Ramses Younan

About

Ramses Younan (1913–1966) was an Egyptian painter, writer, critic, and intellectual born into a middle-class Coptic family in Minieh (or Minya), Upper Egypt. He enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1929 but dropped out in 1933 due to differences with peers and instructors. After obtaining a teaching certificate, he worked as an art teacher in schools across Tantah, Port-Said, and Cairo from 1934. In 1935, he joined The Call for Art Group, advocating art in children's education. A key figure in Egyptian Surrealism, he co-signed the 1938 manifesto 'Long Live Degenerate Art!' and co-founded the Art and Liberty Group with Georges Henein in 1939, along with the surrealist journal La Part du Sable. He edited the leftist magazine Al-Majalla Al-Jadida from 1941, quitting teaching to focus on art and writing. In 1947, Younan moved to Paris, working in the Arabic Department of French National Radio until 1956, while participating in international surrealist exhibitions and signing manifestos like Rupture Inaugurale. He held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Nina Dausset in 1948 and published dialogues critiquing surrealist automatism. Returning to Cairo in 1956–1957 after political tensions, including exile from France over the Suez Crisis, he received a grant from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in 1960 to paint full-time. He shifted toward abstraction, designing pavilions for the São Paulo Biennial (1961) and Venice Biennale (1964), and continued as a critic until his death in Cairo in 1966. His work often featured tortured bodies critiquing repression and advocating women's rights, evolving into geological abstractions.

Surrealism transitioning to abstraction