Wednesday, March 27, 2024

01 photograph, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Imad Abu Shtayyah's We shall return, with Footnotes #100

Imad Abu Shtayyah
We shall return, c. 2014
Oil on canvas
182 x 142 cm
DALLOUL ART FOUNDATION

The painting shows the ruins of Gaza morphing into the torso of a Palestinian woman. This woman – Gaza – is rising to gaze into an expectant sky, body in motion as though she has just picked herself up off the ground. The strength, resilience, and determination communicated by this work are indicative of Abu Shtayyah’s oeuvre as a whole.

Imad Abu Shtayyah is a Palestinian artist born in 1965, in the Jerash refugee camp near Amman, Jordan. Raised in poverty by parents who had fled Palestine during the atrocities of 1948, Abu Shtayyah showed interest in art at an early age, using it as a means to cope with the difficulties of the life he witnessed.

Abu Shtayyah has no formal academic training in the arts. Working in two-dimensional media, he first experimented with the traditional materials that were available to him, such as oil painting, watercolor, and pastel. Later, he incorporated digital illustration into his repertoire. As a painter, his enthusiasm for the works of Salvador Dali and Francisco Goya is apparent in his romantic use of symbolism and saturated color, and in the surreal fluidity, he creates between humans, animals, and landscapes.

Abu Shtayya frequently personifies Palestine as a woman wearing a long traditional dress known as the thobe, embellished with the intricate embroidery that has come to represent pride in Palestinian heritage. Though he depicts his figures with meticulous realism. In keeping with Palestinian nationalist ideology, the artist depicts women as the “keepers of culture,” responsible for raising subsequent generations with respect for their heritage.

Imad Abu Shtayyah still resides and works in Amman. He has held exhibitions in Ramallah, New York, Sharjah, Cairo, and Gaza, and much of his work is exhibited on websites including Fine Art America, The Palestine Poster Project Archives, and the artist’s personal Facebook account. In 2018, one of his paintings was chosen to be represented on a stamp in Uruguay. More on Imad Abu Shtayyah




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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

01 work, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Suleiman Mansour's The bride of the Homeland (Lina Al-Nabulsi*), with Footnotes #101

Suleiman Mansour
The bride of the Homeland (Lina Al-Nabulsi*), c. 1976
Oil on canvas
Painting confiscated by the Israeli government. The Palestine Poster Project Archives

On May 15, 1976 a 17-year-old Lina was shot and killed by an IDF soldier while walking home from school in Nablus.

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Israeli authorities stated that a stray bullet hit Lina when a soldier’s rifle went off accidentally. An investigation into the incident was ordered, with IDF forces reiterating their commitment to only use live ammunition when their own lives were in danger. More on this painting

Lina Nabulsi is an international student from Jordan. She is currently pursuing a dual degree program in Public Health and Global Policy. Lina worked for a while as a research executive, working on projects related to education, gender issues, and women’s and children’s health with well known organizations such as USAID, UNICEF, UNDP, and Abt Associates. She also did a short internship with Human Rights Watch in DC. Her main interests are in social development, poverty, refugee affairs, and the never ending conflict in the Middle East... The University of Texas at Austin

In his early years the painter, Mansour was jailed twice under the pretense that his works were inciting violence. “They didn’t tell me that I was arrested because I was an artist, but I think they wanted to intimidate me,” he said of the two-week-long interrogations. “They put a bag on my head; I was handcuffed behind my back; I was beaten, the same as what everyone else who is imprisoned goes through. I didn’t pose any threat in terms of security — they just didn’t like what we were doing.” Hyperallergic

Born in a little village near Ramallah in 1947, Suleiman Mansour maintained a great attachment to his native rural hometown and its customs, painting portraits of his relatives since his youngest age. In the 1970s, he took part in a thorough research project on the folkloric heritage of Palestinian culture, an initiative that profoundly shaped his subsequent active involvement in the Palestinian art movement. Preoccupied with the preservation and publication of traditional artworks, Mansour aimed to safeguard indigenous Palestinian culture while offering native forms of inspiration to new generations of artists and influencing contemporary art. More on Suleiman Mansour




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Saturday, March 23, 2024

01 photograph, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Hayv Kahraman's Chained, with Footnotes #97

Hayv Kahraman
Chained, c. 2007
Ink on paper
44″ x 30″
Private collection

«I draw inspiration from many of the theoretical and practical feminist ideologies. While I admire the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, I also believe that collective nonviolent activism plays a fundamental role in changing pre-existing perceptions. My work predominantly consists of representative activism. "It is a powerful instrument of non-verbal expression, and why not use it if it can be a catalyst for social change?" More on this painting

Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi artist born in 1981. At the age of 11, her family left Baghdad during the Gulf War and settled in Sweden for several years, where her status of refugee became a catalytic experience for her artistic practice. Having studied graphic design at the Accademia di Arte e Design di Firenze, Italy, Kahraman uses a variety of media including sculpture, drawing and painting to address difficult issues relative to gender inequalities, war and the migrant experience. Channeling refined aesthetics inspired from Islamic arts, Art Nouveau and Japanese paintings to confront the viewer with controversial scenes, the artist engages with the notion of femininity in Middle Eastern cultures. Her approach to gender roles and female identity encapsulates how women are persecuted in their own culture through systematic submission to the male gaze, physicality and politics. More on Hayv Kahraman




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Friday, March 22, 2024

01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Zena Assi's A Storm is Brewing My Beautiful Refugees, with Footnotes #91

Zena Assi (Liban, née en 1974)
A Storm is Brewing My Beautiful Refugees, c. 2021
Acrylic and collage on canvas, six panels
170 x 184cm (66 15/16 x 72 7/16in).
84 x 60 cm each panel
Private collection

Sold for €31,562.50 in Oct 2021


Themes that are central to Zena Assi's vision include present-day issues related to countries in the Middle East as they battle with internal strife and civilian unrest. The artist uses various supports and mediums to document and explore the cultural and social changes around her.

Her work replicates the tumult, angst and cacophony that everyday life in the city is fraught with. Assi's use of pallid colors, jagged angular outlines and intricate layering, imbues inanimate objects, landscapes and buildings, with the emotional burdens of their inhabitants. The artist's central concerns evolve around issues of dual identities, multiplicity, and the potential for residing in this 'in-between' space. More on this painting

Born in Lebanon, in 1974, Zena Assi lives and works in London.

She graduated with honors from l’Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA), worked in advertising and taught in different universities.

Her contemporary work draws inspiration from the relations and conflicts between the individual and his spatial environment, society and its surroundings.

The artist uses various supports and mediums to document and explore the cultural and social changes and put on record our urban contemporary environment’s imprint as well as the impact of our society’s ideologies and political tendencies. Her work takes shape in installation, drawing, etching, experimental animation, sculpture and mainly painting. Themes that are central to her vision include present-day issues, like migration and the relation between memories and people on the move.

Many of her pieces are repeatedly shown in different international auction houses (Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Phillips) and are part of various public as well as private collections.

Throughout her artistic practice, her work has won prizes including the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a woman Artist at the 2020 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, 2020 – the Rosemary & Co Award at the SWA show, London, 2018 and the Special Jury Prize of the XXIX of the Autumn Salon of the Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2009. More on Zena Assi




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Wednesday, March 20, 2024

01 photograph, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Shirin Neshat's Untitled, with Footnotes #98

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957)
Untitled, c. 1996
Ink on gelatin silver print
38¼ x 55 1/8in. (94 x 140cm.)
Private collection

Sold for GBP 37,250 in Oct 2008

The present photograph belongs to an early series titled 'Women of Allah', in which Neshat depicts Islamic women wearing chadors and tattooed inscriptions of decorative patterns, devotional prayers, or poems in Farsi. She uses the Islamic veil to explore and deconstruct stereotypes of Muslim women as oppressed by religion but also empowered by their rejection of the Western imperialistic gaze. In this visually striking image executed in 1995, the woman conceals her face behind a rifle, which, with its masculine connotation, sharply contrasts with the erotic undertone of the decorative patterns. The weapon and the Islamic script also allude to Western perceptions of Islam as both impenetrable and threatening - an interpretation that is even more poignant in the current geopolitical context. More on this photograph

Shirin Neshat (born March 26, 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography She is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran. Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat said that her father, "fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”. As a part of Neshat’s “Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.[4] Through her grandparents, her mother's parents, Neshat learned traditional religious values. More on Shirin Neshat




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Monday, March 18, 2024

01 Painting, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Marwan Sahmarani's The War of August 22-28, with Footnotes #89

Marwan Sahmarani (Lebanon, born 1970)
The War of August 22-28, c. 2006
Mixed media, acrylic, fabric and collage on paper
203 x 149cm (79 15/16 x 58 11/16in).
Private collection

Sold for £10,687.50 in Jun 2019

On August 28, 1997, over 300 people were hacked to death in the village of Rais, about 30 miles south of Algiers, in Algeria. The attack was part of a wave of atrocities committed during fighting between Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and the Algerian military regime, which had intensified late that summer. More on this painting

