Egypt

The cradle of Arab modernism. Egypt was the first Arab country to establish a state school of fine arts (founded 1908 in Cairo), the first to send art students to Europe on government scholarship, and the first to embrace Surrealism formally — with the Egyptian Surrealist Group (Art and Liberty Group) founded in 1939, predating most non-European Surrealist movements by decades. Mahmoud Mokhtar, often called the father of modern Egyptian sculpture, produced the iconic Egypt Awakening; Mahmoud Said founded modern Egyptian painting. The Contemporary Art Group of the 1940s — Hamed Nada, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, and their peers — moved Egyptian art into the postwar Surrealist and Expressionist conversation. Egyptian modernism remains the most internationally recognized of any Arab national school.