With a landmark new museum planned for Beirut, Lebanese-Palestinian art collector and patron Ramzi Dalloul has ambitious plans to expand the global reach of modern and contemporary Arab art.

At the end of the 1930s, a group of avant-garde Egyptian intellectuals rebelled against what they saw as the gradual retreat of their nation into restrictive social customs and despotism. They sought to liberate the Egyptian consciousness by means of artistic freedom and radical political action, creating the Egyptian surrealist movement.