Menhat Helmy Collection

Menhat Helmy (1925-2004) was an artist and a pioneer in Egyptian etchings and printmaking. Born on 11 July 1925 in Helwan, Helmy was the middle child in a family of nine children, comprising seven sisters and two brothers. She graduated in 1949 from Cairo's maʿhad al-ali li-maʿlumat al-funun al-jamila (Higher Institute for Women Teachers of the Fine Arts). In 1953, she was awarded a state scholarship that enabled her to pursue further studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she studied from 1953 to 1955. During that period, she concentrated on drawing and painting, while developing a sustained interest in printmaking. She experimented with copper, zinc, and wood plates, producing black-and-white prints. In 1955, she was awarded the Slade Prize for Etching. Between 1973 and 1979, during a second period of residence in London, where her husband, then Undersecretary at the Ministry of Health, was appointed, she undertook further studies in colored graphics at Morley College. It was during this time that she produced the majority of the prints for which she is known today.

Helmy's oeuvre is varied, including academic portraits and nudes from her first trip to London, as well as paintings such as the Sitting Man (1955). Upon her return to Egypt, a pivotal period in the nation's 1950s history, Helmy went on to depict scenes from her native homeland and especially of the underprivileged masses, with works such as Procession to Work (1957) and The Playground (1959). Her work from that time narrates societal changes from a woman's perspective, positioning women at the forefront in works such as Outpatient Clinic (1958), where she depicts breastfeeding women in newly opened clinics. Throughout her body of work, whether sketches, oil paintings, or etchings, the artist consistently omitted facial features when depicting people, portraying her subjects as archetypes rather than individuals. This stylistic choice transforms her figures—primarily women and working-class people—into universal symbols, sometimes representing the Egyptian peasant, and sometimes representing the collective human experience. Her printmaking also captured the country's changing landscape and developments, such as the Suez Canal crisis and the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Her prints and paintings reveal a sustained engagement with concepts of space, technological progress, and the unknown, with a discernible influence of Islamic and ancient Egyptian artistic traditions, reflected in both their formal vocabulary and compositional structure, with works such as Space Stations (1972), Space Exploration (1973), Way to the Universe (1974-76), and The Corridor (1979).

Although not active in the politics of her homeland, Helmy was politically aware. Animated by the War of Attrition (1967-1970), she depicted Exchange of Fire (1971), which shows military strikes between Egypt and Israel, with the Red Sea separating them. The Children of Bahr Al Baqar (1971) is another politically inspired work, in which she portrays the school bombing that took place in the Egyptian village south of Port Said in 1970, where 46 children died.

Helmy participated in exhibitions in Egypt, starting with the 32nd Salon du Caire in 1956. In her lifetime, she held four (perhaps five) solo exhibitions, starting with her first solo etching exhibition in 1966 at Akhenaten Hall in Cairo. She also held a solo exhibition in London, titled "Exhibition of Etchings by Menhat Helmy," in 1978, and another in Cairo the following year. Helmy also held a solo exhibition at the University Austral in Chile in 1985. She nonetheless took part in numerous group exhibitions, many of which were significant. Helmy participated in many international biennales, including four editions of the Alexandria Biennial between 1957 and 1965, eight editions of the Ljubljana Exposition Internationale de Gravure between 1963 and 1987, the 10th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1976), the Norske Internnasjonale Grafikkbiennale between 1978 and 1984, the Venice Biennale in 1980, the Third World Biennale of Graphic Arts in London (1980), the Fifth Triennale India (1982), the second Cairo Biennale (1986), and the second Egyptian International Print Triennale in Cairo in 1996.

Helmy won several awards throughout her life, including the Cairo Production Exhibition Prize in 1957, the Salon du Caire Prize in 1959 and 1960, the Ljubljana Honorary Prize in 1961, and the Egyptian National Merit Prize for Etching in 1981. At the end of the 1970s, Helmy developed a pulmonary condition that led her to abandon her artistic practice around 1983–1984. She subsequently devoted herself to teaching, holding a position at the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University and lecturing at the School of Fine Arts. She was also appointed Honorary Professor of Etching at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence and was a member of the London-based Printmakers Council. Helmy continued teaching until the day of her passing on 10 May 2004.