A Transcultural History of Modern Art in Egypt: Flâneuses et flâneurs des deux mondes

This thesis is an investigation of modernism in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that modernism has been doubly overlooked, first by the nationalist narrative, produced under President Gamal Abdel Nasser and second by recent revisionist scholarship that have predominantly focussed on the avant-garde movements of the 1930s onwards. This thesis takes a wider historical lens to investigate experiments of modernism from the early 1900s. It adopts a transcultural lens to investigate the cosmopolitan artistic and cultural milieu of Cairo. By placing the artists, art patrons, art critics and artworks in a global network wherein peoples, ideas and objects were in a constant flux to and from Egypt, I seek to uncover a lost history of Egyptian modernism.