Artist Kamal Youssef, who was also an engineer with Swindell-Dressler for 27 years, says that a defined center of gravity is important to the strength of an engineering form, and to an artwork, whether his or one in an Egyptian tomb. The figure in "The Advocate," for example, is "solid, stable," Kamal says. It was painted this year and is a response to the ongoing war and turmoil that began with 9/11. Click photo for larger image. 'Kamal Youssef: An Artist's Journey' Where: The University Museum, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana. When: Noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and until 9 p.m. Thursday. Saturday is the last day of the exhibition. Admission: Free. DVD: A 5-minute DVD introduces the visitor to Kamal Youssef in his studio. Catalog: Paper, 40 pages, color-illustrated, with biography, $10. Information: 724-357-2397, www.iup.edu/ or www.kamalyoussef.com.

It's pretty unlikely that someone who had a long, distinguished career as an engineer would also have exhibited in a Venice Biennale. Even more unlikely is that an Egyptian native who was once a member of the Cairo avant-garde would be conducting salons at his home in rural Indiana County.

Both exist in 83-year-old Kamal Youssef, or Kamal as he prefers, whose retrospective exhibition "Kamal Youssef: An Artist's Journey" is at The University Museum, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, through Saturday.

Approximately 130 paintings, works on paper and sculptures illustrate his artistic career. They begin with paintings from the early 1950s, some of which are representative of those he exhibited in Paris at that time, and culminate in a gallery of work created since 9/11, in response to the attack and to the Iraq war.

Sept. 11, 2001, "had a tremendous effect on me," he says. "We have to change, have to get out of this dilemma, have to get out of this atmosphere of killing everybody."

Kamal was born in 1923 in Cairo, where he attended progressive secondary schools, spending summers at his father's family village in the countryside near the Nile. The discrepancy he observed between bare-bones farm life and urban privilege greatly moved him, he says.

Kamal learned social consciousness from his grandfather, Imam of the district mosque, who himself was the grandson of the head of Al-Azhar, an esteemed Islamic school, founded in the 10th century.

Early in his life, Kamal's artistic talent was recognized and fostered. But rather than train at an arts academy, he earned an engineering degree, which was a more pragmatic course guided by his father, a successful textile merchant.

Kamal headed his own firm in Egypt from 1948 to 1954, but he also continued to make art, as he would throughout his life. In 1939 he joined and began exhibiting with Art et Liberte, an avant-garde organization of literati inspired by the anti-fascist actions of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. In 1946, he cofounded Le Groupe de l'Art Contemporain, which an art historian dubbed "the awakening of the artistic consciousness in Egypt." Exhibitions in Paris followed.

Kamal also exhibited in Venice, Alexandria and Sao Paulo Biennales, and his work is in such collections as the Museums of Modern Art in Cairo, Alexandria and Paris.

After Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser's ascent to power, Cairo, by 1954, had become unsafe for politically outspoken artists and intellectuals. Kamal, then in Paris, opted to stay.

When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, precipitating a global crisis, Kamal and his American wife moved to the United States. (Maria, of Jewish and Christian heritage, was born in Europe and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They have three children, one of whom, Hisham, is a sculptor.)

In 1957, Kamal began a 27-year career with the Pittsburgh-based firm Swindell-Dressler. He was sent to Paris in the 1970s to head a project to build steel mills in Iraq and Iran and he commuted to Pittsburgh every few weeks to see his family.

	Keith Boyer Kamal Youssef (center) gives suggestions this fall to IUP art students Steve Perna, top, and Rich Roberts, bottom. The students were painting a wall-length mural under his tutelage. Click photo for larger image.

He'd also become a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in 1962, and exhibited locally in solo and group shows for three decades.

When Kamal retired from Swindell-Dressler, the Youssefs moved permanently to what had been their weekend retreat on a farm deep in the Amish countryside north of Indiana.

Exhibition sparkles

More than the sparse words of biographical outline that attempt to convey eight richly lived decades, Kamal's artworks speak to who he is.

From the beginning, the influence of Egypt's cultural heritage is evident in his paintings -- in their searing colors, flattened planes, reduced compositions, and figures rendered frontally or in profile.

Although Muslim, Kamal did not feel restrained from figural representation. Egyptian painters had trained in the West pre-World War I, and the 1920s tomb discoveries bolstered the place of the figure in Egyptian art.

The earliest exhibited works include a trio of "Pilgrims" in front of a village, a turbaned "Saint George" spearing a crocodile dragon and a mermaid-like "Circe."

What Kamal and members of his group emphatically did not paint were what most other artists were depicting -- tourist scenes like the pyramids.

Most of his work is figural, featuring predominantly women -- for him, a symbol of life -- often in juxtaposition with an animal, and that frequently a bird.

Some pieces are pure abstraction, such as diagrammatic, gold-leafed works from the 1960s that Kamal began making after taking classes in IBM's FORTRAN language.

Kamal points out that both engineering and art are about concept and design -- "mentally, it's the same process."

In some works, such as "Crescent Moon" of 1993 -- in which a bare-footed, green-dressed woman holds a rooster, symbol of power, in her lap, beneath a luminous Islamic crescent -- one might read the early influence of Mexican muralists such as Rivera.

Others, such as "Aftermath" of 2002, a grief-permeated adult and child, bring to mind Picasso, an artist Kamal especially respects for his independence and engagement with social issues.

Above: Birds are a frequent presence in Kamal Youssef's paintings, as with the woodpecker of "Harbinger." "They're saying something," the artist says. Asked whether we then should listen to them, he answers, "Yes. They bring you a statement." Below: This reclining figure, "Alexa Unborn," sculpted in black walnut by Kamal Youssef, was inspired by his daughter Mounira's 1992 pregnancy. Click photos for larger image.

Convergence of man and art

Some of his sculpture has a folky feel, like the long-limbed and wonderful polychromed plaster "Jacsan." A band of small, silent figures, assembled on a windowsill and part of an 80-strong "Kamal's Army," are observant rather than militant. "They're philosophers," Kamal says.

Another atypical work is the exquisite abstract "In the Beginning," which Kamal made on Sept. 11, 2001. A black sun burns into a collapsed gray-rose twilight of ash over two, long horizontal gray rectangles, an homage both poignant and powerful.

One figure, "Christopher," seems so much a portrait that I ask whether the artist knows him personally.

"I know all these people," Kamal responds with a quiet smile. One senses he is all of them.

From the exhibition Kamal led me to a studio where a dozen young IUP students in Susan Palmisano's class were painting, under his tutelage, a mural on a wall-length canvas. His joy and pride were evident, as was their affection and respect for him.

The man and his art converge: warm, humane, probing, witnessing, mystical, harmonious, cosmopolitan, passionate, sensual, calm, thoughtful, celebratory, vulnerable, idiosyncratic, determined.

It's to IUP's credit -- particularly the perseverance of College of Fine Arts Dean Michael Hood, and exhibition co-curators John Edelman and Sandra Kadlubowski -- that this exemplary life and the objects birthed of it were selected to celebrate the museum's 30th anniversary.

Both Kamal -- and his striking oeuvre -- are experiences that enrich.