Description
Book SynopsisAnalyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a "constellational modernism" for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.
Trade ReviewFrom the crucial final two decades of the nineteenth century, when Egyptian artists were responding to the ambience of colonialism, to the late 1960s, when they were part of the ferment around assertions of both artistic and national sovereignty, Modernism on the Nile takes the history of modern art outside long-outdated traditions of time and territory. A history that crosses postcolonial, global, and transnational lines, the book aims to shift these theoretical frameworks in order to tell a story of art that is solidly anchored in Egyptian histories even as it proposes a universal grappling with the experience of visualizing modernity. -- Talinn Grigor, author of Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio
This is an exciting time to be working on global modern art, and Alex Seggerman's insightful readings of Mahmoud Mukhtar, Mahmoud Said, and el-Gazzar bring the work of these seminal artists to a wider critical readership. Seggerman demonstrates that modern art in a major Arab region emerges from genealogies that are neither purely Arab nor exclusively Western but in a complex negotiation with these as well as with other historical and transnational formations. -- Iftikhar Dadi, author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia
