Lot 119: Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (Egyptian, 1925-1965)

Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (Egyptian, 1925-1965)
Looking for the Unknown (The Tower)
signed 'El gazzar' (lower left), signed and dated again in Arabic (lower right)
oil on celotex
31 x 19 7/8in. (78.5 x 50.5cm.)
Painted in 1964

Soby El-Sharouny, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, Cairo 2007 (illustrated in colour, p. 102)

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

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

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

El-Gazzar's first series of drawings in 1946 when he was only twenty one years old were based on the anthropological theme of man before civilization and his relationship with the wilderness. The second period of El-Gazzar's career reflected the influence of Sayeda Zeinab where medieval traditions resisted all the winds of modern westernization. It was through this district that he witnessed the moulids and the religious festivals that have been celebrated since the Fatmid period. He began to associate the intuitive aspect of art (its soul) with the essential element in the popular magical art (the hidden and the unknown).
The subjects of El-Gazzar's later works were very different, influenced as he was by the politics of contemporary Egypt, with a focus on technology and progress. Major works of engineering on a scale not seen since the construction of the Suez Canal were underway in Egypt during the early 1960s. The construction of the Aswan High Dam employed thousands of workers and was the nationalist project of the post-revolution era. Besides regulating the flow of the river, eliminating the erratic annual flood and providing a reliable source of freshwater, it would also provide electricity for much of the country. This was a technical feat by a country confident in its abilities, and Egyptian artists made the trip to Upper Egypt to view this modern miracle in progress.

El-Gazzar was among these artists, visiting the dam in 1963. Whilst there he made numerous detailed sketches of the site, especially of the huge machines and teams of men who swarmed about them. These pictures are dominated by monumental contraptions, but they recall something of the heroism associated with pharaonic construction, and resemble modern day re-workings of Bruegel the Elder's famous Tower of Babel. The summation of these was his epic painting The High Dam (1964), for which he received the Medal of Art and Sciences and the National Encouragement Prize.
Whilst there is no doubt that El-Gazzar's visit to the dam affected him profoundly (his work pre- and post-Aswan are strikingly different), his attitude to what he saw remains strangely ambivalent. He appears to have been both fascinated and repelled by the interaction between man and machine, between biology and technology. Influenced by what he saw at Aswan, but also by the reports of Cold War space technology brinkmanship, he moved away from a surrealism influenced by the irrationalism of folklore towards a surrealism that resembled ever more closely science fiction. This was really an extraordinary thing for an Egyptian artist to do -amongst his contemporaries there were no parallels. Far from mere fantasies, these works expressed social concerns but it a way that was thoroughly up to date. Over-population was a growing problem in the Egypt of the 1960s and an impetus for the construction of the dam, and for El-Gazzar space was the only possible escape. In his so-called Space Period, El-Gazzar explored the possibilities of closer relationships between man and machines, drawing astronauts, cyborgs, space cities and mechanical environments. Built into these depictions of an extraterrestrial future was a message of caution, lest the machine subsume humanity.

Although El-Gazzar made numerous small-scale drawings, oil paintings from this period are exceedingly rare. The Present work Looking for the Unknown (The Tower) is among the most literal of these space age dwellings fantasies, where the figures move around pipes and tubes which resemble chains, dwarfing them, separating them and compartmentalizing them.