Mahmoud Said

Mahmoud Said was born in 1898 to a prominent landowning family in Alexandria, Egypt. His father, Mohamed Said Pasha (1863-1928) served as Egypt’s Prime Minister from 1910 to 1914. He trained with the Italian painters Amelia Daforno Casonato and Arturo Zanieri before leaving the arts to pursue a career in law. He graduated from the Law School in Cairo in 1918 and then spent his summers attending the workshops of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In 1920, he studied drawing at L’Académie Julian. He then returned to Egypt where he was appointed first as a lawyer at the Mixed Courts of Mansoura in 1927 and then as a judge in Alexandria in 1929. In 1940, he exhibited with the Egyptian surrealist Art et Liberté group in Cairo. In 1947, he quit his legal career to commit full-time to his artistic practice. Said visited Beirut frequently. He exhibited in Cairo, Paris and in several editions of the Venice Biennale. His works feature in the collections of the Mahmoud Said Museum, Alexandria; the Museum of Modern Egpytian Art, Cairo; The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.