Marwan Sahmarani's epic, and monumental mixed media work recalls the murals and illuminated manuscripts of the Medieval Islamic world and their grand depictions of the bloody territorial conflicts that marred the history of the region. Painted while the artist was escaping the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Amidst the melee a brown faced figure looks on perplexed, his neck lodged in the vice-like grip of another soldier. This figure is none other than the artist himself; by stepping into the composition, he not only ceases to be an observer, but by placing himself in the historical landscape of the battles that have scarred the Middle East, he reminds us that not only is he the present victim of conflict, but also the product of a society whose citizens perpetually bear the scars of a society tainted by centuries of war. More on this painting

Marwan Sahmarani (b. 1970) Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1970, graduated from the Atelier Met de Penninghen in Paris, France in 1989. He derives his inspiration from the themes of art history, surging between his Western cultural education and his oriental identity. Islamic and Mesopotamian art with its iconography and history mixes in with Greco-Roman influences as well as the paintings of the great master including Uccello, Rubens and Picasso. 

Sahmarani has participated in a variety of solo exhibitions in London, Dubai, Canada and Beirut as well as group exhibitions in Munich, Washington D.C. and Mexico. His most recent group museum exhibitions are Told/Untold/Retold at the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar in 2010 and The Feast of the Damned at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, USA in 2010. Sahmarani was also one of the three recipients of the prestigious Abraaj Capital Prize in 2010. More on Marwan Sahmarani



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Thursday, March 14, 2024

02 Paintings, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Anas Albraehe's Future's Guards and Bab Alhawa - Gate of Exile, with Footnotes #88

Anas Albraehe (Syrie, né en 1991)
Dream Catchers. Future's Guards, c. 2020
Oil on canvas
130 x 195cm (51 3/16 x 76 3/4in).
Private collection

Sold for €15,300 in Oct 2021

In 1948, more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Palestine's Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army during the 1948 Palestine war, following the Partition Plan for Palestine. More on Palestinian expulsion and flight

Anas Albraehe (Syria, born 1991)
Bab Alhawa - Gate of Exile, c. 2021
Oil on canvas
149 x 149cm (58 11/16 x 58 11/16in).
Private collection

Sold for €14,080 in Jul 2023

Born in Syria in 1991, Anas Albraehe is a multidisciplinary artist focused on painting and theatre. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Painting and Drawing from Damascus University of Fine Arts in Syria in 2014. After the beginning of the war in Syria, he moved to Lebanon where he obtained a Master's degree in Psychology and Art Therapy from the Lebanese University in 2015. His recent work combines his interests in the fields of art and psychology to produce a portrait that explores the psychology of color and the gaze of the Other. Anas Albraehe's solo exhibition, entitled Manal, was held at Artspace Hamra in Lebanon and Wadi Finan in Jordan in 2017. He also participated in two group exhibitions at Al-Bareh Gallery in Bahrain in 2015 and Artspace Hamra in 2016. Anas Albraehe participated in SAFIR TA'AROF 2017, an art workshop within the framework of the Sharjah Art Biennale, 2016-2017. He exhibited two series at the Agial Gallery in Beirut, The Dream Catcher in 2018 and Mother Earth in 2020.

Anas Albraehe has worked on several successive series of paintings, each time taking as subject precise elements of his environment in Syria and Lebanon. He is inspired by the people around him but also by memories of his home region. More on Anas Albraehe




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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

02 Paintings, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Oussama Diab's New Guernica, with Footnotes #96

Oussama Diab
New Guernica
Mixed Media on Canvas,  (3 Panels)
250 X 570 cm

Estimated for $50,000–60,000 in 2013

Oussama Diab's New Guernica borrows from Picasso for his representation of the civil war in Syria. 

Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Pablo Picasso
Guernica, c. 1937
Oil on canvas
3.49 × 7.77 m.
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

The complex painting received mixed reviews when it was shown in the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the world’s fair in Paris, but it became an icon as it traveled the world in ensuing years, raising controversies on its meaning and its rightful home. More on Guernica

Born in 1977, in Damascus, Oussama Diab is a Palestinian contemporary artist based in Lebanon. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2002. Diab has worked through various painting styles, often combining different forms and techniques in a single composition.

His early works amassed paintings in a neo-expressionist style resonating with the tense ridicule language surrounding famed Jean Michel Basquiat's works. Onto large-scale canvases full of dispersed drawings and thick layers of paint in intense colors, the artist embraced iconography and primitivism with a flair of pop art. Diab re-appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's sixteenth-century Mona Lisa, for instance, adopting a Pop art approach – specifically by reintroducing identifiable imagery. Diab would add props and signs into his paintings, making them more relatable to the Palestinian experience. In this case, he would envelop Mona Lisa's face with a kufiyah, or at times she would hold a Kalashnikov.

