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.

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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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