13.12.1932–present
George Bahgoury
George Bahgoury (b. 1932) began in 1953 as a cartoonist for the Egyptian magazines Rose El Youssef and Sabah Al Khair and kept up that work until 1975. He then lived in Paris, where he worked in painting, graphic art and sculpture and wrote books. His work has been shown in Cairo, Amman and at a biennale in Italy.
Biography
In 1953 George Bahgoury published his first political cartoon. Two decades later he gave up that work himself.
He was born on 13 December 1932 into a Coptic Christian family. The sources disagree about the place: by some accounts in Luxor, by others in the village of Bahgora near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt; the family name, it seems, comes from the name of that village. The full name is recorded differently in different sources, so it is best to be careful with names here. He was the third child in a middle-class family that lived between Luxor, Menoufia and Cairo. His professional path began with newspapers: from 1953 he drew for the magazines Sabah Al Khair and Rose El Youssef. In parallel, in 1955, he began studying painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Zamalek district of Cairo; his teacher is said to have been the Egyptian artist Hussein Bikar. He published cartoons until 1975, about twenty-two years. As early as 1970 he had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, and in 1975 he moved there; he returned to Cairo, by some accounts, in the 1990s. His years in France are described as a time when he worked in drawing, printmaking, lithography, painting, sculpture and literature; the exact details of the Paris period are hard to check.
His exhibition list is long, with many Cairo galleries on it. In Egypt it includes the annual national and spring exhibitions (1976, 2005), shows at the Picasso Gallery (2000, 2005, 2007, 2017), Mashrabia (1996, 1998, 2020), Arabesque (1999) and Liwan (2019). Among the international ones are the Alexandria Biennale (1965), the Venice Biennale (1966), exhibitions of contemporary art in Sudan (1977) and Tunisia (1984), and the International Biennale of Book Fancy at the Library of Alexandria (2005). He also took part in the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium (2008); by some accounts he made two granite works there. By his own count he has held more than a hundred solo exhibitions.
His painting “A Face from Egypt” won a silver medal. His works are in the museums of modern art in Cairo and Amman, in a museum in Alexandria, and in the Egyptian embassies in France and in Britain. By some accounts, in 1999 his works were chosen for the Egyptian pavilion at the Louvre; I found no confirmation in other sources.
His awards in caricature date from 1978 (a prize at the caricature biennale in Italy) and 1979 (an honorary prize for a comic strip in Damascus); there is also a gold medal in Spain. By other accounts he received a first international prize for caricature in Rome (1985 and 1987) and the King Abdullah II Award for Creativity, Literature and the Arts.
He is the author of the books “Port Said 65”, “Sadat 80” and “Paris 1990”, of the trilogy “Trilogy of Icon”, and of the books “Bahgar in Exile”, “From Bahgora to Paris” and “The Forbidden Drawings”. Among his recent exhibitions are “Bahgoury Cafe” at the Picasso Gallery (2005), “Upside Down” in Zamalek (2022) and “Luxor” in Riyadh (October 2022).
Profile notes