In recent years, Diab applied the deconstructed figuration of Cubism to his archetypal characters painted in fresh pastel colors. He portrayed figures with intersecting planes that collide as rigid bodies, mirroring the surrounding environment. In reaction to the turmoil in the Arab world and the fragmented state of society forged by political conflicts and migration, Diab depicts fractured bodies within empty, isolated settings. In his neo-cubist paintings, a couple found in his previous works, become the center of attraction. The artist sets his characters against decorative and ornamental backgrounds that seem to extend out of his canvas with no beginning and no end. Although Diab's figurations attain a level of elegance and grace, they possess intense melancholy. More on Oussama Diab




Please visit my other blogs: Art CollectorMythologyMarine ArtPortrait of a Lady, The OrientalistArt of the Nude and The Canals of VeniceMiddle East Artists365 Saints365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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Friday, March 8, 2024

02 Paintings, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Michelangelo and Oussama Diab's depiction of The creation, with Footnotes #95

Oussama Diab (Syrian, born in 1977)
The creation, c. 2011
Mixed media on canvas
140 x 200 cm. (55.1 x 78.7 in.)
Private collection

This painting is based on the Creation of Adam, also known as The Creation of Man is a fresco painting by Italian artist Michelangelo, which forms part of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, painted c. 1508–1512. It illustrates the Biblical creation narrative from the Book of Genesis in which God gives life to Adam, the first man.

The painting has been reproduced in countless imitations and parodies.[4] Michelangelo's Creation of Adam is one of the most replicated religious paintings of all time. More on The Creation of Adam

Michelangelo  (1475–1564)
The Creation of Adam, circa 1511
Fresco
height: 230.1 cm (90.5 in); width: 480.1 cm (15.7 ft)
Sistine Chapel ceiling

Born in 1977, in Damascus, Oussama Diab is a Palestinian contemporary artist based in Lebanon. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2002. Diab has worked through various painting styles, often combining different forms and techniques in a single composition.

His early works amassed paintings in a neo-expressionist style resonating with the tense ridicule language surrounding famed Jean Michel Basquiat's works. Onto large-scale canvases full of dispersed drawings and thick layers of paint in intense colors, the artist embraced iconography and primitivism with a flair of pop art. Diab re-appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's sixteenth-century Mona Lisa, for instance, adopting a Pop art approach – specifically by reintroducing identifiable imagery. Diab would add props and signs into his paintings, making them more relatable to the Palestinian experience. In this case, he would envelop Mona Lisa's face with a kufiyah, or at times she would hold a Kalashnikov.

In recent years, Diab applied the deconstructed figuration of Cubism to his archetypal characters painted in fresh pastel colors. He portrayed figures with intersecting planes that collide as rigid bodies, mirroring the surrounding environment. In reaction to the turmoil in the Arab world and the fragmented state of society forged by political conflicts and migration, Diab depicts fractured bodies within empty, isolated settings. In his neo-cubist paintings, a couple found in his previous works, become the center of attraction. The artist sets his characters against decorative and ornamental backgrounds that seem to extend out of his canvas with no beginning and no end. Although Diab's figurations attain a level of elegance and grace, they possess intense melancholy. More on Oussama Diab




Please visit my other blogs: Art CollectorMythologyMarine ArtPortrait of a Lady, The OrientalistArt of the Nude and The Canals of VeniceMiddle East Artists365 Saints365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others. Some Images may be subject to copyright

I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

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Thursday, March 7, 2024

01 Painting, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Louay Kayyali's From Under the Rubble, with Footnotes #94

Louay Kayali (SYRIAN, 1934-1978)
From Under the Rubble, c. 1974
Oil on masonite
37¼ x 37¼in. (95 x 95cm.)
Private collection

Sold for USD 103,000 in Oct 2007

Active during a time of immense upheaval in the Arab world, Kayyali was one of its most prominent socio-political artists, his paintings externalising the pressing humanitarian and political issues that surrounded him. His powerful depictions of ordinary people are characterized by strong fluid lines that define the figures and the absence of extraneous detail. Although reminiscent of Russian social realist painting, through his humane treatment of his subjects he conferred them with more individuality and pathos.

When The Six-Day War with Israel broke out in June 1967, soon ending with the occupation of Arab territories, he fell into deep depression, and destroyed the thirty works in the exhibition and stopped painting for several years. Kayyali went to live in Aleppo in seclusion and eventually resumed working.

