The annual Asilah Cultural Moussem, an international festival held in northern Morocco, was cofounded in 1978 by Mohamed Benaïssa and Mohamed Melehi in collaboration with Toni Maraini and Al Muhit Cultural Association. It served as a significant postcolonial cultural platform, involving activists from the Casablanca Art School and artists from Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The festival featured outdoor exhibitions, murals, visual art workshops, theater, music, and social and cultural programs aimed at rehabilitating the neglected city of Asilah and integrating art into social progress and daily life. The Asilah Cultural Moussem is still ongoing to this day.

Morad Montazami: Toni, to start the conversation, can you tell us how the idea of creating a festival of murals in Asilah—literally on the city’s walls (fig. 1)—came to you and Mohamed Melehi?

Toni Maraini: Firstly, I would like to mention that Mohamed Benaïssa was with us from the outset. Melehi and Benaïssa were born in Asilah, and our mutual friendship had blossomed many years before under various circumstances. Back when we were teaching at the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s, Melehi and I frequently traveled to Asilah, where we met Benaïssa. At that time, Asilah’s old medina was in poor condition; walls were deteriorating, many houses were abandoned, and the streets were quite dirty. When we got together with Benaïssa, we often discussed how we could contribute to the community’s cultural and economic development. Our goal was to enhance Asilah’s living standards, and for this, we thought about creating a festival. However, instead of calling it a “festival,” we decided to call it a “moussem,” the term traditionally used in Morocco for local festivities organized by the community. Thus, the Asilah Moussem needed to be community-driven from the outset. This is how the concept of a moussem emerged. Fortunately, there were elections during this time, and both Benaïssa and Melehi had campaigned for local office. Their active involvement in various community projects sparked enthusiasm among the residents,  and they were voted in: Benaïssa was elected mayor, which was a significant milestone for Asilah’s political landscape, and Melehi was elected member of the municipality and took on a prominent cultural role, creating a group called Al Muhit Cultural Association. This cultural association represented a fresh start, marking a new chapter in the city’s history. Concurrently, the Ministry of Culture provided funding to restore the city’s walls and its long-neglected houses. This was when the vision of visible walls took form.

MM: This photo conveys a sense of how artists organized and assigned the walls for painting. 

TM: Take a look at the state of the walls in this image (fig. 2). The house you see in the background was abandoned. Fortunately, we had numerous friends who were artists. We forged these connections through our involvement in the Casablanca Art School and through various other activities,¹ including organizing a series of public outdoor exhibitions—Présence Plastique—on the streets of Marrakech and Casablanca.² These artists participated with great dedication. In figure 2, we see them walking around the medina, deliberating on which area to tackle.

Artists were organized into six groups, with each one focusing on a specific location. The walls would initially be painted white, and then each artist would create a composition with the assistance of local young people. Everyone collaborated regardless of gender and age. Take, for example, this mural by Mohammed Chabâa (fig. 3; see also fig. 1). In the photograph, you can see Chabâa himself, but there is also someone assisting him. The wall was painted white, and the streets have been cleaned.

MM: Toni, you pointed out your experience with collaborative methodologies, dating back to the renowned Présence Plastique outdoor exhibition series held in Marrakech and Casablanca in 1969. Therefore, by the time of the Asilah moussem, roughly a decade later, you all had had experience with public space exhibitions. Could you elaborate on the specificity of the Asilah Cultural Moussem and the unique interactions that it fostered between artists and the local community?

TM: First of all, it differed in that in Jemaa el-Fna Square, paintings were hung on the walls of a large, unique public space. Here in Asilah, murals were created on the walls in various corners and city streets. The enthusiasm of the people was enormous, as they would pitch in to help with the painting.

MM: Did local people spontaneously join the mural collaboration, or had you planned for these murals to involve the local community?

TM: As muralists, we naturally considered the principles of street art. It needs to be in public spaces, contributing to urban development, and involving people’s participation. This is why, when working with Benaïssa on the concept of the Moussem, Melehi and I proposed a special art and culture project with three components: workshops, exhibitions, and street art.

MM: And can you tell us about the role of the local inhabitants, especially women? When we examine some of the photographs taken by you and Melehi, we can see many women collaborating on the murals.

TM: Yes, many female students had gathered to create their walls, and older women would come around to look, offering suggestions and help (fig. 4). That was indeed socially important. It sparked interest and friendship and, moreover, it reflected the female community’s desire to turn to more modern habits and experiences, changing from what Asilah was and engaging for better local conditions.

MM: Yes, as you say, apparently the local inhabitants understood the project, and there was some sort of synergy between the project, the city’s state, and how local people responded with enthusiasm and positivity to the Moussem, which brings me to my next question: Was Asilah already a tourist destination in 1978, or did it become one after the creation of the Moussem?

TM: Before the 1970s elections, Asilah was in such poor condition that it only drew a transient crowd—people who would briefly visit and then leave. The restaurants were shut down, and there was nothing to offer visitors. However, after 1978, Asilah’s economic situation improved significantly as shops started to open. Artisans, both men and women, would now sell their products, like rugs and ceramics. The weekly market became a gathering place for people from the countryside to sell their goods—vegetables, tomatoes, and many other products from nearby farms and fields. It was always crowded and very animated. The streets were cleaned, and many shops and houses reopened. Two traditional restaurants (one owned by a woman) opened as well. All of this attracted tourists, who came to see the murals. A museum was also established in the ancient Portuguese Al-Kasbah Tower, where some exhibitions were organized. These significant changes encouraged thoughtful tourism—tourism that pauses, observes, and values. Eventually, as people’s income improved, local families found it easier to send their children to school.

MM: Let’s discuss the workshops that featured so many key artists, especially in such a cosmopolitan environment. Can you tell us how these workshops were organized? I know, for instance, that the printmaking workshop was very significant.

TM: There was a painting workshop that welcomed artists of different nationalities and offered lessons to the youth from the city, but the printmaking workshop (fig. 5) was particularly significant, thanks to three outstanding artists, Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn, who were experts in the field and supervised the workshop activities for several years. They coordinated all aspects, secured all the printing machines, etc. The printmaking workshop was the first of its kind in Morocco. Several artists, such as Farid Belkahia and Malika Agueznay (fig. 6), came to learn how to print their own works on paper, and over the years, they engaged in teaching these techniques to local students.

MM: How and when did you and Melehi connect with Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn?

TM: We became acquainted with them during our stay in New York from 1962 to 1964. Melehi had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and I had been given a scholarship to Smith College. While in New York, visiting exhibitions and participating in cultural meetings, we became good friends with several artists.

MM: So you actually knew these artists for almost 18 years before inviting them to Asilah. That’s impressive!

TM: In those years, we traveled to New York several times, and met them again, and we became friends. The Moussem was a good occasion to invite them to Morocco. Given our collaborations on projects associated with the Casablanca Art School and international exhibitions or meetings, we also traveled to Baghdad, Lebanon, Tunis, Algiers, France, and Spain, and met many other artists. It was a fascinating cosmopolitan time that fostered numerous international, cultural, and artistic connections. Unlike today, there was a positive atmosphere, one characterized by a strong desire to collaborate in every direction—north, south, east, and west.

MM: It’s evident that our current fascination with the 1960s and 1970s, along with the broader postcolonial networks and solidarities, indicates we are facing challenges today. This suggests that our solidarities and networks clearly have limitations, and we need to draw our inspiration from that era.

TM: Exactly. There were no borders at that moment.

MM: Could you remind us if international artists were invited to the first edition, or if the 1978 edition primarily featured Moroccan artists—with international artists being invited starting from the second edition?

TM: Since our initial concept was to conduct local activities with an international approach, fostering connections between the north and south, east and west, and of course, Africa, the first edition was absolutely international (fig. 7) . . .

MM: For example, if I recall correctly, the first time you met Etel Adnan was around the time of the First Biennale of Arab Art in Baghdad in 1974. Four years later, she came to Asilah. I mean, there was a very strong dialogue and an artistic friendship between you and Adnan, as you even translated some of her poems into Italian.

TM: Yes, over the years, I translated and published three of her books and several poems in Italy. I also wrote for the catalogues of a couple of her exhibitions. As you say, I met Etel Adnan in 1974 at the Baghdad biennale, which I attended with Melehi and Belkahia. Since she told us she wanted to visit Morocco, we invited her in 1978; she visited Asilah, traveled around, had an exhibition in Rabat, and then in 1979, came again to participate in the Moussem painting workshop.

MM: There were printmaking workshops, painting workshops, and ceramics workshops, right? Who were the main participants practicing in these workshops? Were they mostly young Moroccan artists from Asilah? Obviously, many incredible artists came together, like Etel Adnan, Mona Saudi, and Malika Agueznay—all the ones we mentioned. But who were the workshop practitioners? Were they young people from Asilah or even youth from other Moroccan cities coming to Asilah in the summer?

TM: The workshops were open to everyone. Some of the artists invited would be responsible for organizing workshops and teaching programs. Artists from many countries would work at the workshops, as did young people from Asilah, including some who came from Tangiers or Rabat. Workshops were a great place for artistic convergences, not only for painting, sculpture, and ceramics but also for learning printmaking, as it was, at that time, the only place to learn it in Morocco (fig. 8).

MM: So this was a poster exhibition (fig. 9), right? Can you tell us if there was a direct relationship between the printmaking workshop and such displays? Were the works on display there mainly by artists who took part in the workshops, or were there other printmakers?

TM: This poster exhibition was held with works made for the occasion by the artists participating to the painting and printmaking workshops. The wide exhibition space was once an abandoned factory that had been restored. It became a very important municipal gallery called “Al-Qasaba,” where many exhibitions have been held over the years.

MM: Were you the curator of this exhibition?

TM: The art exhibitions were curated collaboratively! Certainly, Melehi and I would participate in their conception, yet much of the work was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the new local association called “Al Muhit,” created by Melehi and Benaïssa with the enthusiastic participation of other friends and people from Asilah, Tangier, and Rabat.

It is important to remember that during the Moussem there were not only the workshops and exhibitions, but also many other different projects—conferences, music and theater rehearsals, film screenings, and all the while street art activities. Every day, women and men worked hard and collectively to make all this happen. This is what the Moussem was intended to convey: a collaborative effort that showcased the dynamic enthusiasm of the community.

MM: OK, I get it. So there was never really one person, for example, responsible for the poster exhibitions; it was always a collective effort.

TM: As a newly elected member of the city council, Melehi was responsible for cultural activities. He would work from morning to evening on everything related to the arts, and I would help—but, as I said, without the participation of work groups and the great collective force, it would have been impossible to realize these cultural, artistic, and social projects concretely.

MM: It’s quite clear that you and Melehi were significant driving forces, albeit within a collective framework. Additionally, you both stood out as key figures in fostering connectivity, effectively bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and countries in Asilah.

In the children’s workshop, you played a crucial role. I know you always tell me not to exaggerate your contributions, but in this case, it was definitely you who raised the idea of creating workshops for children. I’m aware that your experience with children and art pedagogy goes back further, as you had already been involved in art therapy, even in schools in Casablanca in the early 1970s. Can you share how the concept of children’s workshops and art pedagogy became so meaningful for you, and how you later implemented it in Asilah?

TM: When I was teaching at the Casablanca Art School, I also wanted to do something for younger audiences and the public schools. In 1976, I was asked by the headmistress of the Ibn Abbad school—a public school in a neglected neighborhood in Casablanca—to organize a free art workshop there. It turned out to be a great experience not only for me but also for the students, who joined with enthusiasm and, in many cases, did much better in their studies and their behavior as a result. That prompted me to study art therapy. In fact, every art historian knows that art serves as a form of therapy. I had a good friend, the psychiatrist Abdallah Ziou Ziou, who encouraged me and with whom I often exchanged ideas. Then, I had the opportunity in 1980 to open an art therapy workshop at the Children’s Hospital Ibn Rochd in Casablanca for two years. That was a great responsibility but also a fantastic experience.

MM: Did you implement the children’s workshop beginning with the first edition of the Moussem?

TM: Yes, since the very beginning . . . and I didn’t want the artists to join and teach . . . there was nothing to teach. The children would teach the artists (fig. 10)!

MM: The workshop’s approach was that we shouldn’t try to teach them anything; rather, they can teach us something.

TM: Certainly! They have valuable lessons to teach us and share. The issue was that at their school, students were asked to copy images, and instead of letting them express themselves, the children would have their drawings severely judged and corrected. During the first week, the first month, and the very first years of the Moussem, the doors of my workshop—which was organized in an open space between the street and the garden of the Raissouni Palace—were wide open, welcoming children and teenagers, boys and girls, from the streets and the neighborhoods around. They came, some from very poor backgrounds, others not. They came in, stayed, and played. Initially, there were approximately 20 children, and within two years, the number grew to around 200, possibly even 250 (fig. 11).

MM: Many of these children seem to have attended the workshop consistently over the years. Some of them you followed over the years; it wasn’t a one-time meeting. I believe you worked with several of them for many years, which implies that you saw some of them grow up, correct?

TM: Yes, many attended the workshop for many years; they literally grew up in it! And I kept in touch with them. Many have become excellent artists and some, art teachers. They still write to me, which is the most important thing. If somehow over the years, my name was forgotten by the Moussem’s organizers, young people who attended my workshops did not forget me …

MM: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the independence of the Asilah Cultural Moussem compared to other more formal postcolonial festivals, which seemed more state-organized. For instance, the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 was state-organized and highly political, as was the Baghdad biennale of 1974. Similarly, the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 had a distinctly centralized organization, despite its international character. Given that the Asilah Moussem was organized on a citywide scale rather than as a state-run event, was it more independent or less political from an official standpoint?

TM: We attended the Bagdad biennale of 1974 with Melehi—as the artists related to the Casablanca Art School representing Morocco. We attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 as well. All these events were fantastic artistically, but they indeed felt overtly political and official. Consequently, there were independent artist groups engaged in protest, like the Aouchem artist collective in Algeria and others. Asilah was different because it was organized locally by the municipality and the Al Muhit Cultural Association, and it involved local people primarily—this is why it was important to call it a moussem and not a festival.

MM: It’s quite interesting that it was just as international as in Algiers. It matched the internationalism of those earlier festivals, but the organization operated on a different scale. And, as you mentioned, it felt more local and grounded in some way, perhaps. So I believe it’s a very intriguing point regarding the originality of the Asilah Moussem within the broader context of postcolonial platforms, festivals, and transnational solidarities.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in September 2024. The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

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Early press reviews of Niati’s exhibitions highlight the artist’s focus not only on gender and violence but also on sound. A review of a group exhibition at the Galerie M’hamed Issiakhem (March 8–April 10, 1987) in Algiers that included artworks by Niati alongside those by Hamida Chellali, Akila Mouhoubi, and Baya Mahieddine notes the artist’s focus on sound or, rather, its absence. “Women are at the heart of Houria Niati’s inquiry. The twelve pastel works on paper and the four paintings on canvas all take the woman as their main subject or, more precisely, the suffering of a woman,” the author observes before adding that the paintings make palpable the “forced silence” to which women have been subjected.² The article draws readers’ attention to the “silence” and “imprisonment” that are discernible in Niati’s depictions of women, many of whom are shown in inhospitable spaces populated by sharp-toothed hybrid creatures and floating masks—as in The Last Words Before the Long Voyage (fig. 1), an oil pastel from 1982. In other works from the same series, which is titled Delirium, women are shown confined in black rectangular and arch-shaped spaces or reclining next to a window and looking into the starry night. Some float through an abstract space in menacing proximity to serpents. The lack of interaction with other figures and their visible solitude submerges them in an overwhelming silence. Yet, while The Last Words Before the Long Voyage depicts a solitary figure surrounded by dangerous-looking animals, the title references the words spoken prior to embarking on a mysterious journey. In fact, sound in the form of poetry and music would become key aspects of Niati’s artistic practice, in effect “activating” the paintings.

The artist is perhaps best known for her series of paintings No to Torture (fig. 2), which she completed as an undergraduate at Croydon College of Art in the United Kingdom in 1982. Recently shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990 (November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024), this series is composed of a first painting depicting four women that is displayed alongside four other paintings, each of which focuses on one of the figures. Shackled at their ankles, their faces wounded by rapid incisions, the figures, the artist suggests, personify all women who have suffered colonial torture.³ The thick layers of paint and repetition of the figures across multiple canvases can be read as the artist’s persistent attempt to recover the tortured bodies without concealing the violence they were subjected to. Indeed, the dark smudges of paint that indicate their faces raise alarm about the aggression experienced by Algerian women during the war at the hands of French soldiers.⁴ No to Torture is a direct reference to two Orientalist paintings by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), both of which are titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, from 1834 and 1849, respectively. Niati’s work retains Delacroix’s composition but replaces his soft, blended brushstrokes with dynamically applied paint and deep incisions—an expression of anger at colonial injustice and violence, Niati explains.⁵

The solitude of the individual women in each of the four canvases makes the silence of incarceration palpable. Even the group painting does not reveal signs of conversation between the women, whose faces are rendered in a highly abstract way, with the green figure’s head immobilized by a rectangular shape that resembles a birdcage. Coincidentally, Niati completed No to Torture only two years after the Algerian writer Assia Djebar published a collection of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1980). In her introduction, Djebar points to the formidable absence of sound in Delacroix’s artwork, arguing that the women abruptly stopped their conversation when the door opened and the painter walked in. “Sound has truly been severed,” Djebar writes, adding that “only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in the painting.”⁶ It seems significant, then, that Niati often integrates sound in her paintings and installations, reciting her own poetry and singing Arab-Andalusian songs in front of her works in an attempt to complement the visual experience with a sonic one. While Tate only exhibited one of the paintings, and Niati did not perform in the gallery space, the display of No to Torture at the exhibition Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1993 was accompanied by the artist’s recitation of her poem “Delirium,” which played from speakers. The poem began with the following words:

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

The lyrical evocation of stories and tales that have become nearly obsolete suggests their healing powers could cure the “infected eyes,” the “resignation,” and the “demission.” Recited alongside the No to Torture paintings, the poem commits to restoring the sound muted first by Delacroix and then by the French army when it incarcerated and tortured Algerian women. The detention is addressed in the poem, which mentions “doorless and openingless” walls of rooms from which there is no escape. The call to listen resonates loudly in “Delirium,” as if asking viewers to focus on and try to hear the muted voices of the women in the paintings. 

During the opening of Forces of Change, Niati also sang three songs a capella in front of the No to Torture paintings (fig. 3). All three works were composed by the medieval singer, poet, oud and lute player Ziryab Ibn Nafi, who lived in exile in Muslim Andalusia and whose songs Niati discovered while working at the Algerian Ministry of Youth and Culture from 1969–76. For Niati, Ziryab Ibn Nafi epitomizes the experience of migration. Born in Baghdad, where he was the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s singer, he was forced into exile by his musical master El Mossili, who was jealous of his student’s increased success and power. Upon his arrival in Andalusia, he revolutionized medieval music, became the court musician for caliph Abd ar-Rahmān II, and gained fame as “the poet of Cordoba.” Widely considered to be the progenitor of Andalusian musical cultures in all their forms, his rich poetic-musical compositions have significantly shaped contemporary urban music in North Africa. When the Arabs lost Andalusia to the Spaniards in the late 15th century, they escaped to North Africa, where they continued their musical traditions. Arab-Andalusian music, then, is a cultural expression that survived exile and displacement. For Niati, it forms an eternal memory of migration, which she herself experienced upon leaving Algeria in the 1970s. By singing these songs in front of No to Torture, she articulated her own experience as a migrant Algerian woman, creating a shared sonic, cultural space in which women of different generations can coexist across time and space.

