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Mamdouh Ammar 1928 - 2012 Cairo, Egypt
Mamdouh Ammar was born in the Lower province of Beheira in 1928. At the age of 17 in 1945, the aspiring teenager took advantage of their house vicinity with a master painter to fulfill his wish to learn drawing and painting. The studio of Turkish watercolor master Hidayet (ca.1895-­1965), who had settled in Cairo following the eruption of WW1 in 1914, was located a few hundred meters away from Ammar’s family home, inciting Ammar to knock at the master’s door. For two years between 1945-­1947, Ammar attended weekly lessons with Hidayet and learnt the secrets of watercolor techniques, focusing on depicting reality as it was.
 * During his four-­year enrolment at the Royal School of Fine Arts in Cairo, Ammar was privileged to study painting at the hands of first generation pioneer painters such as Youssef Kamel (1891-­1971), Ahmed Sabri (1889-­1955), Hussein Bicar (1913-­2002) and the French Orientalist Pierre Beppi-­Martin (1869-­ 1954) who was a great lover of Egypt and chose Cairo as his permanent residence from 1922 until his death three decades later.


 * Keen on advancing his academic skills, Ammar pursued opportunities for government scholarships. At first, he applied for a local scholarship to travel anywhere within Egypt and to be closer to its ancient glorious monuments. Together with now world-­renowned sculptor Adam Henein (1929), Ammar was selected to go on a 2-­year scholarship to the Luxor Marssam or Atelier. Founded by first generation artist and patron Mohamed Nagi (1888-­1956) to open the eyes of future artists to their own culture, el Marssam (literary the studio) was located in the premises that once was the house of Shaykh Aly Abdel Rassoul2 in al-­Gourna village, at the West Bank of Luxor.


 * Upon his return to Cairo and as was the norm at the time; Ammar joined the teaching staff of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, which by then had changed its name from Royal School to Faculty. The decade from the mid-­1950s to the mid-­1960s saw Mamdouh Ammar travel to China, France and Italy on various state scholarship grants. In 1957 for example, he went to Peking to learn the art of woodcut.


 * In 1960, he joined the studio of Frenchman Andre Lhote (1885-­1962), who by then was too senile to teach, forcing Ammar to settle with another French artist by the name of Augame who specialized in the art of murals and mosaics. Finally, Ammar’s last grant was at the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome, which at the time, provided residence programs and promoted academic look to art.


 * The two-­year apprenticeship in the studio of Turkish watercolor master Hidayet;; the close teacher-­student relationship with Beppi-­Martin and Egyptian popular portraitist Hussein Bicar compounded with a prolonged exposure abroad enabled Ammar to build a multi-­faceted narrative in which expressionism, symbolism and surrealism blend. He returned and settled in Egypt in 1966. A year later, Ammar witnessed the 1967 War – the psychological impact of which never healed.


 * The bond with the village was further cemented during his studies under professor and artist French man Pierre Beppi-­Martin. Ammar owed Beppi-­Martin to look at Egypt with a more discerning eye. Beppi-­Martin, who came and settled with his young bride and founded the infamous Maison des Artistes in the neighborhood of the Citadel, had an unshakable affinity with Egypt. A classic Orientalist painter and one of the first professors at the Fine Arts School in Cairo, Beppi-­Martin provided Ammar with the tools to look at Egypt and its people, not merely as subjects for a canvas, but rather as individuals with stories to tell.


 * Ammar painted and immortalized the act of Zikr or Remembrance of God in his stunning large-­scale painting by the same name produced in 1952. A common practice in both rural and urban Egypt at the time and still performed today, el-­Zikr is a ritual ceremony believed to help remove any evil and is a collective form of devotion associated with Sufism, in which the worshipper is absorbed in the rhythmic repetition of the name of God and his attributes. Deriving from el-­Zikr, the Dervishes was another extensive subject for Ammar, who depicted them whirling and performing their mystical journey. The name Darwish, from Persian and Turkish origins and meaning ‘beggar’ or ‘one who goes from door to door and congregates around a mosque’, refers to a Sufi aspirant or a follower of a Sufi Muslim religious order.


 * Magazib (literally meaning people mentally handicapped), are seen in religious festivities and el-­Moulid, a popular tradition marking the birth anniversary of spiritual scholars and religious leaders, are recurrent themes as well. In the process, Ammar brought to light Sufism and the liberating path of spiritual attainment that promises a unique and intimate union, if not annihilation, in the Supreme Being.


