefully nurtured my aesthetic interests (fig. 23). In my painting at that point I was using primary colors juxtaposed in a such a way that lines and dots of color acquired variant ranges of harmonious and contrasting, warm and cold, light and dark qualities in the viewer's eye. The results were reminiscent of Impressionism, with which, however, I was completely unacquainted, for the school library had no books or any other printed material on art.

In January 1949 I entered the School of Design at the Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum, and a new phase in my education began (fig. 24). My teacher, Mr. Greenlaw, taught me to be assiduously perceptive in determining and judging the proportions and dimensions of different visual structures, and the direction taken by a mass and its curved or straight surfaces. I handled the structure of such compositions by using raw, assertive dots of color without any sort of chromatic mixing. Mr. Greenlaw pushed his students to be hardworking and productive, despite the difficult circumstances in Sudan at the time. We learned from him how to open the lens of the eye wide enough to perceive the exciting and intriguing in mundane,taken-for-granted visual objects. I have never forgotten him finding me alone in the studio one day: he took a handful of sand, sprinkled it in a dusty heap on the bench next to me, and told me,"Draw that!" I broodingly sat there all day, examining the fine particles of sand and gravel and the bits of dry grass mixed in with them. It was a revelation, showing me what in the visual world had until then passed me by.

On graduating from Gordon I got a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of the University of London. When I first began work there I experimented with using dots of color after the style of Pissarro, Seurat, and Sisley. As taught by my new instructors, though, I had to conform to the requirements of British art schools of the time, which stipulated that students master realist drawing and painting. Gradually, toward the end of my time at the Slade, I began to compose with colored squares and triangles, which I used to establish the visual field and its masses according to their position in space, their color, and vanishing point (fig. 22; cat. no. 3,[p. 35]). At the same time, I had retained my childhood interest in calligraphy, and was trying to explore its abstract symbolism in hopes of deciphering its visual genesis. In painting two-dimensional realizations of calligraphic forms and figures, I was on the point of making my work completely abstract but for a passing comment from one of my teachers:"Here you are very much influenced by Mondrian." I had no knowledge of Mondrian, so I hurried over to the Tate Gallery to see his art for the first time. Looking

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Fig. 23 The artist, second from right, in his last year of secondary school in Sudan. 1948

at his work, I was quite sure there was no connection between Mondrian's total abstraction and my humble attempts to compose a painting liberated from the illusion of the third dimension. I was fascinated by that notion at the time, and it has continued to haunt me, together with the discoveries of the Renaissance era. I was hoping to develop a satisfactory representational substitute within a two-dimensional picture.

In the summer of 1957, I returned home to Sudan, armed with experience and ideas that I initially expected would help in my teaching and in my own work. But this radically changed attitude, the attitude of an extravagant, conceited young artist fresh from London, actually just hemmed me in. Over time, I came to see that conditions in Sudan required a very different approach on the part of the artist, who would otherwise be completely isolated from his audience. If I was to have a relationship with an audience, I had to examine the Sudanese environment, identify what it offered, assess its potential as an artistic resource, and explore its possibilities as a complementary element in artistic creation.

In my early works of the 196os, then, I adopted a radically different style, a sort of free, spontaneous painting dependent mainly on line and on very simple forms (fig. 25). And these works did begin to reach an audience: some were reproduced in a small book published in Nigeria by Ulli Beier in the early 196os, and a group of drawings and paintings was exhibited at the Mbari Aritists and Writers Club, lbadan, Nigeria, in 1961 and at the lwalewa-Haus gallery for contemporary African art in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1984. I also did some illustrations for stories by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, published by Hiwar magazine in Beirut (fig. 26). My pictures in these years looked the work of an amateur artist, gullible and naive, trying to reinvent the wheel or to rediscover electricity. They featured formations of ghostly human shapes against dark backgrounds and a limited color scheme involving a kind of dry earth touch. The figures gazed serenely into hollow emptiness, completely absorbed, looking at and through me, as if trying to remind me,through their weird, perfect silence, of what I had failed to see.

In later years I would struggle to make out what these elongated facial shapes, recalling African masks, stood for: animals, humans, or humans' animal souls. The images I compared them to in my mind's eye were diverse, including deer, mountain sheep or bighorns, the long noses of horses and donkeys, the face of the baboon, and fish such as the Nile perch and the coral-eating fish of the Red Sea. Alternatively these elongated, black-eyed, glittering facial shapes might represent the veils our mothers and grandmothers used to wear in public, or the faces of the drummers and tambourine players I had seen circling wildly during funeral ceremonies and chants in praise of Allah. Or maybe they evoked the reciters of verses of the holy Qur'an, invoking Allah and chanting the sophist poems of El Burag, again during funeral ceremonies, once the dead had been entombed, in the vain hope 84 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

of making him or her sit up and listen. I was not quite sure of the faces' origin, but the memory of the artist is full of living visual riches, reverberating in the mind whenever a painting in the making strikes. Then, I feel, I am opening the gates of the unknown—unknown yet embedded in my inmost passions. At those times I am captive to a power that is usually indecipherable, beyond my conscious cognition. At least that was how it used to appear to me—I felt as if whatever I drew or painted was beyond my power to decide.

I have often thought about rational cognition and its practical worth, about why we are always trying to explore it. Was it really necessary for me to stop, think, and question what I was doing?

Did I have to try to decipher the ideas that came into my mind, or the unconscious power that drove me? Or was it better for me to drift with the current, following the direction of the strange visions that appeared to me? Perhaps that way I'd learn something about myself. I often had these enticing glimpses of alien worlds when I was a child, and I still had them as an adult, when I left behind the rational pulse of the conscious mind. At these fleeting moments I felt liberated from the shackles of the body. The past fused with the present, and I could see things that my rational mind had failed to fathom.

I don't deny the value of reason and logic, but I think there is something else far more vital: some fixed center, inalterable, interminable, endlessly flowing. I know that I draw on an unwavering spiritual origin in which I resolutely believe. I rely on and submit to the metaphysical and the invisible as ways to gain access to the hidden chambers of my innermost self—ways to get to the bottom of my self, to my essential being, to explore my quiescent potential and to sharpen my eyes to what is around me.

Fig. 24 The artist, left, at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College. 1949

Fig. 25 The artist in his studio. 1964-65

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I am a Muslim and surrender my being to my creator. To me, Islam, in its fundamental essence, is a summation and end point of preceding religions, bringing forth enduringly relevant teachings and decrees. Averse from the holy Qur'an states, "It is not a tale invented, but a confirmation of what went before." Humanity is in desperate need of people who can read the holy script with free and open minds. They must attempt a sound understanding of the script, and must explicate the wisdom behind its prohibitions and demands—which do not belong to the past but remain relevant today.

The goal must be to allow justice to prevail among all people and to bring peace to the world at large.

On September 8, 1975, a radical transformation shook my life when I was jailed by the government at the notorious Cooper Prison in Khartoum North, for no offense on my part. Nevertheless, this must have happened by the will of Allah, through a hidden wisdom known only to Him. By His divine mercifulness, the ordeal became a blessing: in the dark of the prison, I was able to see clearly where in earlier days I had gone wrong—in my work, my intellectual perceptions, my performance. I experienced a rare moment of revelation, unattainable in the hectic pace of everyday life—one of those moments when the veils and curtains are drawn back and one glimpses one's true being reflected in some internal mirror. It happens like lightning; then the curtains fall back into place. The lucky one is able to see in that fleeting moment, and to understand what he has seen. There and then, I was awakened.

Fig. 26 The artist with novelist Tayeb Salih at the Sudanese Embassy in London. Early 1971

There is an issue that troubles me,though I try to keep it in perspective. Globalization, whether overt or covert, is everywhere now; free trade rules in some regions, while our third world is subject to strict controls that limit it to roles as an exporter of a few raw materials, a market for the products of the big industrial nations, and, eventually, a tomb for their nuclear and chemical waste, away from their own environment. There is also the claim that the world has become a village: whisper in the East and you are simultaneously heard in the West, as a corollary of developments in communication technologies, scientific discoveries, and world politics and economies. We cannot deny the existence of these issues; they inform the world we live in, whether we accept that world or not.

I am not particularly pessimistic, nor do I try to keep myself solitary, away from the community that I have shared for so many decades and still do. I am very much aware that what defines the world of aesthetics, like all other human bonds, is a sort of give-and-take relationship freely agreed upon by all. I am also fully aware of, and very much appreciate, the creative, intellectual, and human values of the West, with its doctrine of personal freedoms and individual rights. Even so, the realities of our third world, the so-called developing world, have driven us to a crossroads. We have not managed to revive the golden memory of our past accomplishments, nor have we arrived at the independent standing for which we have long yearned. We are left stranded in a labyrinthine void. Survival is for the fittest; the more culturally powerful lead and the weaker follow, subordinate. Thus most of us have learned what we know about artistic traditions along Western lines, and, unaware, we make Western styles and approaches into standards to be followed blindly.

I have often asked myself a question: for whom do artists create, and what is their mission? Do they work for their own satisfaction, or for those who share their cultural environment and situation, or for people all over the world? So many of us have focused either on the ego, or self, or else on humanity at large, and have disregarded the people with whom we share a cultural milieu. In doing so, we were driven by erroneous perceptions of the merits, the spiritual and aesthetic riches, of our own cultures. By failing to take these riches into account, we have ignored the qualities and histories of these local cultures—and what a loss! We would have gained so much by preserving local values, which could have enriched not only our own work but humanity at large.

When I returned to Sudan in 1957, accompanied by my first wife and our first-born son, Mohammed Sami, we stayed at the family home in El-Abbasyia. Before leaving London I had shipped home the work I had made at the Slade, and when it arrived on the train from Port Sudan, I felt a riveting desire to show it, to demonstrate the skills I had learned—the results of my studies in visual perception, composition, anatomy, and in an art history going back to the Renaissance and its ultimately scientific discoveries, both visual and theoretical, in optics and perspective. The shipment on

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the train included landscapes, still lifes, studies of the body(nude and dressed), portraits, drawings, and many other works of which I was proud. I wanted to give a sort of coming-home exhibition of these works in Khartoum.