As seen with No to Torture, Niati often mobilizes poetry and music to “speak back” to Orientalist artworks. She shares this concern of confronting Orientalist visual representations with artists such as Brooklyn-based Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who is currently working on a series of 16 paintings in response to Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,⁷ and with Algiers-based Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya), whose recent work reimagines two paintings of Algerian women by Étienne Dinet (French, 1861–1929).⁸ Niati’s use of sound, however, is distinctive within this context. Her installation To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It from 1991, is composed of three large pastel-colored paintings and three pottery vases depicting floating women’s silhouettes, masks, fish, snakes, and the moon. The title refers both to Algerian folk songs that praise the beauty of a girl who fetches water from the fountain and to the abundance of Orientalist paintings incorporating sensual aesthetics to conceal the physical effort of carrying water. By using thick outlines for a woman’s silhouette in one of the paintings and displaying the paintings next to heavy pottery vases, Niati emphasizes the strain on women’s bodies. The poem that plays through speakers as part of this installation touches on a recurring theme in Niati’s work—the lack of freedom and inability to break free due to either colonial oppression or patriarchal social structures—by evoking a “World where the explosion of Revolution” was “blocked up by the walls built by possessive hands.” Addressing “oppressed spirits,” the persona in the poem evocatively says, “The immobility is the repressed dream of the impossible escape to far horizons.” The poem then introduces the figure of a “deformed Orientalist” who “has traveled desperately searching for peace and newness,” a reference to the many Orientalist artists in Algeria who depicted the land and its people as exotic and erotic. In the lines preceding the introduction of the Orientalist, the poem reads:

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

Unraveling the Orientalist depiction of Algerian women as mysterious, sensual, and erotic, the poem directly addresses the women fetching water, piercing the layers of Orientalist representation that have fixed a romanticized view of them. The display of To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It also includes the shapes of human hands and feet formed of sand on the gallery floor, evoking the actual bodies of the women whom Orientalist art turned into static images, as well as multiple reproductions of the same photograph showing women fetching water, suggesting the recurring labor. 

Integrating sound into her multimedia installations, Niati works against both colonial and local archetypes of Algerian women by merging their abstract painterly depictions with poems or songs. It is not insignificant that Niati frequently recalls marveling as a child at the stories and fables told to her and her sisters by their grandmother and that she firmly attributes the development of her own plastic language to them (fig. 4).⁹ 
The women in her artworks are always heavily abstracted, as if their bodies are at risk of dissolving into smudges of paint or oil pastel. Yet sound makes their physical presence felt: The poems often address the women directly, while the Arab-Andalusian songs locate them within a distinct cultural heritage. These songs also allow Niati to explore her own position as a migrant Algerian woman for whom sound is a way of forging a precarious relationship with the women she depicts, across space and time. Niati’s expressive way of working and the fact that she never corrects the initial marks made on the canvas suggest that her paintings are deeply performative, as if refusing to be fixed as static images that would delineate the terms under which women can be pictured. Free-floating forms and overlapping colors create vibrant spaces in which the sounds of women’s voices slowly emerge.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

The post Jean-Michel Atlan: An Algerian Imprint on Postwar Modernity appeared first on post.

Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

Cliquez ici pour lire la version anglaise.

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Malika Agueznay, among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco, was able to forge a space for herself within a predominately masculine environment by insisting on the presence of a gendered expression of modernity through her research into seaweed. She was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts of Casablanca from 1966 to 1970, during the tenure of the faculty associated with the experimental Casablanca School. While she was supported by her professors, as one of few women within the student body, Agueznay was able to create a new perspective arising from the embodiment of her own femininity.¹ Her work and viewpoints were shaped by the formative experience within the school, although she also distinguished herself in the ways in which her research emphasized her female identity. Agueznay was the only major female modernist artist linked to the École des Beaux-Arts at the time it was central to the debates around modernism in Morocco. Starting during her studies and expanding throughout her career, Agueznay elaborated on seaweed as a primary motif in her abstract practice. Drawing upon the influences of the Casablanca School, she engaged in abstraction that was deliberately evocative of femininity and of her own female perspective.

The École des Beaux-Arts was the locus of the Casablanca School, and Agueznay’s time as a student there coincided precisely with the movement’s brief heyday.² Directed by modernist artist Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) from 1964 to 1972, the institution became a critical space for modernist experimentation and practice. It had been founded in 1950 under the French protectorate, and its faculty in the 1960s and early 1970s, which included Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Mohammed Chebaa (1935–2013), actively rejected the remnants of colonialism, including Eurocentric teaching methods. Instead, as part of their broader anti-colonial politics, the school’s professors rooted their pedagogy in local visual culture, using objects such as rugs and metalwork as models in the classroom and leading students on field trips around Morocco to document and study applied abstraction within mosques and other local spaces. The École des Beaux-Arts remains open in Casablanca and has trained many women artists since Agueznay. Though there were women on the faculty when the institution was integral to the development of Moroccan modernism, including influential art historian Toni Maraini (born 1941), many of the female students did not go on to have significant careers in the arts. Agueznay is the only major woman artist linked to the institution during this pivotal time.

One of the key moments in the history of the Casablanca School is the 1969 manifesto exhibition Présence plastique, which was held in Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech. In protest to an official salon organized by the city’s ministry of culture, six male faculty members displayed their work in this public square over ten days to engage a broader audience in the debates around modernism.³ Agueznay and her classmates accompanied their professors to Marrakech, witnessing and participating in their conversations with the public. The Casablanca School artists followed up this exhibition later that same year with another public exhibition, this one in Casablanca in the Place du 16 Novembre. Similar to the presentation in Marrakech, their goal was to reach a broader audience by bringing art to a more public setting and to encourage conversation about it. Unlike in Marrakech, however, their students, including Agueznay, participated—though they did not stay with their work, because, as Agueznay remembers, they had to return class. Including the students in this undertaking was part of the broader system of collaboration that the faculty tried to promote. According to Agueznay, the relationship with her teachers “was very friendly. It wasn’t the teacher where you had to stand at attention, let him pass. Not at all—it was contestation. When we didn’t understand, they would help us understand. We discussed things. Once or twice a week, we would have round tables, where each artist would go with his students, and we would sit and talk. There were permanent discussions.” This sense of being part of an ongoing collaborative intellectual pursuit informed Agueznay’s interest in collective practice and abstraction. In 1978, alongside her former professors, she was a founding participant in the first edition of what would become the annual Cultural Moussem of Asilah. In 1981, with many of the same people, she was involved in a public art project within the Berrechid psychiatric hospital, where in collaboration with one of the patients, she produced a ten-meter-long mural. In 1985, she created a large-scale mural in Asilah as part of the festival. These collaborative forms of public engagement were influenced by the formative ideas of the Casablanca School.

Agueznay entered the École des Beaux-Arts at age twenty-four. She was slightly older than her fellow classmates and already a mother, which further set her apart. Although there were very few women students—only three in her memory within the painting studio when she began—she felt supported by the faculty and other students, and was not only treated kindly and respectfully but also no differently. When pressed, Agueznay described some backlash once she had left the school and begun to maintain, as a woman artist, a modernist abstract practice. (“En tout cas, j’ai reçu des coups de bâton pour ça!”⁴) While still a student, she insisted on creating a place for herself as a mother and artist, bringing her young child, Amina, with her on days she did not have childcare. As the institution was relatively small, Amina was able to sit in the corner, where she would play with clay provided by one of the professors. Agueznay remembers Belkahia raising his eyebrows at Amina’s presence each Wednesday, but Agueznay insisted that she could either come with her child or not come at all. She had a second baby while still a student, and so then both children accompanied her on field trips; she, in fact, attended Présence plastique with her newborn. Similarly, her children always joined her in Asilah, as they would be on school vacation during that time. Agueznay describes the collective effort of the festival, with the participation of whole families. Children would have drawing lessons or take part in artist-led workshops. When pressed about the challenges of balancing her practice and her role as primary caregiver, she deflected: “It was the only solution. . . . It was like when the artists got to the school, the most essential thing was art and research. . . . We all [the whole family] participated in the creation of the festival.” Agueznay created a space for herself as a mother and artist at a time when the possibility of maintaining both identities was a crucial aspect of the second wave feminist investigation. In her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969), for example, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939), specifically argues against the patriarchal American art system that deemed she could not be both a mother and an artist, and embodied that in different “maintenance” works. Similarly, in 1973, the collective Mother Art created a playground for the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, making their children’s inclusion in art spaces part of their work. The presence of Agueznay’s children was not performative, but rather the result of necessity. She created this space for herself, though, at a time when there were no other female modernist artists in Morocco and when, in other parts of the world, artists were actively confronting what seemed to be a double bind.  

Agueznay’s practice can be seen structurally through the lens of feminist analysis, including in the groundbreaking way that she navigated her career as an artist and her role as a mother. Within the work itself, which consistently features the motif of seaweed, she also elaborated what she considered to be a specifically female form of abstraction. Recalling, perhaps, the marine plants and algae she would find as a child in summers on the coast, the motif in practice is not figurative. Far from being determined by mathematical systems, these organic shapes are formed instead by instinct, then further built up by the inclusion of texture, whether through cut wood, thickly applied ink, or sand within the paint. The abstraction thereby becomes rooted in the body, guided by feelings and the senses. Agueznay has linked the seaweed to the female form, and saw the rounded shapes, when she first developed them, as only possible from a female artist. Unlike the hard edges of the geometrical abstractions produced by other students, these rounded twisting shapes were, for her, rooted in her own female identity. Within an overwhelmingly masculine context, both at the École des Beaux-Arts and within the broader art scene in Morocco, Agueznay’s deliberate evocation of female identity and female form can be read as a concrete claim for female presence in what was a male-dominated field.

Over time, Agueznay has incorporated the seaweed form in different ways, in effect, pulling it in different directions: as pure abstraction, as the foundation for calligraphic text, as part of a distinct plant formation, or as a specific evocation of the female body. She has also used it across mediums, placing it at the center of her multifaceted practice, which has extended from printmaking and painting to sculpture and woodwork. She first used the motif in the monumental group of painted wooden panels she showed at the 1968 student exhibition. The six panels together measure 305 by 440 centimeters (approximately 10 by 14 1/2 feet), much larger than human scale. In the center of the grouping, there are two diamonds stacked vertically, the smaller one on top of the larger one. They connect organically, with the same seaweed contracting at the meeting point and continuing to expand into the lower shape. The background is sky blue, with the central diamonds in bright orange and the remaining seaweed a deeper marine blue. The whole work is covered in seaweed, and the central shape is thereby distinguished through the use of color; while there are distinct diamonds, there are no hard edges delineating them. The diamonds evoke the curves of a woman’s body. In its use of a singular sign that dominates the panels, the project seems equally influenced by imagery culled from rugs or jewelry. Indeed, the faculty insisted that students undertake rigorous research into forms rooted in local visual culture. The seaweed began from a formal interest. Struggling to find a theme for her final project, Agueznay was encouraged by Melehi to “do your lines,” and it was through visual experimentation that she settled on seaweed. Melehi himself, over the course of a career lasting almost sixty years, maintained a central interest in the motif of the wave, which he then used in various configurations and toward different ends. In the repetition over the span of her career of a central abstract motif, and in some ways the shared oceanic theme, Agueznay is clearly linked to Melehi, who encouraged her to stay with this project. However, there are obvious distinctions within their artistic endeavors. Melehi’s hard-edge waves are often in dialogue with science and cybernetics, and his abstractions seem to function as precise systems separate from human intervention. In contrast to Melehi’s coolly analytic abstraction, the organic shape of Agueznay’s seaweed seems lawless, growing upon itself in a generative abstraction. Built up with materials that add dimension, either through mixed-media application or the inclusion of sand in the paint, Agueznay’s work is also tactile. Her individual touch is always present. Agueznay pulled motifs, forms, and topics from the Casablanca School, while at the same time, carving out her own formal path and insisting on a female presence within a broader, predominantly masculine landscape.

Many of these ideas have coalesced in the importance of printmaking in Agueznay’s practice. She began printmaking in the first edition of Asilah Moussem in the workshop of Roman Artymowski (1919–1993), and went on to study in New York in the workshops of Mohammad Omar Khalil (born 1936) and Robert Blackburn (1920–2003).⁵ She continued to explore printmaking in Asilah with Khalil, Blackburn, and Krishna Reddy (1925–2018), exhibiting her prints in group exhibitions there starting in 1979. She began leading this same workshop when Khalil left. Agueznay was the first woman printmaker in Morocco. Like in the rest of her practice, her prints primarily emphasize the seaweed motif and are built up to have different layers of texture. The physicality of the printmaking process has also been important to her, as she has strived to maintain her own touch and presence within this medium. Collaboration has likewise been central to this part of her practice, both in terms of her own education in different workshops and in the annual workshops she led in Asilah for over twenty years. More broadly, in becoming Morocco’s first woman printmaker and then incorporating printmaking as one part of her multidisciplinary practice, Agueznay has created a space for herself as an artist outside the boundaries of media and gender.

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As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Farhat contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic spaces during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the artist created numerous murals and decorative programs to enhance the architectural environment of newly built schools, hotels, factories, banks, and government buildings. This essay introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition among Tunisian modernists, and describes a selection of the artist’s monumental designs in which her characteristic hybrid creatures predominate. Crafted in ceramic tiles, paint, stone, iron, and wool, Farhat’s artistic corpus portrays animated scenes of laborers and artisans, geometric patterns associated with textiles and pottery made by women, nude female bathers, coastal motifs, and elements of industry. Hybrid organisms composed of flowers, birds, and artisanal symbols populate these fantastical environments. Many of the monumental works remain in situ across Tunisian civic spaces, serving as muted backdrops for the activities of students, teachers, tourists, laborers, and bureaucrats. What subdued histories might Farhat’s composite creatures, made up of anthropomorphized artisanal motifs associated with femininity, reveal? 

A nude woman bather floats along a current of stylized motifs, forming the focal point of a ceramic tile wall designed by artist Safia Farhat circa 1963. Decorating the reception area of the Hôtel Skanès Palace, located on the waterfront of the coastal resort area of Monastir-Skanès, the bather turns her oval eye toward passing guests and employees. The curvature of her breast and fingers mirrors the undulations of waves (fig. 1). She emerges from an imaginary seascape of floating elements: the rooftops of mosques, zigzags from carpets, triangular fish, flowering plants, and jewel-like biomorphic shapes. Two inset panels depicting gazelles and mythical composite creatures rest against the backdrop of deep blue and coral tiles. A few kilometers away, along the same beachfront, Farhat composed similar designs for the stone panels that decorate the bar in the restaurant of the Hôtel les Palmiers. Situated in a hotel adjacent to the presidential palace in the city of Monastir, the bar’s counter features two rows of geometric and biomorphic designs (fig. 2). Farhat’s evolving iconography may be characterized by such fantastical motifs drawn from women’s textiles, tattoos, jewelry, and ceramic wares. These designs germinate and sprout in Farhat’s decorative programs in Monastir’s secondary school and civic assembly hall, as well as in other sites across Tunisia. The artist’s composite creatures and artisanal motifs animate her compositions and reveal the entwining of gender, labor, and art during the 1960s.¹

Safia Farhat worked across several professional domains as she sought to breathe new life into art forms associated with women’s artisanal production.² She created these decorative programs in the post-independence environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when family law reform in 1956 enacted a regime of state feminism, while broader initiatives aimed at women’s social and economic development endorsed the transformative power of creating art.³ As larger numbers of women enrolled in secondary school and pursued higher education, in particular at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, feminist narratives drew on the symbol of the woman artist to promote female creativity and independent thought, and to serve as a gauge for societal progress (figs. 3, 4).⁴ Moreover, the nationalist quest to establish a Tunisian modernist aesthetic gave momentum to the ennoblement of art forms subordinated as “handicraft” under the French protectorate. By the early 1960s, art forms such as weaving and ceramics came to represent possibilities for enhancing women’s social, economic, and intellectual autonomy.

A professor of decorative arts at the École des Beaux-Arts, Farhat joined Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisian, 1928–2008) to become the school’s second Tunisian instructor in 1959; Gorgi taught ceramics from 1956 onward (fig. 5). Both artists were also members of the École de Tunis, a group of Tunisian, French, and Italian painters who increasingly turned to craft-based mediums in their explorations of material and heritage. As professors, Farhat and Gorgi shaped a beaux-arts curriculum that sought to elevate art forms categorized diminutively in colonial discourses as feminized craft. They sought to instill in a new generation of Tunisian students creative, entrepreneurial approaches to the modernist reinvention of art forms connected to local patrimony, as well as the confidence to propose innovative designs executed using craft processes. Under Farhat’s leadership, students in the atelier of decoration gained new perspectives on reviving “artistic craft” through field trips to artisanal centers. She also partnered with the National Office of Handicraft, and specifically weavers in the textile ateliers, to teach technique and design. A feminized bureau whose workforce was 80 percent female, the National Office of Handicraft attracted thousands of young, unmarried women into its pilot training programs because “handicraft,” especially weaving, represented an acceptable profession for lower-class women who, past primary-school age, sought opportunities for education and employment. Farhat’s experimental pedagogy endeavored to support collaborations between artists and artisans, and to cultivate female relationships across social classes.⁵ As she undertook teaching and administrative responsibilities that integrated art and artisanal production, she simultaneously trained a new generation of women creators who would go on to bridge institutional divides.

In 1963, Farhat and Gorgi co-founded a design company, the Société Zin, that put their pedagogical approaches into praxis. This company took its name “Zin” from the Arabic word zīn, which denotes beauty, decoration, and the power to enthrall. Together, Farhat, Gorgi, and their collaborator Claude Béja designed and delegated orders for decorative programs that often overlapped with architectural commissions mandated by law. Specifically, the One Percent Law, reinstated in 1962 by presidential decree, required that a portion of every civic building’s budget be allocated to decoration.⁶ This law underscored president Habib Bourguiba’s emphasis on the arts as a product of societal and cultural advancement. It also enabled participating artists to capitalize on the so-called development decade as the government commissioned artworks for the building of dozens of centralized, state-run offices, the tourism and hotel industry, the redesign of Monastir (Bourguiba’s natal city), schools, and impermanent displays for trade fairs. New construction, concentrated in the capital and coastal regions, centered on tourist and bureaucratic infrastructures. Artists, frequently members of the École de Tunis and their artisan collaborators, were subcontracted to decorate civic buildings, producing more than a hundred murals, mosaics, obelisks, friezes, and tapestries in wood, ceramic, iron, glass, stone, and wool in the decade following the law’s reinstatement. A journalist with the newspaper La Presse elaborated the mission of the Société Zin: “Their goal, they tell us, is to attempt to renovate Tunisian decoration with a utilitarian intention in seeking to employ as many artisans as possible. We have an array of artist-artisans in Nabeul, Ksar Hellal, Kairouan, Hammamet, and elsewhere, such as ceramicists, stonecutters, nattiers [plant-fiber weavers], weavers.”“⁷ Commissions for decorative programs not only created the conditions under which artistic collaborations across social classes could occur, but also brought visibility to these relationships.

Due to its strategic importance in the Ten-Year Plan, which underpinned Tunisian socialism and the Bourguibist struggle against underdevelopment, tourism was an early and vital source of artistic patronage.⁸ The Tunisian Tourist Hotels Company (Société des Hôtels Tunisiens Touristiques, or SHTT) was a public corporation established in 1959 to build a tourist infrastructure. The Société Zin facilitated many decorative projects for SHTT hotels by providing clients with architectural plans and proposing designs for decorative programs. Depending on a project’s size, scale, and medium, Farhat and Gorgi hired collaborating artisans for its execution and employed iconographic references to dramatize the budding artisanat artistique (artistic craft industry). Hotels also purchased handmade objects such as rugs, ceramic vases and ashtrays, and wrought iron candelabras to complete the decor. The tourism industry promoted the concept of uplifting the artisan, stating in its bulletin, “In Tunisia as elsewhere, the craftsman must learn new skills to become both an able technician and creative artist. The 20th Century has assigned him a new and appropriate role: that of enriching daily life by beautifying useful and functional objects.”⁹

The blend of fantastical, animate elements and symbols of feminine labor, which characterizes Farhat’s ceramic tile wall in the Hôtel Skanès Palace, in fact threads her decorative commissions of the period. In partnership with Gorgi, Farhat designed the reception area of the Hôtel l’Oasis in Gabès and the restaurant-bar of the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir to be self-referential. Both seafront hotels feature ceramic tile murals, pierced ceramic walls, and sculpted stone decor that whimsically echo their particular decorative characteristics. Farhat’s stonework in the Hôtel l’Oasis, though now partially dismantled, includes fragments of geometric and vegetal motifs abstracted from women’s textile designs and tattoos. In one panel painted by an unknown renovator, a tattooed peasant woman holding a pomegranate wades through knee-deep water (fig. 6). Schools of fish bearing delicate geometric and floral patterns dart around her ankles; these oval creatures resemble the opaline shapes drifting through the bather’s seascape in the Hôtel Skanès Palace. Above, the fronds of a palm tree turn into resplendent jewelry-like patterns, accentuating the triangular fibula pinning the woman’s dress; similar fibulae spring to life in other compositions.

Other examples of hybrid artisanal creatures are visible in Farhat’s bar in the Hôtel les Palmiers, built by presidential architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub for the hotel adjoining Bourguiba’s summer palace (fig. 7); her stonework depicts animate fibulae and geometric and biomorphic designs similar to those in Gabès and Monastir-Skanès. Highly stylized triangular fish and aquatic creatures (like phytoplankton) swim and float across the bar’s frontispiece. These auspicious symbols re-create the orderly structure of a woven grid. Linear motifs, like small propellers, protrude from the triangles; the “arms” and “hands” of the central anthropomorphic design suggest feminine patterns and a bridal motif found in weaving (fig. 8). In addition, Farhat and Gorgi decorated both hotels with pierced, undulating ceramic walls in vivid orange and in pale turquoise and green. In the Hôtel les Palmiers, Gorgi’s luminescent screen of gazelles, horses, and birds morphing into flowers separates Farhat’s bar from the dining-lounge area and encircles the restaurant (fig. 9). The installation of these artworks in new spaces of economic and ideological power situated them in development discourses, especially, as Tunisian scholar and artist Aïcha Filali (born 1956) has articulated, during a period when hotels officially served as “windows into the country.”¹⁰ While tourism constituted one significant source of patronage for Farhat, she also created monumental works featuring hybrid creatures for state offices and factories.

Farhat’s stone monument L’homme et le travail (Man and Work), which she designed in 1964 for the entrance to the National Institute of Productivity in Radès, amalgamates motifs that exemplify their collective inscription in the institutions of economic and gender reform (figs. 10, 11). Sculpted in low relief by stonecutters from Dar Chaabane, this triangular post displays images on three sides. The composition on the first side depicts a stylized male figure in profile sniffing a mashmūm (bouquet of jasmine buds), which he grasps with pointed fingers. On the second side, a sturdy plant, rooted firmly in the ground, sends up curling leaves and a flower bud, which cups a fish. One bird, which stands atop the flower, is personified with flowing hair and a large, oval-shaped eye. An arched doorway frames these hybrid creatures. On the third side of the post, archetypal plants grow in three-dimensional layers above a cogwheel, a symbol of Bourguibism. Farhat’s iconography elicits the sociocultural and agricultural programs of the National Institute of Productivity, the developmental aims of which she interrogated through her own collaborations with artisans and art students.

Farhat installed friezes in iron and enamel on the facade of the central office of the Tunisian Sugar Company in Béja that invite powerful comparison to her realist mural inside the main entrance (figs. 12–14). The abstract imagery of the exterior friezes consists of stacked lines, zigzags, half-moons, and geometric shapes evoking the core elements and colors of an unraveled tapestry. The dynamic shapes and lines bend, suspending animated crescents and triangles resembling Farhat’s hybrid birds and angular fish. In the building’s interior, the artist painted a socialist realist–style mural depicting male workers holding tools (fig. 15). While at first glance the metallic iron compositions bear scant formal resemblance to the realist portrayal of heroic masculine workers, the thematic content of the murals and the forms and materials of the friezes bespeak the gendering of labor. Artisans and laborers occupied the same discursive fields related to societal advancement. Farhat drew regularly from the symbols, motifs, and materials associated with women weavers in probing the alignment of artistic and economic revivals, and she employed the labor and ingenuity of women artisans in her work. Her triangles, bouquets, and zigzags suggest those found in other women’s artistry, particularly textiles woven in Kairouan and regions of the southern interior, which were targeted by the National Office of Handicraft in its reorganization. Moreover, in official discourses, the laborer (epitomized by the woman weaver) represented the citizen deemed in need of social uplift. In the case of the Tunisian Sugar Company, an ironworker executed Farhat’s designs in a collaborative process between artist and artisan. In evoking the feminized artisanat, Farhat conjured the class-based, gendered division of labor inherent in the production process of the decorative commissions.

Textile motifs comprise the content of Farhat’s largest ceramic frieze, a culminating example of a decorative program in which diverse artistic genres and industries converge. Around 1964 Farhat and Gorgi received a commission from SOGICOT (Société Générale des Industries Cotonnières de Tunisie, or General Company of Tunisian Cotton Industries). At SOGICOT’s main factory in Bir Kassaâ, they merged artisanal and coastal themes for an audience of bureaucrats, designers, and textile workers. Farhat designed a vast ceramic tile mural to wrap around the exterior facade of the building, while Gorgi created a monumental stone obelisk to be set within a courtyard fountain. Farhat’s winding panels portray a mythical world in which feminine motifs are suspended in a watery blue seascape populated by human and animal figures and composite creatures made from anthropomorphized artisanal designs. Across the right wall facing the entrance, these designs interlace female figures, male figures in a boat, fish, flowers, and horses (fig. 16). The left wall bears some of these whimsical elements floating alongside hybrid artisanal creatures; landscapes composed of geometric elements evoking patterns of five (khumsāt), weavings, silver fibulae, and candlesticks (shamʿdan); and men’s bodies composed of geometric-patterned rugs (figs. 17, 18). Composite creatures made of flowers, birds, and textile motifs, patterned into a vivid blue, purple, and red garden, decorate the main entrance (fig. 19).  

Seen as a trailblazer in economic development, SOGICOT was a strong employer of wage-earning women in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourguibist discourses equated the burgeoning industrial textile industry with handicraft, and emphasized its capacity to cultivate an “uneducated” female workforce. As Sonia Maarouf wrote for Femme in 1965, “Yesterday, this woman, who was a custodian of a generation characterized by nomadism, managed to find stability, and today we see her contributing to the building of a new society based on social justice.”¹¹ Sixty-eight women designers, including Beaux-Arts graduates and factory workers alike, were to gain autonomy and professional experience in convergent textile industries perceived as intimately connected to women’s hands and bodies. Farhat’s portrayals of feminine artisanal production, animated by her composite creatures, are discursively linked to embodied labor, constituting an insightful visual record of the interface between fine art and craft in their evocation and materialization of gendered hierarchies of production. These linkages, in turn, delineate the works’ inscription in the infrastructure of gender reform and economic growth, and in an aesthetic of self-referentiality characteristic of the artist’s work of the period.

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The canon of Egyptian art history has consistently championed women. Unlike their Western contemporaries, Egyptian women artists have been both present and on an equal footing with their male counterparts since the first Salon du Caire was held in 1921. As a result, a local industry of empowered women painters emerged during the last century.¹ Exposed to the outside world, they defied conventions, pioneered art movements, fought for women’s rights, and in the process, spoke on behalf of a nation. Gazbia Sirry (born 1925) is one of these groundbreaking women.

A spokesperson for seventy years of history, Sirry might well be looked upon as a complex political project.² Notwithstanding the historical significance of her art—and the international recognition that has come with a record of seventy-five-plus one-woman shows across continents—Sirry is surprisingly under-studied, and her art is described predominantly in technical terms centered on “color.”³ The quintessence of life and political statements, however, seems to have been ignored, if not entirely missed. Educated in Egypt and Europe, Sirry built one of the most influential careers in twentieth-century modern Arab art.⁴ Divided into three overlapping phases, her paintings blur art and politics as they narrate the story of societies vacillating between triumph and defeat, dignity and humiliation, social justice and inequality. Sirry arguably birthed a new identity that makes no distinction between seeing and militancy. As she fluidly moved between styles, this “childless” grande dame became the national godmother to an entire nation (fig. 1).

Gazbia’s Voice: The Voice of a People

Much has been written about Gazbia Sirry’s “Lust for Color,” the title of the only monograph published about the artist, making “color” her legacy and the thread on which her entire career hangs.⁵ Although significant, color is but one facet of Sirry’s life and work. Since her appearance on the art scene in the late 1940s (fig. 2), she has opened a portal to Egyptian society in an effort to translate “the worries that plague [people].”⁶ Decidedly figurative, then abstract expressionistic, her work is often denied the sociopolitical adumbrations she intended when she began her career by stripping the veil of intimate moments in open-end narratives. Often described as “ornamentation”⁷ or “Decorative Realism,”⁸ her early stylistic phase is a window onto an infinitely expandable world—and the foundation of her entire journey.

Raised by her widowed mother and divorced grandmother, Sirry was determined to address gender equality at a time when heated debates around the “Woman Question” peaked.⁹ Filled with movement, resistance, and commotion, the extraordinary painting Tahrir al-Mara’a (Women’s Liberation; 1949) shows Sirry’s symbolism as she renounces the inherited traditions¹⁰ that hold women back (fig. 3).¹¹ Three nude figures struggle to pull an immobile camel forward while carrying three veiled women inside a carriage shaped as a pyramid—a reminder of the tombs of the dead in ancient Egypt. On the top right, a muscular man wrestles a large stone as he tries to free the women’s path. In the middle of what could be a forest, humans shaped as trees raise their hands as they seek salvation. In al-Zawjatan (The Two Wives; 1953), Sirry touches on the controversial topic of polygamy (fig. 4). At the center of this image, the new wife sits on the floor, looking straight at the viewer. In her arms, a newborn baby boy is latched to her breast. The “expired” wife sits miserably behind her replacement. Grieving, the latter’s two teenage daughters console her as they feel responsible for their mother’s misfortune. By the same token, Sirry digs deeper into the ramifications of gender preference as she stresses favoritism toward the male child (Um Antar; 1953; fig. 5), or the perks of daughterhood’s associated domestic lifestyle of seclusion (Um Ratiba; 1952; fig. 6). In this series of paintings, Sirry calls upon the sacred light of ancient Egyptian temples, the rich colors of Coptic textiles, and the geometric themes of Islamic art. Playing with light and darkness, she repeats and juxtaposes vibrant motifs and patterns on walls, floors, and clothes. Consistent with Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor’s notion of “provincialized modernisms,”¹² Sirry transforms the scenes into modern folkloric mosaics in which spatial disharmony and random precision meet.

Unlike the majority of Sirry’s pattern-rich paintings of the 1950s, Umm Saber (1952; fig.  7), is composed of large monochromatic blocks. A tribute to one of the peasant women who sacrificed her life to resist British occupation in 1951 (fig. 8), the painting depicts a rural woman dressed in a traditional loose-fitting black gown (galabia).¹³ Staring out at the viewer, her eyes are filled with fear and she is leaning backward. On the right, three men attempt to hold her before she collapses, while on the left, a young boy, probably her son, raises his tiny arms as he seeks to grab his mother’s attention. In the background, a dozen small figures dressed in similar uniforms and holding rifles stand behind barbed wire. A two-dimensional solid ground separates the soldiers from Umm Saber. Evocative of ancient Egyptian painting, the main figures are characterized by an absence of linear perspective, which results in a seemingly flat and static scene. Darker than the woman, the three men and the boy are shown in profile, their eyes drawn from a frontal view to infuse the surrealistic elements with Sirry’s ancient past.

Whereas a simple village woman illustrates Sirry’s treatment of oppression under British colonialism, two emancipated upper-class urban women represent the dawn of a new era. A tribute to the Revolution of July 23, 1952, and the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy, Song of the Revolution, also painted in 1952, depicts two fashionably dressed women with strikingly short hair, gazing at the unknown (fig. 9). Rendered in horizontal shades of red, white, green, and black, the women’s clothes blend the colors of the old royal and the new liberation flags to symbolize the rite of passage. One woman plays the piano while the other is standing. Portrayed with a falcon face reminiscent of Horus, the emblem of the revolution, the standing woman places her birdlike hand firmly on the illegible music note, bare except for the word “nashid” (chant or anthem).

The Rupture

By 1959, Sirry was working in a new ideological and stylistic zone—revealing her private sphere in times of political instability. Two works serve to illuminate this period: Fortune Teller (1959) marks the break between representational painting and the beginning of the abstract period (fig. 10).¹⁴ Whether by choice or destiny, Sirry never had children. Contextualized, she resorts to palmistry and folk culture to reflect on the future and the (im)probability of having a child. Meticulously constructed around the symbolism of colors developed in ancient Egypt, the face and belly of the central figure flaunt the blue color that routinely symbolizes fertility and rebirth.¹⁵ The diamond-shaped belly button hints at the amulets used to protect the pregnant. While the yellow/gold face stands for the eternal, the choice of a striking red body indicates life and victory, and anger and fire. Facing the viewer, the central figure displays swollen breasts, a rounded belly, and possibly an embryo, cradled by a pale hand. The Arabic title of the painting Kare’at al-Kaf translates as The Palm Reader, which helps to explain why Sirry has chosen to highlight the hand. Rather than reading a coffee cup, or looking into a crystal ball, the artist spells out the method used to predict the future while evoking the protective talisman known as the Hand of Fatima. Heads in profile, the couple surrounding the central figure follow the conventional rule in ancient Egyptian art whereby the male figure is depicted with reddish-brown skin and the woman, here only the body, is light-skinned. In this context, Sirry’s choice to depict the face of the left female figure in black can be associated with rebirth and resurrection, as was the case with the god Osiris, who was returned to life by Isis. “By contrast,” as interpreted by Tiffany Floyd for the exhibition Post-War: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, “the arms of the mud-red male figure on the right are crossed over his chest, a traditional burial pose, suggesting death.”¹⁶ Or the hopelessness of having a child. It is not clear who the central figure represents. Is it the palm reader or a self-portrait? Who is the naked couple? The artist and her husband? Highly rich in symbols and meanings, Fortune Teller is one of the artist’s most revelatory works as Sirry opens up a personal space and invites the viewer to partake in her own self-interrogation (fig. 11). Equally important, it stands at a crossroad between the desire to create a new life and the imprisonment of her husband, Adel Thabet, during the massive crackdown on leftist intellectuals by president Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954–70).¹⁷

In al-Sign or Awlad al-Takhshiba (Prison or Prison Children; 1959), Sirry depicts six figures trapped in the same cell (fig. 12). The figure on the top left is crying, while the one on the right looks to the side, wearing a prisoner’s number on his chest. Using sketchy brushstrokes, Sirry has distorted the prisoners, connecting them through yellow outlines, twisted facial features, and oblique angles. As we sense a reduction of unnecessary visual clutter, the prisoners are portrayed as shadows, laying open the simplicity of the subjects and conveying their blank resignation. Rather than juxtaposing colorful Islamic or Coptic geometric motifs, Sirry’s treatment of imprisonment evokes Pharaonic friezes found in tombs and temples. Chopped heads are arranged vertically on horizontal layers without linear perspective to reinforce the sinister and cramped atmosphere. Overtly simplified, the painting offers a counterpoint to the dazzling exuberance of the artist’s earlier works. Instead, it depicts a compressed and somber space, bare but for a yellow sun visible through the bars.

Al-Hazima (Defeat; 1967) concludes the radical break between Sirry’s figurative compositions and the beginning of her abstract period (fig. 13). The devastating moral aftermath of the 1967 Third Arab-Israeli War echoes in the inanimate painting as Sirry depicts herself standing firmly on the left. A shadow without clothes, she confronts the viewer. Functioning within a field that sways from Pan-Arab pride to shame, a landscape of ruin betrays the personal feelings of disillusionment. Behind the unshakable thousands-year-old gold pyramid appears a red patch, the sun. Is it setting or rising? It does not matter, as Sirry diligently points to the eternity of Egypt. 

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«Je peins toujours beaucoup avec acharnement et inspiration; toujours les mêmes sujets mais avec une nouvelle vision, une vision plus pure et sobre; il s’agit pour moi de me renouveler continuellement dans ce monde de l’inrenouvelable¹ et de la banalité la plus complète où nous sommes» [Fig. 1].² Ces mots, la peintresse égyptienne Inji Efflatoun (1924-1989) les écrivit en 1963 depuis sa geôle, où elle était détenue depuis près de quatre ans. De juin 1959 à juillet 1963, elle fut emprisonnée par le régime nassérien en raison de son appartenance au parti communiste. L’un des leaders de la révolution égyptienne qui renversa le roi Farouk en 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser devint président en 1956 et demeura au pouvoir jusqu’à sa mort en 1970. Il installa une dictature à parti unique, réprimant violemment toute opposition. En 1959, Nasser mena des campagnes d’arrestation de masse, ciblant les communistes. Les milieux intellectuels et culturels furent particulièrement touchés.³ Incarcérée à ce moment-là, Efflatoun fit partie des premières femmes prisonnières politiques. 

Au cours de sa détention, Efflatoun peignit avec ferveur au gré de l’alternance des autorisations et des interdictions d’exercer son art, énoncées par les directeurs successifs de l’institution carcérale.⁴ Dans un premier temps, il lui fut permis de peindre à condition que les tableaux soient vendus au profit de la prison, avec les autres artefacts produits par les détenues. Elle obtint la permission de racheter pour elle-même un certain nombre de ses œuvres, juste après qu’elle les eut peintes, tandis que d’autres furent acquises par des membres de l’administration pénitentiaire. D’autres encore furent confisquées, et consécutivement perdues. Il est par conséquent difficile d’établir combien d’œuvres furent réalisées en prison par Efflatoun.

La cinquantaine de peintures à l’huile que j’ai identifiées⁵ inclut des portraits de détenues, ainsi que des scènes de la vie carcérale, qui donnent à voir la réalité gardée secrète de la prison des femmes. En portant le regard par-delà les barreaux, Efflatoun développa aussi une peinture de paysages. À l’intérieur de chacune des thématiques – les portraits, les scènes de vie collective, les paysages – certains tableaux déclinent une même vue. L’artiste semble même constituer un répertoire de formes et de figures, parfois reproduites à l’identique d’une œuvre à une autre. Ces choix picturaux s’expliquent en partie par le fait qu’Efflatoun était rarement autorisée à circuler avec son matériel de peinture dans les différents espaces de la prison, se trouvant contrainte de travailler confinée entre les murs de sa cellule. Le manque de modèles et de sources d’inspiration visuelles conduisit l’artiste à adopter une méthodologie qui peut être définie comme sérielle. Il semble que les «contraintes […] imposées concernant le sujet et le lieu»⁶ conduisirent Efflatoun à explorer, par la répétition, les potentialités plastiques du médium pictural. Cette évolution qui transparaît notamment dans les variations de touches, de couleurs, de cadrage et de composition observées entre plusieurs portraits et scènes similaires, suscita un renouveau de la pratique artistique d’Efflatoun, et de son appréhension du rôle de l’art.

