Page 44 - EXPOTIME!Sept2017

New exhibitions

Ida Kar: Still Life, ca. 1940, bromide paper, 23,40 X 22,80 cm. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London.
Photo: © Kunstsammlung NRW

Britain – became a political as well as a military front in of the group Art et Liberté endow these "women of the
World War II while the Surrealist movement adopted an city" (Henein) with artistic form. In general, the motif
emphatically antifascist and anticolonialist attitude in re- of the fragmented, ”emaciated body," as Art et Liberté
sponse to the rise of pro fascist sympathies in Egypt as well artists referred to it, developed into an emblem of the
as in Europe. The battles in northwestern Egypt, death and howling social inequality between the large mass of poor
destruction, are the themes of many paintings featured in country folk and the country's small number of feudal
the exhibition, the work of artists such as Kamel el-Telmis- lords and business magnates.
any, Inji Efflatoun, Fouad Kamel, Amy Nimr, Samir Rafi, and
Ramses Younane, to name just a few.
By 1942 up to 140,000 soldiers from the British Empire For their own definition of surrealism, coined as "sub-
were stationed only in Cairo; bitter poverty compelled jective realism” by Ramses Younane in contradistinction
many women to engage in prostitution. The paintings to the more familiar Surrealism of the European variety,

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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017