Mahmoud Mokhtar

From the village to the art school

Mahmoud Mokhtar was born in 1891 in a village in the Nile Delta. As a boy he modelled figures from the river's mud. In 1908 Prince Youssef Kamal opened the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, the first in Egypt, free of charge to students, and Mokhtar was among its first pupils. His teachers, French sculptors, saw his talent quickly, and around 1911 he won a scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In Paris he discovered both the modern sculpture of Europe and the collections of ancient Egyptian art in the Louvre. The second mattered more: he set out to make a modern sculpture that would continue, rather than copy, the art of the pharaohs.

Egypt's Awakening

In 1919 Egypt rose in revolution against British rule. In Paris, Mokhtar made the model of a sculpture he called Egypt's Awakening (Nahdet Misr): a young peasant woman lifting her veil with one hand, the other resting on the head of a sphinx that is rising to its feet. The model was shown at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris in 1920, and the nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul and the Egyptian press took it up as the image of the nation's revival. Its title belongs to the language of the Nahda, the idea of an Egyptian cultural and national renaissance, and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, just as Egypt was granted a form of political independence, fed the pharaonic imagery that nationalists used.

A public subscription was opened to make it full size in granite from Aswan — the first monumental statue in Egypt for centuries. After years of work and political delays it was unveiled on 20 May 1928 in Bab el-Hadid Square, in front of Cairo's main railway station. In 1955 it was moved to the grounds of Cairo University.

Peasants and monuments

Mokhtar's other great theme was the Egyptian countryside. His small sculptures of fellahat — peasant women carrying water jars, wrapped in their cloaks against the wind, or resting by the Nile — have the smooth, simplified volumes and calm of ancient Egyptian statues. He also made two monumental statues of Saad Zaghloul, for Cairo and Alexandria, which were put up after his death.

He exhibited bronze, marble and stone sculptures at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1930, and he died of leukaemia in March 1934, in his early forties. A museum on Gezira island in Cairo, designed by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef, is devoted to his work, and his tomb is inside it.

How to look at a Mokhtar

Take The Bride of the Nile (Arous el-Nil, 1929), a kneeling female figure in limestone about 148 centimetres tall. The Smarthistory essay on it argues that it reads as a direct quotation of ancient Egyptian art framed by the Art Deco taste of 1929, and asks whether the kneeling nude reflects an Orientalist gaze or the agency of a modern Egyptian woman. Both readings are worth holding in mind. The Centre Pompidou's record says Mokhtar's work set out to meld references from ancient Egyptian myth with the formal inventions of modern European sculpture, and the French state acquired the piece in 1930. Look at his peasant women the same way: Al-Khamaseen (1929) shows a fellaha walking forward against sandstorms.

Where to see the work

The Mahmoud Mokhtar Museum on Gezira island is devoted to his work, and Egypt's Awakening stands at Cairo University. The Bride of the Nile is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; check the museum's website to see whether it is on display.

Legacy

Mokhtar is remembered as the father of modern Egyptian sculpture, a counterpart to the painter Mahmoud Saïd. Later Egyptian sculptors, above all Adam Henein, continued his search for a modern art rooted in the forms of ancient Egypt. See also North African art and our lists of Egyptian sculptors and Egyptian artists.