STOCKHOLM.- During spring and summer Moderna Museet presents an exhibition about Art et Liberté, a group of surrealist artists based in Cairo during the Second World War. The exhibition sheds new light on our understanding of modernism through the group’s artistic contributions to the Surrealist movement. It features more than 200 artworks and archival documents, on show for the first time in Sweden.

Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) is the first comprehensive museum exhibition about the Art et Liberté Group (jama’at al-fann wal hurriyyah/Art and Liberty), a surrealist collective of artists and writers working in Cairo. Founded on December 22, 1938 upon the publication of their manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, the Group provided a restless generation of young artists, intellectuals and political activists with a heterogeneous platform for cultural and political reform. At the dawn of the Second World War and during Egypt’s colonial rule by the British Empire, Art et Liberté was globally engaged in its defiance of Fascism, Nationalism and Colonialism. The Group played an active role within an international network of surrealist writers and artists. Through their own definition of Surrealism, they achieved a contemporary literary and pictorial language that was as much globally engaged as it was rooted in local artistic and political concerns.

Cairo was not on the frontlines during the Second World War but being under British Colonial rule the country was obligated to put its national resources along with its entire infrastructure at the disposal of the British. By 1941, an overwhelming 140,000 soldiers were stationed in Cairo alone. A profound engagement with the war, and the destruction that it caused, were leitmotifs across the whole spectrum of Art et Liberté’s work. Surrealist depictions of battlefields and images of destruction capture the state of anxiety fuelled by the war. Several Art et Liberté members who encountered personal loss and displacement, reflected on their experiences through haunting images of the Apocalypse.

In line with Surrealism’s rejection of the alignment of art with political propaganda, Art et Liberté rebelled against the conflation of art and national sentiment. They also rejected the notion of art for art’s sake whereby pictures had become a platform for the recycling of the same pictorial allegories and literary metaphors. In revolt against the bourgeoisie’s championing of Symbolism and Naturalism, the Group’s artists depicted the human body as fragmented in their paintings. They painted deformed, dismembered or distorted figures in order to poignantly illustrate the economic injustice that plagued their society. The motif of the fragmented, or emaciated body, became a site of social as well as artistic protest. The paintings gained in resonance given the simultaneous unfolding of World War II and the increased circulation of images of maimed soldiers and scenes of battles and destruction.

During the war years, due to severe poverty and the massive influx of soldiers, large amounts of women were driven into prostitution in Egypt. Art et Liberté exposed the suffering of prostitutes by depicting them as solitary figures within surrealist settings, some pierced with nails while monster-like trees ravaged others. Unlike those surrealist practices where the dominant male gaze portrayed the female body as a sexual object, the Group criticized the eroticization of women. Several Art et Liberté artists and their patrons were powerful women such as Amy Nimr, Marie Cavadia Riaz, and Lee Miller. Through vigorous salons that they hosted in their homes, they connected several Art et Liberté artists and contributed to the Group’s strong feminist stand.

One of the defining traits of Art et Liberté’s creative expression is the close correlation between their visual art and literature. Several of Georges Henein’s texts, for instance, were based on imagery derived from works by some of the Group painters such as Kamel El-Telmisany, Amy Nimr and Mayo. In turn, Henein’s surrealist poetry led to some of Art et Liberté’s most striking artworks by Inji Efflatoun and Ramses Younane. Between 1939 and 1940, the Group produced three innovative journals: Don Quichotte in French, al-Tatawwur in Arabic and the bilingual Bulletin Art et Liberté. From the early 1940s and into the mid-1950s they also ran two publishing houses, Les Éditions Masses and La Part du Sable, which disseminated writings of authors such as Albert Cossery, Edmond Jabès, Mounir Hafez, Yves Bonnefoy, Gherasim Luca and Artur Lundkvist.

The exhibition features works by Salim Al-Habschi, Hussein Youssef Amin, Albert Cossery, Inji Efflatoun, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, Hassan El-Telmisany, Kamel El-Telmisany, Georges Henein, Edmond Jabès, Anwar Kamel, Fouad Kamel, Ida Kar, Mahmoud Khalil, Mayo, Robert Medley, Lee Miller, Hamed Nada, Eric de Nemes, Amy Nimr, Maher Ra’ef, Samir Rafi’, Mahmoud Saïd, Laurent Marcel Salinas, Alexander Saroukhan, Étienne Sved, Van Leo, Ramses Younane and Kamal Youssef.

The exhibition was shown previously at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 in Düsseldorf and Tate Liverpool in Liverpool.