#saroukhan

On Air

In an interview with Monocle 24 Radio, I examine the rich history and ongoing audacity of Arab comics. It’s about twenty minutes into the program:

And for Arabic speakers, you can listen to my recent interview with BBC Xtra here.

Between Fine and Comic Art

Egyptian caricaturist Saroukhan graces the cover of IJOCA, along with a reprint of my Le Monde Diplomatque essay “On the Arab Page.” 

From that piece:

Many pivotal illustrators were fine artists too, like the painter Husein Bicar (1913-2002), who founded the popular Egyptian children’s magazine Sindibad in 1952. The One Thousand and One Nights and European folktales informed the aesthetic of proto-comics. Sindibad, which was reprinted in the 1990s, is still sold at old-fashioned bookshops. The classically trained Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977) cartooned in top newspapers and magazines from the 1930s, where he drew the familiar pashas and recurring characters (some fictional, like Egypt’s everyman Al-Masri Effendi), loaded with symbolic meanings. Saroukhan skewered Egyptian leaders and statesman from the Arab world. His cartoon The Founding of the Arab League is more sequential than contemporary cartoons. (In his single-frame works, he anticipates the sequential narratives of later generations. Each illustration features whole worlds of politics, with casts of significant characters, useful to students of modern Egyptian history and eye-candy for art critics.)

Adham Wanly (1908-59), who with his brother Seif was closely associated with the emergence of modern art in Egypt, was better known for his art. He and Seif painted modernity: musicians, nudes, writers, the circus and ballet and other colourful milieus. The Egyptian ministry of culture has hundreds of his ink drawings in storage but only a few on display. The line that separates Adham’s caricature and his paintings is narrow: both contain exaggeration, humour and movement. His relationship to illustrations is straightforward: he started out as a newspaperman, drawing cartoons for Rose El-Yusuf, a mass-circulation weekly that launched in 1925 and continues to be published to this day, often with a caricature on the cover.

Saroukhan’s Political Circus

What is so remarkable about the artist Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977) is his versatility. A half-century later, his vast portfolio continues to impress.

Saroukhan drew hundreds of magazine covers, paintings, sketches, cartoons, and caricatures. He poked fun at politics, of course, but also the tenants of fine art, the intricacies of governance and international policy, the boundaries of class, and much more. Among his inventions: Al-Masri Effendi, Egypt’s everyman, the archetype of the average joe who has been adopted and adapted by nearly every cartoonist since.

Each of the illustrations above feature whole worlds of politics, filled with casts of significant characters, fodder for students of modern Egyptian history and eye-candy for art critics and casual observers alike.

Saroukhan by Saroukhan, 1976. For a biography of the cartoonist, see this piece in Community Times.

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On Sunday, Cairo’s Al-Masar Gallery’s Art Lounge will host an exhibition of Saroukhan’s works entitled “The Political Comedy.”

Like a black comedy, however, scandal clouds Al-Masar: Egyptian painter and cartoonist George Bahgoury has accused gallery owner Waleed Abdulkhalek of larceny, a charge that the gallery fervently denies.