Authentic, original , painting by Egyptian pioneer , artist Inji Efflatoun, 1924_1984 , pastil or oil on wooden board , the painted board measurs about 19 cm by 27 cm , then framed , out side frame measures about is 26 cm by 34 cm انجي افلاطون
Inji Aflatoun (Egyptian painter) 1924 - 1989
aka Inji Eflatoun, Inji Efflatoun
Untitled, 1942
Inji Efflatoun was born in an aristocratic family and amidst an intellectually stimulating and creative circle. Her mother divorced her husband after giving birth to two daughters, Gulberie and Inji, and was determined to support her family on her own. She became the first Egyptian woman designer and was hired to be the stylist of the royal family and of high-ranked aristocrats.
After a miserable period spent in boarding school in a nun's convent, Inji rebelled against this traditional and strict education, and convinced her mother to send her to the Lycée Français to pursue her secondary school studies. When she was just fifteen years old, the great master Mahmoud Saïd, who was already well established in 1939 despite being a full-time judge at the Mixed Courts, visited Inji's family. The young girl's mother showed Saïd the drawings Inji had produced at the time to illustrate poems written by her sister Gulberie. Impressed by her draughtswoman skills, Saïd encouraged Inji to pursue studying art and she soon became the student of the Art and Freedom Society pioneer, Kamel El-Telmissany. He was an art professor back then and he played a pivotal role in encouraging Inji to develop her artistic creativity. She exhibited her works alongside Ramsès Younan, Telmissany, Fouad Kamel, at the Art and Liberty Society show of 1942, the same year she painted this outstanding Surrealist landscape.
The 1940s were Inji's Surrealist period, characterized by these fantastical bare landscapes scattered with ribbon-like trees and invasive roots, swaying in the desert. From 1942 and 1952, Ragheb Ayad, from the elder generation of Cairene artists, was her professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cairo; some of her fellow students included artists Margot Veillon and Hamed Abdallah. After her first solo show in Cairo in 1952, she developed a growing interest towards her country's social issues and politics. Despite her family's efforts in convincing her to pursue her artistic studies in France, she adamantly refused, explaining the reason why in her memories: 'it was impossible for me to leave Egypt and go to the countries of the foreigners when I was passing by a hard period of Egyptianizing myself, all my life I talked in French. Eighteen years have slipped from my life in this secluded society even my native language I could not talk it to the extent that when I began really frequenting the people of my country I couldn't communicate with them in their language. What a misery I felt un-rooted'.
Inji soon became acquainted with Egypt's left wing in politics, although the communist party in Egypt was banned. She fell in love with a fellow compatriot whom she married but who tragically died only three years later from brain hemorrhage. She turned towards politics as a refuge for her sadness, only to get arrested in 1959 and jailed for four years in several different women prisons. Art critics have argued that the works Inji produced during her time in jail proved to be some her finest examples. The choice of colour, the play on light and shadow, the expressions on the finely sketched faces and the permanent bars of the prison cells all contribute to the work's depth and richness of feeling, that overwhelm the viewer. Dating from the 1940s and 1950s, the collection of six pen and India ink drawings presented by Christie's this season is an exceptional example in showcasing Inji's talents to communicate strong emotions through the power of line and light in a drawing.
After Inji's realease from jail, her works were exhibited in major shows across the globe, in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Belgrade, India, USA and she had even presented two works alongside Mahmoud Saïd at the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 1953-1954.
We thank Mona Saïd and Sherwet Shafei for their help in providing the above information.
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Aflatoun was born in Cairo in 1924 into a traditional Muslim family she described as "semi-feudal and bourgeois", her father was an entomologist and a landowner, and her mother was a French-trained dress-designer who served in the Egyptian Red Crescent Society women's committee. She discovered Marxism at the Lycée Français du Caire . It was her private art tutor, Kamel al-Timisani, who introduced her to the life and the struggles of the Egyptian peasants. In 1942, she joined Iskra, a Communist youth party. After graduating from the Fuad I University in Cairo, she was, with Latifa al-Zayyat, a founding member in 1945 of the Rabitat Fatayat at jami'a wa al ma' ahid (League of University and Institutes' Young Women). The same year she represented the League at the first conference of Women's International Democratic Federation in Paris. She wrote Thamanun milyun imraa ma'ana (Eighty Million Women with Us) in 1948 and Nahnu al-nisa al-misriyyat (We Egyptian Women) in 1949. These popular political pamphlets linked class and gender oppression, connecting both to imperialist oppression. In 1949, she became a founding member of the First Congress of the First Peace Council of Egypt. She joined Harakat ansar al salam (Movement of the Friends of Peace) in 1950. She was arrested and secretly imprisoned during Nasser's roundup of communists in 1959. After her release in 1963, Egypt's Communist party having been dissolved, she devoted most of her time to painting. She later declared: "Nasser, although he put me in prison, was a good patriot."
During school, Aflatoun liked to paint and her parents encouraged her. Her private art tutor, Kamel al-Timisani, a leader in an Egyptian Surrealist collective called the Art and Freedom Group, introduced her to surrealist and cubist aesthetics. Her paintings of that period are influenced by surrealism. She later recalled that people were astonished by her paintings and wondered "why a girl from a rich family was so tormented". She stopped painting from 1946 to 1948, considering that what she was painting no longer corresponded to her feelings. Her interest was later renewed after visiting Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases. During these trips, she had the opportunity to "penetrate the houses and sketch men and women at work". She studied for a year with the Egyptian-born Swiss artist Margo Veillon. During this period, she made individual exhibits in Cairo and Alexandria and showed at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1956. In 1956 she became friend with and was later influenced by the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. She was able to continue painting during her imprisonment. Her early prison paintings are portraits, while the later are landscapes. In the years after her liberation, she exhibited in Rome and Paris in 1967, Dresden, East Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow in 1970, Sofia in 1974, Prague in 1975, New Delhi in 1979. Her paintings are filled with "lively brushstrokes of intense color" reminding some observers of Van Gogh or Bonnard. Her art of later years is characterised by an increasing use of large white spaces around her forms. A collection of her works is displayed at the Amir Taz Palace in Cairo.