The only available venue in the city at the time was a hall in the Grand Hotel. The hall was next to a bar, as though the hotel management thought it could use art exhibitions as part of the entertainments it offered its foreign visitors. But there was no other venue for such an event in the city—no private galleries, no museums, not even a national gallery.

The viewers I had in mind for the exhibition were my Sudanese compatriots, but although a lot of them came to the opening out of courtesy, they quickly vanished. A few people—some of my colleagues, some of my students, some Western visitors—came later, and the Westerners bought a good number of works, but only two Sudanese citizens were interested in buying any of the works I showed in any exhibition I had in those years. A work I had nearly died to finish, painting on the banks of the Gash River in the Eritrean town of Tisane, attracted the first buyer. I had to chase him for months to get him to pay for it. The other purchaser bartered his secondhand watch in order to pay for the painting, which he wanted to give as a gift to a European guest who had shown interest in it.

I repeated the exhibition twice but no one came. In trying to understand why, I was astounded to find that the artistic tastes and concepts entrenched in the Sudanese personality offered no possibility of really appreciating the expertise I had acquired abroad and was so proud to show off.

The shock was a revelation, and in the end it helped me to see what had passed me by. I stopped painting for over two years, during which I traveled all over the country, sometimes with my students at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, sometimes by myself. My only purpose on these trips was to see what kinds of art were shown, and therefore appreciated, in typical Sudanese homes and public places. Roaming far and wide, and thinking about what I saw, I was amazed to rediscover the riches I had seen all around me during my childhood, and whose value and rich meanings I had for years abysmally failed to grasp. But for the research triggered by the shock of that first show, I would have been unable to see that an aesthetic and cultural alternative had always been available to Sudanese artists, an alternative as meaningful as the foreign one we had tended to embrace.

Northern Sudan has the long history of a civilization predating the pyramids. Its artistic and architectural excellence extended through the days of the pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt and survived the armies of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemaic Greeks, and the Roman emperors. The Christian expansion gave birth to three powerful Christian kingdoms, stretching from Wadi Haifa in the far north down to the southern outskirts of present-day Khartoum. These kingdoms produced rich ecclesiastical art, part of the visual experience and heritage of the people of northern Sudan from the sixth century until the end of the fifteenth. Our Arab forefathers, who came to the region as traders and as camel breeders seeking pasturage and water, became powerful over the years and by the end of the fifteenth century had established the Funj Blue Sultanate, which supported the spread of Islam all over northern Sudan. By then, within a largely pastoral environment, the production of plastic art had declined, replaced by a flourishing applied-art tradition of predominantly abstract and visually simplified objects. Images in which living creatures were veiled behind masks of decorative pigments, permeated in the reddish color of blood, were applied to household furniture, kitchen utensils, food containers, jewelry, and rugs or carpets used in marriage rituals and other traditional festivities. These arts have survived the vagaries of history and are still active today.

This accumulation of practices over generations has given contemporary Sudanese craftspeople an enormously valuable opportunity to preserve their people's legacy. I could see this mainly in decorated goods made of leather, wood,and palm leaves, as well as in tattoos on the skin. What captivated me most, though, were the khalwa practices of drawing on tablets of acacia wood.The tablet is carved as an abstract representation of the human body. Children revise their Arabiclanguage lessons on the smooth surface of these tablets, learning the verses of the Qur'an by heart and writing in Sudanese script. Whenever a student has finished memorizing a chapter of the Qur'an, he goes on to beautify the tablet, using designs called sharafa that look very much like the ornaments decorating the chapter openings in printed copies of the holy book. Yet the sharafas I

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saw in the late 19505 involved something very different, moving away from typical Quranic ornamentation toward serrated designs of intersecting lines forming another, interior body, a form evoking a human chest embracing within itself the key to the secrets of the Qur'an.

Examining these artworks and studying their composition, I saw that the outer facade embodied more than what appeared on the surface. Its simplicity and structurally balanced form invited serious investigation. In fact I saw that the khalwa tablet epitomized a purely intuitive Sudanese art, combining disparate elements yet unified artistically as a very appealing picture. In some way it reflected the conditions of the inhabitants of northern Sudan, a hybrid African race stalwartly and silently roaming the desert, the banks of the great Nile, and the vast savannah plains.

Along this local perspective, and hoping to fill the gap between the artist and his audience, the cumulative outcome of different historical, social, and political factors, I began an experiment later called the "Khartoum School." The common factor in Khartoum School work was the abstract and representational symbolic potential of the Arabic letter, as realized in Sudanese script and decorated

by African ornaments (cat. nos. 4 [p. 44],6-9, 13, 14, 17, 20-24). We submitted this letter to a rigorous, laboratory-like experiment aimed at exploring its hidden artistic potentials and employing them in drawing, painting, and other fine art.

In the Khartoum School project I was honored to receive the invaluable help of my friend and teacher Osman Waqialla, an inspiring artist and poet who taught calligraphy at the College of Fine and Applied Art. Osman had succeeded in establishing the essential methods of using Arabic calligraphy in visual art. I was also indebted to the artist, writer, and critic Denis Williams, who taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and who also worked for the College of Fine and Applied Art during those years. The Sudanese artist Ahmed Shibrain, who joined the staff of the College of Fine and Applied Art after finishing his graduate studies abroad, joined me in the Khartoum School adventure. Shibrain, my best companion on that long journey, is a wonderful investigator of both artistic creation and Islamic heritage. His calligraphic paintings are superb works of art, and his creative ideas were innovative and important in Sudan's artistic awakening during those years.

I worked to probe the minds of the Sudanese people, assuming that if they did not appreciate what we had brought back from Europe, they must have yearned for a different form of art. There was something, I was quite sure, stocked up in their collective mind or spirit. This form of art was somehow related to Arabic calligraphy and its decorative units or blocks. I was fascinated by the idea of finding what would appeal to them.

I began with a simple scheme: I squeezed letters and decorative units together into a narrow, limited space within the overall pictorial field. The letter became legible yet abstract. It was a pleasant surprise to find that my Sudanese audience responded positively to these works. Next, gradually, I began to expand the area occupied by the letter forms and decorations. Later I considered separating the calligraphic symbol from its verbal representation, so that what was read referred only to the letter form and nothing else. In a further development I tried to untie the mold of the letter from its skeletal shape, producing a sort of hollow void within and between the adjacent letter forms on the same line. Thus the form of the letter somehow regained three-dimensional components. This stage was followed by another in which I tried to reassemble these pictorial elements into fresh formal patterns, hoping to create a new visual alphabet incorporating a contemporary artistic concept. I then embarked on the making of new works based on my earlier experiments with plant and animal shapes, spiritually loaded voices and visions. I felt like a spiritual medium, driven by a forceful compulsion to make work that appeared through my agency rather than emerging out of my own free will.

It never occurred to us at the time that our art would attract viewers outside Sudan—we were too preoccupied by the urgent task of building bridges between our work and our Sudanese audience.

But we did know that a genuine work of art appeals naturally to all, and that the division between local and international audiences is arbitrary and illusionary. Those audiences are two faces of a coin, its metal being authenticity, honesty of expression, and originality of execution. A locally recognized artist would be taking his first steps toward international recognition, as we would learn from our own experience.

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My most recent solo exhibition in Sudan, at the Dara Art Gallery, Khartoum, opened in October 2000, after a break of more than thirty years. I was very much delighted when over one thousand people from all walks of life, Sudanese and foreigners alike, attended the opening. The corridors and the two large spaces of the gallery were packed; the audience spilled out into the garden and into the side streets around the building. They were driven by a keen and genuine desire not so much to buy works of art as just to see them. According to the gallery's owner, Dr. Rashid Diab, the flow of visitors continued steadily throughout the whole month of the show,from eight in the morning until almost midnight, seven days a week.

For me it was like a belated wedding celebration, or maybe a honeymoon. It was like seeing green leaves blossoming on a dried-up branch. We had tried so hard to destroy the unnecessary distance between Sudanese artists and their own local audience, deprived of a renewal of its traditional heritage. The bridge we had labored to build since the late 19505 and early'6os had finally become concrete. Enormous credit and gratitude go to people like Diab and Shibrain, who, as the owners of the only two art galleries in Sudan, have given of themselves so freely. They have allotted parts of their own homes to these galleries, with no support whatsoever other than their own belief in the cause of promoting visual art in Sudan and consolidating its social role.

In the late 1950s and early '6os, as part of a rigorous investigation of the best ways of designing and creating a work of art, I cut myself loose from all ties to any style I had embraced in the past, or to any current school in the art of the period. At the same time, I was unembarrassed about staying open to the fleeting inspiration of vision and spirit. I rarely try to explain my work, but if asked to say what the real meaning of painting is, I would briefly reply that to paint, for me, is to register and describe what I perceive through the senses while remaining tightly bound to an elusive, indecipherable, metaphysical essence. For a fleeting, irresolute moment,that essence flickers like lightning in one's mind, where visual images intermingle with visions and dreams from whose components one creates a composite, a visual drama that gives vent to one's passions and emotions, beautifying them in the process. The work of art, whether as a mental construct or as a visual one, is a permutation of elements that include an original, visual inspiration; a spontaneous artistic impulse, to a certain extent controlled and directed by the artist; and knowledge and skill in the basics of artistic creativity. The work unfolds like a fetus growing in some unfathomable womb. Its ultimate shape is impossible to grasp or imagine at the process's start.

From the late 19705 to the mid-199os, I focused on drawing in black and white—that is, in black ink on white, nonacidic paper—using these contrasts to try to evoke a degree of intermediate gray without actually mixing the two. Each work comprises various units that share compositional affinities with those around them but are set within separate frames. The units are arrayed in formations, each unit being integrated into the larger design, as individuals are within their social milieux, or the different elements of an arabesque design are on their flat surface (cat. nos. 39-43).

