Museum Masterpieces : Dirt, Decay Mar Cairo’s Ancient Art

They almost seem to cringe against the dirt-smudged walls, their dust-shrouded shapes and dark, melancholy eyes peering from chipped and crooked frames into the gloom of the great room beyond.

This, the main exhibition hall of the Museum of Egyptian Civilization, is the Skid Row of the art world.

Here, like unkempt derelicts, lie many of the masterpieces of European art collected by Egypt’s former royal family. If they could talk, some of the faces depicted in these portraits might say, “I used to be somebody once.”

And indeed they were. For in this dogeared and dusty exhibition hall, known colloquially as the Gezira Museum after the former fairgrounds in which it is located, are works by Renoir, Rubens, Monet, Degas, Delacroix, Gainsborough, Constable and many other masters of European art.

‘A Magnificent Collection’

“When tourists think of Egypt, they think of the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the King Tut collection in the main Egyptian Museum,” said Sabri Nashed, the Gezira’s director. “They don’t realize we also have a magnificent collection of European art, especially from the Impressionist period.”

Judging from the appalling state of disrepair and neglect into which the paintings have been allowed to fall, few Egyptians realize it either.

“We tried to tell the officials at the Culture Ministry once that they had a real treasure,” recalls the cultural attache of a Western embassy. “Their first reaction was surprise. Their second was to ask how much they could sell them for.”

There are, in fact, two extraordinary collections of European art in Cairo--one at the Gezira Museum and another smaller, but perhaps finer, exhibition of Impressionist and other paintings at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, named after the late Egyptian Senate president who amassed the collection.

The more than 300 paintings and 80 statues on display at the latter museum include seven Renoirs, five Monets, six Pissarros, eight by Delacroix, three Gauguins, three Sisleys, four Courbets, two by Degas and several maquettes by Rodin, including a model for “The Thinker.” There is also a Van Gogh, titled “Genistas and Wild Poppies,” a Toulouse-Lautrec oil, “The Singing Lesson,” and a study for “Odalisque,” the masterpiece by Ingres that hangs in the Louvre.

In Better Condition

Thanks to the Mahmoud Khalil’s small but dedicated staff, led by curator Ahmed Sami, the paintings have been displayed with obvious aesthetic care and are kept in much better condition than those at the Gezira Museum.

Nevertheless, several works, including a Renoir, are in urgent need of restoration, while others need cleaning and reframing.

The Van Gogh, stolen in 1977 and recovered a year later in Kuwait, bears visible damage. An alarm system was subsequently installed, but during the installation one of the workmen ripped the Ingres study. It now bears an L-shaped tear, about one-half by one-inch long, in the upper right-hand side of the canvas.

“The conditions here are not ideal,” admits Sami, whose budget is so tight that he has on occasion been forced to borrow light bulbs. “The lighting is poor,” he says sadly, “and the air, it is not clean.”

Still, the Mahmoud Khalil looks like a miniature Louvre compared to the Gezira Museum, a grimly Stalinesque edifice more suggestive of a mausoleum.

There, the paintings are on the second floor, up a flight of wide stone steps littered with cigarette butts and other trash. The museum, which is rarely mentioned in guidebooks, gets few visitors, but it is easy to estimate how many have happened by on a given day because their footprints are clearly visible in the deep film of dust on the unswept floors.

The atmosphere is gray and gloomy. The illumination, from neon lights suspended at irregular intervals from the ceiling, is poor and--where it exists--garish.

Because of space constraints, only about 200 paintings--less than a third of the royal collection--are on display. These include several by Delacroix, two Renoirs, a Rubens, a Degas, a Gainsborough and a Constable.

In Terrible Condition

Sadly, most are in terrible shape. The Rubens is badly scuffed and scarred by several pinprick-size holes. The Degas is scratched in several places, and a portrait of a nude female torso by the 19th-Century French muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes has been vandalized. Someone, using the tip of a small knife or perhaps a ballpoint pen, has mutilated the breasts.

As bad off as these paintings seem, fate has been much kinder to them than it has to the more than 400 paintings, among them a Manet and a Courbet, entombed in the museum’s basement.

Requests to visit the basement were refused, but a French art expert who was given access several years ago reported that the paintings were stacked one on top of another beneath a blanket of dust.

“What you see is horrible,” said a Western cultural official. “What you don’t see, in the basement, is far worse.”

Sipping tea in his office next to the exhibition hall, curator Nashed, who is a sculptor by profession, says help may be on the way.

France, he notes, has offered to help Egypt restore the damaged paintings, and plans have been drafted to renovate a section of the Gezira Museum to house the best of the royal collection.

“I have many dreams,” said Nashed. “I have many dreams because I, too, am an artist. I dream of this someday being a great museum, with a collection like the Louvre and many people coming here from all over the world.”