Tahia Halim (1919-2003) is an Egyptian artist known for her expressionistic paintings of Sudan and Egypt. Her folkloric images of Egypt depict boats on the Nile, Sudanese women, and domestic life. Deeply influenced by ancient Egyptian aesthetics, Halim’s work merges expressionistic paint handling with her unique cultural identity. She was born on 9 September 1919 in Donkola, Sudan, where her father was posted through his professional engagement with the Palace. Her primary education in music, French and painting took place inside the Royal Palace in Cairo, where she was raised, as her father was the military laureate of King Fouad I of Egypt.

Between 1939-1941, Halim took drawing lessons at the atelier of the Syrian painter Youssef Trabulsi.  In 1941-1943, she moved to the atelier of Elico Jerome, a Greek artist residing in Cairo, before joining the studio of Hamed Abdallah. Eventually, Halim and Abdallah were married in 1945. They were divorced in 1946 but remarried in 1949, moving to Paris, where Halim pursued formal studies at the Académie Julian between 1949 and 1951.

In 1960, she was one of the artists to be awarded a government stipend to dedicate themselves to art production. That year she won the gold medal at the Salon du Caire.

In 1962, she joined a collective trip to Nubia, initiated by then Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha, to document life as it would never be again. The trip was a turning point in the life of the artist, as from then on, her devotion to Nubia would take over the majority of her paintings.

Her career spans four decades during which she came to be known as the pioneer of folk impressionism. A stylistically and ideologically independent artist, Halim makes up one third of the Golden Triangle of Egyptian woman artists with Inji Efflatoun and Gazbia Sirry. Until 1945, she produced works of an academic nature. From 1945 to 1949, she concentrated on the crowds of Egypt, and was highly influenced by her elder peer, the Egyptian painter Marguerite Nakhla. After her return from Paris, Halim began to tackle her Egyptian daily life, a phase that climaxed in the Nubian phase. Her signature style can be seen in the painting Hanan (Tenderness), exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1958, when she became the first female to win the Guggenheim Prize for it. The Guggenheim Museum later purchased the painting.

Following the Tripartite Aggression of 1956, Halim vowed to abandon any stylistic connotation deriving from the West. Instead, she created her own independent movement of legends and myths based on popular daily rituals as she simplified lines, suppressed the third dimension, stressed expressionism over realism, and used bold colours. Influenced by ancient Egyptian temple wall drawings and Coptic art, and characterized by a simple and poetic style, she established herself as one of the pioneers of the Modern Expressive Movement.

Halim received five state awards: the Golden Award from the Cairo Salon in 1960; the Ali Labib Gabr Prize in 1960; the State Encouragement Prize in 1968; the Medal of Arts and Sciences of the First Degree in 1968 and the Arts Award from the Higher Institute of Culture in 1995. She also took part in the Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1956, 1960 and 1970.

Halim passed away in 2003 in Cairo.

Her paintings are on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

*A version of this article appears in print in the  26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly