Orientalist Aesthetics_ Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 ( PDFDrive )

6 Traveling Scholarships
and the Academic Exotic

Government Traveling Scholarships
Our brilliant school of Orientalist painters . . . was it not born whole,
and almost spontaneously, from the institution of the traveling scholar-
ships, so apt to expand individualism, to establish a fascination with the
new, to favor independence of temperament?
– a r m a n d d a yo t , preface to Exposition du cinquantenaire de
la fondation des Prix du Salon et bourse de voyage, 1926
Gathering up and exhibiting paintings made in the far reaches of the French empire is a late stage in
the cycle of Orientalist production. It assumes the centrality of the metropolitan audience and of the
exhibition as a theater of critical encounters. This chapter and the one that follows look back from
exhibition and reception to the formative stage of the cycle, that of journeys out from the center:
their genesis, their narratives, the work they produced. On such journeys, artists as dissimilar as Eti-
enne Dinet and Henri Matisse had certain expectations, even experiences, in common. Traveling to
North Africa to paint was profoundly unlike the archetypal journey of French artists to Rome, un-
dertaken from the days of Nicolas Poussin to those of Edgar Degas.

129

Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Prix de Rome scholarships in paint-
ing and architecture determined the official aesthetic life: the Villa Medici, the seat of the French school
near the top of the Spanish Steps, was the destination not only for the fortunate few Rome laureates
but also for the many non-prize-winning artists who traveled on their own or patrons’ funds: Camille
Corot, Gustave Moreau, Degas, and Maurice Denis were among the progressives to follow that route.
The best official career path followed the route between Paris and Rome: Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Prix
de Rome sojourn, Salon medals upon one ’s return, membership in the Institut de France, then back
to direct the Villa Medici itself. At least two distinguished artists, paradoxically, important in the his-
tory of Orientalism, took such a path: J.-A.-D. Ingres and Albert Besnard.

The faltering of neoclassical aesthetics is evident in the structure of state funding for young artists
to travel, as well as in the history of style. Henri Regnault, by agreement the most talented young
French artist to win the Prix de Rome in the later nineteenth century, had already symbolized the
erosion of its authority. He ended up leaving Rome to seek inspiration in Andalusian Spain and Tang-
ier around 1870 (see Chapter 1). After the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune,
the enlightened new director of fine arts, the marquis Philippe de Chennevières, in 1874 founded a
second major French scholarship, awarded, not for surviving a grueling process of elimination at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but for outstanding work at the Salon. The Salon Prize (Prix du Salon, re-
named Prix National in the 1890s) initially gave a full four-year grant, only part of which was to be
expended in Rome itself.1

This new prize was at best “timidly revolutionary,” in the words of the inspector of fine arts who
presided over the whole traveling scholarships project, Armand Dayot. Coming late, the Salon Prize
gave rise to even fewer painters of subsequent renown than the Prix de Rome, because only exhibitors
at the official Salon were eligible. So the state patronized and perpetuated a specific aesthetic range
at a time when the new impressionist exhibitions (also begun in 1874) and, from 1884, the regular Sa-
lon des Indépendants became venues for progressive painting.

More relevant to the history of Orientalism was the inauguration in May 1881 of a set of bourses
de voyage (traveling scholarships), up to eight of which were granted annually on the basis of Salon
entries chosen, not by the members of the Academy of Fine Arts (who chose recipients of the Prix
de Rome), but by the potentially more liberal Conseil supérieur des Beaux-Arts. The bourses de
voyage were open to sculptors, printmakers, medal makers, and architects as well as painters. The
scholarships were for one year, with the significant requirement that the young laureate be absent
from France the whole year. The stipend was three thousand francs, payable in monthly installments,
and each boursier was required to send quarterly progress reports to the director of fine arts.2

The lack of any restrictions on the artist’s destination reveals some interesting patterns in French
perceptions of cultural geography. The northern Mediterranean no longer provided the natural limit:
with Algeria (and since 1881, Tunisia) in French hands, a typical boursier’s route might begin with

130 Traveling Scholarships

extended travels through Italy, followed by sojourns in North Africa, Spain, and the northern cen-
ters of Flanders, Holland, and England. Germany and Austria were occasional destinations, as was
the eastern Mediterranean.3

Such travel focused on both studying art in the destination country and documenting the human
spectacle, the landscape, or architecture. In continental Europe boursiers primarily worked in the mu-
seums, studying the national schools of painting and sculpture (an option not available in the
Maghreb). In Italy, Spain, and North Africa architectural monuments, particularly antique ones, were
of great interest. Only occasionally did artists stay put in larger towns or cities, working up finished
paintings or sculptures in preparation for exhibition at the Salon back home. More usually they “doc-
umented” works to be elaborated back in their studios in France.

