Good evening. Welcome to the first segment of my lectures on the theme of African artists in the Age of the Big Man.
In the first lecture, you will recall I examined the concept of the big man as a figure of power in post-war and for the most part,
post-colonial Africa. And I noted how a view of the politics associated with Africa's big men might inform a new appreciation
of the diverse work produced by the continent's artists during the second half of the 20th century.
Today I go to Egypt to revisit the dramatic transformation of the country by a group of army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser,
who carried out a successful military coup that subsequently turned into a revolution of immense consequence to the nation.
Africa. The region.
And post war global politics. I consider the response of leading artists in Egypt with a focus on Gatsby,
a series we see on the left to trace the widespread production of revolutionary national culture and the evolution of an
artistic imagination within that momentous context of what has been called the blessed movement led by the charismatic Nasser.
Between 1952. And 1970.
But first. In my introductory lecture,
I noted that I shall dedicate subsequent ones to people who have played a
foundational role in the making of my career as an art critic and art historian.
Today I acknowledge two people.
First is the critic and cultural activist Tony Aquino show, who on my arrival in Lagos in 1990 after graduation from Sooka,
introduced me to the city's art world and to his circle of friends.
My career as an art critic could not have taken off without turning one of the city's finest art critics and literary writers.
Thanks to Toyin. I participated along with four other friends in the making in 1991 of the Committee for Relevant Art.
Which is still possibly Nigeria's foremost an independent cultural advocacy platform.
The second person is currently Ajibade Day, who as art editor of the news magazine African Concord,
provided me regular opportunity to publish art criticism.
Fresh from college.
Conley trusted me enough and helped me develop a confident voice that became the foundation for my work as a critic and later art historian.
To both men. I am forever grateful. And with that, I turn to today's lecture.
Let me begin with this painting by Hamid Weiss titled Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal dated 1957.
A rather awkwardly composed, yet highly legible work.
This oil on canvas shows the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, addressing a crowd of admirers.
Although the faces on the lower right foreground show a diverse range of men and women indicated by different skin tones and shades.
They lack individual uniqueness and seem quite generic, as if the point is simply to signal the miscellany of gender,
race, age and social class of the crowd gathered around the speaker.
The flatness of the composition, moreover, ensures that every face, whether near the front or far behind,
seems to press forward with equal pictorial potency, as though to emphasise the crowd's collectivity of purpose.
Of the prominent heads and faces in the foreground, three are women.
In fact, the only one that stands out visually is that of the woman with dark, long hair.
Her face lit up in obvious delight at whatever the speaker is saying.
It may even be that ecstatic expression is induced not so much by the words of Nasser, as by proximity to the mighty magnetic aura.
For she, like everyone else, including the soldier in black beret, clearly in thrall of Nasser,
who appears to have just sprouted from among the masses in magical embodiment and representation of their collective desire and vision.
At the top right section, we see a partial view of a ship and the blue waters of the Nile.
This painting is no doubt a record of the events that defined post-war international politics.
And that is the momentous announcement by Nasser on July 26, 1956,
declaring the nationalisation of the strategic Suez Canal the vital artery of global trade long controlled by Britain and France,
thus instantly becoming the most admired and powerful ruler in Africa, the Arab world, and the soon to be formed Non-Aligned Movement.
The four elements in this painting, that is the crowds, the gesturing,
a gun to a laser, the ship and the Nile in the way that the artists compose them.
Not only mark an event that defined Egyptian independence from European powers,
they also and practically tell of the apotheosis of Nasser and of his confirmation as Egypt's post-colonial sovereign.
Big man. Four years before the event painted by Weiss on July 22, 1952.
Nasser and a group of military men who call themselves free officers carried out a successful coup, dethroned and exiled King Fouad,
and went about transforming the country from a feudal constitutional monarchy, still beholden to Britain to a social democratic republic.
Wildly popular. The officers soon won the support of Egyptian masses and intellectual elite,
soon turned the coup into a de facto revolution with the promulgation of land reforms.
Plans for a new constitution, reorganisation of party politics and a much more muscular opposition to British occupation of the Canal region.
By 1953, however, Nasser had marginalised his office colleagues, banned all political parties, created a one party state,
and set to the business of consolidating his political power as head of state and leader of the most important nation in the Arab world.
An assassination attempt in October 1954 by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood gave
Nasser all the opportunity he needed to systematically suppress the political,
the powerful group and vanquish all opposition, including, as I'll return to shortly.
The influential Egyptian feminists. Turning his sights to the unfinished business of British and French colonial authorised control of the Suez Canal.
Nasser compelled withdrawal of British troops from the canal in 1954 and in 1956 nationalised it.
To fund his most important modernist project, the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
The subsequent invasion of Egypt by France, Britain and Israel and their withdrawal following US opposition.
Left Egypt an economically weakened but immensely proud nation under its powerful ruler and charismatic leader of the Arabs,
Africa and the future Non-Aligned Movement.
In celebration of the Suez Canal position, the country's greatest singer and firm supporter of Nasser Uncle Tomb,
popularly called the First Lady of Egypt and star of the East,
performed a militant song In Praise of the Revolution, a song that soon became the country's national anthem.
I now come to this. Towards the end of my lecture.
In fact, not terrorism had become an international movement synonymous with pan-Arabism,
a political ideology that centred the unity and interests of the fractious Arab world and the Decolonising continent's.
Pan-Africanism. As such by 1957, when a wise created this painting.
Nasser was at the height of his powers.
As he shaped Egypt, according to his personal vision as a one party state and social democracy.
But he was not alone among contemporary Egyptian artists to come under the sway of NASA's charismatic power.
Another artist, Gamal Elsa Gagne, who, like the Weiss, was a member of the Group of Modern Art.
I will come to this later. To which Seri belonged.
Depicted nationalists and revolutionaries subject matter with a form of language that straddled pharaonic Egyptian imagery and modernist figuration.
Two sculptures by him. One from 1957 showing a seated mother aged suckling two children and the other from 1960,
a portrait of Nasser as a modern pharaoh and protector of flower bearing child life.
Figures of the worker, soldier and cleric, in a way, speaks to the extent to which the big man and the state had more or less become the same.
In fact, the image of Nasser as the guardian of the nation will soon go Continental.
In 1966. Organisation of African Unity Summit in Addis Ababa.
General Ankrah, the Ghanaian new head of state.
Despite being a few years older than Nasser announced to him.
What? All of us in Africa consider you as our father a quote.
Well, Nasser was said to have baulked at such a high level theatrical expression of reverence.
But I have my doubts about that, if only because much of his post 1952 Korea was singularly targeted at becoming the leader of Africa,
the Arab world, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
But one thing is clear, and that is that Nasser courted and secured mass support for his domination of Egyptian,
Arab and African politics with his strong presence on the global stage at midcentury.
And these are some of the few time covers dedicated to Nasser during this period.
And he did that through his land reforms, disbandment of the monarchy, nationalisation of the economy,
and reanimation of a new sovereign imaginary centred on the modern subject and the nation.
All these guaranteed by the sheer force of his personal charisma.
And total control of state bureaucracy.
But just as his and the nation's story is one of triumphs and defeats, sections of the professional class,
including the very artists and feminists that supported the Nasserist regime, were riven by intermittent bouts of revolutionary fervour.
And disillusionment. And as no one among the country's leading contemporary artists whose work affords us a more compelling view of the history.
Than that of. Gatsby? Asked Siri.
Gaza City was one of the first Egyptian artists to express, through her work enthusiastic support of the political program of the three officers,
to a large extent because of their pledge to advance women's right to vote and to address sexist
labour and family laws against which the Egyptian Feminist Union had campaigned since the 1920s.
This feminist motivation, combined with her active involvement in a group of modern art,
made her particularly receptive to the three officer's revolutionary rhetoric.
