Reham El-Adawi tours the Nabil Darwish Museum in Haraniya, and talks to the late artist's wife about the future of the exceptional work he left behind The Saqqara Road boasts the appellation "Artists' Path", for it houses not only sculptor Adam Henein's Cairo (as opposed to Aswan) residence but the Wissa Wassif kelim museum, the Zakariya El-Khanani glasswork museum and the Mohieddin Hussein pottery museum. Through a modest iron gate on the road parallel to it, on the other hand, lies an even more charming pottery museum, the contents of which (some 2,000 of the most charming pieces) are threatened by pluming leakage from a neighbouring building and a governorate-built fountain in the neighbouring village of Abul-Numrous, an ongoing tragedy that is already eroding the walls of the building, and to which no official body has responded. Once a lively stop on the Saqqara tour, the Nabil Darwish Museum still attracts foreigners and Egyptians alike -- pottery lovers, all. From the moment you step in, the simplicity of the place -- the sight of pottery scattered across a tiny, spontaneous garden -- proves arresting. More to the point, the place houses one of the country's most impressive pottery collections, inspired by, and in some ways representing, the three principal stages in the history of Egyptian art: ancient, Islamic and modern. According to the artist's wife Ragaa, the idea of building a museum in which to display his entire oeuvre first occurred to Nabil Darwish (1936-2002), perhaps Egypt's best known pottery, in the early 1980s. The building was soon constructed and designed according to the most up-to-date theories of pottery display. Darwish had intended to donate the museum to the Ministry of Culture. Yet the government has done nothing to address the leakage, Ragaa complains, this despite the museum being "one of the most important tourist landmarks in Giza, registered in the International Tourism Guide and the governorate's own tourist guide". Two days before this conversation, the widow submitted a petition to the UNESCO, the Giza governorate and the Ministry of Health (the latter is responsible for plumbing works); so far she hasn't received any feedback. The works on show, and many others stored inside the building, she insists, should be made available to the public, especially those foreigners with an interest in modern Egyptian art. Darwish, she recounted, would spend hours before the glazing furnace; wooden and primitive, it was the first of its kind to be used by an Arab potter. He delighted in the company of his students at the pottery wheel, discovering new techniques and producing new forms; black-glaze pottery, a world-famous contribution, and the so called pigeon-neck technique are two among many such innovations. Graduating from the Faculty of Applied Arts in 1962, Darwish became the apprentice of the self-made master potter Said El-Sadr before they established the Fustat Ceramics Centre in Islamic Cairo in the early 1970s. It was in 1971 that he impressed the art world with his rediscovery of Muslim techniques long forgotten. He sought varieties of clay throughout the Middle East, first in Kuwait, then in Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. He also managed to practice so called smoke draughtsmanship by isolating carbon dioxide and using it to form decorative figures on the pots he created. Awarded the grand prix at the first Sharja Ceramic Biennial in 1993, in 2002 Darwish was at the centre of the first International Forum of Pottery in Lebanon, where he was celebrated on television. "If there is a noble prize for potters," Nobel laureate Ahmed Zuweil told Darwish at an exhibition held a few months before his death, "I would have no qualms about who to give it to."
