This study of Egyptian aesthetics interprets the historical and political context of artistic discourse in the early twentieth century. In a period marked by intense struggle between landlords and rural laborers during the Depression and World War II, the author compares the rise of the Egyptian Surrealists, from the late 1930s, and the Contemporary Art Group, from the late 1940s, with the discourse of the Egyptian nationalist "nahdah," or Renaissance, that arose from the late 1920s. Polemical discourse by the Egyptian Surrealists from the late 1930s was set amid institutional struggles, specifically in the rise of art teachers who argued against an elite academicism that sought to dominate Egyptian artistic discourse. The critique by the Surrealists was in the context of mass political mobilization against the old regime and large landowners, which culminated in the revolts and coup of 1952. These aesthetics interacted with two central issues: Egyptian peasant struggles against capitalist agriculture and the problem of nationalism and the state, as a reconfiguration of the political economy. In response to these critical issues, discourse about contemporary art and unevenness of daily life transcended the epistemology of the modern or the contemporary as temporal categories that set themselves off as historical transitions. (Contains 116 notes.)