Egypt’s Art and Liberty Group & the Creation of Egypt Surrealism

“Long Live Degenerate Art” was the rallying cry used by a group of artists, poets, writers who came together in Cairo and Alexandria, founding a native Egyptian artistic community extolling a new wave of artistic creation which had been exciting Europe- Surrealism. In 1939, as Hitler and Mussolini were ravaging Europe with their militaristic fascism, and along with it, erasing centuries of Jewish and Black art, culture, music and writing from the continent’s consciousness, ‘Art and Liberty’ was founded in Egypt.

“The members of the Art and Liberty group were mostly members of the old aristocratic Egyptian families, who had taken to Leftist thinking by way of their education in Egypt’s French schools,” Sayed Mahmoud, a researcher on Egypt’s Surrealist Movement, tells CairoScene.

Reflecting an unorthodox model of creating artistic works, uninfluenced by the artistic establishment, Surrealism focused on bringing to the fore an automatic creation, rather than the thought-out approach that had been the method used by European artistic movements for centuries. It rejected Soviet institutional art as well as so-called continental ‘high-art’, and was inspired by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and French poet Andre Breton’s call for the creation of an independent revolutionary art. “This Movement aspired to express an absurdity in living… Almost showing a state of being drunk, a floating between reality and dreams.”

Amongst the biggest names in Egypt’s cultural milieu were attracted to the group, an eclectic mix of Muslims, Christians, Jews and members of the numerous minority nationalities resident in Egypt at the time, including painters Angelo de Riz, Adham and Seif Wanly and Inji Aflatoun, writers Ramses Younan and Albert Cossery and photographer Ida Kar. Their manifesto, which famously proclaimed “Long Live Degenerate Art” was a response to an exhibition held by the Nazi regime in Munich, in which Jewish, leftist and other “undesirable” artworks were exhibited as an example of the styles of art which were to be eradicated in the new fascist world order.

The commitment of a group of creatives in Egypt, so far away from the happenings in Europe, was curious at the time; a reflection of the cosmopolitanism of the Egyptian cultured classes, and perhaps a nod to the high amount of Jews and other emigres in Egyptian society, whose very essence and identities were being threatened by the global fascination with Hitler’s ideas.