In the months after their return, the boursiers were obliged to show the work produced from their
travels to an inspector of fine arts.4 For the first two decades of the scholarships’ history Armand
Dayot carried out that function. One cannot safely separate him from the emergence of what he re-
peatedly called “the happy institution of the bourse de voyage.” As in the case of the Society of French
Orientalist Painters, a guiding personality often greatly influences the propagation of art institutions;
Dayot is like a lesser Léonce Bénédite. (He in fact worked with Bénédite as a fine arts official.) Trained
in the law, Dayot rose in the Ministry of Fine Arts from 1872 to 1880, when he became chef de cabi-
net to the prefect of Oran in Algeria. Presumably he met his wife, “une Oranaise,” when he held that
position.5 This initiation into the colonial exotic helps explain why he favored Orientalist art both as
an inspector and, after 1905, as the influential editor of L’Art et les Artistes.

Dayot returned to Paris and the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts at a time when Jules
Ferry, the most active of all procolonial politicians, was minister.6 Dayot the “ancien Africain,” or
“former African” (as he described himself ), may have helped design the traveling scholarship that
so concurred with Ferry’s interests in the East. Certainly he used his own North African experience
in his reports assessing the accuracy of returned boursiers’ pictures. His enthusiasm in writing them
is exemplified in the following comment on a visit to the studio of L.-A. Girardot (a Société des Artistes
Français regular and future member of the Orientalists): “Having lived in the countries described by
M. Girardot, I make bold to affirm that it impossible to be more truthful than this artist, perhaps a
little inclined, before his voyage . . . to seek success in strange if not excessive e¤ects. Certain stud-
ies M. Girardot made around Tangier are minor masterpieces, and I regret that the state may miss
out on buying one of these little canvases.”7

The immediate departure from Europe of a considerable proportion of boursiers helps explain
Dayot’s claim, quoted in the epigraph to this section, that the Orientalist school was born of the trav-
eling scholarships. The accessibility and relative safety (if not ease) of travel in the Maghreb in the
later nineteenth century made the study of North Africa and the Middle East intensely attractive to
the boursiers. Work in North Africa was by no means limited to the study of the desert, the Maghre-

Traveling Scholarships 131

bian populace, and the exotic vegetation. Most of the boursiers also saw in France ’s African posses-
sions the signs of an antique past. Study trips to ruined sites like the Roman amphitheaters at Tipasa
in Algeria or El Djem in Tunisia were frequent (even if few paintings resulted).

While most boursiers were remiss about filing reports with the director of fine arts, the one thing
that did make them write was money. The papers reveal many monthly missives from young bour-
siers traveling far from France in unfamiliar circumstances, anxious about receiving their next schol-
arship installment. (It is not surprising that by the end of the century they had organized a “friendly
society” to improve their conditions.)8 Although the bureaucracy charged with ensuring payment
was far from perfect, the colonial system itself enabled the financial support to get through: the Roth-
schild Bank often forwarded moneys, or the nearest French consulate or agent: thus the artist trav-
elers were constantly reminded of their debt to the state.

The complaints of the boursiers were legion and give a good sense of the precariousness of their
mission and the stresses to which they were subjected. The young sculptor Félix Soulés conveys his
accumulated anxiety after traveling through Spain, Italy, and Algeria, writing from Tunisia that if
his pay did not arrive soon, he would return to France, “not wishing to undergo the terrible worry
of finding myself without money, in a country unknown to me, where I do not speak the language
and where one must pay one ’s pension by the week.”9 The fortitude of other individuals, however,
was bolstered by recently completed military service. Indeed the military mentality was never far
from the colonial adventure. For example, Paul Bu¤et, an established young Orientalist in the line-
age of Guillaumet and Dinet who had shown at the conservative Salon de la Société des Artistes Français
since about 1890, after winning a bourse de voyage in 1894, used his 1896 Prix National to undertake
an intrepid journey to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia to document meetings between the French
ambassador to Ethiopia, Léonce Lagarde, and the negus, or Ethiopian emperor, Ménélik.10

