Mukhtar, Mahmud

Born May 10, 1891, in the village of Tunbara, near the city of al Mahalla al Kubra; died Mar. 27, 1934, in Cairo. Egyptian sculptor. Founder of the 20th-century national school of sculpture.

In 1908, Mukhtar enrolled at the Art Institute in Cairo. After 1910 he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was influenced by A. Rodin. Mukhtar executed monumental works imbued with the fervor of the national renaissance (for example, the monument The Awakening of Egypt in Cairo, granite, 1919–28). He also did a series of smaller works, which are noted for the poetic, symbolically generalized rendering of Egyptian peasants (The Peasant Woman, marble, 1928; Khamsin, limestone, 1929—both in the Mukhtar Museum, Cairo). Mukhtar sought to emphasize the historical ties between contemporary and ancient Egyptian art.