Regarding this work, I remember the 1984 exhibition at the Iwalewa-Haus in Bayreuth. A prominent critic came all the way from Munich to deliver the introductory speech. His attention was drawn by a work of twenty-four of these units, in a formation 4 meters long and 11 / 2 meters high (fig. 40).

It was, he said, a milestone in contemporary art—not just African art but Western art at large. While he was speaking, even though I appreciated what he was saying, I was more engaged in playing with my son Zakariya. The critic went on to say that he had not seen work in years that excited and interested him as mine had.

I was grateful for these remarks, which I took as polite and civil, but I was not elated or thrilled by them. I had lived for so many years in a country where no one knew I was an artist. I went back to that country a year later to finish the work I'd started there, knowing only too well that I would not in any way complete it—rather, it would take me to a kind of new beginning. And that was indeed what happened,for I came to the conclusion that the world of color in painting involved more exciting and riveting experience than the world of black and white could offer.

Today we seem to drift endlessly, driven by impulses and whims, within unstable circumstances

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Fig. 27 The Tree. 2003. Colored ink on Bristol board, 30 / 1 8 x 30 / 1 8 in.(76.5 x 76.5 cm). Collection of the artist

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that constantly change. I see no glimpse of hope in this ordeal but to return to the center of authenticity within each one of us, artist or not, each according to his or her potentials and capabilities. Only by persistently following that course can we gradually steer humanity, against all odds, back to its original freshness and youth.

I understand authenticity not as creating something out of nothing, which is beyond human powers, but as a process of making additions, genuinely new in both appearance and substance, to what already exists. One cannot do this without an awareness of the self within its cultural milieu, and of a composite history involving its intellectual traditions, hopes and dreams, heritage, ambitions, and experiences. The authentically creative individual is able to grasp all this, and,through insight and perspicacity, to enhance and promote his or her cultural legacy with fresh, relevant contributions firmly rooted in the local milieu. This individual can relate to all humans of all creeds and ethnicities on an equal footing. It goes without saying that being able to learn from the experiences and discoveries of others, and make use of what is learned, is very different from both subordination of the other and a pitiful dependency on and fascination with the achievements of the other.

Here lies the core of a problem that many of us have faced without being fully aware of its ramifications. We used to work in isolation from our own world, alienating ourselves from our immediate surroundings of people, environment, and heritage. For skills and knowledge we went to foreign schools and imported ideas, orbiting within their magnetic sphere of influence, without pausing to look inside our own selves for a glimpse of our own possible visions or our own culturally distinctive features. A few, though, were able to see the necessity of returning to their selves and to their local legacy. Their creative production represented a sort of revival and rebirth of the roots of their artistic heritage, not through a boring repetition of irrelevantly obsolete motifs but through a succinct scrutiny of the values inherent in it.

I have finally arrived at the conclusion that the work of art is but a springboard for the individual intellect, or is like a reflecting mirror bringing us back to our own selves. The picture floats freely within the realm of a simple relationship between viewer and form, an invitation to visual meditation and to a better knowledge of the self.

I am very much obsessed with my work. I am a painter and have no other profession. I go to bed dreaming of figures, forms, and colors and wake up to translate my visions and dreams into works of art. My style changes, but I keep working on one particular theme inspired by a tree, an acacia locally called the haraz, that grows on the banks of the Nile (figs. 16-20, 27; cat. nos. 54-59,62-65). During the rainy season the tree is leafless, and it blossoms with freshly budding green leaves when the weather turns dry and the river flows at its lowest level toward the sea. Through all the tree remains steadfast, silently watching over the passage of seasons and time.

Translated from Arabic by Mustafa Adam

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Prison Notebook: A Visual Memoir SALAH M. HASSAN

IN THE MID-1970s, when Sudan was ruled by the military dictator Gaafar Nimeiry (1969-85), Ibrahim El-Salahi endured an extended period of incarceration in the Kober (Cooper) Prison in Khartoum.

On leaving the prison he produced a series of drawings accompanied by prose and poetic texts in a sketchbook tantamount to a visual memoir about his experience. This sketchbook, which I refer to hereafter fondly as Prison Notebook (after Antonio Gramsci's famous one) is a unique addition to a genre of prison memoirs by former political prisoners in Sudan to have emerged in the last two decades. The authors of these memoirs tend to be leftist in their political leanings, some of them in fact being members of the Sudanese Communist Party, who have suffered political oppression, to the point of torture and imprisonment,from colonial days through the different national regimes since. But while El-Salahi has been influenced, like many intellectuals of his generation, by leftist ideas and their affective impact on Sudan's political public sphere since the 19405, he has never been a member of the Communist Party, or indeed of any other of the country's leftist groups. His Prison Notebook is an exception in another sense as well, in that in addition to a written text it takes the form of visual images—a series of delicate pen-and-ink drawings that he created in a sketchbook during a period of house arrest after his release from Kober Prison.'

El-Salahi's arrest took place in September1975, when he was imprisoned on false accusations of antigovernment activities. After six months in prison without trial, he left Sudan and has since lived in exile, first in Doha, Qatar, and now in Oxford, England. In a separate but more comprehensive memoir, excerpted below, he vividly describes Kober Prison as he experienced it, paying special attention to the routines of daily life among the detainees and their interactions with the prison's security officials. His writing on these subjects reflects the Sufi ideals through which he coped with the experience of his unjust incarceration.

It is fascinating to read the excerpts of El-Salahi's memoir in juxtaposition with his notebook drawings (figs. 28-38), which function as a visual counterpart to it. The eleven drawings shown here demonstrate his mastery of drawing and his skillful painterly hand. They are among the finest examples of his postprison period, which evolved into what he terms "open-ended, endless organic growth painting."2 Viewed as a totality, these works constitute a masterpiece of skill, a compelling commentary, and a sophisticated philosophical vision.3 As part of their compositions, the drawings include Arabic writings, in both prose and poetry, composed by the artist. These writings are executed in El-Salahi's own calligraphy, a hybrid combining classical Arabic style with vernacular styles he learned as a child in Qur'anic schools, and

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manifesting his fascination with the rhythm and structure of Arabic calligraphy and letters. The titles of the drawings on the following pages were not assigned to them by the artist, but are drawn from the texts in the drawings to help the reader understand the works' content.

While the emergence of these powerful artistic expressions will no doubt help to consolidate El-Salahi's place in a broader scene, their role as a sobering reminder of the agony that ensues when the integrity of the individual is compromised must not be forgotten. They miraculously turn an overwhelming sense of the prisoners' suffering into a courageous form of agency and empowerment, breaking the shackles of dominance and domination and opening a space for honorable toil for social justice.

EXCERPTS FROM THE MEMOIR In February 1972, 1 received an urgent message from the office of the minister of information telling me to report duly to Khartoum. There the minister of information, Omar el-Haj Musa, informed me that I had been offered a new job as deputy undersecretary for culture, responsible for the National Council for Arts and Letters, and that I was expected to terminate my duties in London and to return as soon as possible to resume my job in Sudan.

As far as I was concerned, there was no way to refuse that offer no matter how hard my friends in London tried to make me give up my official job and remain in England. My close friend the late novelist Tayeb Salih had advised me against going to Khartoum, telling me it was rather unwise under the current circumstances to go to Sudan. I argued that I was asked to perform a job I very much cared about, particularly in Sudan, and that some jobs needed to be done irrespective of who was in power. Toward the end, my good, old, concerned friend gave up by saying to me,"Remember. I have warned you. After all, you are free to do whatever you think must be done."

It was too late when I clearly remembered his good advice. That was my birthday, Friday, September 5, 1975, when I was beaten like an animal in my office in the Ministry of Culture and Information, which I spent dear time and effort to reorganize. Three days later, I was taken to the security headquarters to be thrown in a filthy narrow cell, awaiting a paper to be signed before I was taken in a closed van to Cooper's top security jail in Khartoum North. There, at government hospitality, as political prisoners sarcastically used to call it, I spent, without any charge whatsoever, six months and eight days. Under continual interrogation, lack of proper food or medicine, no beds, ant and mosquito bites, and an ever-filling and overflowing bucket[used as a toilet], each day was like a year of torture, inhumane humiliation, and misery.

In any case,from April 1972 up to September 8, 1975, when I was arrested, I think a great deal was accomplished. Thanks to the help of a number of efficient and dedicated people I had carefully chosen from the ministry's departments or borrowed from other institutions, we managed to establish a reasonable Department for Culture and to run the affairs of the National Council for Arts and Letters. In that process I had learned a great deal about administrative matters and how to deal with official problems, budgeting, and cultural development at large.

On Monday,September 8, 1975, my secretary told me that two young men wanted to see me urgently. They said that the director of general security wanted to see me in his office for a couple of minutes. I was writing a memo to the minister, informing him in detail about what had happened to me in the ministry on Friday, September 5.1 tried to see him before I left with those two young men, but they assured me that the minister already knew about my urgent appointment at the general security headquarters.

I was asked to sit in the front seat next to the one who drove the car while the other sat directly behind me. When we got to the security offices, I was let in by a side door to an office, where I was told to sit on a wooden bench. Someone sat next to a table in the middle of the room. He took no notice when I kept telling him that I had an urgent appointment with the head of security and that I had to return to the ministry to finish my day's work. At last he turned to me with such a dirty look on his face, saying to me,"lust sit there and keep quiet until your papers are signed to send you to jail." He rang a bell, and a soldier soon appeared and saluted him."Take the prisoner to the cell," he ordered.

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That made me wonder. One minute I was HE the undersecretary of culture and information, one of the main supremacy ministries in the country, and the next a prisoner with no number or any rights whatsoever. Later on I found that common criminals were treated far better under the prison regulations of the Sudan penal code. We,the so-called political prisoners, were left at the mercy of security forces.

That afternoon, after being locked for hours in a dark and filthy cell, I was taken to Cooper Prison, where I was handed over to a jail officer on duty. After I was searched and my pockets emptied, I was led to the shargiya (eastern) cells, where processing took place prior to distribution to different parts of the prison.

Getting to the shargiya cells, I was warmly greeted by political prisoners who knew me or about me,saying,"Himdillalak bissalama ya Salahi"(Thank God for your safety). Among them was a famous lawyer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Khartoum, a number of well-known politicians, a media expert from our ministry, and many others from different walks of life and professions. At first I thought that lot must have gone mad or something to congratulate me on such a miserable day in my life. It took me time to understand what they really meant.

The shargiya had two rows of facing, gloomy, tiny cells. There were ten in each row with a ditch in between running from wall to wall, full of stagnant water. Each cell of those twenty cells was supposed to house three political prisoners, but no one dared to enter any of them owing to the overpowering stench within, the dampness, and the stagnant greenish water that covered the muddy ground. Prisoners preferred to stay outside those awful, dark cells, on narrow strips of dry ground.

One bucket was there to cater for sixty. It had no top to sit or squat on, except for a kind of foothold on each side of that ever-full, overflowing single bucket. If you managed to put your foot on one of them, it spilled on you. The only way we thought to get it right was either to hop like a kangaroo or to jump in one go like a monkey and catch that bucket by surprise. Next to the bucket space there was a tiny space with no door to it, and a tap with no shower set high above. When the tap was turned on, water shot out like a bullet.

Two days I spent there with no toothbrush, no change of clothes, no bed, and no nothing. I had to sleep, if I could, on the dirt. As for food, I had none. I had to share the inedible stuff other fellow prisoners were given, as no food rations were allotted for unprocessed newcomers. After those couple of days, I was taken to my home cell at Quarantine A in the middle of Cooper Prison, between death-row cells and those of the execution, I was told. That cell had nine other prisoners besides myself. Quarantine B, which was next to our cell, also had ten prisoners. Flooring in both cells was of hard concrete. No beds were supplied, just a blanket each and one bucket for all that was always full and flowed toward us in the cell.

Around quarantines A and B there was a courtyard where we were allowed to exercise, surrounded by high sandstone walls topped by railings where prison guards with automatic machine guns and floodlights kept watch. One of those guards, I remember,to keep awake through his night shift, used to sing Egyptian songs of Umm Kulthum. We so much enjoyed listening to him and terribly missed him when he was not on duty.

Over time we got used to the prison routine and regulations: to start with, provisional detention goes for a stretch of three months and ten days, a hundred days, to be renewed automatically by another three months and ten days if one is not let out or killed one way or another. Second, if one happens to hear one's name at the morning call, one of four things can happen: be removed to another cell within the same jail, be transferred to another jail somewhere else in the country, be told to go home and stay at home, or be executed.

As for the possibility of being moved to another jail somewhere in the country, veteran political prisoners used to warn us about Shala Prison in Darfur, western Sudan. They advised that if bad luck took us there one day, each one had to own a cat, tie its leg to one's own big toe, and share his allotted food ration with it. That was one's only hope to survive and be safe from scorpion stings and snakebites. Cats, we were told, were experts by nature with those kinds of creatures. They catch them and eat them in that jail.

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One day I asked our cell prison officer, who used to visit us once a week, ill could be allowed to go to the prison library, if there was one. He looked at me for a time to see if I was serious, then gave such a big laugh, saying to me,"Where the hell do you think you are? In New York?"

Once a month the director general of prisons paid us a routine visit, to see how we were. At the end of his very short visit, he usually asked if we needed anything. One of us had made the usual request,"Some onions, please, Your Highness." Prison food was inedible. The sheer smell of a fresh onion helped us to swallow it down.

During my second month I was told that it was my turn to ask for the miraculous onions. I did ask, and three onions were sent to us to last for a month before the next visit. One of the three onions, I discovered, had two segments. I took one of them and planted it under the drinking-water jar just to see something green growing. When it grew it was called Salahi's garden.

When it happened that I was let out and told to go home,the next day my government-issued chauffeur-driven car was waiting for me to drive me nowhere.

In the house I lived in, I was watched by security men. Each morning a chap climbed up and strapped himself to the top of a telephone post next to my front door with his eye registering who came in and went. At noon another one came with a van, creeping under it as if he was doing some maintenance work. This went on for months on end, no matter how hot the weather or unbearable the earth was.

As time went by, I got used to those morning and midday observation shifts. I asked both chaps why they did not come inside so that I could make them a glass of cool lemonade or a nice cup of tea. The poor chaps apologized, as they were afraid of being caught by the morning or midday patrol rounds if they were not found strapped to the telephone post or grilling themselves under that damn van. So I had to find a way to offer them some refreshments when no one was passing by.

Strange enough I was told that the house arrest and routine house surveillance were for my benefit.

Altogether things began not to make any sense to me. So I just sat on my veranda each morning, watching my two friends, the one up the telephone post or the one under the van at midday. I kept the front door open to see and to be seen.

In jail no writing or drawing material was allowed for prisoners. Whoever was caught with a pen or pencil was put in solitary confinement for fifteen days. But somehow we found a tiny pencil that we took in turn to use and hide it in the sand near the door of our cell. As for paper, when food was allowed to be brought for us from our homes, it was sent in brown paper bags made out of cementpaper casings. I shredded some of those bags into tiny bits that were easy to hide away.

I made pencil drawings on those bits of paper that gave me the idea of the organic growth of a picture based on a central piece that worked as a nucleus. From there, and by my adding other pieces to it, it grew sideways, upward, and downward like a creeper plant. I made each piece work as a separate picture, the same as the relationship that exists between the individual human being and the human society at large.

I drew and drew and hid whatever I had drawn in the sand. When I was let out on March 16, 1976, I did not dig them up. I left them behind.

Coming to my house and sitting in the cool shade of my veranda, I took out some watercolor paper and a box of fiber-tip pencils with watercolors that had been given to me earlier by a friend.

I began to draw in complete abstraction, simple geometric shapes, and lines straight and curved in color or in pencil, away from nature and natural forms, just for the sheer pleasure and enjoyment of color and shape.

I guess I must have intended then to clear my mind of the prison experience, to cleanse myself of any residue of bitterness that may have accumulated within me.

I guess I must have tried through abstraction to understand or to make sense of why things unexpectedly happen to us, and bring some order back into my system in a world that had suddenly, for no fault on my part, turned upside down for me, or had it just gone mad? Could it have been a simple blessing in disguise to help me turn over a new leaf? I just wonder.

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Having been let out, what really puzzled me most was to discover that my job as undersecretary was still on, unchanged. No one was put in my place. My monthly salary with all its increments was regularly paid into my bank account as if having been accused of plotting and of taking part in activities directed against the state, beaten in my office, thrown in jail, and put afterward under continual house observation had no effect whatsoever on my official status. And it continued as such for some time to come.

Then came a day when I was officially told to evacuate the government house I was in. The reason given: that property and all houses in that area were reserved only for military personnel. In fact that house I occupied was at the back of the Coliseum Cinema and next to Dar el-Shifa, a privately owned hospital in the middle of Khartoum. I knew then it was time to move on.

So I went and rented a house in the east Banat district in Omdurman that had no telephone or telephone post by its front door. Besides, there was a huge natural floodwater drainage (khor) with deep slopes on both sides that separated the house from the other side of the street.

The van had no way but to park dangerously tilted on that side of the road. I thought one day it might fall on its side and turn over upside down if its poor driver was not careful. Sometimes I used to go out to chat with him as he sat there with no more pretense of car maintenance.

Finally it seemed that the security lot had decided to pack it up. No more surveillance was evident as the van disappeared. That time, I thought, was the right moment to sever my link with government service. I sent in my resignation, which was immediately accepted. —Ibrahim El-Salahi, October 31, 2005, Ithaca, N.Y.

An earlier version of this article appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly 109,no. i (Winter 2020).

All figures on pages 98-103 are from the artist's Prison Notebook, 1976, pen and ink on paper, 11 1/4 x 7 in.(28.6 x 17.8 cm). Collection of the artist

1. The name "Kober," as the prison is now known, derives from "Cooper," the name of the first director general of prisons in Sudan during the British colonial period.

Located in Khartoum North, near the bank of the Blue Nile, Kober Prison was built in the early 19oos. Other Sudanese prisons include Shala in Darfur and Port Sudan in the Red Sea Province. Some are more notorious than others; all are known as places where political detainees and prisoners are held.

2. El-Salahi, correspondence with the author, 1998.

3. It is the kind of work that can grow to monumental size, as in The Inevitable (cat. no. 42), which he completed in 1984-85. His more recent work is often accomplished piecemeal on paper, executed and framed as separate but structurally related units. Assembled together, these units form one large, unified work.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi Interviewed by Ulli Beier Art historian Ulli Beier conducted interviews with Ibrahim El-Salahi on a number of occasions.

The following text brings together excerpts of two such discussions, published in the form of small books: Ibrahim el Salahi: Conversations with Ulli Beier(Bayreuth: lwalewa-Haus, 1983) and Identity and Exile: Conversations with Ulli Beier(Bayreuth: lwalewa-Haus, 1990). Headings have been added for the sake of organization.

FORMATIVE YEARS U: ... When I came to Omdurman in 1961 you showed me some houses on which people had painted murals, even figurative designs. I remember a giraffe, for example. Did this art form exist when you were a child or is it a very recent development?

I: Yes, it's a long-standing thing. You will find that when people return from the Haj[pilgrimage] they paint their houses blue and they decorate [them], probably with writing, and they might also draw some flags. [I remember that] they would write some forms of greetings, like: "He who is coming to this house, may he praise the Lord ..." Occasionally people painted animals onto their houses or even made sculptures. I don't know where that custom came from. I remember someone had a couple of lions in front of his house, modeled in burnt clay. Other figures were carved out of sandstone or cement and painted.

U: So these were your first artistic impressions. What about school, was there any art teaching?

