Museum of modern art · Egypt
Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, Cairo
The Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, also called the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, stands in the grounds of the Cairo Opera House on Gezira island. Its collection, begun in the 1920s, holds more than 13,000 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by artists who worked in Egypt, and it reopened in 2020 after a long closure and renovation.
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A collection of the 1920s
Modern art in Egypt grew up around the 1919 revolution, with the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar, the painter Mahmoud Saïd and the first students of the School of Fine Arts, founded in Cairo in 1908. The idea of a museum for their work dates from 1927, when, on the initiative of the collector Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil, an advisory committee recommended a museum of modern art. The collection moved several times in the following decades before it settled in 1983 in its present building on the former exhibition grounds of Gezira, where the Cairo Opera House was built a few years later.
What to see
With more than 13,000 works, the museum holds the largest collection of modern Egyptian art: paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, caricatures and ceramics by artists who lived and worked in Egypt over about a century. Only a selection is shown — according to one account of the reopening, its new director chose some 890 works.
- The founders: Mahmoud Saïd, whose large painting La Ville hangs in the main hall, the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar, and the painters Youssef Kamel and Mohamed Naghi.
- Later generations: the museum also holds works by artists who followed them, among them the sculptor Adam Henein, seen as Mokhtar's heir.
For the modernists of the mid-century, such as Inji Aflatoun, and for contemporary Egyptian artists, see their profiles and our list of Egyptian artists.
Reopened in 2020
After years of closure the museum was renovated, its displays redesigned, and it was reopened in November 2020 by the culture minister, Inas Abdel-Dayem. Check what is open before you go: the selection on view is a small part of the collection.
Visiting
The museum is in the Opera House grounds on Gezira island, in the Nile in central Cairo. The Mahmoud Mokhtar Museum, devoted to the sculptor and designed by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef, is also on Gezira, and Mahmoud Saïd's family villa in Alexandria is now a museum of his work. Check opening hours locally. For the region, see North Africa.
