Safeya Binzagr

Biography

Safeya Binzagr held her first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia in 1970, but she was not allowed to attend the openings of her own shows. Male members of her family represented her work. This went on until 1976, when Aramco, the oil company, held a private showing of her paintings.

She was born in 1940 in Jeddah, into a well-known merchant family, in the Haret al-Sham quarter of the old city. In late 1947, when she was seven, the family moved to Cairo. There she completed middle school in 1957 and an arts-oriented secondary school in 1960, and then spent three years in Britain. At the end of 1965 she returned to Cairo and took private drawing lessons. She then entered St Martin’s School of Art in London and completed a two-year programme; by some accounts she received her diploma in drawing and graphic art in 1965, by others only at the end of the two-year course.

Her first exhibition, shared with Mounirah Mosly, took place in 1968 at the Dar al-Tarbiyah al-Haditha school in Jeddah, since the city had no dedicated exhibition spaces at the time. Among the works of those years is the painting “Coffee Shop in Madina Road”, made in 1968. Later came shows in Riyadh, Dhahran, Jubail, Medina, Yanbu and Abha, and also in Paris, Geneva and London. By one count she had eighteen solo and six group exhibitions. In 1973 she decided to stop selling her work. In 1979 her book “Saudi Arabia, An Artist’s View of the Past” appeared, translated into English and French.

Having noticed early on how quickly the traditional way of life was disappearing, she resolved to record it in paint. She worked in oil, watercolour and pastel, and made drawings and etchings. Her series took as their subjects marriage customs, local costumes and the old houses of the Hejaz. Some paintings are based on what older women told her about their lives. For others she photographed buildings, craftwork and neighbourhoods, looked through historical documents and photographs, and made quick sketches from the photographs. Traces of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Cézanne can be seen in her painting, and in the picture “Bedouin Woman” the influence of East Asian art has been noted. From imitation she gradually moved, according to scholars, to a manner of her own. To my mind, what matters most in these canvases is precisely their thoroughness: one can study fabrics, seams and the layout of houses from them.

In 1989 she conceived of a place where her work could be shown permanently. Planning and construction took about nine years, and in 2000 the museum and gallery Darat Safeya Binzagr opened. It is her home, her studio and an exhibition space in one, and admission is free. It holds her library and household objects more than a hundred years old, and hosts workshops for adults and children, lectures, annual poetry contests and children’s drawing competitions.

Among her other publications are “Three Decades with the Saudi Heritage”, on the aims and work of the Darat, and “Darza: Two Hundred Years of Costume on the Land of Saudi Arabia”, on the dress of the country’s different regions. The British Museum holds an album of 38 etchings of regional costumes of Saudi Arabia. In 1982 she was awarded a cup and a diploma of excellence in Italy; in 2016 she received the Order of King Abdulaziz; and at the 31st Janadriyah Festival she was named its honoured cultural figure. In November 2016 she explained that she had stopped selling paintings because they were being used in dissertations: more than 160 researchers had worked with her paintings and costumes at the museum.

Safeya Binzagr died on 12 September 2024, at the age of 84.