From Horus to Aida - Art Nouveau sources in Egypt

UNESCO Courier, August, 1990 by Mona Zaalouk

From Horus to Aida

SUSPENDED in time between the medieval and the modern, a handful of Cairo buildings inspired by Art Nouveau principles have survived in a city in the throes of a building boom as monuments to the complex cultural relationship between Egypt and Europe in the nineteenth century.

Art Nouveau was an eclectic movement and its adepts sought new ideas and sources of inspiration outside Europe. In this they continued a trend that may be said to have started in the eighteenth century when the Baroque movement had shown an interest in Oriental motifs. In the nineteenth, an age of rapid political, technological and economic upheaval, new developments in popular journalism, the increasing use of photography and the telegraph and many other improvements in communication and transport hastened the propagation of ideas, forms and discoveries from country to country. A flow of travel books, guidebooks and magazines were produced, stimulating European interest in distant lands and peoples. Late in the century Art Nouveau was a mirror of this new receptivity and among the many influences that shaped it those of ancient Egyptian art and thought played a part, albeit subtle and indirect.

A key episode in the transmission of Egyptian cultural influence to Europe was Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1799. Over 120 scholars accompanied the expedition with instructions to study and catalogue Egyptian monuments. The results of their work, published in illustrted folio editions after 1809, laid the foundations for a European vogue for styles in architecture, arts and crafts inspired by ancient Egypt.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, echoes of ancient Egyptian art and mythology can be found in the work of European artists and thinkers seeking to re-establish spiritual values in a materialistic society. The fantastic dream worl of Symbolism, one of the many currents tht flowed into the stream of Art Nouveau, is in several ways reminiscent of Egyptian mural painting--in its interest in themes of death and the afterlife, in its fondness for the feminine.

A more direct Egyptian influence on Art Nouveau can be seen in many of the decorative objects and jewellery created in the 1900s by artists such as Gaillard, Gautrait, the Pier brothers and Georges Fouquet. Working with precious metals and stones, coloured glass and enamels, they used motifs from ancient Egyptian art such as the lotus flower, the scarab, the snake and the winged god Horus. In ancient Egypt too, art had permeated everyday life, an ambition shared by Art Nouveau artists.

While Europe was discovering Egypt, Egypt began to turn its eyes to Europe. As part of his drive to modernize the country, the visionary Egyptian leader Mohammed Ali (1769-1849) created scholarships and encouraged scholars, thinkers and researchers to go to France to study. By the second half of the nineteenth century many upper class Egyptians were looking to Europe as a source of fashion. The Cairo Opera House, built by Khedive Ismail for the first performance of Verdi's Egyptian-inspired opera Aida, staged to mark the opening of the Suez Canal, is a smaller replica of La Scala in Milan. Both in Europe and in Egypt it had become current to look to other cultures for inspiration.

When, around the beginning of this century, many European artists, craftsmen, architects and intellectuals emigrated to Egypt, they thus found no lack of patrons among well-to-do Egyptians who were eager to adopt European habits and models. One result of this encounter was that a new style of architecture inspired by Art Nouveau began to appear in Cairo and Alexandria, replacing the traditional style practised since the Fatimid era. Elaborate sculptural ornamentation was introduced into private homes and public buildings. Human figures or columns, or intertwined plants, replaced the more sober traditional architecture which also, however, had featured ornamented ceilings and was initially a source of inspiration for Art Nouveau.

Notable buildings of this period include the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria and Cairo's Cosmopolitan Hotel and Groppi tea-rooms, the latter built by a Swiss emigrant. Patient exploration would reveal other more anonymous examples of the period dwarfed beneath the tower blocks of modern Cairo.

MONA ZAALOUK, an Egyptian artist, has published many articles in Cairo Today, a magazine on art and literature.