I: Well, in primary and middle school we had no art teaching at all. We had the kind of teacher who said drawing is sin. Yet I was already interested at that time. I colored in all the black-and-white illustrations in my school books and made my own drawings, too. In secondary school we did have art teachers and I got my first knowledge of the Western approach to painting there.

U: And there were no people in those days who said: a Muslim does not do this sort of thing?

I: Oh yes, all the way through. But strangely my father never did. He encouraged me in a quiet sort of way, and I think ... he used to draw himself[when he was young]. But from other people we would hear that God created man and that his creation was perfect, and you should not attempt to rival it. And again it was said that if one had imagery in the house, the angels would not come to bless it in the morning.

U: Yet some people were painting images on their houses. Can we conclude that Islam was less rigid in the Sudan than elsewhere?

I: I don't think Islam is rigid as such. Islam has always taken elements from local cultures. Lots of little customs, which could be described as paganism, have been carried on socially and been EL-SALAHI ON EL-SALAHI 105 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

incorporated into the lives of Muslim people. Many of the rituals we performed at weddings or circumcision and are very very old; certainly pre-Islamic.[Ibrahim el Salahi, pp. 24-26] UNIVERSITY TRAINING AND TRAVEL U: Where did you start your art training, was it the Khartoum Technical Institute?

I: ... [In 1949] I went to the School of Design at the Gordon Memorial College, which later became

the University of Khartoum.... ...[After that, I taught] for two years in Khartoum, first at a secondary school, then at the Institute of Design. Then, in 1954 I got a government scholarship to go to the Slade, where I spent three years. I majored in painting and did calligraphy as my subsidiary subject.

One thing I loved about London was the British Museum. I spent a lot of time looking at old manuscripts in the library. I was interested in the origin of the written letters, their background and structure and meaning. I even studied ancient hieroglyphics.

In the painting course, we were perhaps the last batch of students trained in the old tradition: with our noses to the grindstone. We had to prove that we could draw; we had to do anatomy and life drawing: everything had to be done to a rigid set of rules. There was a lot of art history.... Every week we had to present our new work for criticismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and of course anything that deviated from the European tradition wasn't much accepted.... ... The period of questioning had started then already. On the one hand I had wanted to learn the European techniques. I wanted to know about the Renaissance, about Giotto, about the Middle Ages ... because for me it was a varied human experience. But at the same time, I found that something in me wanted to come out and I knew that in this European style and this way of doing things it would never come out at all. I was needing a kind of liberation from within. I was trying to evoke memories from my childhood: how I saw shapes, how I saw color, how I saw form; and I just realized it did not fit, that if I painted pictures in the way I had been taught at the Slade, I could never bring it out. I knew that to do that I would have to return to Khartoum, to find the origin of my thoughts; to find out my background, my roots; find out what makes me nervous and unable to shape my ideas in the form which I had learned.

That's why I began to try things on my own. I painted pictures at the Slade, which I never showed to anybody....

U: I first met you in Khartoum in 1961. The drawings I saw then must have been the very work you are talking about now. They were later reproduced in the Mbari Publication of 1962., I: At the time I was much preoccupied with two-dimensional representation. I started to simplify the third dimension. My figures were becoming flat; form became shape,the patterns became the background.

And I had this interplay between the abstract written form and the visual form that I see. I found that each curve in a human or animal form immediately evoked in my mind the curve of a letter [cat. no. 5].

CAT. 5 Untitled 1957 Ink and gouache on paper 14 1/4 x 8/ 1 4 in.(36.2 x 21 Cm) Collection of the artist

U: The eye suggests a letter and the letter suggests an eye! At the period I could not trace any influence of European art on your work, I saw nothing of what you had learned at the Slade.

I: ... I think I did a deliberate turn! I cut myself off from what I had learned [at the Slade] in order to concentrate on what I had had all the time, without paying attention to it. I decided to open my mind fully to my heritage; I did not want to be distracted by bringing in this and that from outside. Even the technical part; even the techniques I had learned ... I felt I had to freeze ... in order to work in a way that is nearer to what I am seeing, so as to absorb it properly and to understand it properly.

[Ibrahim el Salahi, pp. 26-32]

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PERSONAL, SPIRITUAL, AND ARTISTIC IDENTITY U: Some time ago you told me that a Sudanese has a double identity: an Arab identity and an African identity. Can you elaborate on this? And above all: at what stage in your life do you become aware of this? Because presumably a Sudanese child is conscious of a conflict of identity.

I: When we talk of identity, we must take so many factors into consideration: the individual, the communal, the cultural, and the geographical aspects. In the Sudan we have this duality in our nature, because our fathers came from Arabia, a long time ago, but our mothers are African. If you look at our features: our hair, the color in our skin, the shape of our lips: we are African. Yet on the cultural side— our language is Arabic, our religion is Islam, and our reflection on life is a mixture of the two.

Sometimes, when we meet people from other Arab countries, they don't accept us as Arabs; they regard us as Africans. Strangely, when we meet people from West Africa, they don't regard us as Arabs...[but] as Africans....[Yet] people in our own country, say the people in the Western Sudan, ... refuse to accept that we are Africans. They think of us as Arabs!

And many times I tell them: look at me, look at my hair, my skin, my features; I am one of you.

Why don't you accept me as such? They reject us, yet in many ways our outlook on life is very much African....

U: ... We should talk about the values that you see in Islam, and above all ... the values that you want to pass on to your children. Because whatever it is a man wants to pass on to his children—that is what matters most to him in life and that is the real essence of his identity.

I: Let me just make a link here: apart from the cultural and ethnic identity, I find myself much more a Muslim than an Arab. Because the Arab thing can have all kinds of racial overtones: it is from Islam that I get my values....

U: Can you elaborate on this?

I: The Arab identity refers to my origin, but I do not usually attach much importance to that at all. It's the set of values that makes a person; they guide you, they make you a better person and they help you create a better society. The values that have formed me are the values of Islam: the faith, the duties, and the social concept....

U: There is one more topic I want you to talk about, if you can. All this complexity of your expanding identity—how is it reflected in your work? What process is at work when you create a painting? How does the image arrive? What are the stages of development and how do these different experiences from various cultures and countries merge into one organic whole? You may not, of course, be aware of this at the time, but at a later stage perhaps...

I: Well, actually, I never seem to use an immediate experience. The experience is absorbed, digested, and may surface quite unexpectedly. I remember when I first went to England in the 1950s and I saw the greenness, the intensity of the green and the red roofs of the houses, and the pink faces. All that came out much later in my work; these intense and often gloomy colors.

For in the Sudan there is such glare that you have to half close your eyes—only in certain times of the year can you open your eyes fully. So in the Sudan your impressions are almost half-seen, but I feel them through another eye; I know it by experience of another kind.

In England my eyes are fully open; it's a gray world, old houses, dark, sooty. The appearance of things is rather haunting. I took it all in, but never did anything about it in London. It surfaced later on; it's almost like regurgitating.

Some artists will do the superficial thing, because they are concerned with scenery or human action; and it becomes a direct thing, like "I see, I draw; I see, I paint; I see, I sculpt" and so on.

But there are other people like myself, who take it all in and then let it seep through.

I find that when I come to a new place, I don't take the ideas in too easily, because I have a store within me which is loaded. So whatever I take... it will come later, when I have emptied that store a little bit. [Identity and Exile, pp. 1-23]

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MEDITATION U: I remember that in the sixties you frequently went to the desert to meditate. Did that have to do with your painting, or did it have to do with religion?

I: I think it had to do with my work, because I needed peace of mind. I needed to be with myself and emptiness. Because I had returned from Europe, I was married. I had children, I had the school where I was teaching, I had relatives, I had many things which were crowding in on me. The desert helped me to be myself; to clarify my thoughts. I can only find that in a place that has emptiness and is yet so full. I did not usually paint there. I went to meditate, to see with the inner eye, I was often quite ill in those days. I used to feel dizzy, I vomited quite often, I had headaches. I decided I would try and cure myself just by looking inside and telling myself that what was aching should stop aching. I really did cure myself just by sitting there very quietly.... ... I don't know whether I mentioned this to you before, but I used to see the dead....[Here is an] incident I shall never forget: my second son came home from school one day; he had been thrashed by his teacher for not paying attention in class. I asked him what had really happened and he said: "I saw a man riding a horse, and he came in by one window and he rode out through the next and I followed him with my eyes." Now that was exactly what I used to see myself: a man galloping on a horse, coming in by one window and going out by the next. I had never told anybody about it, because I thought no one would believe me and now my son had seen the same thing! So you see: I have to meditate. Many of the things I drew in those days were not inventions; what I was making was exactly what I had been seeing! They were not creations of my mind; they were things that had been created and that appeared to me and I reproduced them.

Fig. 39 Untitled. 1972. Pen and ink wash on paper.

1 8x 18 1/4 in.(41 x 41 cm).

Four drawings, each: i6 / Collection of the artist

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72

U: Then what does living in London do to you? There is no desert in which you can go and meditate. Don't you find it a strain living like that?

I: Very much so... it makes me a true exile, and 1 try, as often as possible, to go home again.

U: Is this meditation part of the Muslim religious practice or is this your personal way of practicing Islam?

I: You see, meditation is the real unity with God. When you recite the names of the Lord, when you recite verses from the Koran, when you comprehend the real meaning of the message, then you are communicating directly with God. And if you do that, then we firmly believe that peace of mind will come to you: tama'nin. You will be very much at peace with yourself, because you made your true union with your creator. So the particle joins hands with the whole and makes one with the whole....

Fig. 40 Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams 11.1983.

Pen and ink on Bristol board. Twenty-four panels, overall: 59 1/4 x 1.57 / 1 2 in.(150 X 400 cm). Private collection

U: If I understood you rightly, you do not see Islam as a series of rigidly prescribed rituals, but as a road to the understanding of God,as a path towards union with God. Perhaps this explains why you found it easy to incorporate in your artistic work elements from a very different religion. I am referring to the elements of Tantra that begin to occur in your painting from 1970 onwards[fig. 39]. I suppose that the Tantric artists also tried to achieve union with God through meditation, in a way that is not very different from yours....

