Mohamed Nagy

Biography

Mohamed Nagy's date of birth is disputed: some sources give 27 January 1888, others 17 January. The place of birth is certain: Alexandria.

What he completed was not an art school but a law course. In 1906 he went to France to study law and received his degree in 1910, after which he left for Italy. From 1910 to 1914 he studied art in Florence; by some accounts he attended the academy there and was the first Egyptian to enrol, by others he taught himself. I would not choose between these versions: there are no documents. After 1918 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Paris.

His father was Egyptian and his mother Turkish; in his youth he played the violin and the oud. His sister Effat Nagy was also a well-known painter in Egypt.

His early work shows the influence of Claude Monet, the Post-Impressionists and ancient Egyptian painting. Monet is sometimes called his teacher, but this is hard to verify, and I would take it as influence rather than teaching. Nagy's manner is described as a broad, free, full brushstroke and a stage-set (“coulisse”) construction of space. Many of his pictures are devoted to Egypt. In the early 1930s he painted a large cycle of Abyssinian pictures. His easel paintings “The Buffalo and the Fellah” and “The Flooding of the Nile” are kept in the museum bearing his name in Cairo. Among his other works are named “The Barber”, “The Gift”, “Stick Fighting” (tahtib), “Motherhood”, “The Border Guards” and a large picture, “The Alexandria School”, measuring seven by three metres.

In 1932 in Alexandria Nagy founded the art group Atelier, which became the core of the modern Alexandria school of painting. He was also drawn to murals: he painted the panel “Egypt Renaissance” for the assembly hall of the National Assembly in Alexandria, murals for the Moasseh Hospital in Alexandria (1934) and a panel for the World’s Fair in Paris (1937). For “Egypt Renaissance” he is reported to have received the gold prize of the Paris Salon. Another series of his murals is devoted to medicine: ancient Egyptian, medieval and folk, as well as the inauguration of Mohamed Ali.

After his return he served for five years in the diplomatic service, then was appointed director of the Higher School of Fine Arts, and afterwards director of the Museum of Modern Art. His leadership of the museum is dated to 1939, when he began the “Alexandria School” project. In 1952 he bought a plot of land from Hadayek El Ahram and built a studio there.

Nagy died on 5 April 1956; the place of death is given variously as Cairo or Alexandria, and by one account he died in his studio. In 1962 the Ministry of Culture bought that studio, and on 13 July 1968 the Minister of Culture, Tharwat Okasha, opened the Mohamed Nagy Museum in it. It holds about 1,200 paintings and sketches, among them forty of his oil paintings donated by his sister.