Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group

by Sam Bardaouil

In the thick of the Second World War, the Cairo-based Surrealist collective Art et Liberté were pioneering new art forms and mounting subversive exhibitions that sent shockwaves across local artistic circles. Born with the publication of their Manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art on December 22nd, 1938, the group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism, aligning themselves with a complex, international and evolving Surrealist movement spanning cities such as Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Beirut and Tokyo. Art and Liberty created a distinct reworking of Surrealism, which provided a generation of disillusioned Egyptian and non-Egyptian artists and writers, men and women alike, with a platform for cultural reform and anti-Fascist protest. Surrealism in Egypt is the first comprehensive analysis of Art and Liberty’s artworks, literature and critical writings on Surrealism. By addressing the group’s long-lost and often misconstrued legacy, and drawing on a substantial body of previously unpublished primary documents and more than 200 field interviews, the author charts Art and Liberty’s significant contribution towards a new definition of Surrealism. Moving beyond the polarizing dichotomies of Saïdian Orientalism, this book rewrites the history of Surrealism itself – advocating for a new definition of the movement that reflects an inclusive vision of art history.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published January 30, 2017

Reviews

[James Gifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, which this book won.

Surrealism in Egypt historically and critically recuperates the Art and Liberty surrealist group in World War II Egypt. While recovering this late modernist network, it leverages the contingencies and exigencies of the group to question deep set assumptions about center and periphery as well as the critical habits that assume totalizing narratives of imperialism and Orientalism. This approach buttresses and challenges narratives of decolonization and their inherently Eurocentric focus on imperial power – it instead asks how Egyptian Surrealism extended outward and demanded global changes. Bardaouil establishes the enormous scope of the Art and Liberty movement, reaching from Spain to Syria and Cairo to Paris, but also and most effectively recovers long neglected original art and archives. The ready movement between primary materials in Arabic, French, and English brings this cosmopolitan group into coherence and demands attention from the wider study of late modernism. The “exhibition” pattern, or comparatist approach, is skilfully handled and made accessible to readers from different disciplines. With its attachment to the Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) exhibition, Surrealism in Egypt is a polemical yet persuasively readable promise, a promise to alter how modernist studies approaches the surrealist tradition.

[Ami Bouhassane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ground breaking research, fascinating to read and discover properly the surrealist circle/ Art & Liberty group in Egypt. In the brief time that Sam Bardaouil spent researching Lee Miller's link to them at the Lee Miller Archives he was through, identified connections, images and shared information about people involved in Egyptian Surrealism mentioned in her manuscripts that we had not known of.