 * Paintings such as Tassabih / Prayer Beads / Madad ya Hussein / El Madahin / Om Yehia are extraordinary visual commentaries that exemplify the united emotional chants of faith that were widespread in popular areas during the 1950s for the sake of better days and where the protagonists meditated in fear or hope of what was yet to come.

The War for Life


 * Little did Egyptians know then that they would soon witness wars (some cold, others armed), as well as conflicts in ideologies and class struggles.


 * By the time he enrolled at the faculty in 1948, Egypt had stood its grounds and participated in one armed conflict during the Arab-­Israeli War, only to repeat it again during the Suez Canal crisis or Tripartite aggression in 1956. In-­between, Egyptians had witnessed the overthrow of the constitutional Monarchy and the establishment of a republic under military rule, following the 23 July coup d’état led by a handful of young army officers headed by 34-­year old Gamal Abdel Nasser. These successive events seem to have had profound influences on Ammar who, a few years later, would produce one of his most important works – The War.


 * A testimony to history (and our failure to learn from it), The War is a unique account of the human agony deriving from all sorts of conflicts. Painted in 1960 following this succession of consequential conflicts (1948 Palestine war, 1952 Cairo Fire and Military Coup, 1956 Tripartite aggression and the nationalization of the Suez Canal), Ammar reflected on the atrocities of (armed) conflicts by visualizing aggression, pain, fear and death in a deserted or crumbling city. In line with his practice of research when contemplating a large-­scale work, Mamdouh Ammar investigated and sketched the theme of war during three consecutive years starting 1957, producing hundreds of works on paper before completing his large-­scale masterpiece in 1960. As he scrutinized and dissected the physical and psychological impact, Ammar explored movement, colors and void.


 * Ultimately, the monumental painting depicts the height of rejection of war as a solution and demonstrates how Ammar resisted the ideas and struggled against the practices of his times to save Egypt from its impending decline and rising social injustices. What appears in the surreal painting is a standing crowd of naked men, women and children surrounding a group of individuals lying on the floor, to symbolize defeat of the two involved parties. Clearly, there appears to be no winner, as the dozen randomly dispersed figures in the center of the painting are equally immobile, having degraded into mere corpses. Defeat is unmistakable at the heart.


 * With the exception of one figure and in stark contrast with the standing crowd, the defeated are painted green – a color that has regularly been used to depict the devil, the sorcerer or the mad as shown in the seminal painting The Green Man or The Green Fool (1951) by Abdel Hady el Gazzar. Ammar uses a second element to create a rupture between the crowd and those defeated on the ground. Congested and cramped together forming almost a full circle, the standing protagonists represent the masses – who seem to have (had) no say in the conflict beside observing and bearing the consequences, striving for survival, and in the process suffering and dying from the devastating destruction caused by a few. The psychological defeat painfully transcends, as the unknown befalls on man unexpectedly and is further symbolized in the screams of the wounded horse – a dramatic and painful reference to the status symbol the rare animal held in ancient Egypt.


 * Dominated by dark red colors, thick black lines highlight the stretched limbs, crying for salvation, appearing in all directions and in continuous motion, while the trees, with bare

branches, are distant. In one instance, a woman, seemingly panting, carries a child. In another instance, a man seems to attend to his family, as a shield against their

inevitable doomed fate. Naked, his protagonists belong to no specific country or race, as we come to accept the perpetuity of human conflicts, from which no lesson is learnt.


 * Just as they could represent the Mourning Martyrs of the atrocious 1906 Denshway (also written Denshawai) incident, who Ammar honored in a separate series, they could well be the fallen victims of the 2011 Arab Spring and the ongoing war in Syria. They could also be representing the massacres of Sabra and Shatila;; Gaza and Jenin;; or Mossul. Or they could be the children of the Port Saïd town, which endured tragic losses during the 1956 Suez Canal war (who Ammar also paid tribute to in a separate series) or the young soccer fans, who perished in the football stadium in the same city in 2012.


 * The War must also be taken symbolically in that it tackles conflict in the broadest sense; whether between man and the establishment, man and poverty / ignorance or the inner war of identity and beliefs. At the time when he started exploring the theme of war in 1957, Egypt was witnessing radical socio-­ideological changes at all levels. Gamal Abdel el Nasser had become the ‘charismatic’ leader of the new republic, and he was keen on advancing the nation towards an independent and powerful centrally planned nation. His revolutionary government adopted a staunchly nationalist, anti-­imperialist agenda, which came to be expressed chiefly through Arab nationalism. And yet, one could read through The War that, despite the grand promises, Ammar had the farsightedness of what was yet to come.


