Adam Henein, Coptic Christian though he is, owes his entire career as a modern artist to a quasi-mystical experience at the age of eight in Cairo's great Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, when he beheld for the first time the glories of ancient Egypt.
This precocious revelation, which took place on a class trip with his history teacher, was so singularly intimate yet central to his life that Henein was unable to talk about it to anyone until he was well into his fifties.
As soon as he stepped inside that tremendous dark treasure vault of antiquity, Henein says, he entered a kind of trance. Abandoning his classmates, he wandered about the museum on his own. "I felt something change within me. It was almost like certain experiences you read about in the Bible," he recalls. Standing among the colossal awe-inspiring sculptures, he felt overwhelmed by a "tremendous sense of continuity." He felt, he says, as though one of those ancient pharaohs had been his own grandfather.
In the grip of this powerful experience, the little Adam returned home and modeled a clay figure of Ramses II, painted it, and presented it to his father, a Cairo silversmith, who proudly set the work in his shop window.
As a young man, keeping faith with that moment of illumination in his childhood, Henein enrolled at Cairo's Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation in 1953, he received a grant that allowed him to spend two years near Thebes, studying the paintings in the pharaohic tombs. There he also observed life in the neighboring fields and villages. Henein discovered that the paintings on the walls of the five-thousand-year-old tombs mirrored the nature and life surrounding him, unchanged to that day.
Prime Passion
Although Henein studied ancient painting, it was really ancient sculpture that fascinated him. He began his artistic career as a sculptor, and today, though he devotes most of his creative time to painting, sculpture is still his prime passion. Some of his sculptures are reminiscent of the geometry encountered in the mud-brick architecture of Egypt. Perhaps the most striking thing about his work in this medium is the exquisite inflection Henein gives to each surface, not unlike the subtle, simple refinement of the great Egyptian statuary of antiquity.
This is apparent in such sculptures as the finely indented bronze Solar Disk, of which several variants exist. Despite the geometric purity of the forms, they nonetheless suggest a warm, even carnal presence. The hollowed-out navel that the various representations of the disk all share seems to suggest that the solar figure is somehow embodied in a smooth, round belly.
Not all of Henein's sculptures are abstract. Indeed, his bestiary of owls, donkeys, cats, and a variety of birds includes some of his finest works, many of which have a kind of shadowy relation to the ancient tomb statuary of sacred animals.
Ancestors in Luxor
As a painter, Henein has been compared, not inaccurately, by French author
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