Footnotes

A LARGE AND MAGNIFICENT SELF PORTRAIT OF EFFAT NAGHI AND HER HUSBAND SAAD EL KHADEM

Provenance:
Property from the collection of Dr Angelo Gioe, cultural attaché at the Italian Cultural Institute, Cairo 2003-2007
Acquired from Safar Kahn, circa 2004

Exhibited:
Safar Khan Gallery, Effat Naghi and Saad El Khadem, 2004, Cairo

"During the 1960s and 1970s, Effat freed herself from the conventional mediums of most of her contemporaries and produced her most creative and celebrated works"

The present work is a large, majestic, and exquisitely rendered self portrait of the Egyptian artist Effat Naghi and her husband Saad El Khadem and one of the most expressive works by the artist to come to auction

Having begun art lessons as a teenager, Effat found personal and professional success later in life, marrying at the age of 40 and beginning her formal art education two years afterward. In 1945, she married the researcher, writer, and painter Saad Al-Khadem, and from 1947 to 1949, she studied sculpture, fresco painting, and decorative arts at Rome's Accademia Di Belle Arti. Effat outlived both her husband and her brother, carrying on their artistic legacy and promoting the exhibition of their work.

Effat Naghi's art shares a conceptual current with the work of the two most important male artists in her life. The first generation of fine artists in modern Egypt, to which Mohamed Naghi belonged, agitated for the revival of Egyptian folkloric heritage in the 1920s, responding largely to nationalistic sentiment surrounding Egyptian independence (1922).

In the 1950s, as Egyptians grew increasingly fed up with Britain's continued involvement in their country's governance, Saad El Khadem undertook extensive studies of the same subject and wrote about it at length. While Effat Naghi's work also deals with Egyptian visual heritage, it differs from the oeuvres of Mohamed Naghi and Al-Khadem insofar as it defies the limited modes of academic painting privileged in Egypt during the first half of the 20th century.