Ramses Younan

Ramses Younan (رمسيس يونان; Minya, 1913 – Cairo, 1966), also spelled Ramses Younane, was an Egyptian painter and writer. His work is most commonly associated with the Art and Liberty Group, a Cairo-based surrealist collective of artists, writers, intellectuals and activists with an anti-nationalist message.

Early life and career Ramses Younan was born into a poor, Coptic-Christian family in Minya, a city approximately 150 miles south of Cairo and along the western bank of the Nile River. In 1929 he enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo but left in 1933 to teach drawing in secondary schools in various regional towns throughout Egypt after receiving his teaching certificate in 1934. Before officially joining Georges Henein in Art et Liberté in 1939, Younan joined The Society for the Promotion of Art (Jamaa'at al-di'aya al-fanniyya) in 1935. It was "a collective established by artist Habib Gorgui calling for the importance of art in education." In 1938, the Society published his first book The Aim of the Contemporary Artist in which he analyzed the work of the French cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant and his theories of Purism. He also felt that it focused too much on the individual instead of embracing the collective. Instead, he called for, what he referred to as, "Subjective Realism" or Free Art, "an active mining of the unconscious fused with local imagery that would be familiar to Egyptians, but not fetishistic or nationalistic."

His work, among other Art and Liberty members, was on display at the Palace of Arts in Cairo, Egypt as part of a long-term traveling exhibition co-organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Ministry of Culture in Egypt and Cairo's American University in 2016.

Writings « Ghayat al-rassam al-'asri (The Aim of the Contemporary Artist) », essay on Amédée Ozenfant, ed. Gamaat Habib, 1938 « Notes sur une ascèse hystérique (Notes on a Hysterical Asceticism) », dialogue with Georges Henein, Cairo, 1948 « La Quatrième dimension vaut la première : œuvres incomplètes (The Fourth Dimension is worth the first: incomplete works) », La Nouvelle part du sable, 2002