Efflatoun fit ses débuts au sein du groupe surréaliste Art et Liberté alors qu’elle était adolescente.⁷ Actrice prééminente des sphères féministe et marxiste égyptiennes, elle explora dès la fin des années 1940 le potentiel politique et social de la peinture comme corollaire à son militantisme. Elle organisa ainsi au cours des années 1950 plusieurs expositions personnelles dénonçant les ravages du colonialisme, l’oppression des femmes dans la société égyptienne, et célébrant les forces laborieuses du pays.⁸ Celle qui signa trois livres politiques ainsi que des chroniques journalistiques⁹ avait pour priorité de «communiquer [ses] opinions»¹⁰ aussi bien par écrit qu’à travers sa peinture.

Alors qu’elle partageait son temps entre art et militantisme jusqu’en 1959, Efflatoun entama en prison une «période de pratique de la peinture»¹¹ dans laquelle elle voyait l’occasion de «perfectionner»¹² son art. Dans la continuité de son engagement politique et social, peu de temps après son arrivée en prison elle s’employa à portraiturer ses codétenues pour rendre compte, à travers leurs histoires personnelles tragiques, de «la misère des femmes dans notre société».¹³ Issue de l’aristocratie turco-circassienne, Efflatoun s’efforça tout au long de sa vie de mieux comprendre la réalité du peuple égyptien, et particulièrement des femmes des classes populaires. La promiscuité, dans les geôles nassériennes, avec les prisonnières de droit commun parmi lesquelles des voleuses, des prostituées, des meurtrières, lui permit de sceller ce rapprochement. La dimension sérielle des portraits de ses codétenues peints entre 1959 et 1963 provient surtout d’une similitude de cadrage, souvent coupé au-dessus de la poitrine, renforcée par une représentation presque toujours frontale et hiératique des visages [Fig. 2-6]. Seule les anime l’intensité des regards, dont l’expression varie de la plus grande détresse à la fixité la plus glaciale. Le dessin, très linéaire, ainsi que le traitement des carnations par la juxtaposition géométrique de teintes plates, dont les nuances contrastées modèlent les visages, confèrent également une unité à l’ensemble des portraits. Ces représentations individualisées des prisonnières se distinguent des scènes de groupes, où les figures sont le plus souvent dépourvues de visages – peut-être en allusion à la déshumanisation des détenues par le système carcéral.

Ces tableaux révèlent des aspects du quotidien en prison, dans les espaces qui en structurent la vie collective comme les dortoirs, la cour, le lavoir ou le réfectoire : on sait que grâce aux faveurs du directeur de son quartier, Efflatoun jouit ponctuellement de la possibilité de circuler dans la prison pour y peindre.¹⁴ La succession, pour l’artiste, de périodes de mobilité et de réclusion au sein du bâtiment eut un impact sur le choix de ses sujets de représentation, mais aussi sur sa façon de travailler. Efflatoun reproduisit ainsi des figures identiques dans plusieurs tableaux. C’est le cas par exemple dans deux scènes intitulées Femmes accroupies où l’on voit les prisonnières en rang, attendant devant la porte à l’heure de la promenade quotidienne – l’un de ces tableaux est intitulé Al-Qurfasaʾ (femmes accroupies) dans plusieurs sources,¹⁵ tandis que le titre de l’autre est inconnu [Fig. 7-8]. Tout à fait à droite, la même femme aux cheveux courts, coiffée d’un turban, tourne la tête vers le mur, exposant sa nuque. Son mollet nu apparaît sous la galabeya retroussée. Rythmés par les arrondis des dos et des jambes qu’amplifient les rayures des uniformes, mais aussi par des postures récurrentes comme le menton posé sur la main, les deux tableaux se déploient en frise. L’un, plus étroitement cadré sur les figures, fait abstraction des détails qui permettent de reconnaître la cour de la prison. Peut-être l’artiste le peignit-elle en prenant l’autre, réalisé in situ, comme modèle, dans un moment où il lui était interdit de circuler. On observe un cas similaire parmi les représentations de bateaux à voiles, dont Efflatoun pouvait admirer le va-et-vient depuis le toit de la prison, sise en bordure du Nil [Fig. 9-10]. Deux compositions verticales, au cadrage serré sur les voiles, apparaissent identiques à quelques détails près. En leur centre, deux mâts s’entrelacent formant une croix. Tout autour, la disposition des voiles et des cordages enchevêtrés est sensiblement la même. La touche cependant est différente, plus fluide et peut-être plus grasse sur l’un des deux tableaux, où les drapés sont rendus de manière dynamique par des lignes ondulées. Cette variation témoigne d’une attention portée à la matière picturale, au-delà du sujet représenté. Comme l’affirmait Efflatoun: «D’un rien comme sujet, ou même avec toujours le même sujet j’arrive à produire un tas de compositions toujours renouvelées. C’est un signe de grand progrès pour mon travail – chose qui m’encourage à travailler malgré tout et toutes les difficultés».

Si la série des portraits de prisonnières évoquent, dans leur traitement répétitif, la multitude des condamnées et leur destin misérable, en orientant son attention vers la nature l’artiste opta pour une peinture moins directement politique et sociale. Bien après sa libération, Efflatoun déclara: «L’expérience de la prison m’a révélé l’importance de la nature. Avant 1959, je me concentrais sur l’expression de la personnalité, de l’être humain. Il était rare que je peigne un tableau de la nature seule, pour elle-même. Mais quand j’en fus privée, je ressentis à quel point c’était une chose précieuse. Elle devint à mes yeux un symbole de liberté […]».¹⁶ Elle ajouta même dans ses mémoires: «si j’avais été hors de prison, je n’aurais pas peint un seul arbre, car le champ des possibles aurait été très vaste».¹⁷ On sait néanmoins que peu de temps avant son arrestation, Efflatoun déposa un tableau au Musée d’art moderne du Caire pour un concours de paysage. Elle apprit que le premier prix lui revenait alors qu’elle se cachait, se sachant recherchée par la police.¹⁸

Les motivations d’Efflatoun à se tourner vers un sujet qui l’intéressait peu jusqu’alors furent multiples. Premièrement, l’administration pénitentiaire s’étant octroyé le droit de faire commerce, pour son propre compte, des réalisations de l’artiste, il fut demandé à celle-ci de produire des images faciles à vendre: «Le sujet doit être joli, fin, reposant aux yeux».¹⁹ – les portraits qu’elle faisait de ses codétenues étaient jugés « déprimants » et donc invendables.²⁰ Deuxièmement, dans le dortoir, Efflatoun occupait l’étage le plus haut des lits superposés. Cette place présentait l’avantage d’être près d’une fenêtre, offrant une vue sur l’extérieur.²¹ Or l’institution où Efflatoun fut détenue, qui existe encore aujourd’hui, se situe dans la ville d’Al-Qanater Al Khayriya dans le delta du Nil, lieu de villégiature prisé des Cairotes pour ses jardins. Al-Qanater Al Khayriya, qui signifie littéralement «les aqueducs bienfaisants», doit son nom aux barrages érigés sur le fleuve. Ce cadre verdoyant et pittoresque se devine dans certains tableaux, où des arbres touffus et des massifs fleuris apparaissent derrière les murs et les fils barbelés de la prison. Mais surtout, c’est la lassitude de la vie carcérale qui encouragea Efflatoun à porter le regard vers l’extérieur : « Au bout d’un certain temps, je n’eus plus aucune envie de peindre la prison, ni les prisonnières. Je fus dégoûtée de la prison », reconnut-elle.²² Elle trouva alors dans la peinture de paysages une perspective favorable : « cette vue est le calmant le plus facile pour nos âmes captives, et la source continue d’espoir pour le futur », déclarait-elle en 1959.²³

Il y a donc, dans ces représentations de la nature, une portée métaphorique. Il semble en effet que l’artiste se raccrocha à la vision des plantes, des bateaux à voile, ou encore du ciel comme à l’espoir de la libération. Le geste même de peindre et repeindre le même paysage apparaît dès lors comme une entreprise d’évasion mentale. En particulier, Efflatoun réalisa de nombreux tableaux d’un même arbre, au point que ses codétenues le baptisèrent «l’arbre d’Inji»²⁴ [Fig. 11-13]. Les différentes représentations de cet arbre se caractérisent par des variations de la palette, tantôt classique dans des tonalités brunes et vertes, tantôt presque fauve, avec des dominantes violettes. Le rouge figurant les fleurs est récurrent – l’arbre est sans doute un flamboyant. Les couleurs, apposées par touches rondes, se superposent sans souci de rendre la profondeur. Ainsi, le bleu du ciel se confond parfois avec le feuillage [Fig.14]. Efflatoun, justement, s’attache à brouiller les règles de la perspective. Plusieurs tableaux montrent des branches s’emmêlant dans les barreaux, passant devant puis derrière eux en dépit de toute vraisemblance [Fig. 15]. La séparation entre intérieur et extérieur s’en trouve abolie, exprimant le désir de liberté de l’artiste. Les couleurs changeantes des arbres de la série sont peut-être le résultat d’irrégularités d’approvisionnement en tubes de peinture – les petits formats attestent de même d’un usage économique de la toile, si difficile à se procurer. Mais surtout, ces évolutions chromatiques évoquent le temps qui passe. « Je le peignais à chaque saison », dit Efflatoun.²⁵ Elle observait ainsi, en janvier 1963: «mon arbre, celui qui fleurit chaque année en plein hiver, commence à perdre ses feuilles et à revêtir sa cape de bouquets rouges».²⁶ L’expérience, par la peinture, du temps qui s’écoule est d’autant plus saisissante qu’Efflatoun ignorait la durée de sa détention. Elle fut jugée le 23 décembre 1960 et condamnée à deux années de prison. Il était cependant fréquent que les prisonnières et prisonniers politiques ne soient pas relâchés le jour de leur acquittement. Efflatoun ne fut libérée que le 26 juillet 1963 avec des codétenues, à la suite d’une grève de la faim.²⁷ L’application de l’artiste à peindre encore et encore le même arbre prend alors des airs de rituel destiné à conjurer l’angoisse d’une incarcération à l’étendue indéfinie.

Avant son emprisonnement, Efflatoun plaçait au cœur de ses œuvres un message qu’elle souhaitait diffuser. Elle voyait alors la peinture comme un moyen d’initier des changements concrets au sein de la société, de la même façon que l’action politique qu’elle menait. Son pinceau était mû par la perspective d’un avenir meilleur. En prison, il s’ancra dans un présent illimité. Ce décalage de temporalité reflète une modification de l’œuvre d’Efflatoun, amorcée par la pratique sérielle comme réponse aux conditions difficiles de sa détention. Avec les portraits qui racontent la misère des prisonnières, l’artiste mit la sérialité au service de la rhétorique. Mais avec ses représentations de la nature, Efflatoun dépassa l’usage militant des images. Pourtant ses arbres peints, en particulier, préservent une fonction narrative puisqu’ils disent le désir de liberté et l’incertitude face au temps qui passe. Bien que l’arbre se soit imposé à Efflatoun comme sujet de représentation circonstanciel, en suscitant la contemplation et en cristallisant l’espoir il fut bien plus qu’un prétexte. En témoigne le fait qu’il demeura, après sa sortie de prison, un motif central de sa production picturale. Dès le mitan des années 1960, Efflatoun peignit en effet majoritairement des paysages ruraux ponctués d’arbres fruitiers et de palmiers. Une huile, présumée des années 1970, rappelle même le fameux arbre d’Inji.²⁸ [Fig. 16]. Malgré des différences dans les teintes et le cadrage, ce tableau est, jusque dans ses dimensions, la réplique d’un autre estimé peint en prison.²⁹ [Fig. 17]. Aucune des deux œuvres n’est datée ; des erreurs ne sont donc pas à exclure. Cependant, d’autres exemples confirment qu’après sa libération, Efflatoun reproduisit des scènes conçues au cours de sa détention.³⁰

Comment comprendre ces réitérations iconographiques? S’agit-il, dans une logique sérielle, de poursuivre l’exploration formelle de sujets inépuisés? Ou bien faut-il y voir un moyen pour l’artiste, résolue à sa sortie de prison à prendre ses distances par rapport à ses positions radicales, de continuer à témoigner de l’oppression que le régime nassérien fit subir à ses opposants et opposantes? Peut-on aller jusqu’à lire dans l’ensemble de sa production post-carcérale, conçue comme une célébration de la nature et de la clarté du soleil,³¹ le récit en négatif des privations subies au cours de sa détention?

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This text is available in French here.

“I still paint a lot, with determination and inspiration; the subjects are always the same but with a new vision, a purer and more sober vision; for me, it’s about constantly renewing myself in this world of the unrenewable¹ and the complete banality in which we find ourselves” [Fig. 1].² These words were written in 1963 by the Egyptian painter Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) from her jail cell, where she had been detained for almost four years. From June 1959 to July 1963, she was imprisoned by the Nasser regime for belonging to the Communist Party. One of the leaders of the Egyptian Revolution in which King Farouk was deposed in 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser became president in 1956 and remained in power until his death in 1970. Nasser established a one-party dictatorship that violently repressed all opposition. In 1959, when he led massive detention campaigns targeting communists, intellectual and cultural spheres were particularly affected.³ Efflatoun, who was among those arrested, became one of Egypt’s first female political prisoners.

During her incarceration, Efflatoun painted fervently, depending on the alternation of permissions and bans on her practicing her art, declared by the successive directors of the institution.⁴ At first, she was allowed to paint on the condition that her work, together with other artifacts produced by her fellow inmates, be sold by the prison’s administrators. Efflatoun was allowed to buy back a number of her own artworks immediately after she painted them, while other works were acquired by prison staff. Several paintings were lost, confiscated by the penitentiary’s administration. It is therefore difficult to say how many works Efflatoun produced over the course of her detention.

The fifty or so oil paintings that I have identified⁵ include portraits of detainees, as well as scenes of prison life that reveal the reality in women’s prisons that was kept secret. Looking beyond the prison bars, Efflatoun also started painting landscapes. Within each of her subjects—portraits, scenes of collective life, and landscapes—certain paintings offer variations of the same view. The artist even seems to put together a repetoire of forms and figures, at times reproduced identically from one work to the next. These pictorial choices are explained in part by the fact that she was rarely allowed to move about the prison with her art supplies, remaining constrained to the confines of her cell. The lack of models and visual sources of inspiration led Efflatoun to adopt a methodology that could be defined as serial. It seems that what she described as the “constraints . . . imposed on the subject and the place”⁶ in fact led her to explore the plastic potential of her medium through repetition. This shift is reflected in the variations in mark-making, color, framing, and composition in several similar portraits and scenes, which sparked renewal of her artistic practice—and of her understanding of the role of art.

As a teenager, Efflatoun made her debut in the surrealist group Art et Liberté (Art and Liberty).⁷ She was active in Egyptian feminist and Marxist circles in the late 1940s when she began to explore painting’s political and social potential as a corollary to her activism. In the 1950s, she organized several exhibitions of her own work, simultaneously denouncing the ravages of colonialism and the oppression of women in Egyptian society, as well as celebrating the Egyptian workforce.⁸ During this time, Efflatoun authored three political books and newspaper columns,⁹ prioritizing “communicating [her] opinions”¹⁰ through writing and painting alike.

While before 1959 she divided her time between art and activism, in prison she began “a period of a painting practice,”¹¹ in which she seized the opportunity to “improve” her drawing and painting skills.¹² In keeping with her political and social engagement, shortly after being imprisoned, Efflatoun started to make portraits of her fellow detainees to give a visual account, through their tragic personal stories, of the “misery of women in our society.”¹³ Efflatoun, who came from the Turco-Circassian aristocracy, strove throughout her life to better understand the reality of the Egyptian people, particularly its working-class women. Her close proximity in Nasser’s jails to common-law prisoners, including thieves, prostitutes, and murderers, allowed her to seal this rapprochement. The serial aspect of her portraits of fellow inmates, which she painted between 1959 and 1963, stems above all from a similarity of framing, often cut above the chest, reinforced by an almost always frontal and hieratic representation of faces [Figs. 2–6]. Only the intensity of their gaze animates them, the expression of which varies from the greatest distress to the iciest fixity. The very linear drawing, as well as the treatment of skin tones through the geometric juxtaposition of flat tints, which shape the faces with their contrasting shades, also unify the series of portraits. These personal, individual representations of fellow prisoners stand out from the group scenes, in which the figures are often faceless—perhaps alluding to the dehumanization of inmates by the prison system.

These paintings reveal aspects of everyday life in prison, in spaces that structure collective life such as dormitories, the courtyard, the washhouse, and the refectory. We know that at the behest of the director of her district, Efflatoun occasionally enjoyed the chance to move around the prison to paint.¹⁴ For the artist, the alternating periods of mobility and forced reclusion within the building had an impact on her choice of subject, but also on her process. She reproduced identical figures in several paintings. This is the case, for example, in two scenes that depict prisoners squatting in a row, waiting by the door around the time of the daily walk. One of these paintings is referenced as Al-Qurfasa’ (Women Squatting) in several sources, while the other’s title is unknown [Figs. 7, 8].¹⁵ To the far right in both, the same short-haired, turbaned woman has turned her head toward the wall, exposing her neck. Her bare calf appears under her raised galabiya. Punctuated by the curves of backs and legs amplified by the uniforms’ stripes, but also by recurring postures, such as chins resting on hands, the two paintings unfold, frieze like. One, more narrowly focused on the figures, abstracts the details that would allow us to recognize the prison courtyard. Perhaps the artist painted it at a time when she was forbidden to move around the facility and so used the other piece, which was likely made in situ, as a model. We find a similar case among the representations of sailboats, the comings and goings of which Efflatoun could admire from the rooftop of the prison, which was located on the banks of the Nile [Figs. 9, 10]. Two vertical versions of this scene, both with tight framing on the sails, appear identical with the exception of a few details. In their center, two masts are interlaced, forming a cross. All around them, the arrangement of sails and entangled ropes is essentially the same in both works. The touch, however, is different, more fluid, and perhaps smoother on one of the paintings, in which the draping is rendered dynamically by wavy lines. This variation shows an attention brought to the mark-making, or process of painting, beyond the subject represented. As the artist explained at the time, “From nothing as a subject, or even with the same subject all the time, I manage to produce a bunch of compositions that are always renewed. That is a sign of great progress for my work—something that encourages me to work in spite of everything and all the difficulties.”¹⁶

If the serial portraits of prisoners evoke the multitudes of incarcerated women and their miserable fate, by turning her attention to nature, Efflatoun explored less overtly political and social subject matter. Well after her release, she recalled, “The experience of prison revealed the importance of nature to me. Before 1959, I concentrated on expressing the personality, the human being. It was rare for me to paint a painting of nature alone, for itself. But when I was deprived of it, I felt how precious it was. It became a symbol of freedom in my eyes.”¹⁷ Later, in her memoirs, she added, “If I had been out of prison, I never would have painted a single tree, because the field of possibilities would have been very vast.”¹⁸ However, we know that shortly before her arrest, Efflatoun deposited a painting at the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo for a landscape competition. While in hiding from the police, she learned that she had been awarded first prize.¹⁹ Beyond this affirmation, the artist had other motivations for turning her gaze to a subject that had barely interested her before. Firstly, because the prison administration benefited from the sale of her paintings, she was ordered to produce saleable images and told that “[t]he subject must be pretty, slender, easy on the eyes.”²⁰ The portraits that she did of her fellow inmates were deemed “depressing” and thus unmarketable.²¹ Secondly, in the dormitory, Efflatoun occupied the top bunk, which had the advantage of being near a window and offered a view of the outside.²² The institution where Efflatoun was detained, which still exists today, is located in the town of Al-Qanater Al-Khayriya in the Nile Delta, a destination popular with residents of Cairo for its gardens. Al-Qanater Al-Khayriya literally means “the beneficent aqueducts” and refers to the dams erected on the Nile. Efflatoun recorded this lush and picturesque context in several paintings, in which bushy trees and flowerbeds appear behind the walls and barbed wire of the prison. But above all, it was weariness with prison life that inspired Efflatoun to look outward. She later recalled, “After a while, I didn’t want to paint the prison, or the prisoners, anymore. I was disgusted by prison.”²³ She then found a favorable prospect in painting landscapes: “[T]his view is the easiest calming agent for our captive souls, and the constant source of hope for the future.” she declared in 1959.²⁴

There is, then, in these representations of nature, a symbolic dimension. It seems, in fact, that the artist clung to the vision of plants, sailboats, and the sky as to the hope forfreedom. The very gesture of painting and repainting the same landscape then appears to be an enterprise of mental escape. Efflatoun made several paintings of one tree in particular, to the point that her fellow inmates called it “Inji’s tree” [Figs. 11–13].²⁵ The different versions of this subject vary in color—ranging from classic brown and green tones to an almost Fauvist palette dominated by shades of violet. The red of the flowers is recurring—the tree is probably a flame tree. The colors, applied in round strokes, are layered on top of each other without any concern for creating depth, and the blue of the sky at times blends with the foliage [Fig. 14]. Efflatoun in fact strove to blur the rules of perspective. Several paintings show branches tangled in the metal bars of the window, passing in front and then behind them despite all likelihood [Fig. 15]. In these images, the separation between interior and exterior is abolished, expressing the artist’s desire for freedom. The color variations in the series are perhaps the result of the irregular supply of tubes of paint—their small format similarly attests to the need to conserve canvas, which was difficult to procure. Perhaps, above all, these chromatic evolutions evoke the passing of time. Efflatoun stated later, in her memoirs, “I painted [this tree] every season.”²⁶ As she observed in January 1963: “[M]y tree, the one that flowered every year in the middle of winter, is starting to lose its leaves and put on its cloak of red bouquets.”²⁷ The experience, through painting, of time passing is all the more striking because Efflatoun was unaware of the ultimate length of her detention. She was tried on December 23, 1960, and sentenced to two years in prison. It was common however for political prisoners not to be released on the day of their acquittal, and in fact, Efflatoun was not freed until July 26, 1963, along with co-detainees after a hunger strike.²⁸ The fact that she depicted the same tree over and over can also be seen as an act of ritual, one intended to ward off the anguish of an indefinite incarceration.

