Seif Wanly

Biography

The first question anyone reading about Wanly asks is what exactly he studied, and with whom. From the information available only one name is clear: the Italian artist Otorino Becchi, in whose studio in Alexandria he began to paint.

Mohammed Seif al-Din Ismail Mohammed Wanly was born on 31 March 1906 in Alexandria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The family was aristocratic. According to some accounts his father had Turkish roots and his mother came from the Caucasus; other sources mention only the family’s Turkish origin. His younger brother Adham (1908–1959) also became a painter, and Seif’s later career cannot be separated from his. In 1936 Wanly received the Mahmoud Mokhtar Prize, named after the well-known Egyptian sculptor. Little is known about how his early working years unfolded: the documents and detailed memoirs available to me are silent on this. But in 1942 the brothers opened a studio of their own in Alexandria, and from then on they appeared together. They took part in more than seventeen exhibitions, some of them abroad; the most notable were the Venice Biennale and the exhibition in São Paulo, Brazil. Wanly is regarded as one of those who introduced modern forms into Egyptian art; that is the judgement of scholars, and it is hard to assess from lists of exhibitions alone.

In the late 1950s he travelled to Nubia. A government project aimed to document the culture and living conditions of the region before the relocation of its people, which was needed for the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Wanly produced a series of paintings and drawings of life in Upper Egypt.

In 1959 he won first prize at the Alexandria Biennale. That same year his brother Adham died. In 1977 the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo awarded Wanly an honorary doctorate. He died on 15 February 1979 in Stockholm, aged seventy-two.

Wanly’s works are held in the collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Darat al-Funun in Amman and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. The Mahmoud Said Museum in Alexandria devotes an entire floor to the Wanly brothers. In 2015, on the 109th anniversary of his birth, Google marked the day with a Doodle in his honour.