01 Painting, MIDDLE EASTERN ART, Inji Aflatoun's L'OR BLANC, With Footnotes - 35

Inji Aflatoun, 1924 - 1989

L'OR BLANC (WHITE GOLD), c, 1963

Oil on canvas 

66.5 by 79.5cm.; 26 1/8 by 31 1/4 in.
Private collection

The current work -  “L’or Blanc,” which translates to White Gold is a unique phrase coined by the Egyptian fellah (peasant) to cotton. As it was the most common commodity traded on the Egyptian stock market. More on this painting

Inji Aflatoun (16 April 1924 - 17 April 1989) was an Egyptian painter and activist in the women's movement. She was a "leading spokeswoman for the Marxist-progressive-nationalist-feminist movement in the late 1940s and 1950s", as well as a "pioneer of modern Egyptian art" and "one of the important Egyptian visual artists".

During school, Aflatoun liked to paint and her parents encouraged her. Her private art tutor, Kamel al-Timisani introduced her to surrealist and cubist aesthetics. She stopped painting from 1946 to 1948. Her interest was later renewed after visiting Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases. During these trips, she had the opportunity to "penetrate the houses and sketch men and women at work". She studied for a year with the Egyptian-born Swiss artist Margo Veillon. During this period, she made individual exhibits in Cairo and Alexandria and showed at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1956.

She was arrested and secretly imprisoned during Nasser's roundup of communists in 1959, then release in 1963.

She was able to continue painting during her imprisonment. Her early prison paintings are portraits, while the later are landscapes. In the years after her liberation, she exhibited in Rome and Paris in 1967, Dresden, East Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow in 1970, Sofia in 1974, Prague in 1975, New Delhi in 1979. Her paintings are filled with "lively brushstrokes of intense color. Her art of later years is characterised by an increasing use of large white spaces around her forms. A collection of her works is displayed at the Amir Taz Palace in Cairo More on Inji Aflatoun

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