Based on the recently discovered diaries of artist Tahia Halim, Diwan has just published its most recent volume, Tahia Halim: Al-Sira Al-Makhfia (Tahia Halim: A Hidden Narrative). Compiled by Nagla’ Riyad, a niece of Halim’s, the text of the book assembles several pages from the handwritten diaries, a collection of letters exchanged between Halim and her husband and mentor Hamed Abdallah, and a set of pages written by prominent Egyptian intellectual Louis Awad on Halim’s work. In addition to this first section, the book includes two subsequent sections devoted to photographs of Halim and reproductions of selected paintings.
Unlike the 1999 Al-Shorouk coffee-table book, written by Sobhi Al-Sharouni, with a foreword by Hussein Bicar, which focused strictly on the evolution of Halim’s style as a leading painter of the third generation of Egyptian art pioneers, Diwan’s volume, predictably, offers a much more personal account of the artist’s life, especially her turbulent marriage to Abdallah, whom she first met at an exhibition of his work.
Although only two years older, Abdallah was inevitably the most influential of all the mentors from whom Halim learned. Her artistic journey had started much earlier than their encounter. However, they met at a time when her command of the medium had already begun to mature profoundly.
The text of her diaries shows that his art was the source of her profound love for him, which overcame the unmistakable social differences between them and the undeniable fact that he was an unapologetic skirt-chaser. Despite the many troubling moments when Halim had to contend with the harsh reality of the economic hardship the couple endured, to the point of acute hunger at times, and the pain of knowing about and even witnessing Abdallah’s affairs, Halim continued her artistic pursuit, both in Egypt and later in France, until her talent and style fully matured. After endless affairs on Abdallah’s part, countless disappointments, and two miscarriages, the couple inevitably divorced, and Halim found an independent path both as an artist and as a woman, in the perfectly soothing company of her cats.
Both the Diwan and Al-Shorouk volumes offer similar reflections on Halim’s artistic path. The first phase extended from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, the second encompassed the 1950s, and the third—the most prominent—unfolded during the 1960s, when she consolidated the key traits of her art in terms of colour combinations and line, while incorporating the strong influences she acquired from her 1962 trip to Nubia ahead of the mass displacement of Nubian villages caused by the construction of the High Dam.
Born in 1919, the year of the Egyptian Revolution, Halim was destined to produce some of her most remarkable works, capturing pivotal moments in modern Egyptian history. Her painting The Demonstration depicts a protest against the British occupation. Later came the Cairo Fire, which captured the beginning of the end of the monarchy in Egypt. Equally remarkable are the paintings she dedicated to the construction of the High Dam and to Egypt’s wars of 1956 and 1966.
Throughout this phase of her career, as Al-Sharouni wrote in the Al-Shorouk book, Halim mastered the art of mythical realism, through which her work became fully liberated from strong European influences and firmly rooted in ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and folk traditions.
Today, Halim’s work is on display at the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and in several Egyptian embassies overseas. Other works by Halim are held in private collections, while some remain untraced.
As Riyad notes in the Diwan volume, the time has come to catalogue the work of this remarkable artist, who died in 2003.
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