Abstract

This article discusses a painting of the Great Dam of Aswan made by Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar in 1964 and immediately crowned as the iconic image of Egypt in the heroic age of the Nasser regime. The painting clearly adopts the aesthetic language of surrealism, illustrating a particular zeitgeist in the Egyptian artistic milieu and mirroring the individual and genuine artistic response of al-Gazzar to the utopian, almost mythical status given to surrealism in Egypt in the first half of the last century. This work of art is dealt with here as a reflection of the changing social and political context in Egypt in the 1950s and the early 1960s under the governor-ship of the charismatic ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, and as influenced by the global Cold War era.

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