Mahmud Mukhtar: The Prophet and the Professional
Abstract
Mahmud Mukhtar (1891-1934) is widely considered to be the father of modern Egyptian sculpture, and the country’s first internationally recognised artist. Throughout his short career, and following his untimely death, the sculptor is lauded as both a prophet and a professional. In my talk, I map the concurrent and seemingly contradictory representations and expectations of the modern Egyptian artist as they appear in Mukhtar’s biographical and autobiographical material. Through a re-examination of Mukhtar’s biography, I seek to denaturalize the social and cultural construction of the artist prevalent in existent scholarship on Egyptian art history. While traditional western art history posits the modern artist—in contrast to his pre-modern forefather—as a rebel, a non-conformist opposed to bourgeois conventions, in pursuit of his art on the fringes of society, the example of Mukhtar offers a counter model, by demonstrating how the modern Egyptian artist occupied a different position, one that placed him at the centre of a national struggle shaped by an emergent class of educated professionals. Mukhtar and his peers were not only in pursuit of an individual vision, but also a collective, national one and their success depended on their ability to do both. The case study of Mukhtar therefore brings into sharp relief the simultaneously expansive and restrictive understanding of the Egyptian artist that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Bio
Dina A. Ramadan is assistant professor of Arabic and director of Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and was a EUME postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien from 2013-14. She has contributed to Art Journal, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Education of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt (Edinburgh University Press). A senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, she guest edited the Spring 2010 themed issue on the visual arts. She has been invited to lecture on the cultural politics of the Arab world at a number of museums and academic institutions including the New Museum, the Tate Britain and Modern, SOAS University of London, European University Institute, and the American Research Center in Egypt and is a founding member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA).