I came to know Sabry Ragheb at the
beginning of the seventies when he already enjoyed a considerable
reputation as an artist. It is from that time that our friendship
dates, and it continued uninterrupted over the years. He was both a
friend and a mentor, a man whose integrity, modesty and warmth was
never compromised by his celebrity or by the loneliness that must
inevitably accompany the single-minded pursuit of such excellence. He
would remain always dedicated to the near perfect realisation of
beauty, light and love.
I spent many hours sitting on a low
chair as Sabry Ragheb painted, following the movement of his hands as
they gave life to the pigments they manipulated, fascinated by his
manner of holding the brush, gripping it at its very tip, a technique
that appeared at once fastidious and, as another friend once noted,
aristocratic.
Many years have passed since those
long sessions, enveloped by smoke, when all my senses would be in
concentrated focus on the swift movements of the brush, between
palette and canvas. I would ask, naively, what need this mad hurry,
this -- as it appeared to me at the time -- unseemly haste. And he
would reply, with characteristic modesty, that he did not know. Even
more naively, I would continue. "When," I asked, "did
he recognise the moment when it was right to sign the canvas?"
Many times I watched the brush, as it mixed the required colour and
then unhesitatingly select the place where his name would be
inscribed, becoming an essential component in the overall design.
"There is a moment," he would reply, "when I recognise
that all I have inside has materialised on the canvas and there is
nothing more for me to add."
I do not know if Sabry Ragheb ever
realised just how much I was indebted to him, both as a friend and
mentor. Certainly I never told him how much, nor is that debt
quantifiable in those kind of calculations that suffice for the
crudely material. The times I spent in his studio in Heliopolis, which
remained always familiar, always the same, were indeed precious. for
in that studio quotidian concerns would slide away, leaving the
visitor ample room to dwell on things more sublime.
At the opening of each of his
exhibitions I would joke with Sabry Ragheb that no matter how many
exhibitions he held my home would remain, always, a permanent
exhibition. Now that the day that I long feared has arrived, I pace
between the rooms of my small home, seeking shelter from the pain of
his loss in the warmth of the colours of his paintings that hang even
in every corner.
We tried to offer as much love as
Sabry Ragheb himself offered. Perhaps, though, in some sense, we were
unable to give all that his noble humanity, so perfectly embodied in
his art, deserved. Fate is capricious and the fate that dogs the
artist more capricious than most. Now the circle is closed, will he at
last begin to receive the attention his life's work merits?
A final word, to both a friend and a
master, something I would have hoped to have said personally but
which, sadly, I find myself writing: We have always felt -- my wife
and daughter no less than myself -- that you were an integral part of
our home and family, a fourth member that completed the whole.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Clockwise
from top: Ragheb in his studio; yellow roses, among the
artist's favourite flowers; literary pioneer Tawfiq Al-Hakim
and Yvonne,
Ragheb's wife and
model
>>>
|
By Makram Henein
At 1pm, on Saturday
22 July, after a long and painful illness, Sabry Ragheb's weak heart
stopped, the spirit finally departing from the body of one of
Egypt's most accomplished artists. It left behind an empty frame
looking for shapes and colours to fill it, a bunch of roses searching
for some new admirer.
Ragheb's story is equally one of
pleasure and of pain -- the pain arising from a talent that
transformed his life into an instrument for his art, the pleasure
incumbent upon that art being a life-long, and often triumphant, love
story, a vital solvent in which Ragheb was fully dissolved. And
between the pain and the pleasure, the glittering paintings that in
his last days he was prevented from producing by his doctors, who
deemed the activity risky and damaging to the ailing heart, there were
only his wife and model, Yvonne, and his kind daughter; nobody else in
his life.
I could hardly have known that my long
conversation with him, in which he opened up his memory bank, juggling
both ideas and feelings, would be Ragheb's last.
In his flat-studio in Roxy he
invariably came out to meet the visitor with a sympathetic look on his
face, not severing eye-contact until his visitor had turned to the
portraits, the landscapes and the still-lifes that overcrowded the
place, always in classically fashioned frames, denoting a historical
weight.
