Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar

Biography

In 1964 Al Gazzar was given a State Incentive Award and a Medal of Arts and Science for his painting “The High Dam”. He was thirty-nine, and had less than two years left to live.

He was born on 14 March 1925 in the Akkabri district of Alexandria, the son of a sheikh, a religious scholar. In 1940 the family moved to Cairo and settled in Sayyida Zaynab. That district, with its urban folklore, its storytellers and its rituals, returns many times in his paintings. At Helmiyya Secondary School he attended an art club run by Hussein Youssef Amin, the future founder of the Contemporary Art Group. He first enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Cairo, but left it (in 1944, according to some accounts) and moved to the Higher School of Fine Arts, to the painting department. He graduated in 1950 and stayed on as an assistant, later becoming an assistant professor. According to some accounts, from 1950 to 1954 he also studied at the institute of archaeology, where he learned, among other things, hieroglyphics.

The Contemporary Art Group took shape in the mid-1940s. Its members, among them Hamed Nada and Samir Rafi, searched for Egyptian traditions and used folk symbols and popular philosophy in order to rid local art of the romantic, unrealistic images left by Western Orientalist painters. From their predecessors, the Art and Freedom Group, they inherited surrealism and abstraction. Al Gazzar was one of the most prominent members.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo on 17–24 December 1951. In those years he painted “The World of Shells” (1948), “The Green Fool” and “An Ear of Mud, An Ear of Paste” (both 1951); the latter, in oil on paper, is considered his best-known work. Early on he worked more often in crayon or ink on paper, and later moved to painting. In 1954 and 1957 he received scholarships to study in Rome. There he completed the School of Art and Restoration, earned a diploma, and visited art schools in England, France and Italy. According to some accounts, he was ranked first for the restoration diploma and was the first Egyptian to receive it; the sources disagree on the dates and length of his Roman stays, so I limit myself to the two scholarships.

Exhibitions followed one after another. He showed work at the São Paulo Biennial in 1957 (bronze medal), at the Venice Biennale in 1960, at the “Art in Fifty Years” exhibition in Brussels in 1958, and at a Rome gallery in 1961. In 1958 he won the competition for a mural for the Cairo courts building, in 1962 first prize in the competition “The Revolution, Ten Years After” for his painting “The Charter”, and in 1963 and 1964 he was honoured at the Cairo Salon. In 1965 the Ministry of Culture granted him a scholarship that allowed him to work without teaching. In the same year he took part in the Alexandria Biennial for the second time.

Political subjects in his work led to an arrest. At an exhibition of the Contemporary Art Group he and Hussein Youssef Amin were detained because of the political content of the works; according to some accounts, this happened in 1949 over the painting “The Meal” (“The Theatre of Life”), and they were released after Mahmoud Said and Mohamed Naghi intervened.

Besides painting, he wrote folk poems, articles for the “Islamic Post” magazine, and two stories: “Barber’s Shop” and “Soul’s Departure”.

Al Gazzar died on 8 March 1966, six days before his forty-first birthday. His painting “Inspired by the Red Sea Lighthouses” (1964), lent in 1971 to an exhibition of the Ministry of Culture, went missing and in June 2022 was found hanging in a coffee shop; it was returned to the Gezira Center for Modern Art. In 2023 a two-volume catalogue raisonné of his works was published in Paris.