OUM KALTHOUM
signed Bahgoury in Arabic lower left
oil on canvas
118 x 96cm; 46 1/2 x 37 3/4in
145 x 123.5cm; 57 x 48 3/4in (framed)

Exhibited
Cairo, Picasso East Gallery, Bahgoury and Caricature Artists, 8-30 October 2023

“No one can describe the extent of my pride when I went to Paris, stood in the middle of Europe, and raised my voice in the name of Egypt.” - Oum Kalthoum

Egyptian French artist George Bahgoury’s portrait of Oum Kalthoum strikes a masterful balance between subject and identity with the transcendental qualities of art and music. Bahgoury began his artistic career as a political cartoonist in 1953 and his work gained popularity when published in Sabah Al Khair and Rose El Youssef. After studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Zamalek in 1955, where he was taught by Hussein Bikar, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris in 1970, he turned to painting full-time rather than commercial cartoons. However, his roots in caricature portraiture and unfounded ability to render the essential character of his sitters through powerful exaggeration continued to influence his figural painting throughout his artistic career.

Based on iconic photographs of the singer, Bahgoury’s portrait sculpts Kalthoum with sinuous curves, bold colour and sharp edges to create a painting which suspends her in a perpetual moment in time. Known by her contemporaries as the ‘star of the east’, she is renowned as one of the greatest icons of 20th Century Egyptian classical music. Born at the turn of the 20th century in the Tamay El Zahayra village she began performing with her Imam father, where she would wear a boy’s coat and black Bedouin headdress to protect her identity as a woman performing religious songs was considered taboo. Despite this, she was discovered and invited to Cairo in the 1920s by oudist Zakariyya Ahmad to pursue her musical career where she quickly gained fame and notoriety in the city’s artistic circles for her unique improvisational style and powerful performances often lasting five hours. She employed a traditional style of classical Arabic singing consisting of repeated lines embellished with subtle changes in emotive emphasis and intensity to captivate her audiences and elicit a state of euphoria known as tarab. From 1934, Kalthoum broadcasted a live concert on the first Thursday of each month which attracted listeners almost religiously across the Middle East for almost forty years. Despite her music being temporarily banned after the revolution of 1952 due to its association with the old regime, her popularity transcended the politics of the age to represent the possibilities of artistic unity across the Pan-Arab world.

Bahgoury emphasises Kalthoum's closed eyes and stretched mouth to elicit the monumental range of her vocal performances which, along with the rich blues and reds, captures the emotional charge that moved her audiences to tarab. Her prominent jewellery embraces her femininity, reminding the audience of her freedom to express herself away from the male disguise she wore to protect herself during the performances with her father in her youth. Through exaggerating her features using a whimsical caricatural mode of expression, Bahgoury balances a refinement of the individual appearance of the sitter with the temperament of her soul, one which was – and continues to be – shared and enjoyed by millions through her music.