Before her imprisonment, Efflatoun focused on the message she wanted to convey through her artworks. She saw painting as a way to effect concrete change in society, similar to her political activism. She wielded her brush to ensure a better future. By contrast, in prison, her work was anchored to the limitless present. This shift in temporality led to a modification in the artist’s practice, which became a serial endeavor as she responded to the difficult conditions of her detention. With portraits that tell of prisoners’ misery, the artist put seriality in the service of rhetoric. With her representations of nature, she went beyond the militant use of images. Her painted trees, however, preserve a narrative function as they express the desire for freedom—and uncertainty in the face of passing time. Although the tree imposed itself on Efflatoun as a circumstantial subject of representation, by provoking contemplation and crystallizing hope, it was much more than a pretext. Its significance is evidenced by the fact that even after her release from prison, it remained a central motif in her pictorial production. From the mid-1960s onward, Efflatoun painted mostly rural landscapes studded with fruit trees and palm trees. One painting, believed to be from the 1970s, evokes the famous “Inji tree” [Fig. 16].²⁹ Despite the differences in colors and framing, this painting is, down to its dimensions, a copy of another painting thought to have been executed in prison [Fig. 17].³⁰ Neither work is dated. Though errors cannot be ruled out, other examples confirm that after her release, Efflatoun reproduced scenes she first depicted while imprisoned.³¹

How should we understand these iconographic reiterations? As the continuation of a formal exploration of inexhaustible subjects in a serial logic? Or as a way for an artist, who resolved upon her release from prison to distance herself from her radical positions, to continue to bear witness to the oppression the Nasser regime imposed upon those who opposed it, both male and female? Can we go so far as to consider Efflatoun’s post-prison production, conceived as a celebration of nature and the clarity of the sun,³² as the counter-image of the deprivations suffered during her detention?

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

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Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis. The resulting answers reflect a diversity of viewpoints on the status of the arts vis-à-vis burgeoning independent nations, cultural heritage, and historical tradition, as well as on the legacies of colonial artistic influence.

The questionnaire, here represented in full, was excerpted for the 2018 publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. To access a PDF of the original roundtable in Arabic and other sources translated for the book, please visit the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) website.

Art and Us

In presenting this special edition, we are led to ask ourselves about the state of art in the Arab world in this period in which a true awareness is violently impelling us to renew our strength and exploit our potential. There is no doubt that the answer to this question will point to the state of the artistic sense within our being, indicating whether it is healthy or ill, whether it is active or ailing. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the artistic sense of a particular nation is a measure of its quality of life and its ability to create a civilization.

To what extent is this artistic sense healthy within our being?

Upon reviewing the state of contemporary Arab arts—including painting, sculpture, photography, music, singing, dance, theater, and cinema—those who know a bit about culture will find no difficulty in recognizing that those arts collectively inspire a sense of reassurance, and may promise a better future than their current reality.

Without fear of generalizing, we can say that all of these arts suffer, first and foremost, from the fact that they have not found a distinctive personal style, a style that would convey their characteristics. These arts have nearly lost their character, and for this reason, they are on the verge of being exposed as unworthy of immortality.

There may be individual painters who have found a particular style that reflects the integration of a character with clear features. However, they are all a long way from making painting an art with distinctive traits that are the result of inspiration from the geographical environment and social milieus, and from the historical heritage. It is rare that we find in the effects of our painters a focused direction, whether psychological or social. Although there are ties that could bind a number of these painters together to form a group, these ties generally fail to indicate a clear trend, let alone an outlined school. Perhaps the most prominent shortcoming that appears in painting in our region is that many who practice this art form are more likely to incorporate the characteristics of foreign schools of art—at the expense of seeking vibrant and genuine inspiration from the reality of their own lives and the lives of their people. Such painters do not have proper awareness of the issue of content, for if they did, they also would have proper awareness of form. Let any one of us question, upon seeing Surrealist, Cubist, or abstract paintings, the value of the psychological and artistic development that their creators went through before reaching this stage in their production!

We might not be wrong to say the same about our region’s sculpture, which is the brother of its painting. Most works produced in sculpture have, until now, been limited to statues of great, important, and notable figures; rare are the works that are produced by an “idea,” or that depict a “condition,” or denote a “trend.” Rather, in all cases they remain linked to the principle of commerce—a principle that is forever fated to corrupt the artistry of any work that seeks to be artistic. Among the reasons for this—or the results of this—may be the fact that we have yet to have the chance to see exquisite sculptural work that aspires to stand before one of those foreign works carved by nervous, creative fingers through whose veins runs the essence of sacrifice and burning inspiration.

As for instrumental music in our region, it verges on being absent. We cannot find a single Arab musician who has tried to compose a complete piece of music that expresses a thematic unity, such as the well-known classical works that, based in science, enjoy undisputed aesthetic value. It is almost strange that our modern musicians evidence such shortcomings in musical capacity, and that their utmost in composing is to make melodies to accompany the genre of poetic material being sung. As for sung music, it falls into one of two categories: The first is popular music, which may have personal characteristics. However, it is nearly petrified, for it is not developing, and it remains in a primitive state insofar as it is not following a course to becoming art. The second illegitimate form, in its claims to represent a renewal, is dependent on stealing foreign melodies without even attempting to be influenced or enriched by them, or to draw from them.

Whether this music is instrumental or sung, it has created for itself, within the realm of expression, a suffocating framework in which melodies and tunes revolve only around the subject of bemoaned love. This music is guilty of the greatest negligence in attempting to emulate the consciousness that the Arab nation is struggling to bring forth.

In terms of dance, I believe that no country has seen a deterioration like the one that has occurred in our countries. Individual dancing, almost entirely restricted to silly bodily movements based on repetition, shaking, and vibrations, lacks any artistic flair. Indeed, this dancing aims to arouse the senses in a superficial manner incapable of producing any refined pleasure. As for popular group dancing (folkloric dancing), it is virtually nonexistent, and there is not anyone who attributes any artistic value to this dance in its modern form.

Theater and cinema are what remain, and they are—outside of Egypt—nearly nonexistent. Within Egypt, the former has made significant headway but it has been unable to reach an artistic level that would satisfy an informed intellectual. We do not need to stop too long to consider cinema, as its value is deteriorating in all aspects. As such, it is no exaggeration to describe the cinema as being in a state of decline.

Now then, I am not painting a bleak picture of art in our region, but rather detailing the reality of the situation. What can we conclude from this review? Is our artistic sense ailing? Or has our ability to produce beautiful works of art disappeared, or at the very least, been reduced?

I myself am not able to answer these questions, for to do so would require that I study the subject more faithfully than I have—despite the fact that I consider this quick overview to be close to the truth, for it represents what many believe to be true, even though they may disagree as to why.

However, I believe that publishing this special issue on the arts, both Arab and Western, is a broad way of posing the questions: Where do our arts stand in terms of the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation in this period? Is it possible for us to discern from the current state of these arts anything that points us away from pessimism and toward more positive signs about the future, in either the short or long term?

I doubt that the literature of our region, in terms of poetry and the novel at least, finds itself in a better state than that of the plastic arts. In order to experience a civilizational renaissance that is fruitful and productive, we should be provided with this important aspect—the artistic aspect—in the life of every idea. This art must be maintained at a high level to ensure that our artistic sense is alive and well.

—Souheil Idriss

Artists’ Questionnaire: “Art and Arab Life” (1956)

Modern Arab societies have gone through important periods of development and growth, to which numerous factors have contributed—and art has been one of these driving, influential factors. What role has art played in the field of your specialty (painting, music, theater, cinema, etc.) in terms of its impact on Arab society, and in terms of the impact of Arab society on it?

al-Adab posed this question to a group of people working in art in different Arab countries and received from them the following responses:

Response of Mr. Moustafa Farroukh (Lebanon)

If we examine the truth of our artistic production, and its relationship with our reality and our lives, we find that everything connected with culture in the Arab world is unconnected to anything of our reality. We find that chaos, unbelief, and turmoil dominate our reality and that the Arab thinker “lives in one valley” while the rest of the Arab nation lives in another completely.

Art, as one of the elements of culture and guidance, is rarely linked to our current reality. It fumbles about in the chaos of different foreign artistic currents. It is not inspired, whether in small or large part, by personal or national feelings, with the exception of certain phenomena. Most of this art was transferred or copied from foreign arts.

And we can see that art in Lebanon—which we might claim to be more developed than the other Arab countries due to its antiquity as well as for other reasons—is for the most part a copy, an imitation, and a repetition of foreign arts. Rarely does it express its reality, or derive from its surroundings and history or from personal feelings.

I do not wish to narrate events or to disclose certain artistic scandals; this is not my goal. Instead, I will leave this to time and the people’s cultural development, which will guarantee that all of it comes to light.

In sum, the dominant spirit of art in our region is a spirit of commercialism and the endless pursuit of money. Any careful observer will note that the jealousy, animosity, disaffection, and loss of communication between artists all comprise irrefutable evidence of the soundness of this statement. Thus, one does not hope that present-day art will undergo improvement or revival, for art anywhere in the world—and including in Lebanon—must be based on a spirit of love, and an artistic work must be for the sake of art and nothing but that.

As for the state of art in the rest of the Arab countries, it is no better off. Most of this art is based on copying and imitating art movements established in Europe, without making any attempt to deny this or to draw inspiration from the present realities and exigencies of Arab countries. At the same time, the mission of art, as we know, is the truthful expression of the feelings and reality of the nation.

For all these reasons, I am of the opinion that true artists must move away from the idea of commercialism and work solely for the sake of the art. They must seek inspiration from within themselves and from the nature of their countries, clearly after studying the principles and laws of art in proper art schools. Then they must leave behind the idea of commercialism and the acquisition of wealth, for art has never, throughout its long history, been a means of acquiring money and wealth. Finally, the adherents of art in our countries must not let envy permeate their being. Instead, they should possess a beautiful spirit and a good character, for this is the fertile soil in which true art can be established, and from which it can carry out its noble mission.

Response of Mr. Kaiser al-Jamil (Lebanon)

There is no relationship between our current reality and our artistic production. The artist has lived throughout the ages in a world of pleasure, pain, and imagination. He has lived among the people, with legends and the gods of legends. He, like the poet, if shaken by a sudden real event, will resort to symbolism to express his feelings.

Our social reality is not devoid of alluring novelty. If an artist is affected by this novelty, and if it penetrates the depths, he will transform it into a painting or sculpture, or compose it into a poem. However, adherence to reality limits the imagination and results in codification, which the artist’s nature abhors and to which it refuses to submit. I wish to say that the value of the subject of a painting is very insignificant, for the painting is in itself an independent artistic work—it is the world of the artist, in which he gathers his things, orders them, and then bestows on them from his mind and heart what tinges them with this strange hue that is what the tune is to the string, what the scent is to perfume, and what love is to the heart.

Response of Mr. Rachid Wehbe (Lebanon)

It is well known that art is considered the truthful mirror of every people. Indeed, it seeks inspiration from images of its past and its heritage, and it expresses its present and portrays its desires and hopes for the future. As such, art is a symbol of the spirit of that people. It echoes their responses to their environment and times, and in doing so presents a vibrant picture of life over time. If we search in the light of this truth for the relationship between our artistic production and our current reality, we will not find it to be a closely linked relationship. This is because, if we mention certain artistic works that attempt to approach this reality, and its stamping by national traits, we cannot forget that our present artistic production is represented by the theory of “art is for art’s sake,” where art exists in its ivory tower, far from the environment and the people; and literary ideas remain secondary to formal considerations, which center artistic value around the creation of a harmonious composition of volumes, lines, and colors.

Even though this theory enjoys a great deal of support from international artistic circles, we should nevertheless take into account our specific circumstances, as a people who are building for history, and ensure that we improve the alignment of the pillars onto which our solid edifice will be raised, so that our works present a true picture of what we feel and experience. Art is one of the most prominent of the intellectual aspects that accompany the renaissances of nations. The true artist is the person who lives in his environment, searching and inquiring in order to convey the feelings and impressions that influence him. Art in our region suffers from the foreign influences that nearly divert it from its ideal direction and separate it from our current realities. In many cases, our production comes as if it were another image from those schools whose artistic principles we have borrowed or taken. Drawing from others is necessary to develop our artistic culture, yet there is a major difference between consciously drawing from another’s work and adopting his ideas to the point of becoming lost in his personality, estranged from our context and our environment. Here, in order to successfully navigate this critical stage of our artistic life, we should work to liberate ourselves from all that obstructs our proper nationalist direction, in order to be rid of all foreign influence on our artistic thinking and to establish sound foundations for the independence of our artistic personality. We must search for this personality in our Eastern, Lebanese surroundings, which are full of vibrant, exciting light, as well as in our glorious national heritage and in the subjects that have value for us. We should remember that these surroundings have already enchanted Western artists and served as a source of innovation and inspiration for them. What would be more appropriate for us, as we revive these surroundings, than to draw from them the impetus for an elevated artistic production, consistent with our environmental circumstances—which we sense more fully than anyone else. Let us adopt them as a basis on which we plant the foundations of our artistic renaissance, that very renaissance we are working to bring about. And let us move forward by its light with strength, determination, and faith.

Response of Mr. Fouad Kamel (Egypt)

The art of Mahmoud Said is considered the first stage in the history of modern Egyptian art. He who researches Said’s two paintings zhat al-jada’il al-zhahabeyya [The One with Golden Locks] and ad-da’wa ila as-safar [A Call to Travel] will see in them the logical and emotional development of an artist who wished to link his studies of Western composition—including of light, shadow, and perspective—to the heritage of Coptic and Islamic art, so as to grow with his art in terms of humanism and populism.

Just prior to 1940, sets of liberated ideas began to be formulated, based on a social awareness built on a material and psychological understanding. The magazine at-Tatawwur [Development] and then al-Majalla al-Jadeeda [The New Magazine] continued to publish these ideas, alongside the activities of the Art and Liberty group, who organized exhibitions of free art. We saw for the first time in modern history a union between art and literature, for the sake of achieving a revolutionary social language. Egypt read the poetry of George Hanin, the stories of Albert Cossery, and the articles of Anwar Kamel, Hussein Yousef Amin, and Yousef al-Afifi. It also saw the images of Ramses Younan, Kamel al-Telmasany, and Fouad Kamel. A revolutionary spirit filled the air, denouncing the facts of this corrupt life. Images and hopes of a new life were crafted out of the symbols of this dream.

Yousef al-Afifi and Hussein Yousef Amin made a significant contribution to the field of art education by developing the “New Awareness” current, and especially when Yousef al-Afifi dedicated himself to establishing the Higher Institute of Art Education for Teachers. A generation, led by Mahmoud Y. el-Bassiouny, Hamdy Khamees, Saad al-Khadim, and Latfy Zakki, completed their studies abroad. They resumed the work of spreading artistic awareness by forming art schools in public education.

The Contemporary Art group, established by Hussein Yousef Amin, drew from Egyptian legend and popular literature as the basis for its philosophy. It also took the tools used in daily life as forms for its artistic composition. Myth emerged for the first time from the literary domain into the realm of form and color. We find in the art of Aj-Jazzar and Hamed Nada a trend that is more compatible in this respect, while we find in the paintings of Samir Rafa’, Ibrahim Massa’ouda, Kamel Yousef, Mahmoud Khalil, and Salem Habashy certain subjective, rational, or poetic traits that are the result of the encounter with world cultures. As for art criticism and its value in defining and creating artistic currents, there was no clearly defined dogmatic criticism prior to the writings, lectures, and discussions of George Hanin, Yousef al-Afifi, Hussein Yousef Amin, Erik de Ghosh, and Cyril de Bou. This criticism and argumentation was only rarely published in the press. Rather, it was circulated within the art community and at private events. These discussions played an important role in forming and developing numerous artistic personalities.

We cannot ignore the importance of the attempts of Ahmed Rassem, who wrote for the first time to the Arab Library about modern Egyptian art in its first stages. We must also note that Rassem was interested in presenting the art of Kamel al-Telmasani in a lengthy article in the al-Ahram newspaper.

It was necessary for critics to emerge to re-create the history of Egyptian art and awaken the youth to its treasures and sources. Philip Darscott wrote and provided general images in which he chronicled and critiqued modern trends, yet he did not adopt a specific viewpoint, in contrast to the critic Aimé Azar, whose book The History of Modern Art in Egypt is comprised of six parts. After establishing a philosophy and objective for the book, Azar gathered together an assortment of modern Egyptian art. We should mention the crime that is committed by the Egyptian press today against these rising generations through its atrocious disregard for art criticism—or its recourse to personalities who are not knowledgeable or studied in either the origins of criticism or providing guidance. Numerous artistic personalities attempt to continue producing art, and they come together or split apart when showing their works. We find Yousef Sayyeda, Taheyya Haleem, Hassan al-Telmasani, Hamed Abdullah, Fathi al-Bakri, Ezzeddin Hamouda, Saleh Yosri, and Walim Ishaq, and yet this is an irresolute and ambiguous continuation.

Since 1953, Egyptian artists have felt the need to establish more vibrant arenas in which to display their developing art. Discussions in some of the newspapers have begun to ask about the role of art in relation to society, and debates have been initiated regarding the methods of realism in art—thereby following the current trend of freethinking that began with the establishment of the Art and Liberty group. Today we see that the Egyptian artist is nearly suffocating in his own art. If he does not set out for new horizons, armed with a progressive awareness of art and science, this artistic generation will be doomed to annihilation, and Egypt will continue to wait for another new generation to hold its dreams in their minds and hearts. These new horizons are the mural arts. And fortunately, the modern Egyptian artist has a long artistic heritage at his disposal, beginning with cave paintings from the prehistoric era and including pharaonic art and the art of churches and mosques. These different images and various materials can well serve as a fertile source for study, revival, and development. The Egyptian artist may be assured that the mural is also found in modern artistic heritage, as in the creations of Mexico’s artists such as [José Clemente] Orozco, [Diego] Rivera, and [Rufino] Tamayo, which occupy government buildings, halls of science, theaters, restaurants, and all the popular institutions. These are tall, broad pages, on which developed, modern artistic principles may be manifested in murals, without slipping into prevalent academic taste.

