Obituary: Abdel-Badie Abdel-Hay (1915-2004) By Reem Nafie Sculptor Abdel-Badie Abdel-Hay, celebrated for his representations of peasant life executed in Pharaonic style, was murdered by burglars on Monday night. Born in Upper Egypt in 1915, Abdel-Hay first came to Cairo by boat, a journey that took nine days and during which he was able to complete a rough carving of the boatsman. On arriving in Cairo Abdel-Hay lived in the house of the pioneering feminist Hoda Shaarawi, working as a cook while pursuing his studies in his spare time until he was able to join the College of Fine Arts. Invariably he took as his subject the inhabitants of Egypt's villages and rural areas -- rendering them with a startling fluidity of both form and gesture. Abdel-Hay first came to the attention of a wider public when his sculpture, The Most Beautiful of All, took first prize in the 1943 Mahmoud Mukhtar Exhibition. The Egyptian Worker, A Child from Luxor and Liberty simply served to consolidate his reputation as one of Egypt's leading figurative sculptors. A Woman Bathing exemplifies Abdel-Hay's technique, a striking illustration of a woman bathing in the Nile, drawing her galabiya up from her body and wrapping it around her head like a turban. Abdel-Hay's work, though, was by no means exclusively carved scenery from peasant life. One of the works he was most fond of, and which he kept in his studio till his death, is a bust of his patron, Shaarawi. Though they came from different social classes, both hailed from the same area of Egypt and Abdel-Hay remained loyal to her memory. Abdel-Hay leaves behind three children, Hoda, a lawyer, Montasser, a police officer, and Sherif, Professor of Sculpture at Minya University. In an earlier interview with Al- Ahram Weekly, Montasser recalled that "as a child I saw him carve until his hands bled, and yet he would continue working". He remembers his father's dedication to work, as well as his occasionally strange hours: "As children, we used to go to bed, get up at six to go to school, and then return in the afternoon to find that father had been working all the time." Abdel-Hay died in the eccentric house he had built himself, overlooking a graveyard. He had chosen the house both as a place to live and a place to work. Unlike the first floor apartment in which he had lived before the new house had ample space for larger sculptures. In his last days Abdel-Hay continued working but seldom travelled. He had become a strict vegetarian, insisting meat today is "not what it was". He had become one of Egypt's leading artists, a man entirely dedicated to his craft.