The present painting is unique, in that it is the only one with such strong subject matter to have been executed after Kayyali destroyed all his political paintings following the 1967 war. It deals directly with the suffering caused by the the 1973 conflict. More on this painting

Louay Kayali (1934–1978) was a Syrian modern artist. He was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1934 and studied art in the Accademia di Belle Arti after having studied at the Al-Tajhiz School where his work was first exhibited in 1952. He met Syrian artist Wahbi Al-Hariri there and the two would share a friendship for the rest of Kayali's life. Al-Hariri would become his mentor as he was for artist Fateh Moudarres (Below) that Hariri introduced to Kayali in 1955. Moudarress and Kayali would together represent Syrian modern art at the Venice Biennial Fair. He suffered from depression and died in 1978 from burns incurred from his bed catching fire, reportedly from a cigarette. More on Louay Kayali



Please visit my other blogs: Art CollectorMythologyMarine ArtPortrait of a Lady, The OrientalistArt of the Nude and The Canals of VeniceMiddle East Artists365 Saints365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024

01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Oussama Diab's Monroe Al Jadida (The New Monroe), with Footnotes #92

Oussama Diab (Palestinian, b. 1977)
Monroe Al Jadida (The New Monroe), c. 2013
Acrylic on canvas
47 3/8 x 47¼in. (120.5 x 120cm.)
Painted in 2013
Private collection

Sold for USD 10,000 in Nov 2013

Born in 1977, in Damascus, Oussama Diab is a Palestinian contemporary artist based in Lebanon. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2002. Diab has worked through various painting styles, often combining different forms and techniques in a single composition.

His early works amassed paintings in a neo-expressionist style resonating with the tense ridicule language surrounding famed Jean Michel Basquiat's works. Onto large-scale canvases full of dispersed drawings and thick layers of paint in intense colors, the artist embraced iconography and primitivism with a flair of pop art. Diab re-appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's sixteenth-century Mona Lisa, for instance, adopting a Pop art approach – specifically by reintroducing identifiable imagery. Diab would add props and signs into his paintings, making them more relatable to the Palestinian experience. In this case, he would envelop Mona Lisa's face with a kufiyah, or at times she would hold a Kalashnikov.

In recent years, Diab applied the deconstructed figuration of Cubism to his archetypal characters painted in fresh pastel colors. He portrayed figures with intersecting planes that collide as rigid bodies, mirroring the surrounding environment. In reaction to the turmoil in the Arab world and the fragmented state of society forged by political conflicts and migration, Diab depicts fractured bodies within empty, isolated settings. In his neo-cubist paintings, a couple found in his previous works, become the center of attraction. The artist sets his characters against decorative and ornamental backgrounds that seem to extend out of his canvas with no beginning and no end. Although Diab's figurations attain a level of elegance and grace, they possess intense melancholy. More on Oussama Diab




Please visit my other blogs: Art CollectorMythologyMarine ArtPortrait of a Lady, The OrientalistArt of the Nude and The Canals of VeniceMiddle East Artists365 Saints365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, El Hussein Fawzi's A Glimpse from History of the Channel Crossing, with Footnotes #87

El Hussein Fawzi
A Glimpse from History of the Channel Crossing, c. 1980
Oil on masonite 
93 by 120cm.; 36 1/2 by 47 1/4 in.
Private collection

The Crossing of the Suez Canal by Egyptian troops in October 1973 to attack Israeli forces; and the signing of the “Treaty of Peace between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the State of Israel” by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin on March 26, 1979.

Born in Helmia district, Cairo on 4 September 1905, El Hussein Fawzi was known in Egypt and the Middle East for his pioneering work in the field of journalistic graphic arts.

For two decades (1950 - 1970) he was a renowned book and press graphic illustrator. His illustrations were seen on magazine covers of Akher Saa, El Risala El Gedida and the child magazine Ali Baba.

He was also the illustrator for many writings such as, the stories of Youssef El Sebai, El Gumhuria series "Omar Makram's Life" - which ran in 340 daily episodes - and for Naguib Mahfouz's novel Awlad Haretna, published in series in Al Ahram. More on El Hussein Fawzi




Please visit my other blogs: Art CollectorMythologyMarine ArtPortrait of a Lady, The OrientalistArt of the Nude and The Canals of VeniceMiddle East Artists365 Saints365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others. Some Images may be subject to copyright

I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

I do not sell art, art prints, framed posters or reproductions. Ads are shown only to compensate the hosting expenses.

If you enjoyed this post, please share with friends and family.

Thank you for visiting my blog and also for liking its posts and pages.

Please note that the content of this post primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.