I: ... To recite the name of God and comprehend its meaning is a prayer; I found that contemplating a Tantric design is a similar experience.

U: So you felt a strong affinity to this culture.

I: Yes.... 1 was already dealing with two elements [from Tantric mandalas] in my paintings, the square and the circle.... I was very much interested in the structure of the paintings: how they deal with the circle and the square; trying to dissect them, to open them, to close them; because between an open shape and a closed shape there is a lot of dynamic tension in a painting.

U: When you returned to the Sudan in 1972, did you continue in the Tantric phase?

I: No, in the Sudan 1 was made to set up the Ministry of Culture and later I became undersecretary for Culture and Information. So my hands were tied. I had no time whatsoever to paint. I found myself in a closed circle! Until I went to the real squareâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which was jail. That was another closed shape....

U: But when you came out of jail[in 1976]and you produced these fine line drawings in colorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; could one say that you were, in a sense, picking up the Tantric phase after a long interruption [cat. no. 29]?

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I: Yes, and you can see the difference. In London I worked almost entirely in black and white, because then I was interested in the structural aspect of the square; and always when I'm researching, I limit my colors to the basics; like those earlier years when I did my research into Sudanese folklore and the origins of design and pattern.

U: ... When you come out of a difficult experience,then the abstract form [must present itself as a means of putting]some distance between yourself and the immediate experience. It objectifies your art.

I: Yes, you see, when I came out of jail there was something in me that said: look here, enough is enough. You are a painter, get back to your colors and shapes. I was happy to be a free man again, but I just wanted to shut out the sad part, the part which hurts.... I wanted to liberate my sense of color.... And I wanted to liberate myself. ... I tried to produce something that was firm outside, but soft and tender inside. Something that would allow me to shut things out; but what came in ... was rather soft and delicate.

U: These drawings were created in the Sudan in 1976-77. After that you went to Qatar, where you had another time-consuming administrative job. Did that leave you any time to paint?

I: Extremely little time! But while I was there, I was asked to make illustrations for a literary magazine [cat. nos. 44,45]. I illustrated a book of poems by the Sudanese poet Tayeb Salih, and these were published in five issues of the magazine.... These illustrations were something quite different again; in fact one can say that they were a bit—well, let me say surrealistic. They were also extremely colorful.

U: Now these large designs with certain calligraphic elements ... were exploratory works, were they?

I: Yes, here 1 recalled earlier experiences, because calligraphy was something that still lingered in the back. Throughout the years I never quite cut it off; I simply got what lwanted from it. Because I am not a calligrapher; it is not an end in itself for me. But I touch on it many times; sometimes fully as writing which can be read, other times as fragmentations of letters to create textural effects.

Sometimes I find it's like vibrations! When you fragment it, it's almost like filling in a space with very beautiful little shapes. So in my black-and-white work I got my grayness through calligraphy. Instead of using a wash—lwrote!

U: Were you able to produce larger works in Qatar?

I: No, but 1 did start that very large drawing that I later finished in London [fig. 40]. The idea of the drawing started in Qatar.... Once I went to a little fishing village and I found a group of three old ladies, walking by the sea. They were wearing those black masks on their faces. The women in Qatar don't wear veils, you know. They wear black masks,some of them quite large, which cover the face from the top of the forehead to the nose, leaving only very small slits for the eyes. So I remember these three women on the beach—very, very old; their hands were wrinkled, you could see the bone structure. And that triggered off a whole series of ideas. I started with a rather small drawing ...[of] the face of the first lady who passed by. Then I added a sheet of paper on top, to draw the shape of the head. Then the body seemed to be pushing [in] and I kept enlarging the paper, and so the thing kept growing. When 1 returned to London I started serious work on the ideas; I gave it a period of six months, six months hard work, day and night.

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U: The huge drawing, or rather this series of drawings, expresses a great deal of sadness and suffering. How did these complex ideas grow from that first sketch in Qatar?

I: Well, it began with the three women, but it took shape in my mind as man's progress in life: where it starts, and how you grow, and where it ends. It made me think about the human condition; the sadness of life. It took me back to the Sudan, it took me back to prison. There is a lot of sadness in that picture, but I am not one of those who record an incident. I put into it what I hope will take place. ... There is one very strange figure; it is a very powerful figure and a strange bird is sitting on his arm, which is pointing to something ...I don't know whether it is the future or the way out of a certain situation; a certain political or economic situation. So the picture has a way out, but it still represents a very sad experience ... it pours out memories....

U: Why did you decide to make the drawing in so many small sections?

I: I didn't have much space in my studio in London, so I decided to work on lots of smaller sheets.

From time to time I put them together to see what was happening and to find out who wanted to come in. [Ibrahim el Salahi, pp. 33-42] THE CREATIVE PROCESS U: What you have described now is that in the creative process there are two quite different— even mutually opposed—processes. One which is totally uncontrolled by you: an image that just comes. Then there is the other process, where you actually go and look at something, where you analyze, break up, and reshape. In the one process you just allow yourself to be taken over; in the other one you want to know what's happening. How do these two processes blend with each other? Does the one ever get in the way of the other? Do you find that at times you are becoming too conscious of what you are doing?

I: This can cause a dilemma, this process of weeding between what flows from within, and that which you have acquired from outside. How to weigh the two elements, which may be quite contrary to each other, that is the whole nature of the work. Because ideas are ideas—and not art. Art is what you make of the ideas. So this process of making, this factory in which you try to weld this to that, change this and add that until you feel satisfied that no more readjustment is needed, that is the artistic process....

U: Could one say that this image that appears—uncontrolled and unsolicited—is really some kind of archaic identity and that the intellectual process then is to find some common denominator between it and all the other identities that you have acquired through various educational processes?

I: Yes! Let us say that the artwork is the meeting point....

The archaic imagery, hidden, coming through you from the unknown, and allowing you to glimpse it briefly, has to be wedded to the things that you have teamed,the things that you see and feel.

This wedding is the artwork.[Identity and Exile, pp. 27-281

1. Ulli Beier, Ibrahim El Salahi: Drawings (tbadan, Nigeria: Mbari Publication, 1962).

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1

Meditation and Mastery 1957-1972

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opposite: CAT.6 The Prayer 1960

Oil on Masonite 1.6 x 10 in.(40.6 x 25.4 cm) lwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, A 00230 NS

CAT. 7 Self-Portrait ofSuffering 1961

Oil on canvas 12 X 16 in.(3o.5 X 40.6 cm)

lwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, A 00229 NS

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CAT.8 Untitled Early 396os Pen and ink on cartridge paper 3 8 in.(46 x 56.8 cm) 181/8 x 22 / Collection of the artist

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CAT.9 Hippo Early 1960s Pen and ink on cartridge paper 1 4in.(24.4 )( 31.4 cm) 9 Vs X 12/ Collection of the artist

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CAT. 10 Self-Portrait Early 1.96os Pen and ink on cartridge paper 38 in.(31.1 x 23.8 cm) 4x 9 / 1 1.2/ Collection of the artist

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above: CAT. 11

By His Will, We Teach Birds How to fly 1969 Pen, ink, and wash on paper 15 x 22 in.(38 x 56 cm) Collection of the artist

right: CAT. 12

By His Will, We Teach Birds How to Fly 1969 Pen, ink, and wash on paper 15 X 22 in.(38 x 56 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 13 The Last Sound 1964 Oil on canvas 8 in. (121.6 x 121.6 cm) / 1 4X 47 7 47/ Collection of Abdulmagid A. Breish

CAT. 14 They Always Appear 1966-68 Oil on canvas 1 4 in.(92 x 122.5 cm) 36 1/4 x 48 / Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.12

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CAT. 15 No Shade but His Shade 1968 Mixed media on canvas 1 4 x 30/ 1 4in.(77 x 77 cm) 30/ Collection of the artist

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CAT. 16 The Woman,the Bird,and the Pomegranate 1968 Mixed media on canvas 35 3/4 x 353/4 in.(91 x 91 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.11

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CAT. 17 The Embryo,the Child,and the Bird 1964 Oil on canvas 18 x 12 in.(45.8 x 30.5 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.9

124

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CAT. 18 Al-Kas 1964 Oil on canvas 16 / 1 3 x 20 1/4 in. (41 x 51.3 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.10

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CAT. 19 Vision of the Tomb 1965 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 in.(91.4 x 91.4 cm) Museum for African Art, New York, 2008.2.1

CAT. 20 Funeral and the Crescent 1963 Oil on Masonite 40 x 37 Vs in.(101.6 X 95 CM) Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, gift of Mariska Marker, 2000.021.001

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CAT. 21 The Mosque 1964 Oil on canvas 12 7 / 8 X 18 / 7 8 in.(32.7 X 47.9 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York, Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Fund,7.1965

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CAT. 22 Dry Months ofthe Fast 1962 Mixed media on Masonite 18 / 1 8 x 24 in.(46 x 61 cm) Collection of the artist

129

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130

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CAT. 23 Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I 1962-63 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 6 in. x 8 ft. 7 in.(259.1 x 261.6 cm) Collection of the artist

CAT. 24 Victory of Truth 1962 Oil on Masonite 40 x 49 in. (101.6 x 124.5 cm) Collection of Hampton University Museum, gift of the Harmon Foundation, 67.387

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CAT. 25 The Bull and the Mint Shrub 1972 Colored ink on watercolor paper 1 4 in.(21.3 X 21 cm) 8 3/8 x 8 / Collection of the artist

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CAT. 26 The Scale 1972 Colored ink on watercolor paper 22 X 22 / 3 8 in.(56 x 57 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.7

133

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CAT. 27 Portrait of Mrs. McKelvey 1965 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 in.(61 x 76.2 cm) Collection of Dr. John J. McKelvey, Jr.

