Farouk Hosny

Biography

The Nubian Museum in Aswan, the Alexandria National Museum, the Palace of Arts and the Gezira Arts Center in Cairo, the Horizon One gallery, a modern dance troupe and school, a programme for restoring historic Cairo: all of this came into being under a single minister of culture. Farouk Hosny entered the Egyptian government in 1987 and stayed in it until 2011.

He did not start out as an official. Hosny was born in 1938 in Alexandria, graduated there from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1964 and in the same year joined the Ministry of Culture, in its department of fine arts; from 1969 he ran the Anfoushi Cultural Palace in his home city.

In 1971 he was sent to Paris as cultural attaché and director of the Egyptian Cultural Centre; he spent seven years there and in 1972 received the prize of the Cagnes-sur-Mer festival. After a short return to Cairo, where he ran the children’s cultural centre and advised the minister, in 1979 Hosny went to Rome as deputy director of the Egyptian Academy of Arts, and from 1982 to 1987 was its director and cultural counsellor at the embassy. It was from Rome that he was called into the government.

In twenty-four years at the ministry he expanded the network of state exhibition spaces and set up the Cultural Development Fund; under him the Grand Egyptian Museum and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat were begun. In 2005, after the fire at the Beni Suef Cultural Palace in which dozens of spectators died, he offered his resignation, but the president did not accept it. He left the ministry early in 2011, during the revolution; in March the interim government appointed Cairo University professor Emad Abu Ghazi in his place. He also chaired the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Supreme Council of Culture.

In 2009 Egypt nominated him for Director-General of UNESCO, and the Arab states backed the candidacy. On 22 September 2009, in the fifth round of voting, he lost to Irina Bokova of Bulgaria: 27 votes to 31.

All this time he remained a painter. His abstractions were shown at the UNESCO gallery in Paris (1994), in Tokyo (1996), at the Carrousel du Louvre (1998), in Vienna (1999), at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1999/2000) and at the National Geographic Society museum in Washington (2005). What the canvases themselves look like cannot be gathered from such lists, and I will not venture to judge them from a record of exhibitions. Soka University in Japan gave him an honorary doctorate and its Culture and Peace Award in 1993 and invited him to lecture on aesthetics; since 1999 he has been a professor at his old faculty in Alexandria. His awards include the Mediterranean arts prize of the Lazio region (2005), the Grand Prix of the International Council for Film and Television at UNESCO (2007), the Grand Cross of Egypt’s Order of Merit and the rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1999). He chairs a foundation for culture and the arts that bears his name.