Vue de la plage à Cassata en Grèce (View of the beach in Cassata in Greece)

Vue de la plage à Cassata is one of the last paintings Mahmoud Said produced before passing away prematurely aged just 67 years old in April 1964. As such, it epitomises Said’s style and the way it evolved throughout his forty-five year or so-long artistic career. What is clear from this masterpiece of Said’s landscapes, is that since the beginning, Said - as clearly explained to his friend and artist Pierre Beppi-Martin in a letter dated 1927 - sought to capture that inner light through his paintings. His cultural assimilation of the Old Master Paintings he had admired on several occasions when traveling to Europe, combined with the blinding light so characteristic of his homeland Egypt, but also of other Mediterranean countries such as Greece or Lebanon that he regularly visited, meant that he forged his very own style, defined by an unprecedented mastery of color, light and composition. In Vue de la plage à Cassata, all these elements are mastered to perfection. Said has divided his view into three distinct parts: the foreground with a couple of trees to invite the viewer to enter the scene, and with the sea on which three or four steam boats cruise along; the middle-ground in which the imposing mountain towers above the tranquility of the maritime scene, and finally, the background, is an almost electrifying sky because of its dynamism and the threatening clouds. Using the diagonal of the three steam boats decreasing in size, Said accentuates the scene’s perspective and answers to the diagonals that give the rhythm to the sky in the background. Between them, Said articulates his painting with the sea’s horizontality and the mountain’s verticality, opting for a dramatic and almost cinematographic light to the composition, as if announcing that the scene’s seemingly calm atmosphere is about to be disrupted by the leaded stormy sky looming over the mountain and the boats.

The most striking aspect of this Greek seascape is its simplicity in that Mahmoud Saïd has omitted any extraneous detail and each element has a carefully determined compositional function. This particularity can be best understood when looking back to the much more detailed and rugged landscape in Soukkari - Mont Hangalia of 1949. In a similar way that the Montagne Sainte-Victoire crowned the oeuvre of Paul Cézanne – often considered as the father of modern art, Vue de la plage à Cassata, is one of Saïd’s paintings that stands out as one of his most modern landscapes and in which he truly gives prominence to the nature’s elements – the sea, the mountain and the sky – and reduces the human presence to a few small dotted houses, the discrete sail-boats and the construction at the top of the mountain. This is particular noticeable when comparing the present work to Assouan – îles et dunes painted in 1949 (sold by Christie’s Dubai for $685,000 in March 2017), in which Saïd gives most of the central pictorial space to the felucca in the foreground and its two sailors. Saïd focused here on the warm light emanating from its rays through a deep blue-grey sky, threatening to transform itself into a thunderstorm, whereas another painting of a Greek landscape, Le Pirée à l’aube, painted in 1949, has a very distinctive silvery light and the subject revolves around the steam boats coming in and out of the busy seaport of Piraeus, very different from the peacefulness of Vue de la plage à Cassata. Nonetheless, the apparently heavy sky still conveys a sense of oppression with the dark mountain towering the seascape, yet it does not suffocate the pictorial space like the massive mountain in one of Saïd’s most ambitious Lebanese landscapes, Vue de la montagne à Dhour El Choueir, painted around 1951-54. Saïd seems to have painted a couple of Greek landscapes in 1963-64, including one that is devoid of active human presence, and that only features a typical Greek church by the sea and a few empty boats. Another landscape from the last ‘Greek’ series is a completely different one from both a subject and stylistic perspective, Port de Syra (Syros) – Grèce, of also 1963-64, in which Syra’s houses are piled up on top of one another in the bay, barely leaving the space for the sea which is in turn occupied by two prominent sail boats in the foreground. To some extent, the latter seems to be a zoomed in view of the very small, inhabited area suggested on the far right of the composition in Vue de la plage à Cassata. As opposed to the Syra port painting, the Cassata painting has much more lyricism in its seascape and offers a breather to the viewer after the confrontation with this flow of Syra houses pouring into the sea. Belonging first to Nadia Mahmoud Saïd, the artist’s only daughter, and her husband, the great art historian, intellectual and critic Dr. Hassan El Khadem, Vue de la plage à Cassata has always remained in one of the branches of the El Khadem family for the past 80 years, as Nadia and Hassan gifted it to Samir El Khadem from who it was inherited.