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Imprisonment, Expatriation, and Exile 1972-1998

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CAT. 28 Man in Prayer 1973 Watercolor pen on newspaper 18 1/4 x 14 Va in.(46.4 x 37.1 cm) Collection of the artist

136

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CAT. 29 Untitled 1976 Watercolor pen and pencil on cartridge paper 1 2 x 9½ in.(24.1 x 24.1 cm) 9/ Collection of the artist

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CAT. 30 Untitled 1976 Colored ink on watercolor paper 15 X 15 in.(38 x 38 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 31 Untitled 1977 Pen,colored ink, and wash on watercolor paper 15/ 1 4X 20 Va in.(40.3 x 51.1 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 32 Head ofa Man 1977 Pen and ink on paper 13 / 7 8 in.(34.6x 25.1 cm) 5 8 X 9/ Collection of the artist

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CAT.33 Self-Portrait 1977 Pen and ink on paper 16/ 1 2x1o / 1 4 in.(41.9 x 26 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 34 Picasso and Milk Bottle on Window Sill 1984 Pen, ink, and wash on Bristol board 11 3A X 12 in.(29.8 X 30.5 cm) Collection of the artist

CAT. 35 Osman Waqialla 1981 Crayon and charcoal on Bristol board 12 / 7 3 X 9 78 in.(32.7 x 25.1 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 38 Midday Halabi 1992 Mixed media on watercolor paper 13 Vsx 93/4 in.(34.5 x 25 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Qatar Museums Authority. Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.3

CAT. 39 Untitled 1994 Mixed media on Bristol board 16Âź x 16 1/4 in.(41.3 x 41.3 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.4 146 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

CAT.40 In the Present No. 2 1994 Pen and ink on Bristol board Ten panels, overall (framed): 44 x 90 in.

(111.8 x 228.6 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 41 Between Forest and Crescent 1990 Pen and ink on Bristol board Three panels, each: 9/ 1 4x 9 3/E, in. (23.8 x 23.8 cm) Collection of the artist

150

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CAT. 42 The Inevitable 1984-85 India ink on Bristol board Nine panels, overall: 17 ft. 5 / 1 2 in. x19 ft. 9 3/4 in.

(532.1 x 603.9 cm) Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, acquired through the African Acquisition Fund, a purchase fund established through the exchange of gifts from Mr. and Mrs. William W. Brill, and other donors,99.o58a-i

pages 154-55: CAT. 43 Untitled 1984 Pen and ink on Bristol board Twenty-eight panels, overall: 48/ 1 2x 82 in.

(123.2 x 208.3 cm) Collection of the artist 152

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CAT. 44 Vision ofRiver Mermaid 1977 Colored ink on Bristol board 13 / 1 2 x 9/ 1 2in.(343X 24.1 cm) Collection of the artist

CAT. 45 al-Booma 1977 Colored ink on Bristol board 16 1/4 x14/ 1 2in.(41.3 x 36.8 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 46 "Visual Diary of Time-Waste Palace" 1996-97 Ink on paper Fifty-seven drawings (thirty-one shown),each:7 1/4 x 7 1/4 in.(18.4 x18.4 cm) Collection of the artist, courtesy Skoto Gallery During his self-imposed exile in Doha, El-Salahi served as an expert adviser in the Qatari government and then, as a result of bureaucratic restructuring, as a translator in the palace of the emir. In this latter position, he was assigned the project of documenting Qatar's history.

Deep in the palace offices, the artist came across a set of square blank books with cardboard covers. He thought their pages would be perfect for drawing. In ballpoint pen, he produced the fifty-seven compositions that now constitute "Visual Diary of Time-Waste Palace." The series began on his sixty-sixth birthday, September 5, 1996, and continued until April 28, 1997. After completing this body of work, El-Salahi decided to dedicate his life solely to his art.

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CAT. 47 One Day!Happened to See a Ruler 2008 Oil on canvas Three panels, overall (framed): 6 ft. 4 in. xis ft. 3 in.(193 x 464.8 cm) Museum for African Art, New York, 2008.3.1a-c

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CAT. 48 Untitled 2000

Pen, ink, and wash on Bristol board 8 Y8 X 8 Y8 in.(21.4 X 21.4 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 49 Untitled 1999 Colored ink on watercolor paper 11 1/2 x 15 in.(29.2 x 38.1 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 50 Untitled 1999 Colored ink on watercolor paper 9 78 X 9 7/8 in.(25.1x 25.1 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 51 Reclining Figure on Lion's Back 2000

Colored ink on watercolor paper 5 3 in.(24.4 x 24.4 cm) 9/ 5 8 X 9/ Collection of the artist

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CAT. 52 Nos AI-Muweilih 1999 Pen and ink on watercolor paper 11 3/4 x ii / 5 8 in.(29.6 x 29.5 cm) Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation, 2008.3.6

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CAT. 54 The Tree 2001

Colored ink on watercolor paper 18/ 1 2x 18 in.(47 x 45.7 cm)framed Collection of the artist

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CAT. 55 The Tree 2001

Colored ink on watercolor paper 1.8 / 1 2 x1.8 in.(47 x 45.7 cm)framed Collection of the artist

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CAT. 57 The Tree 2003 Colored ink on Bristol board 29 / 7 3 X 30 in.(75.9 x 76.2 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 56 The Tree 2001

Colored ink on watercolor paper 211 / 2X 21 in.(54.6 x 53.3 cm)framed Collection of the artist

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CAT. 58 The Tree 2003 Colored ink on watercolor paper 40 X 39 3/4 in.(1째1.6 x101 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 59 The Tree 2008 Acrylic on canvas Seven panels, overall: 80 x 48 in.(203.2 x 121.9 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT.60 Untitled 2009 Watercolor and colored ink on watercolor paper 9/ 3 4x 9/ 3 4in.(25 x 25 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT. 61 There Is No Victor Except God 2009 Colored ink on watercolor paper 12/ 1 4X 12/ 1 4 in. (31.1 X 31.1 cm) Collection of the artist

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[WiPlnV i ,1>< CAT. 62 The Tree 2009 Colored ink on watercolor paper 1 4 in. (31.1 X 31.1 cm) 12 1/4 X 12/ Collection of the artist

CAT.63 The Tree 2001

Colored ink on watercolor paper 1 4in.(76 x 76 cm) 30 ¼x 30/ Collection of the artist

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CAT. 64 The Tree 2002

India ink and colored ink on Bristol board 7/ 3 4 x 7 3/4 in.(19.7 xi9.7 cm) Collection of the artist, courtesy Skoto Gallery

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CAT. 65 The Tree 2000

India ink and colored ink on Bristol board 8 V4 X 8 V4 in.(21X 21 cm) Collection of the artist

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CAT.66 Flamenco Dancers 2010

Colored ink on paper 10 X 10 fl. (25.4 X 25.4 cm)

Collection of the artist, courtesy Skoto Gallery

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CAT. 67 Underwater 2010

Colored ink on plywood 12 X 12 in.(30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Collection of the artist, courtesy Skoto Gallery

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ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHY BORN IN 1930 IN OMDURMAN,Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the pioneers of the Sudanese and African art movements. El-Salahi studied at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (now the College of Fine and Applied Art). In 1954, he left Sudan on a government scholarship to study at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he became acquainted with Western modernism. In 1957, El-Salahi returned to Khartoum and accepted a teaching position as head of the painting department at the College of Fine and Applied Art. Throughout his career El-Salahi has held influential positions as a cultural figure, advising governments in Africa and the Arab world on cultural policies.

El-Salahi's work has been included in major exhibitions such as The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa,1945-1994, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002); Interventions: A Dialogue Between the Modern and the Contemporary, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2010); and The Future of Traditionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;The Tradition of Future: loo Years After the Exhibition "Masterpieces ofMuhammadan Art"in Munich, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011). His art is in numerous private and public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.; Hampton University Museum, Virginia; lwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany; National Gallery of Victoria, Sydney; and the Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia. El-Salahi has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1964-65); the Order of Knowledge, Arts, and Letters, Sudan (1975); and the Prince Claus Award (2001).

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CONTRIBUTORS

SARAH ADAMS specializes in the contemporary and historical arts of Africa. Her research topics have included u/i body and mural painting in southeastern Nigeria. She has contributed articles to African Arts and RES:Anthropology and Aesthetics, and cocurated the exhibition Call and Response: Journeys ofAfrican Art at the Yale University Art Gallery (2000).

I FTI KHAR DADI is associate professor in the Department of History of Art and chair of the Department of Art, Cornell University. His research interests include postcolonial theory, modern art, and contemporary art. He cocurated (with Salah Hassan) the exhibition Unpacking Europe (2001), and coedited the publication Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Other curated exhibitions include Calligraphic Abstraction: Anwarfatal Shemza (2009) and Tarjama/Translation (2009), which showcased numerous artists from the Middle East, Central Asia, and their diasporas. His most recent book is Modernism and the Art ofMuslim South Asia (2010). As an artist, he collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi and has shown internationally.

SALAH M. HASSAN is director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Goldwin Smith Professor of the Africana Studies and Research Center, and professor of African and African diaspora art history and visual culture at Cornell University. He is founding editor of Nka:Journal ofContemporary African Art, and serves as consulting editor for African Arts and Atlantica. He has authored and edited several books, including Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (1997), Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001), and Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art(2001). Additionally, Hassan has contributed to anthologies such as The Art ofAfrican Fashion (1998), Reading the Contemporary: African Artfrom Theory to the Marketplace (1999), and Women,Patronage,and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (2000).

HASSAN MUSA is a visual artist, writer, and art teacher. He studied painting in Khartoum Art School, Sudan, and obtained his Ph.D. in art history from the University of Montpellier III, France. His art has been shown in exhibitions worldwide, including Looking Both Ways:Art ofthe Contemporary African Diaspora (2003) and Africa Remix: Contemporary Art ofa Continent(2004). Musa has published critical texts in various journals, most recently in Critical Interventions and South Atlantic Quarterly.

CHIKA OKEKE-AGULU is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. He was a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2007 and the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College in 2008.

