Monthly Archives: August 2016

KEMical warfare

KEM

Found on ebay, this postcard depicting arrivals at Shepheard’s heading for reception past an intimidatingly large phalanx of tarboosh-topped staff (all of whom would be looking to squeeze as much baksheesh as they could from the newcomers during the course of their stay). It was posted from the hotel (the stamp on the reverse has a Shepheard’s Hotel frank) to an address in Paris in 1934.

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The cartoon is signed ‘Kem’; this was the pen-name of Kimon Evan Marengo, born in 1904 in Egypt, the son of Evangelos Marangos, a Greek cotton merchant. He grew up in Alexandria and from 1923 to 1931 he edited and contributed to a political weekly called Maalesh. In 1929 he moved to Paris and then in 1939 went to Oxford University, where his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war. He ended up working for the British Foreign Office as political adviser on the Middle East, producing cartoons, postcards, posters and other propaganda material, notably pin-cushions in which the pins were stuck into the backsides of Mussolini and Hitler. He also acted as a war correspondent and was later awarded the Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre. In 1956 his family lost everything when Nasser nationalised the Egyptian cotton industry and Marengo remained in the UK, dying in London in 1988.

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Fauvism comes to Shepheard’s

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The painting above is new to me – I stumbled across this image online only last week. It’s titled ‘At Shepheard’s Restaurant’ and it was painted in 1928 by Dutch-French artist Kees van Dongen. I’d only vaguely heard of van Dongen. I knew he was a Fauvist, part of that colourfully slapdash group that grasped the baton from Impressionism in France in the early years of the 20th century and whose leading light was Henri Matisse. What I didn’t know was that, like Matisse, who was majorly inspired by his travels in Morocco, van Dongen also went looking for inspiration in North Africa. Around the same time Matisse was in Tangier (1912–13), van Dongen was in Egypt. But whereas Matisse saw Morocco through Orientalist eyes, knocking out a series of bare-breasted odalisques, van Dongen carried with him his preoccupations from Paris, which notably included nightlife, partying, high society and pretty women. These he apparently found at Cairo’s hotels and also, it seems, cafes, judging by the painting below (titled ‘The Cairo Bar’).

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Van Dongen wasn’t totally immune to the temptations of Orientalism, however; he also produced a series of lurid illustrations for an edition of the Arabian Nights that would have titillated European readers with its significant nipple count.

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Filed under Art and artists, Shepheard's

More Pyramideering

Pyramideering

The always interesting Nile Magazine has taken a post from this website on the history of Pyramid climbing and expanded it into a lavish photo feature. The piece isn’t online but you can pick up a copy of the latest issue of the magazine at WH Smiths in the UK or buy it online. You can find the original post here.

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Filed under Travellers' tales