NOW AND TEN

more than 10,000 victims hit by more than 320
shells per day. Like many Muslims around the
world, Omar El-Nagdi deeply felt the persecution
of the Bosnian Muslims. Their ongoing massacres
by Bosnian Serbs, starting in 1992, profoundly
afected the Egyptian artist and urged him to
react to these monstrosities by spontaneously
expressing himself in his monumental composition
of Sarajevo.
Omar El-Nagdi in Pressagny L’Orgueilleux, France,
painting the fnal touches on Sarajevo, 1992. Courtesy
H.E. Francine Henrich.
Christie’s is honoured to have been entrusted
with the sale of Egyptian artist Omar El-Nagdi’s
museum-masterpiece, Sarajevo, from the
prestigious collection of Her Excellency
Ambassador Francine Henrich. The Sarajevo
triptych is undeniably the most important and
the most ambitious work produced by El-Nagdi
in terms of complexity, monumentality, expression
and subject matter. Together with Iraqi artist Dia
Al-Azzawi’s mural-size painting Sabra and Shatila
Massacres of 1982-1983, that was acquired by
the Tate Modern, London, in 2012, El-Nagdi’s
Sarajevo is without doubt one of the most poignant
depiction of the horrors of war ever painted by
an Arab artist since 1937, when Pablo Picasso
realised his iconic piece Guernica.
Shortly after it was completed in 1992, Sarajevo
was exhibited at the artist’s one-man show
organised at Al-Ahram Gallery, Cairo, the opening
of which was attended by Egyptian Prime Minister
Atef Sidky; Egypt’s Minister of Culture at the time,
Farouk Hosny; Omar Abdel Akher, Cairo’ Governor;
Omar El-Nagdi and Giorgio de Chirico in Rome, 1960.
Courtesy H.E. Francine Henrich.
Sarajevo, exhibited at Al-Ahram Gallery, Cairo in 1992.
Courtesy H.E. Francine Henrich.
Youssef Affy, Giza’s Governor and Ibrahim Nafaa,
Chief Executive President of Al-Ahram. This event
was flmed and reported by CNN and several
European channels before the exhibition travelled
to London.
Having started his artistic education at the Faculty
of Fine Arts of Cairo under the tutorship of Ahmed
Sabry (1889-1955), Omar El-Nagdi pursued his
training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice
in 1959, where he studied frescoes and mosaics.
Travelling between Venice and Rome in 1959-
1960, Nagdi found himself at the heart of the
avant-garde artistic, musical and intellectual
circles of these enchanting cities, with Italian
‘metaphysical’ painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-
1978) as one of his most infuential mentors.
Before even turning 30, Nagdi was already praised
as an established artist by the contemporary
Italian, Greek and English press, earning him
the designation of the ‘Egyptian Picasso’. His
fruitful encounter with the Roman and Venetian
art scenes led him to participate to several group
shows alongside 25 international artists, which
included Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Salvador
Dalí (1904-1989) in Sardinia (Italy) and Saragossa
(Spain) in 1961.
As indicated in the triptych’s title, the subject
matter refers to the atrocious tragedies of war
that ravaged Sarajevo during the Serbo-Croatian-
Bosnian confict between 1990 and 1994 and
particularly to the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim
Bosniak and Croat population by Bosniak Serbs,
mainly taking place in Eastern Bosnia. The Bosnian
Institute in the UK recorded the destruction of
almost 300 Bosniak villages by Serb forces around
Srebrenica during the frst three months of the
war, between April and June 1992. This led to the
displacement of more than 70,000 Bosniaks and
the massacre of around 3,200 Muslim Bosnians
in that short period of time. This turned out to
be only a prelude to the dramatic Srebrenica
genocide of July 1995, during which more than
8,000 Bosniak men and boys were massacred
by the Bosnian Serb Army led by General Ratko
Mladic. Meanwhile, Sarajevo was under siege
from 5th April 1992 until 29th February 1996, the
longest siege to date in modern history, counting
The pictorial vocabulary and compositional
virtuosity used in Sarajevo is unique in its violence,
as it translates the artist’s feelings of anger, shock
and compassion as well as being a visual requiem
of the actual contemporary deadly events raging
through Sarajevo and its surroundings in 1992. In
Sarajevo, El-Nagdi transcribes literally the chaos of
war, isolating each disproportioned fgure onto the
canvas yet bringing them all together through the
agony expressed in their faces. His fgures, or rather
creatures, appear inhuman, resembling animals
more than people, showing how the suferings
and torturing of war has stripped them bare of
their humanity and dignity. Each movement, each
body part and each expression scream out onto the
canvas, such as the hand reaching out of despair
from the canvas at the lower edge, between the
central and right panels, or the frightening bulging
eyes of the fgure in the lower right quadrant of the
triptych, who is staring right out to the viewer, or
the disturbing detail of the two feet hanging at the
upper edge of the left panel.
Although El-Nagdi is known for his colourful
folkloric depictions of daily life scenes, Sarajevo
demonstrates that he also excels in capturing the
essence of these people’s pain as each part of
his monumental composition depicts a diferent
distressing angle of this outrageous slaughter.
Producing such a large-scale triptych with such
aggressive iconography not only shows the artist’s
commitment to denouncing the atrocities of the
Bosnian War but it also unavoidably engages the
viewer by provoking profound feelings of revolt
and opening his or her eyes to the reality of these
unforgivable crimes.
With slaughtered fgures fooding out from
El-Nagdi’s canvas, it suggests that the massacre
has no end. Sadly, the artist proved to be right, as
his fgure on the left panel of Sarajevo appears to
have unknowingly announced the 1995 Srebrenica
genocide, as it carries a sign with blood-red Arabic
writing, that can be translated as ‘a nation is being
slaughtered and its people are becoming extinct’.
In terms of palette, El-Nagdi immerses the entire
blood-bath scene in a beautiful and almost surreal
turquoise-blue light on a warm ochre background,
confrming once again the Egyptian painter’s
prodigious mastery of colour.
Sarajevo joins the series of iconic worldwideknown
museum masterpieces that depict the
horrors of war and that visually scream out
the great artists’ reactions to historical events
contemporary to their time. 17th century Flemish
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