NOW AND TEN

diplomat master Peter-Paul Rubens depicted many war scenes, amongst
which his famous vast composition entitled The Consequences (or Horrors) of
War painted in 1638-1639, currently exhibited at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence,
or his two elaborate versions of The Massacre of the Innocents, one dating of
1611-1612 in the Art Gallery of Ontario, the other of circa 1637 from the Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.
Omar El-Nagdi breathes in a similar energy as Rubens in his fgures and in
the drama of the scene with the virtuosity of his brushstrokes and his intricate
composition. However, El-Nagdi abandons the classical perspective, the
linear structure and the realistic characters of Rubens’ paintings, opting for a
more dislocated and absurd composition, inventing his own representation of
the people. It is therefore not surprising that El-Nagdi’s Sarajevo has always
rightfully been compared to Pablo Picasso’s most notorious monumental
painting, Guernica, painted in 1937, that prominently hangs today in the Museo
Reina Sofa, Madrid. Whilst the 20th century Spanish painter denounced the
horrors of the Nazis’ mass destruction of the Basque city of Guernica during
the Spanish Civil War, El-Nagdi depicted the massacres of the Bosnian War
in Sarajevo. Both mural-size masterpieces are strong political statements and
feature unprecedented images of violence, that resonate the dark and brutal
depictions of death and destruction found in Spanish painter and printmaker
Francisco Goya’s renowned series of 82 prints, The Disasters of War, executed
between 1810-1820, showcased in the Prado Museum, Madrid.
It is undeniable that El-Nagdi greatly admired both Picasso’s way of
representing humans as dismembered, animal-like, surrealistic creatures
and Goya’s crude and factual depiction of the consequences of the so-called
Dos de Mayo Uprising of 1808, when the citizens of Madrid rebelled against
the occupation of French Napoleonic troops, leading to the Peninsular War
of 1808-1814, raging through Spain. Sarajevo defnitively inscribes itself as a
continuation of world art history in which artists actively engaged themselves
with contemporary conficts of their time, using their paintings and visual
vocabulary as their powerful weapons.
A comparable and almost contemporary mural-size masterpiece to that
of El-Nagdi’s triptych is Iraqi artist Dia Al-Azzawi’s impressive polyptych
depicting the Sabra and Shatila Massacres, painted in 1982-1983. It was also
executed by a Middle Eastern artist who witnessed from a distance the tragic
murder of between two and three thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians
in and around the refugee camps of Southern Beirut in 1982. Like Sarajevo,
the panels of Sabra and Shatila Massacres express the artist’s disgust and
outrage to the 1982 slaughter, but also his compassion towards the victims.
Both Azzawi and El-Nagdi pay tribute to their forerunners Pablo Picasso and
Francisco Goya in their high-impact images of war, suferings and death.
Nonetheless, whereas Azzawi’s intentionally chaotic composition overfows
with fgures and shapes, El-Nagdi’s is to some extent more structured in
The present work.
its linear succession of victims. Azzawi was much more inspired by the
monochromatic black and white tones of Picasso’s Guernica, sparsely adding
some discrete colours to his composition. El-Nagdi has a more colouristic
approach to the theme as he meticulously paints with a rich palette of warm
brown, ochre, maroon, turquoise, royal blue and beige pigments. Whilst
Azzawi takes Picasso’s Surrealist depiction of fgures and animals even further
towards abstraction, El-Nagdi brings it back to its more fgurative roots to
highlight the absurdity of these humans who are being treated with such
inhumanity. Together with the Tate Modern’s Sabra and Shatila Massacres
and the Museo Reina Sofa’s Guernica, El-Nagdi’s Sarajevo is one of the most
outstanding and provocative painting of the horrors of war of modern history.
El-Nagdi’s Sarajevo is an unprecedented example of its type in the history
of art not only because of the artist’s unparalleled imagination of the scene,
but also because of its unique subject matter. El-Nagdi, a Muslim Egyptian
painter represents the slaughter of his Bosniak brothers in Sarajevo and its
surroundings on the traditionally Christian format of the triptych, a theme
that no other artist has ever dared to paint on such a vast scale. Watching the
horrors of the Bosnian-Serbian confict from a distance, El-Nagdi was also
able to infuse his painting with an extraordinary beauty despite the violence
and inhumanity of the scene. The frieze-like aspect of this monumental
painting, enhanced by the alignment of elongated starving and dying fgures,
features such vitality rendered through El-Nagdi’s colours and brushstrokes.
At the same time, the liveliness and energy of the scene conveys a sense of
eternity, in that these victims of the Bosnian-Serbian massacres will become
martyrs, with their haunting eyes staring out to the viewer.
Peter-Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, circa 1637.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Bridgeman Art Library.
El-Nagdi’s intricate calligraphic work in the background of the central and
right panels pays homage to Islamic art and architecture, emphasising the
cultural, historical and religious relationship between the artist and the
persecuted Bosniaks. Sarajevo triptych acts not only as the artist’s weapon
and word against the atrocities of the Bosnian-Serbian war, but at the same
time it is a spectacular memorial to the Bosniak population that unavoidably
impregnates forever each viewer’s spirit with its powerful pictorial language.
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