Today’s insightful critic senses the seeds of this art in the works of Hamed Nada in its latest phase.

The collective dreams of today should push beyond the limits of the frame and the salons, to be rejuvenated and to live under the sun, before the eyes of millions.

Response of Mr. Hamed Abdalla (Egypt)

Art and society simultaneously influence and are influenced by each other. The true artist takes reality as his raw material. He does not convey this reality literally, but rather revives it through his whole living being, “viewing it from within” as he creates it anew as a more vibrant reality. Society is also impacted by art and responds to its inspiration. For this reason, the content of art is the content of life.

As for the artists who, adhering to pure formalism, imagine that pedantically creating empty forms is art, or the artists who imitate external reality or depict it in an anecdotal manner, considering art to be a means of comprehension and not an actual modality of knowledge, or who create art for the purpose of propaganda in any of its forms—those artists represent superficiality and stagnation in art, for they are only grazing the surface of life.

We note that every phase of society’s development is also a phase of the development of art and all sorts of ways of thinking. We find in Egyptian society’s phases of struggle—in the middle of this century, for example, for the cause of independence—that modern Egyptian representational art has been liberated from the influence of Western art and has been guided to its correct path: connected with its ancient, inherited past, and with the well of the art of the people and their traditions, adopting the principles of the artistic origins of the ancient East without imitating them, in contrast to the artistic origins of the West, which observe the rules of perspective painting, or the personification through the Modèle or Modulation. Those original principles of the West aimed to depict objects as seen by the eye without regard for their truth, and constitute a certain submission to the false appearance of nature—the principle that the contemporary West rejected when it abandoned easel painting for wall painting.

Response of Mr. Hamdy Ghaith (Egypt)

I would like us first to agree on the concept of the word theater, which is contained in the question. The theater, as I understand it, is this work or that artistic phenomenon that we see in the Dar al-Ta’lil and that comprises the literary text as well as production and acting in all their elements of movement, gesture, rhythm, music, sound, silence, lighting, and decor. In this way, theater becomes the complete dramatic act, not just the written play—for the written play, as long as it remains such, is not a theatrical act but merely a literary work.

If we understand the word theater in this way, then we are able to say that theater cannot influence nationalist thought, because it is, by nature, a result of this nationalist thinking, meaning, it follows from it rather than precedes it. If theater in Egypt (as opposed to Egyptian theater) has influenced nationalist thinking, this influence is reflected only in the men behind it, in that the producer and the actor have surpassed the playwright. This is because theater in Egypt began through the translation of Western literature. As such, its sole influence is in having established the art form of drama in Egyptian literature. If we wish to speak about theater in terms of the literary text that we call the play, it cannot be said that theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. This is because nationalist thought is a continuous current that takes on various forms, including the novel, poetry, photography, and plays. It cannot be said that the novel, for example, has influenced nationalist thought or been influenced by it, as the story itself is among the forms of this thought.

Thus, it is not possible to speak about the extent to which Egyptian theater has influenced or been influenced by nationalist thought. However, we can ask whether Egyptian theater has moved in pace with nationalist thought, or lagged behind it.

The nationalist thought contemporaneous to the establishment of Egyptian theater was itself what paved the way for the revolution of 1919. It preached political and social liberation. As for Egyptian theater, we unfortunately have to affirm that it has always lagged behind nationalist thought. In political terms, Egyptian theater did not play the same role as that played by other artistic and literary forms. Theater was never an expression of the Egyptian revolution; rather, it was surprised by it. Theater’s only role was to cry out in the wake of the revolution. The theater was highly insignificant on the battlefield, as the revolution’s events were always greater than it.

As the theater was mired in the melodrama that was translated or composed and that overran the Ramses troupe, Egyptian literature took a different course—a new path blazed by Taha Hussein, al-Mazni, and al-Aqqad. Though romantic theater may have been considered an expression of the middle class, meaning a natural expression of the Egyptian political and social revolution, it was incapable of comprehending this awareness; instead it took melodrama itself as a means of expression, but of what?

Perhaps we know that the melodrama was a theatrical expression of the regret of the collapsing landed gentry and its sense of doom in the face of the revolutionary tide of the middle class. In this way, the theater—represented first and foremost by the work of the Ramses troupe—was reactionary and misleading. This is absolutely clear not only from nationalist novels, but also from the novels that address social problems. We can take as an example of this the issue of women’s liberation, which has pervaded nationalist ideas in Egypt from the beginning of this century. On this issue, Egyptian theater adopted a reactionary position that, expressed in novels such as Zawgatina [Our Wives], asserts that the natural place for women is in the home.

All of this applies to Egyptian theater in the period in which we are living. The theater until now remains unable to adapt to new nationalist thought, for many reasons that cannot be mentioned here. While the realist school emerges in Egyptian literature, theater remains stuck in melodrama and vaudeville. And while Egyptian society is shaken from time to time by political and social uprisings, the theater is always surprised by these uprisings and never joins the calls for such uprisings in anything more than—in the best of cases—a weak voice that is quickly drowned out by these decisive popular movements. This is because the theater dealt with and continues to deal with political and social matters in an unsophisticated manner—rather than undertaking a real analysis and coming to a clear understanding of the truth of these matters in terms of their economic and social aspects, instead of solely within a socially regressive framework.

Finally, I wish to say that Egyptian theater has not been born yet, even if many signs indicate that its birth is not far off.

*Mr. Ghaith restricted his response to Arab theater in Egypt, due to its connection to his particular experience and his depiction of the general characteristics of theater in other Arab countries.

Response of Mr. Khalil al-Masry (Egypt)

Many researchers differ in their views of the arts in general, and of music in particular. Some say that art leads to renaissances. Others assert that art follows renaissances or, more clearly put, that art is a depiction of these renaissances, and that true art gives us a true picture. Since our views of this picture may differ, we may think of it as a point of origin, one that influences and guides society. Yet the meticulous researcher does not overlook the fact that this so-called true picture is merely a copy of the original, which is society. As such, art is but a chronicler of history, not an instigator of renaissances. If we accept this position, we find that Arab art has been able to depict the renaissances of its peoples and, with its limited or local capabilities, to give us a true picture of their prevalent anxiety. Arab music was influenced by Turkish music when the Turks had a say in the rule of our country, and it was influenced by the Western music that was present among us when we looked to the West and moved toward it. However, Arab music did not become completely devoted to the West, nor did it lose its identity and its ancient civilization. Rather, this influence embellished and enhanced Arab music, and moved it toward becoming a global art.

However, many factors existed in Arab countries that led to the decline of the arts, two of which are extremely important and thus worthy of mention:

1. Most funders in these countries are not from these countries.
2. These countries were struggling under the yoke of foreign occupation.

These two factors caused feelings of inadequacy among the Arab people and divided them into two groups, which moved in opposite directions. The first looked to the West, believed that Egypt was capable of rising to its level, and demanded the highest degree of freedom possible. The second was oriented toward the East, struggled to admit its own inadequacy, and clung to the flimsy threads of its Eastern identity—it called for conserving this identity by imposing strict censorship.

Despite this there is significant evidence today that Arab music is responding to and being influenced by the renaissances of the people. However, I disagree with those who say that Arab music is the creator and inspiration behind this reawakening.

Response of Mr. Maher Ra’ef (Egypt)

The West came before the East in revolting against men of religion—not religious teachings—who, without good intentions, appointed themselves the protectors and advocates of religion, after placing stumbling blocks on the road to the progress of civilization for so long. The impact of this was that the West made great strides in the fields of science, discovery, and invention, which with the East has been unable to keep pace. The West thus extended its authority over the East and launched a siege to prevent it from progressing, and even to block it from freedom. This became clearer than ever in art in general and particularly in the plastic arts, which are the topic of this discussion.

If art is the equal of science in the field of human progress, then we attempt to understand the truth of our external reality through science and to probe the depths of our internal reality through art. The two are linked in a way that reveals the extent of the importance of art to human life and the extent of its influence in the field of human progress.

The East, led by Egypt, has attempted to awaken from its ignorance and to cast off the effects of the political occupation and the foreign monopoly on Eastern thought and taste. By the East, I mean the Arab East. The effect of this revolution against this occupation and monopoly emerged in the field of plastic arts. And if it was right for us to keep pace with the West’s scientific progress and to take from the West its latest inventions, we do not have the least right to keep pace with the West in terms of its art, for art has a nation from which it must spring forth. And it has traditions, customs, and norms associated with a group of people who define its form and subject, and even the direction of its development. Those who attempt this not only carry within themselves the tools of their own destruction and the obliteration of their identity, they also help the West to directly or indirectly solidify its hold on the East.

Currently in Egypt, there are those doing all they can to embrace artistic trends to liberate Egyptian art from its slavery to foreign art, and even from a return to ancient Egyptian art—despite the fact that others claim the latter would return originality to Egyptian art. Yet this is not in accordance with the social environment, which defines the general image of art, even if the geographical environment is the same in both cases.

These modern trends have succeeded. In art, more or less, those embracing them have achieved their objective through their dedication to the principle upon which these ideas are based and through their keenness to expose themselves to modern global culture, which is necessary for the contemporary artist to be successful in realizing his mission. That he shares in abundance in addressing subjects related to social life in Egypt, with a view permeated by the logic of modern thought.

If the Egyptian public as a whole does not appreciate works of modern art, it is because these works are not as familiar to them as the thousand varieties of art presented to them by foreign artists and by teaching professors who took art from the institutes of Europe and circulated it, or worked to circulate it, in our region.

Response of Mr. Jewad Selim (Iraq)

In any time or place, all important and good artistic production is a mirror that reflects the reality in which it exists. How we perceive this product—whether it is truly human, and how it can be a genuine and powerful expression—all this is related to the freedom of the artist to express his surroundings. This is simultaneously an intellectual freedom and an economic one. There are hundreds of “shoulds” and “musts” that are repeatedly mentioned in our newspapers and magazines, and in most cases the writer is attempting to express his own superiority or the nobleness of his ideas, trying to extricate the artist from his stupefaction or backwardness. This generally indicates the presence of old commonplaces in new molds. Most authors who are agitated with lofty human ideas are quick to offer guidance to writers or artists, even when they themselves do not know or intentionally forget the contents of museums and books, and all the art that humanity has produced that restores our trust in humanity’s goodness.

Response of Mr. Hafidh al-Droubi (Iraq)

Our reality suffers in its appearance, but not in its essence, from the dominance of European character. Our way of life has taken on affectation in order to fit with European life. Local dress is on the verge of being swept aside by European styles as we leave the countryside and move to the cities. Moreover, there is a great contradiction between our core equilibrium as Eastern people and these almost completely false and affected appearances. This is in terms of our reality. In terms of art, the problem is different, for art in our region suffers from Western domination in both its essence and its external forms. In other words, the contradiction mentioned above is nearly nonexistent, for art in our region is in fact Western in its entirety. The reason for this goes back to the fact that painters, and Iraqi painters in particular, had their artistic beginnings and studies in Europe and in the style of European schools, and as such their views of things became that of a Western person. In addition, there was a dark period that cut us off from our heritage—whether ancient or Islamic civilizations—following which Iraqi artists opened their eyes and saw nothing but mature European art before them. As for our civilizational heritage, it remained concealed until only recently, when museums were established. As for local art, it is extremely simple in impression, so much so that is difficult to use it as any kind of basis. Another thing is that the local art market is invaded by an artistic culture with a European art affect, whether in in inquiry or in outline. We have barely any access to authentic Eastern art—such as Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art—despite the fact that the West has also been influenced by it, and despite its maturity and importance.

Today, we feel intense pain at this move away from local reality and national character. Most of us attempt and endeavor to establish an art that represents this reality, that influences it and is influenced by it, and each of us seeks to achieve it according to his specific point of view. Some deal with line and composition, attempting through them to claim something of the Assyrian and Sumerian spirit, yet they remain European nevertheless. Yet these artists try—always, they try.

Others continuously call for a specifically Iraqi art, yet they themselves have not found such a character. One of the Europeans who said that “dusty colors are of an Iraqi character” may have been mistaken, for Iraq is never dusty. And these are our colors. And this is our sun.

There are artists who consider their attempts to be Iraqi art, even as they follow the direction of the modern European school, and the French school in particular. This is because France had a major educational influence on these artists.

As for me personally, despite the fact that I continually endeavor to paint Iraqi subjects, on the basis of my upbringing in a purely Iraqi context, I continue to think of the work of European painters when picking up the brush and painting. As such, I continue to consider myself to be playing the role of attempting to establish a modern Iraqi school. Even though I have at times proceeded along the lines of the ancient Iraqi way, these were an imitation and nothing more.

As for how this relationship should be: we believe it should be a close relationship. Artistic tendencies are not subject to logical controls, but rather to the circumstances surrounding the art, the abovementioned factors, and other factors. These current schools will endeavor to create a sound, strong connection with reality, which continues to develop, and to strive to find its particular character.

Response of Mr. Ismaeil al-Sheikhly (Iraq)

For a long time, the Arab world has lagged behind the rest of the world in scientific progress as well as in social and political spheres. The inevitable result is a backwardness that is reflected in our social reality and that has led to a backwardness in thought, literature, and art.

The Arab world has been isolated from the rest of the world and thus rarely influenced by the intellectual currents that affect our times. The Baghdad school of painting under Abbasid rule deserves mention, although it ended with the Abbasid era. Al-Wasiti was one of the most prominent painters of this period. Yet throughout the last fifty years, the experience from which Iraq and the other Arab countries have suffered due to their contact with the civilized world—and to its innovations in the fields of science, industry, and thought—has led them to “borrow” from it. I doubt whether this assimilation of Western intellectual and artistic currents is deep and true, as our regressive reality is different from the natural, progressive reality of the West. For example, the appearance of Cubism in the Western world is justified, as it is an artistic form that evolved from previous artistic forms. We can say the same about the other artistic schools in the West. The Cubist trends in our country, however, fail to represent a genuine reality not only in terms of the type of production, but also in terms of our present historical circumstances. Owing to this, the artistic movement in Iraq has yet to acquire distinguishing characteristics and a clear identity in either form or content. The truth is that the artistic movement in our country represents nothing but confusion and turbulence resulting from the underdevelopment of the Iraqi identity in terms of expressing its condition, environment, and historical circumstances.

However, Iraq is on the verge of making major social, economic, and cultural progress, which will surely impact the production of our artists. Iraqi artists must seek inspiration from this new life, yet imbue it with their own particular Iraqi character. In my opinion, Iraqi artists should work toward establishing a connection to the public, for the purpose of developing the artistic taste of its people. This will not happen unless artists channel public concerns and feelings, through the expression of public and private subjects directly related to daily life, and unless the public acknowledges its own reality. However, at present this production carries no more than the purpose we envisage for it, which is only the development of artistic taste, a sense of beauty, and the artistic feelings of the public. The natural relationship between the artist and his audience will undoubtedly influence both the quality of artistic production and the public’s taste. Indeed, one of these factors will affect the other until art takes on an authentic form or many authentic forms that express the needs of the people and are simultaneously understood by them.

Response of Mr. Atta Sabri (Iraq)

Artistic production and reality have been interrelated since time immemorial. The first humans expressed the shape of animals due to their dire need for those animals and in order to cast away the dangers posed by them. Later came arts that expressed the ancient civilizations, such as in China, followed by those in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. In Mesopotamia, art represented power, might, and the conquests that were undertaken, such as the Lion of Babylon, the winged lion, and the reliefs that represent the kings of Assyria and others in their wars and conquests.

If we move on to thirteenth-century Baghdad and its famous artistic school, we see that the painter [Yehia bin Mahmoud al-Wasiti], in his illustrations of the Maqamat of al-Hariri, held today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris, realistically depicted views of human social life in the form of large drawings that remind us of wall reliefs. He depicted thirteenth-century Arabs in mosques, in the desert or field, in libraries, or in inns. Another famous manuscript, Kalila wa Dimnah, was painted by other artists to express their social circumstances and events through pictures of animals.

Moving ahead to Europe, particularly the age of the Renaissance in Italy and other countries, we see the artistic productions of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci in paintings such as The Last Supper by Leonardo, The Resurrection by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, as well as his great sculptures of Moses and David, and Raphael’s many paintings of the Virgin and Christ. Then came [Francisco de] Goya in Spain, who expressed in his paintings the atrocities of the French and their occupation, as well as the scandals of war.

If we move forward to today’s era, we find that the chaos, decadence, confusion, moral collapse, and apathy that followed the two [world] wars have had a major impact on artists. We find them defeated by reality and moving in different, confused directions. Their artistic production was in ebb and flood, until artists in some domains arrived at Social Realism and began to assert their social and political opinions in murals that gave expression to the working class, peasants, and others. This is what happened in Mexico at the hands of the artist [Diego] Rivera and others.

Here we see that the state entered the field and supported and directed artists, or imposed its will on them, so that these artists give voice to their society or political regime, either directly or indirectly. Whereas [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, with his regime known as the “New Deal,” moved to encourage artists materially and morally and left the field open to them with complete freedom of artistic production, the dictatorships prior to World War II imposed restrictions and conditions on the kinds of art permitted.

As for today in Iraq, following a long period of stagnation, we have embarked on a new and blessed artistic movement, initiated about a quarter of a century ago with our deceased artist Abdul Qadir al-Rassam, the “artist of Tigris and Baghdad,” who captured peaceful views of the landscape in his oil paintings. Then, after 1930, artistic missions began to go to Europe at the behest of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, and returned to their homeland after lengthy study in a new mold and with a European character. These new Iraqi artists, and their students after them, began to look to Europe as a source of revelation and inspiration for their artistic paintings and even their subjects, which became Leda and the Swan, flowers, landscapes, etc. They forgot all but a very little of their surroundings and the environment in which they lived.

Others then emerged who conducted their artistic experiments in the manner of the European artists who were prominent between the two wars, with distinguishing circumstances and causes. They began, in painting their pictures and images, to adopt the schools and methods of Cubism, Surrealism, or abstraction, regardless of the reasons that led European artists to use such modes of expression in their own paintings. As such, they imitated [Pablo] Picasso and others in order to be “modernized” painters. The truth is that we today are facing social, economic, and political problems and circumstances and going through new developments that differ completely from those of European artists.

We noticed that the exhibition of Indian art held in Baghdad three years ago bore a distinctly Indian character, and was tending toward the formation of a modern Indian school. Undoubtedly, that had a pronounced effect on the psyches of Iraqi artists and on a majority of those who visited this exhibition, thus prompting Iraqi artists to think about new and prospective ways to arrive at an Iraqi artistic school, or create a local character, or to form a style that represents Baghdad. Yet this cannot be attained in a single day, or even in a year. Rather, writers, literary figures, and artists must unite to establish the solutions and capacities for attaining a local character, with connection to the international artistic movement.

The new generation in Iraq today has begun to appreciate art in a very encouraging manner for this goal. For we must present more art exhibitions, with facilitation from the Ministry of Education via the Institute of Fine Arts, so as to connect with foreign countries and bring art exhibitions to Iraq, whether of the old works by their masters and schools or of the contemporary. And I think it is incumbent for artists to work to create an artistic and literary magazine to consolidate a public of readers who are thirsty for arts and literature.

