As an Egyptian-Jewish student of Fine Arts in Rome in the 1920s, he became painfully acquainted with Fascism. Returning to Alexandria, he found an artistic environment that was as sensitive as he was to innovation and to the political themes of freedom, anti-fascism and anti-colonialism. A recursive approach drawing on both figurative and informal art and seeming almost to be in search of the right visual vocabulary to express, with acknowledged mastery, his passion for being avant-garde.
