Ramses Younan

Biography

In 1938 the Society for the Promotion of Art in Cairo published Ramses Younan’s first book, an analysis of the work of the French painter Amédée Ozenfant and his theory of Purism. The author was about twenty-five and had already been teaching drawing in the provinces for several years.

He was born in 1913 in Minya, a city about 240 kilometres south of Cairo, on the west bank of the Nile. His family was poor, Coptic and Christian. In 1929 he enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo but left in 1933, and in 1934 he received a teaching certificate. He taught drawing in secondary schools in various towns across Egypt. From 1933 to 1938 he regularly took part in the salons of the Friends of the Fine Arts Association. In 1935 he joined the Society for the Promotion of Art, founded by the painter Habib Gorgui, which called for a larger role for art in education. In 1939, together with the poet Georges Henein, Ikbal El Alaily and Edmond Jabès, Younan founded the surrealist journal La Part du Sable. By then he was already a prominent member of the leftist group Art and Liberty: he had signed its manifesto, “Long Live Degenerate Art!”, on 22 December 1938, and formally joined Henein in the group in 1939.

From 1943 to 1945 he edited the magazine Al Majalla Al Jadida (“The New Magazine”), in which the group’s manifesto was first published. His Arabic translations appeared there and alongside it: Albert Camus’s “Caligula”, Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” and Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”. The magazine’s tone was hostile to British colonialism, to Hitler and to Stalin alike.

In 1947 Younan left for Paris, after the dissolution of Art and Liberty and a short time in prison. He spent nine years in France, working as editorial secretary of the Arabic department of the French broadcasting service. That same year he took part in the international surrealist exhibitions in Paris and Prague and signed the collective manifesto of the Paris surrealists, “Rupture inaugurale”.

His first solo exhibition was held in 1948 at a gallery in Paris. The works shown there were already abstract, and he kept to that style for the rest of his life. In the same year his dialogue with Henein, “Notes sur une ascèse hystérique” (“Notes on a Hysterical Asceticism”), appeared, sharply criticising surrealist automatism. Younan had distrusted European surrealism even before the break: it seemed to him too premeditated, it did not let the unconscious be used to the full, and it was too concerned with the individual. In its place he proposed “Subjective Realism”, or Free Art: an active mining of the unconscious, joined to local imagery familiar to Egyptians but free of fetishism and nationalism. I think this formula also explains his move into abstraction, although he himself linked it to an interest in form and space.

In 1956 he returned to Cairo; according to the available accounts, he had been expelled from France because he refused to condemn the Egyptian government on French radio. In Egypt he met an increasingly stifling political and cultural climate, but did not give way to pressure. In 1960 he received a grant from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture that allowed him to paint full time. He published articles in the journal Al Tatawwur, the successor to The New Magazine.

Ramses Younan died in Cairo on 24 December 1966. A collection of his writings, “La Quatrième dimension vaut la première: œuvres incomplètes” (“The Fourth Dimension Is Worth the First: Incomplete Works”), came out in 2002, and in 2016 his paintings were shown in the Art and Liberty exhibition at the Palace of Arts in Cairo.