Marguerite Nakhla (Égypte 1908 - 1977) Lot n° 15

Saint Germain des Prés, Paris Oil on canvas 46 x 55 cm Painted in 1938 Signed and dated lower right "M Nahkhla 4 - 38 Oil on canvas Painted in 1938 Signed and dated lower right "M Nahkhla 4 - 38 Private collection, Paris On 30 September 1977, Marguerite Nakhla died in her family apartment in Alexandria. Nicknamed the "pioneer of the shadow" or "the nun of fine arts", Nakhla was determined, forgotten by the Egyptian artistic community and remained anonymous for decades. A remarkable artist, she left little documentation after her death and much of her work is scattered in private collections around the world. It is only recently that Nakhla has experienced a resurgence of interest and her long overdue recognition is accelerating. It was in 2009, thirty years after the artist's death, that with the publication of the first monograph devoted to the artist: "Marguerite Nakhla: Legacy to Modern Egyptian Arts" in Canada by the Egyptian-Canadian sociologist that the artist returned to the forefront of the art scene in her country. More recently in 2014, Ezz el-Din Naguib, a renowned Egyptian art critic, succinctly titled his essay "In Search of Marguerite" in the preface to one of the few, if not the only, Arabic-language book devoted to the artist's life. Finally in 2015, two of Nakhla's paintings The 14th of July (1930) and Untitled (1940) were auctioned and sold at record prices at Christies in Dubai. Born in Alexandria in 1908, the year the Egyptian School of Fine Arts and the Coptic Museum in Cairo were founded, Nakhla devoted her life to art in isolation and interpreted Egypt in a new light. A graduate of a French-speaking school for girls run by nuns, she was one of the first Egyptian women to pursue studies in pedagogical art at the Pedagogical Institute of Arts for Women Teachers and was relentless - throughout her life - in continuing to learn, study and teach. Thus, in 1934, she was one of the first Egyptian women artists to travel to Europe to pursue university studies, first at her own expense and then through a government scholarship program. Between 1934 and 1939, Nakhla studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and obtained a diploma in teaching drawing. The work presented belongs to this period of the artist's "Parisian life" where she painted Parisian scenes such as A Sunday at the Luxembourg (1937), for which she received a prize, exhibited in the monumental Egyptian pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937. The city of Asnières acquired her painting, Obelisk of the Place de la Concorde, the year it was conceived in 1936.