ABSTRACT
Modern oil on canvas arrived in the Islamic world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries via the conduits of European colonialism. Around the turn of the century, local artists began adopting French techniques, often blending them with references to local culture. However, European avant-garde forays into abstraction fell flat in a context where Islamic artistic heritage had been primarily abstract for centuries. This chapter examines the work of Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (1925–1966), an Egyptian painter active after World War II, who incorporated Muslim religious content through Surrealist approaches alongside a commitment to social justice for the lower classes. Placing El-Gazzar’s work alongside poignant examples from the region confirms that artists responded to local historical artistic traditions through materials of oil painting on canvas, yet they did not do so in a unified way. From Qur’anic tales to Arabic calligraphy to Sufi mysticism, artists carefully and purposefully incorporated references that spoke to the specificities of their social, cultural, and political contexts.
