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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. 24
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bridgeman Art Library. Dia Al-Azzawi, Sabra and Shatila Massacres, 1982-1983. Collections of The Tate Modern, London. © Dia Al-Azzawi. Courtesy Meem Gallery, Dubai.
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INDEX A Abboud, S., 11 Amighi, A.,
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