By Nigel Ryan Both the Centre of Art, Zamalek, and Horizon One Gallery, attached to the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, are hosting an impressive selection of instantly recognisable names. It is the kind of brand recognition of which advertisers must dream -- in the case of the Centre of Art's Spanish-sponsored show, "Twenty Five Painters from Catalan", the list includes Gaudi, Dali, Miro and Picasso, while Horizon One's "Impressionism to Modernism: From Corot to Picasso" includes absolutely everyone. The Spanish show is, frankly, something of a disappointment. Miro and Picasso are represented by prints while Gaudi gets only what looks like a plaster reproduction of a five-foot column which does little justice to the megalomaniac ambitions of a man whose life was dedicated to realising one of the most extraordinary cathedrals ever to be built. Whatever one feels about his work, Gaudi surely deserves something a little more imposing than a column that looks for all the world as if it has been removed from the tiers of an oversized wedding cake. Among the prints Miro comes off best. Facsimile reproductions of sketchbooks, which are in any case framed so a single image shows, or else reproductions of pencil sketches, however expensively printed, hardly do justice to Picasso. Miro's prints, though, are at least conceived of as such, and the series of four large black images, though a very tame expressionism, manage nonetheless to dominate the entrance hall. Dali, too, is present mostly in prints and photographs, though one large and, I would guess, late painting is included for good measure. Grey-blue sausage-like fingers and brown nails and tacks hover in grey-blue space. Dali, in later life, was given to parodying himself. It was, of course, his prerogative to do so. The high point of the exhibition is the room allocated to Tàpies. Graffiti, scrawled on glass, paint -- real paint -- swirled on card, marks on brown paper. After the convenience of the prints Tàpies opens up a space that has yet to be drained of air by the deadly attentions of the curatorial embalmers and poster makers. As for the rest, occupying the upper galleries, they are, despite the declamatory banner outside the Centre of Art proclaiming Twenty Five Modern Masters from Spain, largely decorative works, pretty in their way, but derivative. Perhaps it is a pity that the Spanish show is running concurrently with the Horizon One gallop through a century of French painting, an exhibition that has drawn on the collections of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, Paris and the Musée Marmottan, in addition to major private collections. Given the sources it would have been difficult for Daniel Marchessau, the curator, not to have stuck in his thumb and pulled out quite a few plums. What is astonishing is that he has amassed an exhibition of 52 works, by 52 separate artists, and included very, very few duds. Chronologically, the paintings run from an 1860 Corot landscape, Entrée de village, to Matisse's 1942 Danseuse assise. It is a formidable task to plot a route through the eight decades that separate these two paintings, since they encompass the entire history of European Modernism, though it is a task Marchessau has accomplished with aplomb. Obviously something has to be jettisoned. But what? That Braque should be represented by the ravishing Fauvist landscape L'Olivier gives away something of the direction the curator seeks to highlight. Braque, after all, was a latecomer to the Fauvist fold, and remained in situ for a very short time. However beautiful -- and Braque's Fauvist works are among the most astonishing produced by the movement -- few would claim that they count among his most significant achievements. The Dionysian is favoured over the Apollonian, revelling in colour over the more cerebral exploration of form. But there is little point in complaining. If the monochromes of early Cubism are ignored it is in a good cause. Just stand in front of Bonnard's Coin de salle à manger au Cannet. Even Delauney's Eiffel Tower, impossible to conceive of without Picasso and Braque's early experiments, comprises a late Cubism conditioned by a highly developed colourism. Delauney's simultaneity is, as Marcel Duchamp pointed out, "a technique for construction, colour construction... It is a dislocation of the Eiffel Tower, one that could fall." In the version included here it would fall in a mass of oranges and yellows. There are wonderful surprises where least expected, among them Odilon Redon's startlingly modern small landscape Rochers de Vallières près de Royan and Gustave Moreau's Promenade dans un parc, an oil painting in which a lady strolls nonchalantly away from an agitated and ambiguous swirl of saturated crimson. Suddenly one realises that it was no accident that Matisse was once enrolled as Moreau's pupil and that Symbolism, while sometimes wishy-washy, could on occasion display a heart of steel. Marchessau offers a salutary reminder that perhaps the Fauves were not so wild after all, that two decades before colour had seeped beyond its descriptive confines. And Toulouse-Lautrec's portrait of André Rivoire could well make Madame Matisse turn even greener with envy. From Corot to Picasso adroitly side-steps the canonical images apart, perhaps, from Léger's Les deux femmes debout. And in doing so it gains in strength, seducing the spectator with its insistence on the pleasure principal. Even the small Cézanne bathers contributes to the orgy of colour, the sheer delight in slapping on paint, that makes Jean Arp's white relief look like a party pooper. Chagall is viridian, Maurice Denis rose and violet, Giacommeti red and brown, Dufy blue blue blue, van Dongen impastoed flesh with miraculous purple eyes, Monet as saturated as he ever became, Fantin-Latour as succulently flowery, Puvis de Chavannes a view to a cerulean landscape, Picabia violent and verging on the psychedelic, Bernard cool and exquisitely modulated. But maybe the strangest guest at this particular party is Marcel Duchamp, the artist who renounced easel painting and whose shadow continues to fall most heavily on contemporary practice. He is represented by La bo�te en valise, a portable museum containing miniature reproductions of his most important works issued in a limited edition between 1938 and 1941, and attributed to Duchamp and the alter-ego he created, Rrose Sélavy. It is the only non painting included, although the box contains, alongside a phial of Paris air and a miniature urinal, a reproduction of Nude Descending a Staircase. It may well point the way to the future but, my, what a glorious past. Horizon One is once again perfectly lit. Marchessau has achieved a curatorial coup. Cairo is full of self-professed art lovers. They should not just be queuing outside the gallery but around the block. Unfortunately, they are not. For full details of exhibitions, see Listings
