Chafik Charobim and the Quest to Fill Art-Historical Gaps

How do you adequately fill an art-historical gap? A retrospective for Chafik Charobim was held at the American University in Cairo’s Margo Veillon Gallery of Modern Egyptian Art last December. Curated by Sama Waly, Lightmarks on vanishing points commemorates 50 years since the artist’s passing, bringing together 50 paintings and a collection of previously unseen photographic prints to highlight the dialogue between his two interests over half a century of practice. Charobim was the first Egyptian artist to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1923, studying under Italian painter and educator Umberto Coromaldi. His palette and technical fluency are steeped in the academic painting tradition. At a moment when modernity in Egyptian art was tied to the construction of national identity through local heritage and neo-pharaonic motifs, Charobim’s work appears to have remained marginal to dominant narratives shaped by broader national movements. Charobim also resisted monetizing his work, believing that putting work for sale undermined artistic integrity. In a conversation with his daughter, she recounts that when a diplomat attempted to purchase a piece at one of Charobim’s rare exhibitions, he was told it was already sold (it was not). Since his passing, Charobim’s work has been exhibited thrice, framed almost invariably as an impressionist or a realist. Waly, encountering the artist’s photographic archive for the first time while browsing his family archive during her initial research phase, selected the works for display to explore the interplay between painting and photography in his practice. This review postulates that Charobim’s art-historical relevance can be most productively understood through the photographically mediated realism that underpins his oeuvre, rather than through stylistic labels such as realism or impressionism. The exhibition text presents to me a conundrum: Charobim is described as painting en plein air while also drawing extensively from photographic archives. The text does not differentiate between these practices but frames both as documenting Egypt’s modernization, “Charobim’s body of work offers a rare glimpse into the birthplace of modern culture in Egypt, capturing ordinary people, daily life transforming, beach culture, crowds, friends, figures he met along the way — and also an expression of a passionate treatment of light.” While en plein air painting and photographic mediation are not historically incompatible, the exhibition’s failure to distinguish between works produced through direct outdoor observation and those constructed in the studio obscures the methodological stakes of Charobim’s practice. This is key in light of the fact that Charobim’s art-historical significance seems to emerge through his use of the camera as a mediating tool, rather than through stylistic classification alone. In his work, the camera acts as an extension of his vision, allowing him to articulate his inner perspective vis-à-vis the artistic currents of the time. Research on the history of photography as practiced by Egyptian photographers remains fragmented and uneven and is less accessible than parallel studies of painting. In her book Photography and Egypt, Maria Golia stated that foreigners dominated Egypt’s early photographic history, and that the first Egyptian to use a camera was Colonel Mohammed Sadiq Bey, a survey engineer who initially only captured Islamic architectural monuments during a trip to Madina. Nationalist shifts in the country’s landscape in the 1920s, alongside ongoing modernization, made photography more accessible to Egyptians as both a professional and artistic medium, with photography education introduced at Helwan University’s Faculty of Applied Arts in 1929 and the Société des amis de l’art holding the first of its annual photography exhibitions in 1933. Charobim’s daughter recounts that he was close friends with an Armenian photographer based near his Zamalek home. The two would sit for hours discussing photography. Owning a 1920s projector, Charobim would project his images on a wall and draw from them. His photographic practice, therefore, did not exist in a vacuum, and may actually point toward an art-historical gap that warrants further investigation: how did technological modernization influence the practice of Egyptian artists in the early twentieth century? And, consequently, where does Egyptian realism sit in its wake? In a lecture accompanying the exhibition, art historian and critic Yasser Mongy discussed the politics of visibility in Egypt and the paradoxes of pioneering and concealment in modern Egyptian art. He highlighted how gaps in the literature, particularly the lack of robust ethnographic studies of Egyptian art history, impede critical engagement, foregrounding how the interplay between the art market, art criticism and academic writing shapes how “stars” are manufactured and remembered. With this lack, Mongy noted that Charobim’s Orientalist tendencies, well-appearing in the exhibition, may have limited his visibility. While Orientalist tropes are often undervalued in Egyptian art history, exhibitions like this one can counteract the marginalization Mongy identifies by situating underrepresented artists within broader historical currents, through acknowledging the gaps in primary and secondary sources. Going through the exhibition, one may be quick to point out the Orientalist scenes that surface through some of the works, such as the peasant woman carrying a jug, the breastfeeding woman and the sheikh. The subjects initially appear documentary, but Waly’s selected archival photographs reveal their careful composition — not only of the Orientalist scenes, but of the nudes as well. Charobim overlaid circulating tropes to construct images that reflect the intellectual and artistic discourse of his time. This complicates reductive readings of Charobim’s Orientalism as ethnographic or documentary, revealing it instead as a constructed visual language shaped through nuanced photographic staging, rather than one stemming from his imagination, as was often the case with European orientalists. This became explicit to me as I reflected upon the sitters’ identities in his photographs. If Charobim is to be compartmentalized as an Orientalist painter, then the identities of the sitters staging the Orientalist scenes, and his