Egypt Guide
Alexandria and the Mediterranean coast
The Mahmoud Said Museum
Address: Sharia Mahmoud Said Pasha
Opening time: Daily 10am–6pm
Price: £E10
Another treat in this part of town is the Mahmoud Said Museum: take tram #1 or #2 to Gianaclis (the stop after the Jewellery Museum), cross the tracks, head up the steps to the raised road and turn right. A judge who painted as a hobby, Mahmoud Said (1897–1964) was the first Egyptian artist to receive a state prize, yet disliked official commissions such as the wall-sized Inaugural Ceremony of the Suez Canal that greets visitors to the museum. He preferred to paint pensive, sensual women – TheSiren of Alexandria, Egyptian Country-Woman and Nabawiya With a Flowered Dress – or landscapes of Alexandria, Lebanon and Stockholm.
Upstairs, six rooms are devoted to the brothers Seif (1906–79) and Adham (1908–59) Wanly, who founded the first Egyptian artists' studio in 1942 and taught Fine Arts at Alexandria University after the revolution. Seif was an Expressionist who depicted such bourgeois delights as casinos, nightclubs and horse-racing, with a prolific output including three thousand oil paintings, more than eighty thousand sketches, and theatre and opera sets; while Adham was into Cubism, abstraction and Socialist Realism, producing such polemical works as Hunger, Peace and Palestine. There are also two rooms showcasing the work of contemporary local artists such as Myriam Abdel Alim, Magda Sa'd el-Din and Abdel Hadfi al-Gazzar, as well as the odd abstract by Farouk Hosni, Egypt's Minister of Culture since 1987.