Nima Sagharchi
Group Head
This auction has ended. View lot details
You may also be interested in
Lot 30*
Hussein Youssef Amin(Egypt, 1904-1984)The Dancer and the Zammar
Amended
28 November 2017, 15:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£40,000 - £60,000
Looking for a similar item?
Our Modern & Contemporary Middle Eastern Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
Noor Soussi
Head of Department
Hussein Youssef Amin (Egypt, 1904-1984)
The Dancer and the Zammar
oil on canvas
signed "Hussein Youssef Amin" and dated "1946" in Arabic (lower right), executed in 1946
176 x 85cm (69 5/16 x 33 7/16in).
oil on canvas
signed "Hussein Youssef Amin" and dated "1946" in Arabic (lower right), executed in 1946
176 x 85cm (69 5/16 x 33 7/16in).
Footnotes
Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Giza
Hussein Youssef Amin belonged to the second generation of the modern Egyptian art movement. Amin was born in 1904 in a socially privileged class and was the son of a Turkish government official. Amin was naturalised Egyptian by order of the khedive. During his youth he travelled through Italy, France, Spain and Brazil, acquiring deep understanding of various art schools and graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. During his travels around the world Amin became closer and closer to his Egyptian identity. Upon his return to Egypt in 1931, Amin became a prominent art scholar and taught art at a number of universities.
His young promising students gathered every week at their mentor's house in Maryoutiya to foster their creativity and discuss the world of art. Amin not only gave them the courage to embrace their traditions, but also to become spokespersons for the unheard majority of the population by depicting the fear and fatality generated by poverty. Following in the footsteps of the surrealist artists, Amin's students condemned social injustice, political oppression and the bourgeoisie.
In 1944, Amin formed the Contemporary Art Group; the group members included Abdel Hadi Al-Gazzar, Hamed Nada, Maher Raef, Kamel Youssef, Abou Khalil and Ibrahim Massouda. They were dedicated to shaping national identity, promoting modernization, social reform and collective freedom through art. Their works were inspired by folk symbolism, popular traditions and notions of the collective unconscious. In the mid-1940s he formed several groups collectively known as the" Rejectionists". They challenged previous romanticised imagery and Western academic styles by exploring the daily realities of poverty and oppression. In 1946, Amin organised the Contemporary Art Group's first art exhibition, at the Lycee Francais du Caire. History was in the making with the 190 works by Amin's protégés that dealt with previously unexplored themes rich in symbolism. In 1948, a second exhibition took place at the YMCA in downtown. That same year Amin won the first modern art prize at the Sao Paolo Biennale.
The most spectacular and inventive artworks by the groundbreaking Egyptian artists Adel Hadi El Gazzar, Samir Rafi and Hamed Nada from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s exist because of Amin's relentless efforts. His financial and ideological support was instrumental in the discovery of these artists. Rejecting the absence of both local heritage and the reality of unprivileged people in the works of art & freedom, Amin built on the foundations of Henein's socially engaged movement to visualise a national character born from homegrown psychological, social and historical values. Amin succeeded in creating an embedded Egyptian surrealist-expressionist movement which he termed "cultural emotions".
"Egyptian painting started miraculously around 1946" wrote Aime Azar a Lebanese professor of literacy criticism at Ain Shams University and Egypt's most important art historian, in his 1961 book La Peinture Moderne en Egypte.
Saleroom notices
Please note the correct date for the artwork is 1940 and not 1946