Iraq today is going through the birth of a comprehensive architectural and industrial movement. As such, our architects must open the field to painters and sculptors to create murals and bas-relief sculptures on the walls of these buildings, and particularly government buildings, so as to be completely integrated. On the other hand, attention must be paid to commercial art, so that it can meet the needs of the country’s industrial production for images, advertisements, and other commercial art forms. Art must also be used for social purposes, such as social services and other uses. The new and expansive squares and open areas to be created upon completion of Baghdad’s city planning will be among the best arenas for sculptors in our country to erect monumental statues, which will become a Ka’aba for visitors and for excursionists who seek an escape from the people or fill their free time, just as in the squares of Rome, Paris, and London.

Our artistic production should be a true expression of our current reality. It must reflect the pains of the people as well as their joys, in social and popular subjects. The artist faces an open field, for these subjects have not been addressed previously. Art today is moving toward a kind of new realism, by which it is possible to record daily life in our country in tremendous, expressive paintings.

Response of Mr. Fateh al-Moudarres (Syria)

The Arab arts have suffered through a long period of decline, from painting to styles of buildings, from metal engraving to textiles, and even popular traditions of dress and song. In addition, a permanent religious opposition, combined with the shallowness of the scientific culture, and the lack of genuine, constructive attempts by Arab governments to revive popular Arab heritage—all this has led to the obliteration of what remained of a distinctive artistic heritage.

Along with all these urgent ailments, European imperialism arrived to spread distortion and poverty and poisoned relations between the remaining religious sects so as to politicize them. All this destroyed the last remaining bastion of Arab art in the East, and it remains in ruins.

If we wish to define a character for any Arab artistic production, or if we wish to find a link between any such production and our reality, we will fail. If a European critic today were to view any painting by an Arab painter, he would not find anything but a Turkish fez, the face of a dome, an ancient minaret, a strangely designed water pipe in a carnival of cafés, or a piece of embroidery from a worn-out Shiraz carpet!

The modern concept of contemporary realist Arab art is difficult to define, as the nonexistence of inherited artistic features has, to a great extent, rendered our Arab artistic production weak in terms of its identity. Indeed, the contemporary art of each state in the world is based on substantial inheritances. In India, we see in the paintings of modern artists clear references to the ancient Indian artistic heritage. The same is true of modern China, as well as Japan. We see in the exhibitions of all the nations an originality and differentiation that indicate that this painting is Indian or that painting is Chinese or Finnish. However, the painting created in the Arab East has no identity, for its character is lost, its originality erased, and it consists of a distorted, mixed-up imitation of the European schools. We can thus assert, for all the preceding reasons, that Arab artistic production has no relationship at all with our reality or our renaissance.

In order to bless contemporary Arab taste with a truly Arab art that interprets its reality and its social struggle on all fronts, we must begin a new “renaissance” era—meaning an era based on the rebirth of ancient Arab art, grafted to current modern concepts, in a light rich in distinctive color and inherited, authentic designs.

The reasons for the chaos to be found in the exhibitions held in Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad have become clear: There is no close coordination between governments and painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, and authors. Nor is there even a sense that this collaboration is lacking.

Come with me: Stand next to me before an Arab painting, and let us assume that its creator has called it an Arabic name meaning “Awakening” or “Revolution” or “Protest.” What would you find in this painting? You would not find anything except a carnival of influences, firstly because the artist has no personal style. You would not find any colors from the East, nor would you find that authentic effort to highlight originality in the orientation of the design and the subject as a whole. Perhaps the reason for this goes back to the fact that Arab history is not studied, on one hand, and on the other to the dearth of understanding of common artistic schools. Thus, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects are unable to establish a distinctive character by which they might define their place in the ranks of universal art.

The development of the artistic understanding of a contemporary people is not incompatible with the inherited ancient values that have a unique character. If you were to take even the most contemporary of schools, such as Surrealism, and if you as an artist fervently cling to your Arab nationalism, you would be able to render an original expression from your lines. And even if you were an advocate of the abstract or the nonobjective schools, you would be able to maintain a distinctive Arab character. This matter is inevitable for modern architects who insist on taking from the style of Le Corbusier! Indeed, if Le Corbusier had been Eastern or Arab, he would have given his school a distinctive character, while still observing the latest requirements of the age, because comprehending character requires it, and national pride as well!

I visited Europe this year, and found a unique character in every country I visited. When the steamer docked us back on Syrian shores, the absurd hodgepodge became apparent in the buildings, the music, and all signs of life—even in people’s faces! The East appeared before me as if it had been hit by a hydrogen bomb! How, then, can we respond to the original question: Does contemporary Arab artistic production have a connection to our reality—apart from what we have said in the preceding lines?

Our situation is disgraceful, our values cheap, and our confidence nonexistent. As such, our distinctive Arab identity is also absent. If we have been allowed to stand among the many nations, it is only because we have not yet died out completely.

Look: This man is Chinese, that one is Siamese; this man is Filipino, that one is French—and who do we have here? Tell me, by God, who is this strange creation who wears a fez on his head and on top of that a hat, and below them a tie, and on his shoulders an overcoat, and over that an abaya, and on his feet crepe-soled shoes. He speaks in a language that is neither Arabic nor Chinese nor Siamese, nor anything recognizable—his language does not even resemble the language of the birds! Now look at his face, and you will not even find distinctive Eastern features in it! After all this, how does your stomach accept and digest the painting the Arab holds in his hands, as if he were a beggar holding out an empty bowl, begging for the peoples’ sympathy before they judge him with sweeping verdicts, but not daring to reveal it! How do we accept to call this a painting? Such an Arab, when standing among the ranks of nations, should bow his head in shame.

We can lie to ourselves, but the matter is different in the eyes of others, who must see us as we truly are—who must see that our pride in our distinctive values has ceased to exist.

If we wish to have a modern Arab art, we must initiate an era of rebirth for all that has become extinct. We must build it up and graft to it what we will, according to what the old outlines will accept in terms of new turns and appearances. As I say this, regret fills my heart, because the matter applies to my own work as well!

Response of Mr. Munir Sulayman (Syria)

The question about art and its link to our Arab reality is frequently repeated, and the people respond to it with a host of different answers. The most important of these answers is that the greatest purpose of art is to express the features of life in its various aspects. In all Arab countries, art remains far from this. If you were to see a painting that represents a landscape or face or still life, you would feel that there is a dense veil blocking you from seeing the truth of these objects or separating you and the life that pulses within each of them.

The important thing in painting is that people see in every canvas something of themselves, something of their hopes and dreams for life. Even more, the artist seeks to depict through his painting the life that is lived by the people, as well as the hopes that stir in his heart and in theirs. The artist succeeds to the extent that he expresses these dreams and makes them speak in his painting with a power to affect the people, even influencing the simple souls among them who have not had the good fortune to enjoy a culture of art.

The function of art, whatever its color and whatever its form, is to serve life. A beautiful painting—whether of a river, or the breast or legs of a beautiful woman, or the shoulders of a man of great stature, or his arm—is beautiful because it suits its organic function, and its concept is nothing but the elevated rendering of our many needs. Indeed, it is the perpetual extension of these needs, meaning that the concept distills the future of these powerful, unrestrained needs and makes it evident, just as the flower and the fruit condense the tree, promulgate it, and extend its life into immortality.

Yet this eternal truth remains unfamiliar to artists in all the Arab countries. For this reason, we cannot claim that there is art in the Arab countries, and we will remain far from it so long as artists are distantly removed from the essence and secret of art, and even from its fundamental components.

“I have seen a vibrant genius and an innovative Arab sensibility”: Visitors’ impressions of the 1933 Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair

The texts below are entries taken from the 1933 guest book from the first solo exhibition of the work of Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1905–1988), a young Palestinian female artist, held in the Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair, organized in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Sa‘di, who had studied with the renowned “Jerusalem School” icon painter Nicola Saig (1863-1942), exhibited a range of work: oil paintings of landscapes, still life compositions, and portraits of Arab heroes as well as contemporary cultural and political figures—the latter, such as King Faysal I of Iraq, which is illustrated here, drew on the photographic sources then circulating in the expanding print media—alongside applied arts such as embroidery works.

Hundreds of visitors signed the guest book, many of them identifying hometowns and origins from across the Arab East. Entries are predominantly in Arabic, but also in French and English. The remarks offer a window into a moment when even the format of the solo art exhibition held a kind of modern novelty, demonstrating visitors’ searches for appropriate vocabularies to articulate their responses to al-Sa‘di’s work as well as a common impulse to express national pride.

Four of these entries were selected for translation and inclusion in the 2018 publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. And in this online format, we are pleased to make five additional entries available in translation to readers interested in the development of artistic discourses around the world. To access a pdf of extended guest book entries in their original languages, please visit The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) website.

Guest book entries for Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1933)

The fine arts leave a fine impression on the soul, and the work I’ve seen here has left a deep impression on my soul. I can’t help but rejoice for Miss Zulfa, for this work has amazed me and my companions.

From Gaza, July 22, 1933

Have you heard the lovely melodies? Have you experienced how they make you quiver in delight and arouse sweet hopes and desires in you? This is how a person feels when he sees the refined lady Zulfa al-Sa‘di. The wonderful handicrafts on display in the Arab exhibition stir up great hope in the spectator—the hope that our women are on their way to a renaissance through such beneficial work. This brings us pride and joy.

Tanious Naser, newspaper owner, 1st day of the month of Rabi‘ II, 1352 [July 24, 1933]

We should have great admiration for the skillful hand that produced everything we saw in the first Arab exhibition—the hand of Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di, who truly counts as one of the treasures of the artistic renaissance in Arab Palestine. We plead to God for more women like Miss Zulfa, so that the men of this nation can come together to revive the glory and civilization that has been wiped out. God bless.

Abd al-Ghani al-Karmi and Muhammad Taha, 1st day of the month of Rabi‘ II, 1352 [July 24, 1933]

I am very proud of the artisanal renaissance that is being carried out by young Arab women in Palestine. I was delighted by the work I saw during my visit to the Arab exhibition, which demonstrates Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s excellent taste. Hopefully the young women of the future will follow in her footsteps. Bravo, Miss al-Sa‘di, and cheers to her work and to all who follow her example—onward until we acquire independence.

Abu Khaldoun, Tulkarem, July 26, 1933

Art expresses the purity and delicateness of the soul and the refinement of morals and excellence. The wonders of Miss Zulfa’s art are a source of pride for Arab handicrafts. She deserves our appreciation, and we commend the precision of her art and wish her brilliant success in her quest.

Omar al Saleh, lawyer, July 27, 1933

The works I found here in this room are truly the best I’ve seen in this blessed Arab exhibition, which is a good start for Arabs in general. The fair hands that worked at night to create these things are a testament to the Arab renaissance of the future. The hands of Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di will be the best means of spreading the Arab renaissance in the future. Good luck.

[Name illegible], July 27, 1933

I have seen a vibrant genius and an innovative Arab sensibility in Miss Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s exhibited handicrafts. These works demonstrate precision and creativity. May God grant her success—I hope one day she becomes the director of an artisanal school for women, so that future young Arab women can benefit from her singular genius and her innovative taste. Many thanks to her.

Abd al-Raziq Mayri, Aleppo, Syria, July 27, 1933

Zulfa is a wellspring of verse and oratory, for poetry is nothing but tireless effort. Take a look at your creations, Zulfa: they’re marvels, the best on display at the Arab exhibition. The creation of Zulfa, is there wonder in magic? For the magic it contained, bewitched those who beheld it.

Yes, this is truly magic, and a wonder—or rather, many wonders: such extreme precision in the embroidery, such marvelous mastery in the craftsmanship, and such superb representation in the paintings, beyond even the skill of professional painters. When I saw her miraculous paintings, and in particular the one of the cactus fruit, I couldn’t help but try to grab one of the fruits and eat it!

This genius, this lady’s brilliance, is something every Arab can be proud of. It is fair to say that Miss Zulfa’s works are innovations to which nothing can be added—one is left speechless, for such creativity is unprecedented.

Al-Afghani, July 29, 1933

I visited the Arab exhibition, and the truth is that I couldn’t find anything that demonstrates more genius and artistic taste than Ms. Zulfa al-Sa‘di’s handicrafts, oil paintings, and other works. I am truly proud that someone in my dear country has achieved such status in the world of art, for I am but one of that country’s servants.

Akram Abd al-Salam al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Farjouli [?] Raouf Darwish [?], Adnan [illegible], Jerusalem

—From the guest book of Zulfa al-Sa’di’s 1933 exhibition, accessed from the research files of Rhonda Saad, departed colleague of the editors of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, who was preparing a study of Palestinian art and its publics until her unexpected death in 2010. Translations from Arabic to English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language

By Mohammed Chebaa | 1966

In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat, and published in January 1966 in the Arabic daily al-‘Alam. In it, Chebaa argues for an authenticity of representation in modern Moroccan art. The poster by Mohammed Melehi that advertised the exhibition, in MoMA’s collection, signals this group of artists’ contemporary practice, grounded in vernacular forms and international graphic arts and design modes.

On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language (1966)

Mohammed Chebaa

The exhibition is a fitting occasion to take a look at the situation of our plastic arts in recent years.

We cannot deny that we are subject to the various problems that this situation poses, despite the impossibility of doing justice to them, with all their ramifications and complications, in a single essay or presentation. I believe that this plight comes from the fact that all of these problems have been fully raised, and now various opinions regarding them contend with one another.

Before we examine these problems, we need to take a small step back to see how the phenomenon of painting emerged in our country and what ultimately has become of it—virtually the only manifestation of the plastic arts movement that we have—and to examine the social and political influences it was subject to.

Our preliminary investigation foregrounds paintings by the oldest of the painters among us, who are now well-known figures: the likes of [Mohammed] Ben Ali Rbati of Tangier, around 1920, for example. Rbati’s paintings are not entirely primitive; rather they are symbolic figurative paintings. I believe that they are an extension of the paintings that typically accompany illuminated manuscripts—an art form still practiced by a small number of Moroccan artists, the most famous of whom is al-Qadiri of Fez—for they are closer to Persian painting than to European painting, not least because Persian artists have employed similar methods for ornamental painting on architecture as well as furniture, such as tables and chairs.

To this extent, this phenomenon remains purely Moroccan, although we notice that the abundance of painting production by these older artists often was due to the support of certain foreigners who discovered them and then exploited their production for various reasons, the most common being the quest for the exotic and the primitive. Rbati, for example, was a cook in one of the large English families living in Tangier at the time. And after this phase, which is still characterized by a Moroccan authenticity, came another phase that included many foreign patrons, most of who were expatriates in Morocco during the Protectorate and after it, whose inclinations and intentions varied.

We will only be concerning ourselves with two examples here. One of them is from the north, and the other is from the south. In the north, the Spanish painter [Mariano] Bertuchi was commissioned by the Spanish Protectorate to preside over the fine arts, and the most important of his initiatives was the founding of a school of fine arts, which, in Tétouan, is there to this day, and a school of Islamic arts. The school of fine arts played an important role in preparing Moroccan painters and sculptors to pursue studies abroad, in particular in Spain, just as the school of Islamic arts took part in revitalizing the national arts of the north: wood, metal, and plaster engraving; pottery; and mosaics. In the school of fine arts, Moroccan pupils became familiar with painting according to an academic concept of representation.

I believe the most important example in the south was undertaken in Marrakesh by the French painter [Jacques] Majorelle, who had both direct and indirect influence on the emergence of painting there. I once heard that the first female painter in Morocco was a woman who worked with Majorelle and who he guided toward painting.

In addition to these two examples, which are positive to a certain extent, there were also deleterious elements among the foreign painters, some of who exerted a negative influence on the emergence of our painting, for in their painting, they were only interested in views of daily life. This lent their work, and that of those Moroccan painters who were influenced by them, a touristic and documentary quality.

It is for this reason that those paintings are not in any way characterized by a Moroccan authenticity; rather, they are nothing more than distortions of what Moroccan painting might be, in addition to being inferior examples of what might be characterized as European art. And if we recall that European painting was, in that particular phase, in the process of distancing itself greatly from purely representational classical painting, we further realize that those foreign painters did not present us with good examples of what authentic Moroccan painting might be. After this, there came a phase that is much nearer to us, in which the phenomena of primitive painting and the naïf painter arose. The strongest examples are works by Mohamed Ben Allal and Moulay Ahmed Drissi, both of whom are from Marrakesh. It is common knowledge that the backers of these two artists were foreign patrons, led by a few foreign painters. I believe that this foreign support—first by the French Protectorate’s fine arts administration prior to independence, and by the French cultural mission after independence—was a way of highlighting an artistic phenomenon based (given our backward characteristics) upon exoticism, and not by any means upon support of popular art, as some people might believe.

Immediately after this, certain young painters emerged who demonstrated a particular openness to modern art, and especially to abstraction. They were sponsored by those same circles, and were sent to Paris to benefit from its school. All those painters did in fact return to Morocco, and most of them were greatly influenced by the city of Paris, and they are the ones who now represent the abstractionist trend in general, and Art Informel in particular, with [Jilali] Gharbaoui being their most prominent figure.

As a result, most of those painters also fail to demonstrate a trace of Moroccan authenticity, still less any African authenticity. The patrons and supporters I mentioned sense this, and so they seek a new outlet. When they opt to abandon these artists by renouncing their most prominent representative, Gharbaoui, then they soon find him wandering the streets without food or shelter, with illness gnawing away at his body! And in their search they find “new talents,” but this time we see those talents returning to the ranks of the primitives. For the best those foreign supporters can find among the artists who come after Ben Allal—who has become too old for them—is [Ahmed] Ouardighi. And so they bring Ouardighi out into the open, and set up exhibitions for him at home and abroad, and create a market that no Moroccan painter has ever even dreamed of (some of his paintings have sold for record sums).

Although this presentation was brief due to space constraints, we can see that our manifestation of painting is closely linked to our associations with foreigners, and consequently to our lived historical and political circumstances during the Protectorate, and during the independence after it. Indeed, some of the aforementioned foreign circles imposed their patrimony on the artistic and cultural renaissance. Painting’s turn away from African and Arab traditions goes back, firstly, to the guidance of those circles, and secondly to a lack of awareness on the part of our painters with our cultural and intellectual identity, in light of the weakness of their own education—most of our painters are illiterate.

The disadvantages of that artistic orientation do not stop here, however. Their repercussions also include the fact that some of our intellectuals now associate representational painting with Moroccan reality, unaware of the fact that the essence of our art was not and will never be representational, for there is nothing representational in either our Islamic art or our Berber art. Rather, it is abstraction and symbol—the abstraction of nature in geometric painting, engraving, mosaic ornament, and Berber carpets. It is impossible for us to be authentic in our work by orienting ourselves toward representation in painting, so how would such an orientation be appropriate for us at a time when research in the plastic arts in the West is turning toward the symbolic and abstract, after abandoning their classical traditions; attempting to draw benefit in that new research from our [collective] mentalities so as to reach a rejuvenation, a symbolism and art that is in keeping with what might be a foundation for art of the future?! This leads to a certain confusion between the understanding of plastic arts and that of literary language, and consequently to a lack of understanding of the true function of painting: they demand from the painting that it tell stories, that it depict events for them, as if it were a report or a narrative record. And they also demand that the painting perform the same task that the newspaper—or writing in general—performs, or that photography performs, and here there is a serious confusion between the characteristics of languages and their identity. For if I demanded of a painting that it merely record an event for me, then it would be more appropriate for me to read an article in the newspaper, which might very well be a clearer and more faithful rendering of that event!

The language of the plastic arts is not subject to the requirements of verbal or literary language, for these are two separate entities, each with its own rules and characteristics, and neither of them needs the other in order to accomplish its task fully, although both of them do have certain points in common with other languages—mathematics, music, theater, etc.—in embodying the human intellect and its civilization.