To appreciate the significance of these two affiliations to sit serious political consciousness.
And more specifically, her response to NASA's impact on what it meant to be Egyptian at mid-century.
Let me paint a broad picture first of the history and politics of the country's feminist movement,
and second of the group of modern art to which she belonged.
Founded in 1923 by Huda Qaradawi.
The Egyptian Feminist Union was as much interested in advancing the modern idea of the new woman,
as did their counterparts in the International Women's Alliance.
But they were more committed to advocating the end of the Haram culture.
Polygamy and divorce by repudiation.
While the removal of the veil, which for the West was the most visible sign of Arab women's oppression,
was never officially included in the Egyptian feminist agenda.
Sahrawis. Public unveiling at the start of the ESU served as a performative assertion of our freedom from patriarchal subjugation.
Besides campaigning for the right to vote,
the RFU embarked on educational programs for women and established French and Arabic language magazines like the Gypsy Inn and Miserere.
But you are not alone in this. In 1944, another renowned feminist, Doria Shafik.
Established the French language magazine La Femme Val, followed by the Arabic Beantown Neil in 1945.
In the wake of the revolution and the free officers.
Radical openness to gender equality.
Shafiq registered Beantown male party to press for women's right to vote and to run for political office.
Indeed, the vigour and diversity of the Egyptian feminist movement was such that the secular elite segments led by Shafiq al-Shara,
we were challenged by Zainab Al-Ghazali, Muslim Women's Association, on matters related to veiling and women's political participation.
But they were unified in their rejection of the position of women on the personal status law.
And as we'll see shortly, Siri was fully attuned to and deeply harboured the concerns of Egyptian feminists insofar
as they focussed on women's rights in the context of the modern sovereign nation.
But if the feminist movement gave Siri her political orientation and thematic focus,
her involvement in the group of modern art provided her the requisite expressive language as a painter.
Formed in 1948 by young artists associated with the Institute of Pedagogy in Cairo.
The group followed on the heels of successive artist groups that had since the 1920s,
participated in the discourse of what it meant to be modern Egyptian in a world of conflicting and complementary political,
cultural and artistic ideologies.
One such group is the Society of Art and Liberty, an interdisciplinary group founded in 1938 and led by the writer George,
her name and the artists Kamal, Tony, Sunny and Ramses Eunan.
The society identified with the International Surrealist Movement and protested the Nazi
suppression of the European modernist avant garde publishing their manifesto in December 1938,
titled Long Live Degenerate Art.
Not only that, they rejected all forms of colonialism as well as nationalist art because of its tendency, as they claimed, to limit artistic freedom.
A son, Badawi has noted. The society also denounced what they perceived as the imported academy system, endorsed by the propaganda seeking monarchy,
and broke away from conservative bourgeois morality and celebrated art for art's sake.
Yet for all its internationalist perspective and more specifically, what one might call the euro failure,
some Ghareeb has also suggested that it is impossible to discountenance the group's
participation in Egyptian social and political activism to its utmost ability.
There was also the group of contemporary art led by the art teacher Hussein Yusef Amin,
and which included such artists as Abdel Have the Alcazar or See shortly.
Hamid, Nada and Yusef Kamel. Despite that, some of its members are associated with the older surrealists of art and liberty.
They were less interested in the internationalist preoccupations of the latter,
focusing instead on the role of artists in the social and political transformation of the Egyptian society.
By identifying with the underclass and with full cultures in a highly stratified society,
they called for a break with the elitism of the previous avant garde groups, particularly the surrealists.
They are a brand of realism soon attracted official attention, such as when El Gonzales,
who was detained in 1949 by the Kings King Ford's agents for his painting,
he called the hunger for its primitivist depiction of impoverished and hungry Egyptian ordinary folk.
Following the inexplicable loss of the offensive work.
Gaza recreated it in 1951, giving it a less accusatory, though no less disturbing title for quiet.
Like the other members of the Group of Contemporary Art, Garza identified with the free officers, nationalistic rhetoric and revolutionary program.
Though he still retains some of the surrealistic impulses that pulled him into the orbit of art and liberty.
For its part, the Group of Modern Art formed in 1947 by former students of the art critic Yousef Al Afifi at the Institute of Arts Education,
including Gamal Serafini and Hamid Weiss,
who differentiated themselves from other groups by developing a rather cacophony,
yet persuasive modernist art that liberally borrowed from forensic Coptic and folk
art mixed with various styles and far more strategies of the European avant garde.
This stylistic eclecticism may have resulted in what Liliane Kaniuk was described as a non revolutionary Mannerist style,
but it clearly was compelling pictorial argument for modern Egypt's multiple heritage.
They are work as we saw with a wise and sad.
Guinea was at once modernist and unabashedly nationalistic, which made it particularly responsive to the imperatives of a revolutionary period.
Thus, Gatsby, a series of early 1950s paintings, reflect group's version of Egyptian modernism.
Yet. Her images of the woman as activist.
Mother, daughter, wife. True to her feminist consciousness, thick to the precarious conditions of women during the revolutionary years.
Two paintings. First, Umrah Tiba from 1952.
And two wives we'll see shortly are exemplary.
The first shows an older woman holding the hand of a younger woman, possibly her granddaughter,
in a gesture that conveys maternal intimacy and protection and filial confidence.
With. They are tense polls and inscrutable facial expression.
The women assert their mutual solidarity and strength made all the more palpable by the older woman's powerful hands and strong facial features.
The Egyptian woman in series telling stands confidently with each other,
crossed generationally ready to confront the challenges of the nation in time of radical change.
On the other hand, two wives address polygamy.
That most vexed subject for Egyptians, secular feminists.
It points to the determinate role. Having a male child plays in the lives of coal wives.
In this case, the second younger wife sitting on a rug and suckling a male child,
commands the attention of a proud husband whose left hand firmly clasps her shoulder.
The first wife, mother of three daughters, now sidelined, is hunched over, grief stricken along with her children.
One only needs to compare the glowing skin and flowery dress of the suckling mother to the depressed shades of the grieving woman.
To see, as the feminists argued, the connection between a woman's ability to bear male children and her status in a polygamous family.
Even so. The Second Wave's expression of boredom laced with anxiety might reflect the precarity of
our low class life implied by the uninvited dish and wilted vegetables set before her,
but also the likelihood of our fall from favour the moment her husband marries another younger wife.
Without doubt,
this is one of Syria's most direct confrontation of a culture that measures women's value by their fertility and the personal status law,
which more or less guaranteed their expandability as wives or core wives in polygamous families.
The work was forms a critique of the sexist system and a pressure campaign in
support of the new regime because of its pledge to end such discriminatory laws.
Two other paintings of the period Song of Revolution from 1952, in which two Ben women perform at the piano and the teacher.
Showing a young instructor with all girls class are among Syria's most direct expression of support for the revolution from her feminist perspective.
Oh, let me put it this way. In these works, Siri not only declares the firm support of Egyptian women for the revolution,
she highlights their role as revolutionary teachers and as cool guardians of the new progressive socialist state.
Even so, they testify to perhaps the dilemma of an artist still negotiating artistic and political allegiances between the fiercely modern
Parisian chic women revolutionary musicians rendered in a style mildly reminiscent of the rebellious German expressionists.
And the tame social realist sentimentalism of the teacher.
This stylistic eclecticism, though a hallmark of the group of modern art,
might in fact reflect not just the artist's ambivalent response to the struggle between the independent feminism of Qaradawi and Shafiq and others,
and the scripted state version in the early years of NASA's rule,
but also anxious search for appropriate modes of address for a quickly changing post-revolutionary Egypt.
What is clear is that by the mid 1950s, the regime's record had become quite controversial, particularly in its affairs with women.
In 1956, for instance, the law granting women the right to vote finally passed.
To the delight of the suffragists.
Yet the government systematically liquidated most of the established feminist movements like the ESU,
replacing them with state controlled associations.
Doria Shafiq was placed under house arrest and banned from speaking in public following her second hunger strike in 1957.
While the painter in a platoon was jailed for her work as a prominent communist and feminist activist, not because of a painting.
And despite that, more women joined the civil service and participated in party politics as never before.
The personal status law remained largely intact.
As if to reflect these socio political tensions of major gains and stifling losses for the women's rights movement and the citizenry.
Series Painting style changed drastically.
The earlier boat lines, distinct forms and shapes of colours soon gave way to encrusted,
frenetic paint application, and the dutifully drawn figures and environments were replaced by.
Crudely rendered and more resolutely expressive surfaces.
In many of these later paintings, emphasis on bold, graphically painted eyes might insinuate Egypt's Coptic Christian heritage.
Yet it is hard to miss the nervous gaze of figures deceived by a world set to swell by changing forces beyond their control.
They are moored, floating alongside scrawny birds and cats, barely holding onto flimsy threads against flat and unbounded areas of colour.
Or they are fleeing from setting and unknown terrors, as did many opponents and critics of the nursery.
By the end of the decade, Nassau was at the height of his powers within Egypt and internationally.
Although he suffered a major political setback when he.
His signal political experiment that is the 1958 unification of Egypt and Syria.
As the United Arab Republic collapsed in 1961, the Nasser right movement dominated North Africa and the Middle Eastern region,
no small thanks to his use of radio broadcasts to spread his pan-Arab ideology.
Even so serious work, including prison fight of 1959 and Matter of 1961,
addressed the widespread suppression of dissent by the triumphant head of state.
Suspended in prisons. Dark Pictorial Space.
Six hastily drawn, lightly painted, disembodied heads outlined by the rough white glazed canvas.
The bright light behind them. Framing them in trembling halos.
Their eyes, still reminiscent of the Coptic style are large the pupils smaller with the fact that the faces apps cared.
What is more at the top of the picture is a square shaped, barred window behind which is a golden yellow sun.
One of the faces has teardrops.
While the black face to the bottom left has dabs of red paint on her head, suggested that she might be a victim of punitive violence.
This picture of incarcerated women.
Of diverse races may allude to the fact that the opposition to NASA's government consisted of women and men of different ideological,
religious and political convictions. Quite tellingly, however, Siri placed her signature as substitute for one of the prisoners eyed,
tagged as if to personalise the experience of NASA's carceral state and to identify
with other women that might have been Sisters of the Revolution in the early 1960s,
but had become enemies of the right state.
The matter, on the other hand, shows an emaciated man clutching at a tree branch,
his left palm open, as if in surrender or is an assertion of innocence.
But with a gaze at once accusatory and defiant of the victim, temporarily fends off his inexorable martyrdom by hanging on to light.
Unwilling to plunge into the threatening darkness.
Like prison. The matter, too, might be biographical, as it is likely a portrait of our daily series husband,
who was jailed for three months for his political affiliations.
In any case, these two paintings must be seen as serious act of solidarity with victims of official
suppression that included people in a circle such as India Flatworm that I mentioned earlier,
whose husband died in 1957, apparently from head injuries sustained while in prison.
And, of course, a platoon herself, as mentioned earlier, was jailed in 1959,
an experience that she recorded in paintings that more or less defined her artistic practice.
They are also a testament to the harsh political manoeuvres of a regime intent on suppressing dissent.
But if the canal the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1954 marked NASA's first triumphal act.
The US one high dam. That great icon of technological mastery over mighty nature, constructed between 1960 and 1970,
dramatically raised Egypt's energy production and became the focal point of its industrialisation program and Cold War politics.
Progress on the construction celebrated by many contemporary artists and key changes in the civil service, social services,
educational sector and the economy became an alibi for suppressing Nasser's political and ideological opposition.
