“Dirty Dark Loud and Hysteric”: The London and Paris Surrealist Exhibitions of the 1930s and the Exhibition Practices of the Art and Liberty Group in Cairo

Abstract

IntroductionSeveral studies on the international proliferations and appropriations of surrealism have taken notice of the short-lived yet significant Art and Liberty Group (Jama’at al-Fann Wal-Hurriyyah)1 (1939-1947). Established on January 19, 1939, in Cairo, it comprised a core group of intellectuals and artists who aligned themselves primarily with surrealism. While many of the artists who were affiliated with the Art and Liberty Group did not work in a surrealist style—at least not in what is conventionally defined as surrealist based on the movement’s aesthetic and political considerations within its originating European context—they seem to have been attracted to, or at least sympathetic towards, its leftist revolutionary project. Through the manifestos, bulletins, and journals that they published between 1938 and 1955,2 the formal and informal conferences and meetings they organized mainly between 1939 and 1947 in their headquarters, and the five main group exhibitions they staged from 1940 to 1945, the Group provided a generation of disillusioned Cairo-based Egyptian and non-Egyptian artists and writers with a platform of cultural and political reform. These artists implemented a number of creative and political projects that rejected what they perceived as an imported and stale salon-like artistic academicism endorsed by an oppressive colonial/monarchic regime and a conservative middle-class morality that fostered bourgeois art.Much of what has been written so far ab [...]