compositional decisions, are worth studying. Charobim was well-versed in the intellectual currents of his time. This is particularly evident in his photographic interest in the “mad woman,” la folle, a figure that, according to Waly, occupied an entire dossier in his photographic archive. This is timely, considering that representations of madness, or hysteria, were transformed by the nineteenth-century medical photographic archive Iconographie photographique de la salpêtrière, which codified hysteria among women and later informed Sigmund Freud’s theorization of hysteria, developed during his period as a student of Jean-Martin Chacrot, who oversaw the archive’s creation. Hysteria subsequently became the subject of a vast visual culture, with references in the work of Surrealists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí. Notably, there was a rise in translation efforts of psychoanalytic literature in Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s, as Omnia El Shakry documents in The Arabic Freud. While no direct line of transmission can be established, Charobim’s photographic interest in the “mad woman” trope contributes to a broader visual regime through which hysteria, femininity and the body were rendered legible in modern visual culture. The exhibition unfolds across three rooms titled: At the White Sea: Beach culture, crowd watching; There was once a flood: Daily life, ordinary people; and At Studio Helwan: Models, lifelong friends. While visually compelling, these diffuse titles risk glossing over the art-historical nuances crucial to understanding and situating Charobim’s practice. Retrospective exhibitions carry a responsibility not only to display works, but to contextualize them for audiences, thereby preserving and transmitting knowledge. In not doing so, one risks diminishing rather than amplifying Charobim’s historiographic value. This glossing over reflects a broader trend in Egypt where art is often valued for its beauty and decorative qualities, rather than for its historical or cultural contribution. In the absence of such distinctions, the exhibition risks flattening methodological differences that are crucial to understanding Charobim’s practice. If the exhibition’s goal is merely dissemination, it eloquently succeeds by bringing to light Charobim’s photographic work. Yet, given the gaping holes in literature on Egyptian art history, post-mortem exhibitions, particularly those supported by artists’ families, are foundational for engaging the public and shaping cultural memory. It is a fragile endeavour, especially at a time when the afterlife of this lack of art-historical literacy is evident in the many decorative works dotting galleries and art exhibitions across the country. In the absence of robust museum infrastructure, retrospective exhibitions of historical artists are left to shoulder an uneven historiographic burden. Institutional authority in Egypt has long shaped what is remembered, exhibited and canonized. As artist, writer and curator Ahmed Shawky Hassan argues in a piece for Madina Magazine on his recent exhibition 99 Objects of Interest at Cairo Gallery, the creation of a state canon in the 1960s by Egypt’s first culture minister, Tharwat Okasha — through his mawsu‘at tarikh al-fann (Encyclopedia of Art History) — did not constitute a neutral translation of European narratives. Rather, it carried out a process of recomposition and selection that produced a particular vision of “global art” approved by the regime, as part of the Gamal Abdel Nasser-era cultural nation-building project. In this sense, the question is not whether exhibitions are political, but which regimes of visibility they reproduce or contest. Charobim’s remarkable practice likely did not fit the traditional state-sanctioned tropes of his time, nor does it now. His work and vision, situated at the intersection of photographic mediation, Orientalist influence, technical mastery and authentic artistic vision, demands careful positioning within the broader landscape of modern Egyptian art. Photography, rather than being a mere fascination, seems to have anchored his practice, allowing him to study the human body, compose his figurative works and stage a realism true to his own eye. Without curatorial differentiation, however, viewers are left to consume Charobim’s work aesthetically rather than historically or critically. As I contemplate this exhibition, I ask myself how a museum operating within established curatorial and historiographic protocols might have organized this show. Such an institution would first and foremost focus on knowledge production. It would seek to understand the broader histories of photography and painting that nurtured the local and international artistic landscape which informed Charobim’s practice. This would involve archival and comparative research, as well as a study of his photographic archive alongside his paintings. The exhibition would likely be structured chronologically and methodologically. For example, it would allot sections to Charobim’s biographical development, his painting en plein air versus his constraining realism, his engagement with Orientalism and his interest in the human body. The museum would also catalogue the exhibition as an art-historical intervention and commission a critical essay on Charobim’s relationship to photography, a historiographic text on Egyptian realism, an analysis of his institutional absence and archival gaps, an annotated chronology of his artistic development, and a comprehensive exhibition history encompassing all of his solo and group showings, including those carried out privately. Finally, a museum would treat the archive itself as fragile, contested and incomplete, and would frame objects accordingly. During my visit, two young visitors attempted to use Charobim’s projector without permission; their surprise at my intervention underscored the need for educational framing and supervision. I beg to argue that imagining how a museum might have organized this exhibition is not an abstract exercise, but a way to identify what knowledge production could look like as we strive to move forward — so that historical artists like Charobim are not only made visible, but studied and understood. That such art historical gaps are addressed through university galleries and family estates rather than state museums is itself symptomatic of Egypt’s institutional condition.