Mahmoud Said Bey was an Alexandrian judge and modern painter. Though Mahmoud Said never worked as a professional artist, his paintings of the cosmopolitan community of his northern port city are central to the history of modern art in Egypt.
Background
Mr. Said was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on April 8, 1897, to a prominent landowning family. His father, Mohammed Said Pasha, served as prime minister of Egypt from 1910 to 1914, and again briefly in 1919. His niece Safinaz Zulficar (1921 - 1988) became Queen Farida of Egypt, reigning from 1938 until 1948. His family lived in a luxurious villa (which today houses the Mahmoud Said Museum) in the affluent Gianaclis neighborhood.
Education
Mahmoud Said became interested in art in his teens and studied with a local Italian artist, Amelia Casonato da Forno, from whom he learned to paint in an impressionist style. He also studied with another Italian artist, Arturo Zanieri, between 1915 and 1918.
Mr. Said's very early works portray simple images of the countryside and his friends and family in a painterly style with heavy, visible brushstrokes. He graduated from the Cairo School of Law in 1918, and in 1920 travelled to Paris, studying drawing at the private Académie Julian. Unlike other Egyptian ar-ruwwād (pioneer) artists, such as Mahmoud Mokhtar and Ragheb Ayad, who traveled to Europe on official scholarships, Said attended classes at his own expense, embodying the role of elite amateur artist.
Career
Upon returning to Alexandria, Mr. Said became a lawyer at the Tribunaux Mixtes (Mixed Courts) in 1922, a vanguard institution of international law that provided a single legal system for the many different nationalities inhabiting the cosmopolitan city. He was first a judge in Mansourah in 1927 and in Alexandria in 1937. In addition to landscapes and nudes, he painted portraits of his colleagues. He adopted a painterly style which he would maintain throughout his career. His style is distinguished by simplified, almost decorative compositions in rich colors depicting the people and places of an elite Alexandrian community as well as more "traditional" Egyptians in front of imagined landscapes.
Mr. Saïd’s first solo show was organised by the Atelier d’Alexandrie in 1942, and his first major retrospective exhibition was held at the Gezira Centre for Modern Art in 1951. On the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the 1952 revolution, another retrospective exhibition of Saïd’s works took place at the Museum of Fine Arts of Alexandria, comprising 120 paintings. A third comprehensive exhibition would be organised in the same premises a few months after the artist’s death, in 1964.
Though Mahmoud Said painted primarily for his own edification, the pubic grew to appreciate his work in his later years. Mr. Said became an increasingly respected member of the Egyptian art community, especially after he retired from his legal career in 1949. In the later 1950s and 1960s, he held many retrospectives and served on organizing committees for museums and exhibitions, including the Biennale de la Méditerranée of 1955, 1959, and 1961. Mahmoud Said served as member of the Jury Committee of both the third Alexandria Biennial (1959 - 1960) and the fourth (1961 - 1962).
Mahmoud Said passed away at the family home in Gianaclis in Alexandria on 8 April 1964, having suffered a fatal asthma attack on his 67th birthday. The next day, a grand funeral was held, with a procession headed by the students and professors of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria.
Views
Quotations:
" I believe great art has tremendous power to uplift you and though it may sound like an exaggeration, also to alleviate human suffering."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Didier-Hess: "Mahmoud Said is so special because he did not have one specific style or recognisable subject matter. It is his use of colour that can characterise him but he doesn’t belong to any group, -ism or trend because he influenced himself so much from many different sources."