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Two rare Mahmoud Mokhtar works are being sold at Sotheby’s this month, bookending the Egyptian modernist’s life.
The first bronze,
Arous El Nil (or Bride of the Nile), shows a woman with a Pharaonic headdress and scarab necklace looking to the side. It was made in the 1920s or 1930s and is the bust for the full-length sculpture that is in the collection of Paris’s Jeu de Paume. The work has the
art
deco stylisation that the artist is now famous for, as well as his dexterity with Egyptian symbolism. Like many intellectuals of the period, Mokhtar returned to motifs, styles and subjects from Egypt’s Pharaonic past