Many among the original supporters of the revolution.
What is clear is that this decade confirmed Nasser as the single most important figure in the Arab world.
A dominant force in the nascent organisation of African unity.
And a powerful voice in the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement.
Indeed, El Garza's enigmatic painting piece of 1965 might be the most powerful artistic statement to the glory of Nasser and his socialist state.
While it might take an entire lecture to decode the complex signification and surplus imagery,
characters and symbols deployed by the artist in this work,
it should suffice to note that it is an unabashed paean to Nasser as a leader,
to Egypt, as a powerful, ancient and modern nation, and to Cairo as a world capital.
Some scholars have suggested Rafael's school of offence as a model for this work,
especially with a crowd to the right that includes the artist at his easel,
characters representing diverse professions and students at the chalkboard.
But apart from the fantastical figures in the foreground, mysterious animated pageantry of people and animals to the left,
and of course, the big winged monumental structure in the distance.
It is the scene at the centre that reveals the work's subject matter.
In this now beachside clearing framed by rows of national flags and witnessed by the festive and watchful crowd,
is a historic gathering of global leaders.
That is the second summit of the Non-Aligned Movement that took place in Cairo in 1964.
It is at this same summit, the largest gathering of nations outside of the United Nations that the then Sri Lankan prime
minister spoke about the imperative of world peace that was adopted as the summit's declaration,
the other being total decolonisation.
We know from all Gaza's preparatory sketches that he initially had a monumental figure standing on a stepped platform, his hands stretching out.
And that in a subsequent sketch the figure is replaced by a winged crowd like
abstract mass that ruled in the final work morph into a gleaming palatial structure.
Here then, I believe, is Al Gore's surrealistic conflation of NASA's mighty presence with the Egyptian nation.
In the context of the Non-Aligned Movement that served as the guarantor.
And protect our global peace in the shadow of the Cold War.
But if 1964 represents NASA's finest moment.
That. And that is the year he hosted not just the Non-Aligned Movement, but the inaugural Arab League as well.
Gaza's subject in peace might suggest.
1967 ruptured his charisma.
And political clout in Egypt and on the international scene.
In the first week of June that year, Israel and three Arab states led by Egypt fought the Six-Day War,
in which Israel humiliated its opponents in the battlefield, annexed Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
The crushing defeat resulted in the loss of faith by many Egyptians in the Nasserist Socialist ideology.
Inaugurated in 1952. By the revolution. The shock of what Nassar euphemistically called max or setback spread through the Arab world.
Days later, Nassar announced his resignation.
Oh, well, he only changed his mind the next day, but only after mass demonstrations in Egypt and across the Arab world.
Built up in his support. Back in on the shaky driving seat.
This time, he added to his portfolio the role of Prime Minister and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,
reorganised the military hierarchy, made cosmetic changes toward political liberalisation in response to protests by workers and students.
By the next Arab summit in Khartoum that November, it was clear.
To the gathered heads of states that NASA's time at the helm was over,
prompting his Saudi rivals and their Western backers to ramp up their anti-socialist schemes in the region in order to undermine Nasser.
Indeed. The glorious Nasser rights piece, celebrated only two years earlier by Alcazar, was quashed by the Six-Day War, leaving in its wake,
despair and grief, especially among the intellectual and political elite that had invested much in post-revolutionary Egyptian nationalism.
In response to this moment. Hamid Weiss, an ardent Nasser.
Right. Painted arguably his most memorable work, and that is the enigmatic garden of life rendered in the social,
really style the artist developed early in his career.
Inspired especially by the work of the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros,
the pictorial montage of diverse landscapes and inchoate clusters of people
renders the painting's subject matter mute or rather close to easy reading.
Framing the background to the left are a verdant lawn desert landscape and a cake version of the Swan Dam housing the cerulean waters of the Nile.
To the right. It built up Oasis, an active factory and group of workers.