The treatment of this topic leads us to discuss an important problem: that of commitment in art. There are many conflicting opinions concerning this principle, but those who have hitherto posed this problem have, in my opinion, made the same mistake that we mentioned earlier: for in their understanding, commitment comprises “representational” painting, and the personification of the feelings and problems that the people are subject to in their bitter struggles. They also believe—and rightly so, this time—that painting must express the people and be understood by the people.

From this erroneous perspective, it appears as if the woman who weaves carpets in the remotest tribe of the Atlas Mountains does not understand the carpets she has woven, the designs of which she herself has created. A few conclusions can be drawn from this:

“Representational realism is not at the core of our artistic mentality. Rather, it was imposed by a different, European mentality—a reactionary one—which is alien to us.

Primitive art is not the only fitting direction our plastic art movement can take.

True commitment does not necessarily mean returning to regressive artistic models that are alien to us.”

So what is the solution, then?

Just as I do not claim here to comprehensively treat all the elements that were at the origin of our current situation in the plastic arts, neither do I claim to be able to put forward solutions to the problems that this situation poses. All I can do is suggest elements of solutions, which I hope we can discuss.

My presentation should not lead anyone to think that I am defending what is called abstraction simply for abstraction’s sake. Instead, I want to have been of benefit to the reader by demonstrating that the problem is not that of “abstraction vs. realism?” Rather, it is the following: research within the plastic arts befitting our rich traditions, our mentality, and our true perspective on the future.

And I believe that the best research within our plastic arts will be none other than investigation that takes the facts that we mentioned earlier into account. In my opinion, we must stop equating representation and figuration in painting with realism, since our artistic heritage—that of geometric ornament—is more realist and expressive of our historical mentality than any image that depicts a scene from everyday life!

I believe that this is the path of our true commitment.

Translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu Zeid.

Belkahia, Chebaa, Melehi at the Mohammed V Theatre in Rabat, January 9–February 17, 1966.

Eds.: This is a reference to the mental illness and hospitalization of Jilali Gharbaoui, who had earlier gained fame in Paris as an Informel painter.

The Crystalist Manifesto

By Hassan Abdallah, Hashim Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, Naiyla Al Tayib | 1976

Introduction

Man himself is the endeavor and the subject of a crystal that extends endlessly within. This happens simultaneously in isolation from and in connection to other things. We believe that the contradictions inherent in the claim that the universe is finite are no less than the contradictions inherent in the claim that the universe is infinite.

In the face of this crisis, the Crystalist idea emerges: the universe is at once finite and infinite; things have dual natures. When we say dual, we do not mean contradictory, for we go further and say that truth itself has a dual nature. When we refer to the duality of truth, we do not mean its multiplicity. This is not an issue that can be contained within a simple quantity; but perhaps it can be contained within a teleological quantity, namely, pleasure.

Theorization

Truth is relative, and absolute nature is dependent on man as a limited proposition. The struggle between man and nature always tries to find forms and claims for the opposite, that is, the absolute man, face-to-face with the limited forms and institutions in nature, which are themselves man-made. If the dialectic in classical modern thought is expressed with the phrases there are no isolated phenomena and man’s knowledge of matter lies in his knowledge of the forms of that matter’s movement, then we, in accordance with the idea of the crystal, may venture that the dialectic is a substitute for nature itself.

The basic premise for Crystalist thought, or modern liberalism, is to reject the essential quality of things, for it is now clear that any essence is nothing but a semblance for another essence. In the past, it was said that the atom was the irreducible essence, but then a whole world was discovered within it—nuclei, electrons, protons. This applies to subatomic particles, sub-subatomic particles, and to the limitless forms of existence of the entire cosmos. Man’s struggle with nature is but a transition from semblance to essence, which is in turn a semblance for another essence, and so the undoing of contradictions continues endlessly. This is what we mean when we speak of the transition from the opaque to the transparent, i.e., the removal of layers of concealment. The discovery of atoms does not negate the surface existence of things. Hence the naming of our school Crystalism, which implies the existence of both the semblance, or form, of the crystal and the dimensions and spectrums perceived within it. In the past, the transition from semblance to essence, and then to semblance, and so on, was regarded as idealistic thought, the standing objection being: Is there no difference between semblance and essence? And does that not also entail a beginning and an end? To that we say: The difference is primarily one of research methodology, and that the differentiation between semblance and essence is also subject to the same infinite sequence: semblance, essence, semblance, essence. . . .

But in order not to drag others into precarious territory, we opt for simplification and describe the process as follows: the transition is from relative semblance to relative essence, which creates another relative semblance that contains a new essence, and so the undoing of contradictions continues. Furthermore, the idea itself, as well as objections to it, are ultimately nothing but a potential embodiment of the crystal in its infinite spectra and its semblances, themselves also subject to endlessness. It is self-evident that a book lying before its owner is nothing but a semblance of a deeper essence, but we would here add that the same book is an essence for the semblance that surrounds it. That is to say, the crystal not only moves forward but also extends backward. To be more precise, it moves in all directions, or in all of space; or, if you will, the Crystalist school is nothing other than a negation of the objectification of objects.

The Unit of Measurement

The possibilities that nature lays before our eyes are not the ultimate possibilities. When an electron is two thousand times smaller than a proton, and one gram measures six hundred million trillion protons, it is understandable that a human being today—with disparate senses and a simple, empirical mind—would feel extremely alienated when attempting to grasp such massive numbers. We believe that the crisis lies originally in the old unit of measurement, for philosophy and the empirical sciences make man the unit of measurement, which leads to a dead end. The solution to this contradiction is to resurrect the essence, not the semblance, as the unit of measurement. Man’s essence is pleasure, and that should be the sole unit of measurement everywhere, including in the sciences, philosophy, and art—there is no other criterion. Pleasure in fact represents a full circle, in the sense that it is both a means and an end. Our goal is to seek out the teleological quantity.

The Chaos of Quantity

The dramatic struggle between materialism and idealism has resulted in familiar theories regarding the reality of things. Since antiquity, idealist thinking has claimed that the difference in things lies in expansions and contractions in quantity, and that, per Pythagoras and Democritus, numerical proportions are the basis of differences between things. Materialism, on the other hand, declared differences between things to be qualitative and occurring as a result of quantitative accumulation. From the crystal’s perspective, we believe that neither of these approaches sufficiently grasps the reality of things, for both deal with quantity and accumulation as fixed realities rather than a reality full of myriad contradictions. Quantity itself is simultaneously rational and irrational. Taking, for example, the number one as a unit of quantity, we find that it is made up of an accumulation of three thirds. But if, for the sake of precision, we divide it decimally by three, we unexpectedly find the result to be cyclic fractions that extend into infinity, which means that the accumulation in the number one is irrational, for it is both finite and infinite. Furthermore, when one is divided by an even number—for example, two—we find that the result is infinitely divisible by two.

We are confronted with the truth of the statement It is irrational for the finite to contain the infinite. We conclude that the number 1 is an irregular accumulation that, despite its finiteness, contains infiniteness. But we are still faced with the quantitative unit of “one.” In response to this quantum chaos, Crystalist thought emerges and proposes the teleological quantity, which is pleasure, and which also has a dual nature, being simultaneously a means and an end.

The Unit of Time

From the perspective of the crystal, we assert that things produce their own time, that there is more than one time depending on the diversity and difference of nature’s possibilities, and that what we live in is not that mythical collective time supposedly agreed upon by all people and shared by all things. Understanding the interconnectedness of multiple times is not particularly difficult, but it does require a high level of Crystalism. Man’s current alienation does not lie in the discrepancy of public times produced separately by separate things, but rather in the discrepancy of personal times, considering that each person is a construct of multiple and diverse things. The time unit of the individual is a matter of utmost importance.

Knowledge

Neoclassicism asserts that knowledge moves from the specific to the general, then back to the specific. We believe that generalization is a domain of repression. What really happens is that the specific and the free are pulled into the general domain and then returned in chains. We aim to liberate things from the repression of knowledge itself. To say that we seek knowledge that liberates things from knowledge itself does not make us self-contradictory; it makes us Crystalists. If knowledge was once based on the paradigm that a thing cannot be known in isolation from other things or from itself, then what we are currently proposing, in accordance with Crystalism, is that a thing cannot be known in isolation from infinity, or, in other words, that a thing can only be known in isolation from finiteness. We attach great importance to the claim that nothing is something, and that the dissolution of objective boundaries is itself a new objective boundary.

The Unit of Space

Matter exists in space. Things can exist above or below, to the North or the South, to the East or the West, etc. In other words, space is direction. But a thing is itself a space in the sense of an area, and area is determined by specificity, meaning that it would be difficult to claim that space is area, since area is extracted from the absence of area. We therefore say that when direction is specified it should be called an area, or, in other words, when it is perceived it should be called an area. Hence, North or East are also spaces in the sense of areas, except that they extend infinitely and are relative; indeed, infinite extension is possible from any relative point. Quantity is corrupt! We do not mean to claim that space does not exist in reality, but rather that it is an intellectual methodology. Based on the idea that space is direction, it is possible to say that the thing itself exists everywhere and, to complicate matters further, that the thing exists here and there in the same direction. In the face of this chaos of space, we propose teleological space, which is pleasure.

Language

Language, in its current state, being extremely close to objects, demonstrates its own corruption. The only way out of this is to dissolve language and turn it into a transparent crystal that moves in all directions: between the name, the subject, the thought, and their components; between the word and its components; and between the letter and its components. We expect this to happen in such a way that the fundamental opposition in language becomes an opposition between the crystal of meaning and the crystal of vocalization, which is a first and necessary step. We should mention here that the science of semiotics, [Claude] Shannon’s information theory, the methods for measuring quantitative possibilities of all information contained in a vocalization, the methods of measuring the information contained within one letter of the alphabet, and all associated mathematical laws—are nothing but dry academic methodologies as far as the problem of language is concerned. They are all based on the corrupt notion of quantity, and so do not rise to the level of the crisis.

Community

There are three types of repression suffered by the human form. Seen from a modern perspective, the first type is the repression that started with the separation of organic and inorganic matter, leading to the creation of man. The second type is the emergence of the objective mind, which is the mind of man’s entry into community. We also concede that at first, man collided with reality and outwitted it by creating certain institutions to fight it. It was inevitable, then, to form a community, and accordingly, man gave up a portion of his freedom in order to achieve harmony between his individual interests and the community’s interests. At the time, this price he paid was almost a freedom in itself. Ever since entering into community, man has been confronted with certain historical epochs characterized by different production relationships that were adopted by the intellectual institutions of each epoch, all confirming that instrument of repression. But the truth we are now facing is that the repression that occurred with the emergence of the objective mind continued to be inherited from one generation to the next. The idea of behavioral inheritance has much to support it, despite its being intentionally neglected for a long time. The obvious battle was between the schools of [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck and [Charles] Darwin on the one hand, and those of [Hugo] de Vries and [August] Weismann—with their germ-cell research and evening primrose discoveries—on the other. In recent times, McDonough¹ came up with the decisive response to the question of behavioral inheritance. In all cases, we currently adhere to the idea that the function creates the organ and not the other way around. The third type of repression is the ongoing repression that is linked to the individual from birth to the present moment. As mentioned earlier, repression at first was both a necessity and a form of freedom, but through the acquisition of characteristics and its normalization, things become one’s nature, so that repression is no longer a price that man paid that ends with the end of its causes, but has become a human characteristic. Furthermore, man now finds pleasure in repression itself, having replaced sensual pleasure with nonphysical pleasure. There would be nothing wrong with that had the insufficiency of abstract pleasure not been scientifically proven. This has led to the creation of a new man for this age, the indifferent man, the refusing man, the man who does not experience pleasure. Modern literature, from Albert Camus’s “stranger” and Colin Wilson’s “outsider” to Tayeb Salih’s character Mustafa Sa‘eed, speaks of the indifferent man, the man who does not experience pleasure. We believe that anyone who reads such literature and appreciates it also carries a similar current within him. The risk is magnified by the fact that the undoing of that repression and the liberation of man, and thus all forms of his creative activities and energies—arts and literature—would be achieved by negating the objective mind.

Transparency

Crystalism seeks transparency, and so does Sufism, but the difference between the two can be summarized as follows: while Sufism (a mode of behavior) calls for dissolving into the self by negating personal volition, we believe that negating personal volition itself requires volition, or, in other words, that negating volition is itself a volitional act. When continued infinitely—volition, negation, volition, negation, and so on—an extending, infinite crystal is created, which again means the endlessly extending presence of semblances and essence.

But similarities do exist: the idea of the crystal is mentioned, both explicitly and implicitly, in a number of religions, for example Manichaeism, Orphism, Christianity, and Islam.

Beauty

In response to the question of what beauty is, we say that the crystal represents utmost beauty, and that the most prominent quality of the crystal is its liberality, in the sense of its being liberated. Furthermore, we maintain that a thing becomes beautiful when it has acquired a certain measure of dissolving objective limitations.

Plastic Art

Line: The basic value of the line lies in its direction. As mentioned earlier, matter exists in a direction, which is space, and matter is itself space in the sense of area. But in the final analysis, a line is a dynamic spatial dimension that contains temporal differences and transforms into them. The most exciting things about the line are its tangible bias toward the concept of space as direction rather than as area, and its containment of simple and dynamic temporal differences.

Color: Color is a composite. Taking for instance the color red, we find it to be unlimited both positively and negatively. This has prompted academics to break it down into principal bundles—scarlet, vermilion, crimson, and rose—in a desperate attempt to contain its limitlessness. To make things easier, we call for a change in the names of colors, so that instead of red we would say redness. Furthermore, there are numerous principal factors that negate the limitedness of color, such as:

1. The inclination of unlimited color toward other colors, [as] blue exists in reddish or greenish tones, in utterly limitless variations.
2. The amount of light falling on a color and reflecting off it.
3. The proportion of whiteness or blackness in a color.
4. The eye’s capacity to see, taking into consideration: a) the eye’s physiological makeup; b) the eye’s training in seeing and perception.
5. Spatial distance, which is also limited. Color is completely different, depending on whether it is one centimeter away or ten thousand meters away. This can be clearly discerned in natural landscapes, where the color red is the first to fade, turning gradually to brown until it disappears.
6. Also, the psychological state of the viewer, which can simultaneously be both certain and doubtful.
7. The possibilities of the nature of color presented before us at any given moment are not final, for the colors of nature are limitless.
8. Colors exist in nature in the form of surface. It follows that no surface in nature is without a specific color. Areas themselves appear geometrically or organically. Once again, geometric forms are limitless, as are organic forms.
9. Another relative factor for the surface of a color, if its form is defined, is its size. Blue, for instance, can exist in an area as wide as the sea, or it can cover just one millimeter. Again, there are no limits to how big or small an area can be. This leads us to unequivocally assert that colors exist in nature in limitless forms and possibilities: each color has limitless tonalities, the number of colors in nature is limitless, and the relationships among colors are limitless.

It can be said that simply being aware of a thing causes it to lose its essential characteristic, provided it had one to begin with. In this regard, Mao Zedong says that to know the taste of an apple you must taste it, meaning that you must change its taste in order to know it. Saying that green cannot be known in isolation from other colors would be an incomplete claim. The truth is that green can be known in isolation from finiteness.

Form: Objects acquire plastic value from their external movement: the value of a triangle lies in its triangularity. The academic perspective then studies the affiliations or relationships of a triangle with regard to other related forms, i.e., its external movement within the set of external movements of forms that it influences, or by which it is influenced. Aspects of similarity, balance, sequence, rhythm, and the rejection of disharmonies are studied. We assert that the triangle itself is of unlimited triangularity, assuming the validity of its reality as a triangle. The possibilities of its relationships with other forms are also unlimited. But let us forget all this and return to the academic perspective, where forms have always been divided into geometric and organic. Then, as knowledge progressed, academics had to budge a little, for it was proven that organic forms are only the product of geometric accumulations. As for geometric forms, those were eventually relegated to the museum of history with a massive sign that read “Euclid.” The old dreams have all collapsed—that two parallel lines never meet, that a straight line is the shortest route between two points, and the most impregnable stronghold of all, that light moves in a straight line. The old academics clung to these for a while, believing that an equivalent of the straight line existed in nature. But modern physics showed no mercy for any of these beliefs, and now the straight line no longer has any existence whatsoever. The differentiation between geometric and organic forms was a result of a quantitative understanding of things, but in reality everything is simultaneously geometric and organic.

An Appeal

We call on all plastic artists to use the color blue, for it has great potential in showing internal dimensions and depths—in other words, it has the ability to create a Crystalist vision. It is currently the clearest embodiment of Crystalism within the color spectrum. We must stress that the human ability to see internal dimensions in the color blue is not merely the result of a conditional reflex specific to the blueness of the sea and the sky.

Drama

The idea of the three dimensions of theater is irrational, for each theatrical performance is as multiple as the people who watch it. Someone sitting in the first row sees movements, expressions, and emotions, and hears vocal tones that are all completely different from what someone sitting at the very back of the theater, or to the right or left of the stage, sees and hears. So with the arrival of each new audience member, who would naturally occupy a different seat from all the others, a play remains open to further plurality and division. This plurality goes on infinitely, which is valuable in and of itself. But academics, with their habit of twisting the truth, deal with each play from a singular view, and it is on this basis that they issue their judgments, criticisms, and interpretations. Last year, when we covered the front of the theater with a transparent crystal, we were referencing this affliction. In the near future, in an attempt to ease critics’ consciences and give ourselves some rest, we will be interrupting the performance for short intervals in which we will ask audience members to change seats so that they can enjoy a greater variety of plays and have a more pleasant experience. This should result in less criticism. The idea of acting, or characterization, is itself an irrational idea: for two hours an actor can wreak havoc in the world through his assumed character, before hurrying off the stage for a previously arranged appointment, a cinema date for instance. This irrationality is not something that we discovered; the very history of theater is built on it. The struggle between theater giants like [Bertolt] Brecht and [Konstantin] Stanislavsky reflect it, and a dialogue with them is quite possible. Let us start with Stanislavsky’s question, “How can affective memory be turned into deliberate action?” And can this be achieved in isolation from the thesis of transparency? Is there not a need—even a minor one—for a theater of telepathy, history, clairvoyance, psychiatry, or automatism?

Concerning the appeal to morphology (the science of form) to provide a futuristic solution to the problem of drama, we say that human morphology is a set of developmental cycles and multiple adaptations to ensure survival. We still maintain that it is the function that creates the organ and not the other way around. Furthermore, present morphology reflects that struggle that relates to the different capacities of an earlier age. Now that man has entered the technological age, present morphology has become almost a burden on him.

Poets

Transparency is a genuine current in poetry. What artist and poet William Blake said about man’s four-dimensional vision—the ability to see an entire world in a grain of sand—represents a cornerstone of Crystalist thought. Sufi poetry is also full of references to the reality of the crystal. Indeed, it takes the crystal to its furthest and most impenetrable extremes. This can be seen in the following translation of a poem by Asif Jatt Halabi:

The colors went to the sun I need neither colors Nor the absence of colors The suns died, devoid of space I need neither light Nor darkness

Children

The interest and intense joy that young children exhibit toward the crystal in its simple forms—like a soap bubble or a kaleidoscope, which consists of a lens and broken bits of glass—add to the crystal’s authenticity. Children’s interest in the crystal is a deeply complex matter, for children are the most complex of riddles.

Conclusion

We conclude by repeating that the crystal is nothing but the denial of the objectification of objects. It is infinite transparency. We painted the crystal, we thought about the crystal, and so the Crystalist vision came to be.

—“Bayān al-Madrasa al-Krīstāliyya,” al-Ayyām, January 21, 1976; repr. in Ṣalāḥ Ḥasan ʿAbd Allāh, Musāhamāt fī al-Adab al-Tashkīlī, 1974–86, 2nd ed. (Khartoum: Madarek, 2010), 311–22. Translated from Arabic by Nariman Youssef.

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