Painter · Egypt
Mahmoud Saïd
Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964) was an Egyptian painter from an aristocratic Alexandrian family who worked as a judge for decades before devoting himself fully to art in 1947. A founder of modern Egyptian painting, he is known for monumental, glowing figures of Egyptian women, workers and landscapes; his 1929 painting The Whirling Dervishes sold at Christie's Dubai in October 2010 for $2.55 million, then the highest price paid for a Middle Eastern painting.
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Law and painting
Mahmoud Saïd was born in Alexandria in 1897 into one of Egypt's most prominent families: his father, Muhammad Saïd Pasha, served as prime minister, and his niece Safinaz Zulficar later became Queen Farida, wife of King Farouk.
He trained in the law and spent most of his working life in the legal profession. In 1922 he was appointed assistant judge at the Mixed Courts of Egypt, the international courts that heard cases involving foreigners; he became first judge in Mansourah in 1927 and in Alexandria in 1937. He painted throughout, studying with European artists in Alexandria and spending time in Paris, but only in 1947, aged fifty, did he resign from the law to paint full-time. He died at the family home in the Gianaclis district of Alexandria on 8 April 1964, his sixty-seventh birthday.
Egypt seen from inside
Saïd painted Egypt as a modern painter who knew its museums and its streets. His figures — peasant women, boatmen, dancers, workers at the shadoof, the water-lifting device of the Nile — are heavy, monumental and calm, with a solidity that recalls ancient Egyptian sculpture. Light is everything: warm, golden, often at dusk, as if the whole scene were cast in bronze.
He also painted portraits of Alexandrian society, religious scenes and landscapes of the Nile and the Mediterranean coast.
Les Chadoufs
Les Chadoufs (dated 1934 or 1935 in different catalogues) shows a veiled woman carrying water while men and a donkey draw water at a well. In April 2010 it sold at Christie's in Dubai for $2.43 million, against an estimate of $150,000 to $200,000. At the time it was the highest price paid at auction for a work by an Arab artist.
In October 2010 it was overtaken by The Whirling Dervishes (1929), an early work that sold at Christie's Dubai for $2,546,500 against an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000, the most expensive Middle Eastern painting ever sold at that time. Both Dubai sales fell in 2010, and each set a new price record in turn. Saïd is the only Arab artist to have had three paintings sell for more than a million dollars at auction.
How to look at a Saïd: let the light lead. The figures are heavy and still, like ancient Egyptian sculpture, and the warm, golden light does the moving; look at where it falls on a shoulder, a pair of hands or the water. The Whirling Dervishes shows the opposite case, a subject built on motion and given the same weight.
Legacy
Saïd is counted among the founders of modern Egyptian painting, alongside the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar and others of the generation that came of age around the 1919 revolution. His family villa in the Gianaclis district of Alexandria is now a museum dedicated to his work; one account says it opened in 1999, as part of a group with the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art and the Seif and Adham Wanly Museum. His large painting La Ville hangs in the main hall of the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo.
Related artists
Among the Egyptian painters who followed him were Hussein Bicar, Inji Aflatoun and Farouk Hosny, another Alexandrian (see our list of Egyptian painters); his niece, Queen Farida, also became a painter. For later modernists from the Arab world and North Africa, see the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, the Moroccan Farid Belkahia and the Algerian Baya. Museums where Egyptian modern art can be seen are listed in where to see African art, and the region as a whole is introduced in North African art.