But who is this dark skinned, mustachioed, powerfully built militant.
With his cropped hair wrapped in a bandana. He's clearly not a regular soldier.
Yet. He gestures his massive right hand as if to shield and protect the motley group that includes a scientist in his lab.
Smooching lovers, a wedded couple is seated.
Mother nursing her baby girl in blue, drawing on a board.
A farmer gently torching a full. We have here a decidedly more diverse spectrum of people in an atmosphere hovering between gloom and solemnity than
we saw in the electrified and rowdy scene of the artists Nasser and the nationalisation of the Canal of 1957.
But who indeed is the guardian of the Post's Max Life?
This anonymous militant who appears capable of and ready to guard the citizenry and the land of Egypt from known and unknown terrors.
It seems to me that this work is the meditative expression of an artist who,
in the face of the unexpected defeat of NASA's military and political machine in the Six Day war harbours the devastating,
yet utterly evident but cautiously hopeful idea that the future of Egypt will no longer depend on the singularity of NASA's power and charisma,
but on the collective spirit of the people and the nation personified by the hulking, anonymous militant.
I might even suggest that this work is a way, in a way, echoes.
The sentiment in the inn is tons of oom kalthoum national anthem that I referred to earlier in which the lasting protection of Egypt is attributed.
Not to some king or big man, but to the people themselves.
Guys we are series response to the Nassar through to her more sceptical view of NASA's politics was darker and more ominous.
Her painting style the equivalent of a dirge.
Her most important work that year is grief, a grim painting featuring a pedestal, self-portrait with dishevelled hair and mournful expression.
She's nearly absorbed by the sombre and apocalyptic landscape of a support, cruel, airless structure behind which is a red blood setting.
Sun in its front blows a spectral pyramidal form.
If the Red Sun of NASA's socialist state had been in assent since 1952.
The war forced it to premature setting. Spreading such darkness across the land that not even the nostalgic glow of Pharaonic glories could dispel.
While she painted Griff,
Siri also began to develop a new series of paintings in which she reflected on the shattering of the national psyche after the war.
The abstracted houses that frequently appeared in her late 1950s paintings became animated metaphors for contemporary Egypt in disintegrated houses,
for instance, a vertical, mostly white zone of relative silence split to areas of dominating reds and blacks.
Each part is fragmented into smaller, rectangular shapes reminiscent of the dense geometric architecture of urban Cairo.
The Shatter forms, in a way, suggests a zone of violent devastation,
perhaps an epicentre of massive bombing that has reduced an entire neighbourhood to rubble.
Yet at the top left corner is a face,
the outline of which merges with the edges of the broken architectonic shapes of colour, the oneness of body and structure.
Land and mission, suggested here, must be seen as a serious way of connecting this traffic of the landscape with
psychological desolation of Egypt and its people resulting from the war.
In subsequent work from the series faces an evanescent human figures began to appear.
ENMESHED in a web of dense, horizontal and vertical strokes and masked shapes as if to reinforce the inseparable ability of the land,
the houses and the people of Egypt locked in a political and existential muck at a time of great despair.
In his last years, Nasser endeavoured to capture his pre 1967 magic by attempting to stitch together
the increasingly crumbling regional power network through the Arab League.
His position made all the more tenuous by weakening Soviet support.
In October one, 1970, he convened an emergency Arab League summit to stave off crises between two regional parties he no longer had sway over.
Hours later. He died of a heart attack.
At 52. Sending the entire mission into a state of unexpected mourning.
His funeral, attended by more than a million people, brought the Nasarawa State and Iraq to an end.
A year later, Gatsby's theory painted silent house.
An all over canvas of bounded geometric patches of colour and decorative motifs,
all scrambled and in part organised by strong curvilinear and perpendicular lines.
The dense looseness of the composition.
The shutting door at the bottom. And the stylised figure with her hand covering her mouth.
All signify, I think. Estate of stifling and stultifying spaces.
Thank you.