His writings on African art have appeared in many journals and anthologies. He is the editor of Nka: Journal ofContemporary African Art, coauthor (with Okwui Enwezor) of Contemporary African Art Since 1980(2009), and coeditor of Who Knows Tomorrow (2010).

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LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION Abdulmagid A. Breish Eve El-Salahi Ibrahim El-Salahi Hampton University Museum,Va. Salah M. Hassan lwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar Museums Authority, Qatar Foundation Dr. John J. McKelvey, Jr. Museum of Modern Art, New York Skoto Gallery, New York

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DONORS CORPORATE, FOUNDATION,AND GOVERNMENT DONORS President's Circle Bloomberg Philanthropies Carnegie Corporation of New York Ford Foundation Mitsui & Co.(U.S.A.), Inc. National Endowment for the Humanities New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Rockefeller Brothers Fund Toyota Motor North America, Inc. Sponsors Aetna Foundation, Inc. Arent Fox LLP Ark Restaurant Corporation Colgate-Palmolive Company ConEdison Deutsche Bank Entrust Capital, Inc. Fundacion Botin Macy's Central Macy's East, Inc. The Mai Family Foundation Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame National Endowment for the Arts New York City Council, District 8 New York City Council, District 9 New York State Council on the Arts Nielsen Nihon Unisys, Ltd. Pinkerton Foundation Rockefeller Group Development Corporation May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP Thompson Reuters Waterman Interests Associates Aid for Africa Brickman and 1280 Fifth Condominiums Brown Harris Stevens Carver Bancorp, Inc. Christie's African and Oceanic Art Department Jeanne Collins & Associates Bernard de Grunne Tribal Fine Arts Dominick and Dominick Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield

Goldfarb and Fleece Harlem Globetrotters Leon Levy Foundation Manhattan Delegation of the New York City Council Microsoft Corporation Mutual of America Foundation New York Community Trust Pfizer Inc. Saks Fifth Avenue Marty and Dorothy Silverman Foundation Sotheby's Tambaran Gallery TD Bank Tides Foundation United Way of New York City Xerox Foundation INDIVIDUAL DONORS President's Circle Marc Abrams Peggy and Keith Anderson Lawrence B. Benenson Marion J. and Stanley M. Bergman Paloma Botin Joan Ganz Cooney and Peter Peterson Edward Dandridge Ian Bruce Eichner Michael Fuchs Sally and Jonathan D. Green Sharon Hakakian and Edward Bergman Stephen and Ruth Hendel Cathy P. and Man nie L. Jackson Jane and Gerald Katcher Tracy and David Markin Howard R Milstein Edward Tyler Nahem Mary Slack William C. Thompson, Sr. John L. Tishman Monica Winsor and Joshua Mailman Sponsors Russell H. Abrams Kevin Arnstein Myrna Balk Richard Benenson Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Lynn and Samuel Berkowitz Patricia Blanchet Jeffrey Bolton

Woodrow W. Campbell Donald A. Capoccia and Tommie L. Pegues Betty and Louis Capozzi Kathryn and Kenneth Chenault Lisa Corrubia Heidi Diedrich and Kevin Umeh Ly and Frederic Dumas Moctar Fall Wendy Fisher Emily Frances Ford and Harold Ford, Jr. Jacques Germain Irwin Ginsburg Liz and Steven Goldstone Francis Greenburg Stuart Gross Agnes Gund Elizabeth and Dale Hemmerdinger Francis N. Janis and Mitchell A. Harwood Helen Kimmel Susan Kloman and Pierre Amrouche Krista Krieger Kathy Lacey and James Hoge Roxanne and Guy Lanquetot Edward G. Lloyd Marjorie Macfarlane Kathy McAuliffe and Jay Kriegel Monica Menell-Kinberg and Jud Kinberg Werner Muensterberger Raffiq A. Nathoo Rosemary Nelson Veronica Pollard and Joel Dreyfuss Marc Rayner Patrice Riordan Neal Rodin Daniel Rose Shirley Lord Rosenthal Lara Ross Jill Shaw Ruddock and Paul Ruddock Stephen Rustow and Caroline Voss Kerni Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz Carolene Skeeter and Richard W. Eaddy Lucille and Maurice H. Solomon Ellen D. and Jerome Stern Katherine D. and Dennis D. Swanson Ann and Andrew Tisch Lizzie and Jonathan M.Tisch An Untracht Cynthia King Vance and Lee G. Vance

Claudia Wagner and Don Lebowitz Monica and Andrew Weinberg Kathryn Wylde Associates Evan Azriliant Gregory Davis Peggy Cooper Davis and Gordon Davis Jean and Noble Endicott Minna R. Fyer and William Brodsky Stephen and Myrna Greenberg Sarah and Geoffrey Gund Anne and John Hermann, Jr. Carol and Jerome Kenney Alida and Christopher Latham Loida Nicholas Lewis Dorothy Lichtenstein Linda and Bill Lindsley Mary C. and Merritt Lutz Marian and Daniel Malcolm Aurora Lopez Mejia Florence and Steven Morris William Darrell Moseley Pat and Ronald Nicholson Myriam and Herman Portocarero Jock Reynolds Tracey and Phillip Riese Renaud Riley Nataly Ritter David Rockefeller Elsa and Marvin Ross-Greifinger Melissa Salten and Richard Rothman Carol A. Scribner and C. Lawrence Decker Christopher Smeall Anne H. Stark and Kurt Locher Bill Sturtevant Gerard Tate Ellen Napiura Taubman Helen S. Tucker Eric Vaca Angela Vallot and James Basker Lola C. West B. Joseph White Ralph L. Wickstrom Isabel Wilcox Claude Winfield Frank G. Wisner Jason H. Wright And all of those who wish to remain anonymous Current as ofJanuary 2012

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MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART BOARD OF TRUSTEES CO-CHAIRS Edward Dandridge Bruce Eichner

MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART STAFF

SECRETARY Veronica Pollard

ADMINISTRATION Elsie McCabe Thompson, President Kenita Lloyd, Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer Bridget Foley, Associate Director of Operations and Administration Winston Rodney, Jr., Facilities Manager Raina Sutton, Assistant to the President James Hoge,Senior Consultant

TREASURER Marc Abrams

COMMUNICATIONS Virginia Reinhart, Communications Associate

VICE CHAIR Jane Katcher

PRESIDENT Elsie McCabe Thompson TRUSTEES Corice Canton Arman Lawrence B. Benenson Edward Bergman Sharon Hakakian Bergman Paloma Botin Moctar Fall Jonathan D. Green Mitchell Harwood Stephen Hendel Hadeel Ibrahim Mannie Jackson Joshua Mailman David Markin Edward Nahem Rosemary Nelson John Tishman Jason Wright HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEES William Lynch, Jr. Kathryn McAuliffe James Ross Robert Rubin (in memoriam)

CURATORIAL Lisa Binder, Curator Donna Ghelerter, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs Jerry Vogel, Special Advisor Amanda Thompson, Registrar Carol Braide, Publications Manager Ryan Dennis, Traveling Exhibit Coordinator Eve Perry, Assistant Registrar Roger Arnold, Curatorial Assistant DEVELOPMENT Marietta Ulacia, Director of Development Nicolet Gatewood, Associate Director of Institutional Funding Margo Donaldson,Senior Development Manager Alison Karpel, Associate Director of Individual Giving and Special Events Claire Hoffman, Manager of Individual Giving and Special Events Maxwell Heller, Development Associate EDUCATION Erika Gee, Director of Education and Public Programs Dan'etta Jimenez,Youth Programs Coordinator Ebon Brown,School Programs Coordinator Lawrence Ekechi, Community Outreach Liaison FINANCE Raji KaIra, Chief Financial Officer Velky Valentin, Senior Accountant Idalia Cajigas, Accountant

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Carlos Gimenez, Director of Information Technology NELSON MAN DELA CENTER Zaheda Mohamed, Associate Director MERCHANDISING AND TRAVEL PROGRAMS Michelle Pinedo, Director of Merchandising and Travel Programs Jerry Vogel, Special Advisor Tevia Clarke, Store Associate THEATER Marietta Ulacia, Director of Theater Programs Dana Elmquist, Associate Producer, Theater Programs

PHOTO CREDITS Art Resource / SCALA 0 Museum of Modern Art: cat. no. 21 Courtesy Ibrahim Et-Salahi: figs. 1-3, 23-26 Hampton University Museum: cat. no. 24 Courtesy Salah M. Hassan: figs. 4, 5, 8, 28-38 lwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth: cat. nos. 6,7 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University: cat. nos. 20,42 Museum for African Art: cat. nos. 1-3, 10, 28, 31, 43, 53,63; figs. 6, 15-22, 40. Cat. nos. 23,60-62,65 (Photo: Mark Heathcote). Cat. nos. 4, 5, 8,9,11-18, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32-41, 44, 45, 48-52. 54-58; figs. 9,14, 27, 39(photo: Andy Keate). Cat. nos. 19, 27, 47, 59,64, 66,67(photo: Jerry L. Thompson) National Archives and Records Administration: figs. 7, 10, 12 Courtesy Chika Okeke-Agulu: fig. ii Courtesy Sadequain Foundation: fig. 13 Courtesy Skoto Gallery: cat. no. 46

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Ibrahim E1-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, published as a companion to a traveling retrospective by the same name, chronicles the evolution of Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi's work over more than fifty years of sustained artistic productivity and intellectual engagement. El-Salahi's accomplishments offer profound possibilities for understanding African modernism in the context of modernity as a universal idea, one in which African art history is part and parcel of a global art history. The essays reconstruct the remarkable journey of El-Salahi, and, through a critical look at his artistic contributions, expand the narrative of modernism in the visual arts from comparative and international perspectives. Edited, and featuring a historical overview, by Salah M. Hassan, the book includes essays and interviews by well-known art historians and critics Sarah Adams, Ulli Beier, Iftikhar Dadi, Hassan Musa, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, as well as special texts by El-Salahi himself.

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