Avinoam Shalem

Exceeding Realism: Utopian Modern Art on the Nile and Abdel Hadi Al-Gazzar's Surrealistic Drawings

The question of modernity in the radical sense of the word, in its wish for the rejection of the past, creation of a clear distinction between nature and science, and focus on individual freedom, seems to be of major interest to the Egyptian intellectual milieu in the late 1930s and the 1940s. One of the important artists of the time and a founding member of the newly created Egyptian surrealist group Art et Liberté, Ramsis Younan, set up with transparent language the whole staging platform, so to speak, for the modern debate in the postcolonial Egyptian context. In a 1956 article, he argues:

Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies: Introduction

In early 2012 German officials investigating violations of tax law discovered a trove of mainly nineteenthand early twentieth-century European paintings and drawings in the Munich apartment and Salzburg house of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of the prominent art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The elder Gurlitt had worked for the Nazis but also counted a number of artists despised by them among his friends. Since then, the story of the Gurlitt collection has made headlines worldwide. Beyond the bizarre obsession of the aging son, who lived with and for his artworks hidden from public view, the case raises fundamental questions about the role of art dealers during and after the Third Reich, the mechanics of a largely secretive and insufficiently documented market in looted art, the complicity of art historians and business associations, the shortcomings of postwar denazification, the failure of courts and governments to adjudicate claims, and the unwillingness of museums to determine the provenance not just of Cornelius Gurlitt’s holdings but of

Art, Space, Mobility in Early Ages of Globalization. A project, multiple dialogue, and research program

Abstract “Art, Space, Mobility in Early Ages of Globalization” aims to promote a new history of art that recognizes the complex and diverse connections forged between the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent from the fourth through the sixteenth centuries. Over the past four years, this project has brought together more than one hundred junior scholars from countries around the world, including Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Tunisia, Romania, Greece, Spain, Mongolia, Israel, India, Italy, the United States, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and China, as well as twenty distinguished senior scholars from different fields and academic contexts. Extending well beyond the project’s base in Florence, Italy, workshops were organized in northeastern Turkey, Germany, Croatia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, and summer schools were held in Italy, Tunisia, Spain, Morocco, and Uzbekistan (Fig. 1).

Passages. Meyer Schapiro's Early Travels and the Uniting Mediterranean Sea

In July 1926, while preparing material for his doctoral thesis on the Romanesque sculpture of the abbey of Moissac, Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) traveled along the shores of the Mediterranean. Departing from Paris to follow several itineraries over fifteen months, Schapiro, not yet twenty-two, explored medieval southern France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Traveling over land and sea, he traced the medieval pilgrims’ routes. In doing so, he was in fact crossing borders of his fellow art historians’ disciplines and regional-studies’ categories. “I feel as if space is different and the whole world more accessible”, Schapiro wrote to his fiancee. This openness suggests that Schapiro was able to unite, in this journey, the many histories of the Mediterranean - the space that came to serve as the foundation for his inquiry of medieval aesthetics. This essay considers Schapiro’s drawings from the eastern Mediterranean. Not only do they illustrate his particular method of processing...

The image of the Prophet between ideal and ideology : a scholarly investigation

By crossing disciplinary boundaries in the field of the humanities, this volume aims to elucidate Muhammads visualization in the West vis-a-vis his image in Islam. It does so not by relegating materials to geographical and/or linguistic spheres or by separating texts from images. Rather, it seeks to place various articles in thematic and theoretical conversation so as to explore more broadly how the Prophet has been constructed, visualized, narrated, encountered, revised, adapted, and adopted in multiple cultural traditions, in European and American traditions and in the world of Islam from the medieval era until the modern period.

Man's Conquest of Nature: Al-Gazzar, Sartre, and Nasser's Great Aswan Dam

This article discusses a painting of the Great Dam of Aswan made by Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar in 1964 and immediately crowned as the iconic image of Egypt in the heroic age of the Nasser regime. The painting clearly adopts the aesthetic language of surrealism, illustrating a particular zeitgeist in the Egyptian artistic milieu and mirroring the individual and genuine artistic response of al-Gazzar to the utopian, almost mythical status given to surrealism in Egypt in the first half of the last century. This work of art is dealt with here as a reflection of the changing social and political context in Egypt in the 1950s and the early 1960s under the governor-ship of the charismatic ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, and as influenced by the global Cold War era.