 * Severe restrictions on political opposition, proliferation of religious fundamentalism andshort-­lived socialist measures created a new sense of ambiguity and confusion amongst a few – Ammar included. In that sense, The War broadly depicts the height of social misery of the poor and the oppressed as they vacillated between triumph and defeat, dignity and humiliation, social justice and inequality – again in Egypt, the Arab region and the world atlarge.


 * As we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 23 July Revolution and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 War – commonly known in the Arab world as ‘el-­Nakssa’ (The

Setback) and ‘one of the most devastating conflicts in Arab memory’, The War is in fact a universal cry for humanity and a call for peace.


 * The painting may well be a silent nod to Ammar’s extraordinary farsightedness as he foresaw the urgency to convey the importance of a collective sense of a shared fate. It is more than half a century since Ammar painted The War and sought to improve the moral condition of humanity and yet the work still reflects particularly well the present day turmoil afflicting the Middle East and the world at large.

The Meaning of Life (OR) ‘The relative calm in my life’:


 * As he came to realize the incapacity of Man to learn from repeating the same mistakes and as he felt deceived, Mamdouh Ammar began his third and final stage.

The Circus of Life


 * Just as he transited from the ills of wars, he envisioned society as a big glaring popular circus, where a blatant divide separates the lonely ‘heroes’ (the entertainers) from the

crowd. At times, the circus, often that of the renowned and highly popular Helw family, appears like a cage or a jail, where the audience stands watching the accused.


 * At other times, Ammar vows us with the charm and inner beauty of the lonely heroes – the trapeze artists, the clowns and the dancers. And yet, throughout the extensive series ElCirque or The Circus lays an inherent message where the symbolic imagery of the complexities of humans looms.


 * Disguised as clowns for example, the protagonists are shown vibrant and colorful, in their temporary physiological transformation and difficult journey in which they have to leave their troubles aside, engage with the public and even make them laugh.


 * Take away their make-­up and underneath is the quintessential Egyptian breadwinner or the existential stance of work. These structures and symbols are probably consciously chosen by Ammar, given the popularity of circuses in Egyptian rituals and daily life, but are also similar in the universal symbolism. In a way, these situations are the sacrifices of many people. We are all both subjects and objects. For example, women’s predicament resonates in this series as well, where shown as professional belly dancers, women’s lives transpire as movements from one conditional role in relation to men to another.

Surreal Sugar Dolls, Birds and Flowers


 * Moving forward, the urge to withdraw amplified and Ammar decided to ‘exile’ inside his homeland, in pursuit of the essence of humanity. He retreated in isolation and away from society and began to explore the splendor of solitude.


 * During that final stage, we come to realize that Ammar seems to have found the answer then to a more peaceful life in the generative power that emerges out of the company of

one’s own self -­ in silence and away from the turbulence of a society facing yet again significant changes. Starting the 1970s, the proliferation of an Islamist movement was

encouraged, the extent of which was directly felt across all levels of the society and affected daily life. For Ammar, radical ideas lay at the root of backwardness and obscurantism and could only be explained as an act of despair and a reaction to the widening gap between the Orient and the West. In seeking to protect and salvage their Arab / Muslim identity, those few who embraced Salafism were reaching out for what they believed was authentic.


 * “The inability of the Third World countries to catch up with the fierce development witnessed in the advanced world, has caused a certain malaise for some – which ultimately led a few to return to Salafism. And that, naturally, does not bring anything, but backwardness and darkness.”5 In his last show a year before he passed away, Ammar had chosen to exhibit a number of works from the series Sugar Dolls inspired by the popular yet dying tradition of Arousset (Dolls ) el-­Moulid associated with the celebration of the Prophet Mohamed’s birth. Ammar offered the works, devoid of usual bright colors and ornamental patterns, as an act of clinging to tradition while at the same time rebelling against the growing Salafist ideology that considered the doll a sin.


 * The rupture, following his self-­imposed retreat and the realization of human weaknesses, is evident in his paintings as we see fewer protagonists. Gone are the crowds of people gathering around spiritual ceremonies or at a café or mosque or coming together against war. In fact, Ammar went as far as portraying a society inhabited by animals (birds/horses) or by solitary protagonists living in desolate / remote places, where questions of love, human relationships and their transformations are at the heart.


 * In all these new roles, the protagonists are powerful symbols, but also manage to maintain a sense of identity and inner self – no matter how subtle it may be. Indeed, it is this very power of symbolic identity that contributes to their sense of existence. And yet, during this monologue stage, there is an almost permanent nostalgia for a lost Egypt, which for example Tawfik el-­Hakim in 1927 described in a suggestive manner in his novel The Awakening of a Nation. That nostalgia is not for that part of Egypt that was feudal, since Mamdouh Ammar, like Tawfik el-­Hakim, believed in the essential equality of humanity and that man’s dignity lies in his liberation from all yolks of life. The nostalgia is rather a chance to forge a new understanding of human nature and a reorientation of humanity and hope.


 * Poet and art critic Jean Moscatelli (1905-­1965), an Italian resident of Cairo, summed it up well when he observed in 1963: ‘’A subtle poetry bathes the works of Mamdouh Ammar.’ Artist and poet Ahmed Morsi (1930) went further when he wrote in the accompanying catalogue to a USA touring exhibition in 1977: ‘The works of Mamdouh Ammar are tinged with the nobility of sorrow, for in his latest phase, the artist expresses the futility and deceptiveness of life’.


 * At times, the contradiction in scale between the figures and the scene in which they appear gives a feeling of calculated modernism and surrealism – another element that cements further the aesthetic rupture between the last and the earlier two stages. The face of a woman suddenly becomes a pot of flowers. A child rides on a wooden horse. Many figures are suddenly deformed. A green man is eaten by a gigantic fish. Holes appear in the body of the protagonists. Paul Richard, an American critic for The Washington Post, wrote on April 21, 1976, ‘Ammar is a surrealist. A number of his pictures have a bit of de Chirico about them’.


 * Having taken part in a touring show in the USA with other Egyptian artists such as Ezz elDin Hammouda and Zeinab Abdel Hamid, Ammar exhibited his masterpiece ‘First

Acquaintance with Pain’ (1975), which Richard had described as a child, symbolizing humanity, on a hobby-­horse, symbolizing anguish and pain, looks down at a dying bird,

symbolizing defeat or death in the modern world, on the desert sands (the void that surrounds us and that is inside of us).


 * The dramatic isolation of the boy on the wooden horse in a deserted city or in fact the tiny clown surrounded by a vast audience in the gigantic circus accentuate the version of ourselves – limited and constrained, powerless in a gigantic world. The idea of the grotesque – through exaggeration, hyperbolism and excessiveness in the body forms as

seen in The Fishermen whose find is gold (1974) -­ contrasts with the noble ability of the fishermen (the breadwinners) to feed their families.


 * Ammar may have used the idea of ‘romantic grotesque’ or compassionate monstrosity as an ambiguous and satirically amusing symbol. His protagonists – whether colorful tiny clowns, grotesque fishermen, deformed pregnant women, or traditional yet plain sugar dolls are more than just frozen ideas. They are alive. They are humans, and their destiny lies elsewhere. They are in transition or double symbols, one breaking out of the other, but from what to what?

Conclusion


 * Rich and versatile, Mahmoud Ammar’s oeuvre has extended over a period of six decades, without ever ceding from its strength, even during the last years of his career. Ammar began by linking the post-­WWII and post-­1952 Egyptian culture, dominated then, by Egyptian Folk Realism, and the culture of popular rituals. The exploration of Egyptian reality through myth, Sufism and popular folklore as well as the later investigation of the agony of war (physical or psychological) blend as Ammar persevered in his confidence in the goodness and wisdom of mankind. As he fluidly moved between chronicling ordinary mystical life and releasing social rage, the prolific artist concluded by giving glimpses of what words do not say and he may well be a timid wake-­up call for us to realize that we are indeed in this together.


 * Throughout, a definite ‘personism’ and emotionalism mark the works of Mamdouh Ammar, where everywhere, there are elements that betray the personal feelings of the artist for thatlost ‘Egyptianness’ and that longed for humanity. These qualities are so important. They allowed the freeing of the clown’s sacrifice and his humanizing aspects loose – ultimately reminding us, the viewer, that we too are part of the ‘giant comedy’ that is life.


 * At the end, Ammar gave the germ of a new identity and interpretive framework that made no explicit distinction between seeing and believing. His renewed ‘magical realism’ is founded on a notion of certainty, a recognition of the need for imagination, the maturing and coming together as individuals, a willingness to believe, to make believe in a magical and better reality. For Ammar, people need to be, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. In merging the social utopian idea with the realistic, Ammar created a carnival experience, unique in its kind. Such vision allowed acceptance in finding a solution to the problems he laid out regarding human relationships. His final solution emphasized the bond made between man and the self to convey the importance of freedom.