On my last visit he lit his pipe,
against the protestations of his doctors. "It has become part of
my life, how can they stop me from smoking it. At least I'm
trying." He hesitated as he blew out a cloud of smoke. "A
life-long companionship -- my wife, my daughter, the paintings, the
colours and the pipe," he insisted. "If art colleges taught
only modern schools of painting, I wouldn't have applied to them in
the first place. I love the human being's presence in art -- that has
been completely indispensable to me."
Ragheb sits back, submitting to
reminiscence.
"André Lut used to lecture us in
Rome, where I studied. We most certainly had our debates. After six
months he said to me, 'Sabry, you have a classic heart, you must
continue as you are rather than trying to alter your style.' And
indeed it made sense. If it was a four-legged chair, I couldn't
possibly paint it with five legs. Of course, as an artist I could
change the position of the chair as I liked, moving any one straight
line if it bothered me. By the way, I particularly liked Mancini,
Morelli and all of Italy's great artists. Often, after that episode, I
would visit Italy simply to benefit from them."
"I look at shapes -- faces, a
rose, a length of fabric. And it is out of the feeling that I have for
these things that art emerges. Sincere art has its own logic. To
mention one example: I remember that we were working on the subject of
the café with Lut, who after painting his picture, and attaching a 50
centime bank note to the canvas, asked me democratically what I
thought of it. I asked him about the bank note and he explained that
it referred to the cost of the drinks at the café. And I pointed out
that he had painted the café in a modern style while the bank note
remained classic and that there was a consequent contradiction --
something he hadn't consciously reckoned on while painting. But
nonetheless, in my view, art remains connected with the audience's
understanding of it, and the artist cannot live inside his audience if
he does not speak to it in a language it can understand."
When I managed to steer the
conversation towards portraiture, Ragheb acknowledged that his
fascination with portraits lay behind his adopting an impressionist
technique and a colour scheme characterised by fantasy, remembering
that even in childhood, when he still couldn't paint eyes, he painted
eyeless faces. He identified Ahmed Sabry as a principal influence in
this department. Enrolling in the School of Arts in 1937, Ragheb
remained in close contact with the painter for 15 years, until he
finally graduated in 1952. "I lost ten years due to my
fascination with freedom and my travels," he confided. What was
the story behind the delay?
He remembered the rivalry between Sabry
and Salah Kamel -- with whose son, Youssef, he was unwittingly in
competition, due to Sabry's desire to prove Youssef inadequate. He
remembers an unkind comment he made about the work of Sahab Almaz, the
head of the Egyptian Art Academy in Rome, unfortunately to his face,
following which Ragheb was transferred to another school, living a
Bohemian life and suffering many problems.
"When I returned to the Academy in
Rome in 1948, the great artist Mohamed Nagui welcomed me and I joined
the third-year class."
It was, ironically, Youssef Kamel who
summoned him back to the School of Arts in 1949, but Sabry insisted on
him taking an exam. Yet though the verdict of this assessment was
"excellent," Kamel used his influence to prevent Ragheb from
joining the fourth-year class, placing him in third year instead. And
so it continued.
"I forgive them all, and if I
mention this now -- the power struggles of which I was the unwitting
victim -- it is only for posterity."
He continued: "How is it possible
that enrollment in the arts college be on the basis of a percentage,
and how can people study art without models? It is just like taking
anatomy out of the medical curriculum -- a very strange thing."
The life class, he insisted, is an
indispensable stimulant. In 1959 he remembers an exhibition of 117
paintings, all of which were depictions of his wife. "No one
painting was like another, though," the model being, for him,
simply an initial stimulant. Although he likes some abstract art,
collage and installations do not appeal to him much because they lack
human and spiritual dimensions. He remained, always, incorrigibly
figurative.
"When I create my colours on the
canvas, the spirituality in which Egypt is immersed is always present
inside me, an essential aspect of my aesthetic sensibility." Even
in landscape and still-life such spirituality invests the painting --
both the end result and the act -- with a palpably human dimension.
And the criticism directed at his work -- it is neither modern nor
close to the dynamics of social and cultural reality -- he accepted
warmly, the way one would accept censure from the beloved. "I
receive criticism with love, because that is how I paint and think
about painting," he said, our conversation drawing to a close.
photos