The Ethiopian coast was remote enough for Arthur Rimbaud to have chosen it, over a decade be-
fore, as the location for the career in anomie that replaced his failed vocation of poet: as a merchant
with French and Italian companies trading into the African interior. Charles Nicholl describes Rim-
baud’s Ethiopia of the 1880s as a rough and uncertain place where communication between the few
large towns was tenuous and travel by caravan slow.11 Little had changed by the time Bu¤et arrived.
Given his desire to spend the whole year in Abyssinia, he was, as a ministry clerk wrote, “worried
about how he would be able to receive funds at Entotto, which is six hundred kilometers (twenty
days) from Djibouti, the nearest French port.”12 By December 1896 Bu¤et could write to the direc-
tor of fine arts from Harrar (where Rimbaud had lived for some years), reporting “how numerous
and interesting the elements of study looked in the region that I have just crossed. . . . The difficul-
ties of communication are very great, but I hope to be able to arrive at the Abyssinian court in the
month of February.”13

L’Illustration covered Ambassador Lagarde ’s mission and many other events linked to Franco-

132 Traveling Scholarships

figure 57
Abyssinia—Arrival at
Harrar of M. Lagarde,
envoy of the French
government, 1897.

British rivalry in Africa, publishing wood engravings based on photographs of Lagarde ’s arrival at
Harrar (Fig. 57). As the journalist remarked of the full-dress uniform of a French minister plenipo-
tentiary, “rarely will ceremonial embroidery be seen in such a strange and disoriented setting.”14 By
March 1897 Bu¤et was at Addis Ababa: “The party in honor of Monsieur Lagarde ’s entrance into
the town . . . gave me the chance to enjoy one of the most beautiful spectacles that a painter could
wish for.” To gain a rank sufficient to ensure his presence at important ceremonies, Bu¤et wrote to
Paris requesting a letter recommending him to the negus. Lagarde ’s intervention made it possible
for Bu¤et to begin a portrait of Ménélik by August, even though Bu¤et’s official letter still had not
arrived and his money had been held up by “the halting of a caravan in the desert by a Daukali chief.”
Eventually, the young artist was able to produce, on the basis of his studies, a canvas “representing

Traveling Scholarships 133

figure 58
Paul Bu¤et, The King
of Ka¤a (Central Africa),
pen sketch after a painting,

ca. 1897.

the emperor reviewing his army before combat,” presumably a splendid display of costumes and
weaponry highly unfamiliar to Parisian audiences.

Almost immediately the boursier’s picture was returned to France. Bu¤et’s Negus Menelik at the
Battle of Adoua (Le Négus Ménélik, à la bataille d’Adoua) was exhibited at the 1898 Salon de la So-
ciété des Artistes Français and purchased from it by the state, keen for the return on its investment.15
Evidently enlisted by Bénédite, Bu¤et joined the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1899 and
began exhibiting his Ethiopian work regularly over the next few years. Bu¤et’s lithograph of a lancer
on the edge of the Abyssinian Plateau was used for the society’s 1899 Salon poster, and Bénédite

134 Traveling Scholarships

chose one of Bu¤et’s portrait drawings of the king of Ka¤a, in southern Ethiopia, to illustrate his
article on the society in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (Fig. 58).

At the institutional level, then, crossovers between the boursiers and the Orientalist Painters were
frequent. Several future associates of the society, including Maurice Bompard, Bu¤et, Leroy,
Rochegrosse, Emile Friant, Girardot, and Lunois (as well as artists of the 1920s) began their travels
overseas with a bourse, partly vindicating Dayot’s claim that the government scholarships were the
handmaiden of French Orientalism. Etienne Dinet’s own scholarship in 1885 had allowed him to fol-
low up an enthusiasm for southern Algeria, first encountered on a private and adventitious journey
undertaken in 1884. Already a promising Salon artist exhibiting rural French and religious subjects
broadly in the manner of Bastien-Lepage, Dinet accepted an invitation in 1884 to travel to Algeria
with two friends, the future Bande Noire painter Lucien Simon and his elder brother, an entomolo-
gist bound for the desert to research a rare butterfly. From Algiers the group took a coach south,
reaching the oases of M’sila and Bou-Saâda after traveling for more than a week.16 Like most bour-
siers of the era, Dinet would have made careful studies in pencil or watercolor that became the basis
of the work he exhibited at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français on his return, the View of the
Oued M’Sila after Rain (Vue de l’oued M’Sila: après la pluie). This rather conventionally composed
river landscape looks down the course of the oued, in which di¤erence from the European norm is
encapsulated in the terraces of calcined mud buildings on either side; the phrase “after rain” implies
that the rushing watercourse in Dinet’s picture was usually dry.17

Not an Orientalist work, however, but another, Saint Julian Hospitaller (Saint Julien l’Hospita-
lier, inspired by the novella of Gustave Flaubert), exhibited at the previous Salon, in 1884, had earned
Dinet a bourse de voyage.18 That was the standard pattern: the bourse was awarded on the basis of ac-
ademic works of nonexotic subjects at the official Salon. The records of Dinet’s bourse de voyage seem
to have escaped bureaucratic collection; Dinet’s sister, Jeanne Dinet Rollince, in her posthumous bi-
ography, however, published generously from his correspondence during his year of travel.

So as to arrive in Algeria in February, after the winter rains, Dinet spent the first months of his
bourse traveling in Brittany, Jersey, and Switzerland. Once in Algeria he headed south immediately,
arriving in Laghouat—the town famously painted by Fromentin—and telegraphing his friends Gas-
ton Migéon (the young Islamic art expert) and a certain Michelin to join him, because the weather
was propitious for a camel journey south to Ouargla: “The sun is still admirable—it has not been
covered a second since my arrival at Laghouat. It is already 20 to 25 [68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit] in
the shade and more than 30 [86 degrees Fahrenheit] in the sun. Everything is in flower, and many of
the trees already have their leaves. I am about to prepare for my journey, which should yield some
very interesting things. I will try riding a camel to see if I think I could make the expedition on this
animal, which would be much more comfortable. I am still in excellent health.”19 As Dinet Rollince
observes, Dinet continued to enjoy the same iron constitution and optimistic outlook he had evinced

Traveling Scholarships 135

during his military service. The young Frenchmen set o¤ with six camels and a guide provided by
the military authorities (which continued to govern this and most regions beyond the temperate zone).
Their reception as they traveled, visiting the sights and painting, was evidently peaceable: “At El
Atef, the Djemâa [local assembly of inhabitants], which expects us, waits at the gates of the town and
o¤ers us a superb Di¤a: hamis (all sorts of excellent ragouts), méchoui, couscous, milk, dates, hard
eggs. We eat enormously—the next day my three colleagues are unwell.”20

Making for Ouargla, Dinet and his companions were overwhelmed by the landscape: “It is ab-
solutely as if we were on the ocean. All one sees is a straight line around one. A windstorm hits us
as we put up the tent 103 kilometers from Ouargla.” Two days later they entered the immense val-
ley that shelters the oasis town, with its two minarets among some half a million palm trees, sur-
rounded by dunes. They were guests of the French commandant of Ouargla, a Lieutenant Le Chate-
lier, who was stationed there with fifty riflemen and a military doctor. As Dinet relates, the officer
explained the geography of the oasis and took them on excursions, one of which provoked Dinet’s
second canvas as a boursier, El Rattacine (The Well Diggers) (El Rattacine [Les puisatiers]).21 Ouar-
gla is distinctive for the enormous number of man-made wells used in irrigation that require con-
stant upkeep to function. That feature of desert life also fascinated the young novelist André Gide,
who, when visiting the oasis of Touggourt in 1896, made a detailed account of the technique for well
digging.22 Dinet described the scene: “On the twenty-ninth we go to see the rhettages, indigenous
men who clean out the wells; very interesting! They stay on average two and three-quarters minutes
underwater in wells forty meters deep, and for the basket that they fill I believe they are paid seven
sous.” Dinet painted two oil studies of workers’ heads on the spot; his canvas (which he presented
to the commandant) shows six men squatting around a small fire among the palms, while another
man drags an exhausted diver from the mouth of the well.23

In Ouargla, Dinet saw and sketched festivals in which women danced and a comic masquerade in
which “a man disguised as a woman [led] a camel formed of men hidden under draperies, brandish-
ing a camel’s head at the end of a pike.”24 Traveling back through the Mozabite center of Ghardaïa
to Laghouat, the group separated, with Migéon and Michelin returning to the Mediterranean at Bône.
Dinet’s second surviving oil painting, Terraces of Laghouat (Les terrasses de Laghouat), presumably
dates from this stage of the journey (Fig. 59). A particularly well constructed landscape that was
shown at the Salon of 1886 and sold to the state, it became (according to Bénédite) “almost imme-
diately a classic among the little clan of Orientalists as the freest treatment yet given to the African
landscape.”25 The general idiom is close to that of Guillaumet’s later works, which stressed the mud-
brick structures of desert architecture. Dinet, however, makes them the subject in themselves, di-
minishing the human element to three burnous-clad children barely discernible in the sandy rooftop
terrain. He vigorously establishes pictorial architecture, using a network of diagonals and verticals
as the terraces are bathed in light and shadow. The green swath of date palms beyond provides an

136 Traveling Scholarships

figure 59
Etienne Dinet,
The Terraces of
Laghouat, oil on
canvas, 1885.

anchoring horizontal. Dinet’s handling of paint texture is unusual: he worked the oils to a matte,
sandpapery finish that complements the rough earthwork represented, presaging his gritty signa-
ture style of later years.

While he awaited his bourse stipend in Bou-Saâda, Dinet made pencil sketches in his traveler’s note-
book of subjects that later became the bread and butter of his Orientalism—“market scenes, stud-
ies of camels, washerwomen in the oued, sleeping caravaneers.” As Jeanne Dinet Rollince points out,
Dinet undertook no major canvas on the spot in Algeria until 1889—his Snake Charmer. In her esti-
mate, his first and this second, more sustained, voyage to Algeria “completely overturned the way
he saw the future of his art. The idea of Brittany and of Italy vanished before the grand light of the
desert.”26 Of all whose conversion to Orientalism may be attributed partly to a bourse de voyage, Dinet
remains the most significant.

Not all winners of bourses were aesthetic conservatives, even if all had academic training. A
significant number of exponents of art nouveau in the 1890s—including the sculptor-designers Jean
Dampt and Raoul Larche and the architect Emile André—had been scholarship holders. Two of the
most popular painters around 1900, Henri Le Sidaner and Henri Martin, who brought a high-color
academic pointillism to the Salon with great success, were also former boursiers who had seen North

Traveling Scholarships 137

Africa. Dayot’s publications favored the work of such artists and illustrated it in the catalogues of
the large exhibitions of the Prix du Salon et boursiers de voyage, organized by the Ministry of Pub-
lic Instruction and Fine Arts every five years from 1902.27

One of the most progressive of all boursiers and the one for whom the richest record of travel
survives is Victor Prouvé, the future director of the design school the Ecole de Nancy. The son of
a ceramist in the Gallé family workshops in Nancy, in eastern France, he worked from adolescence
for Emile Gallé, the celebrated designer-manufacturer of art nouveau glass and furniture. An ex-
pert designer with the figure in both two and three dimensions, Prouvé built an international rep-
utation in ceramics, jewelry, glassware, bookbinding, graphics, and sculpture, executed according
to art nouveau principles and exhibited at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. He traveled to Tunisia
in 1888 and again in 1889–90,28 staying more than a year in all. Although his background in Ori-
entalism did not lead him to a career in the genre, his travels were a formative experience with a lib-
erating impact.

Prouvé, who shared literary and political ideas with Gallé, became an important proselytizer for
the decorative arts of the Ecole de Nancy after Gallé’s death in 1904.29 He was also considered one
of the leading Nancy painters. Although his best-known work today is his 1892 portrait of Gallé at
the moment of inspiration, in the later 1890s he attracted mural commissions for town halls in the
Paris suburbs and Nancy. He began his career as a painter under the Nancy Orientalist Théodore
Devilly, moving to Paris in 1877 to study painting with Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts. A contender for the 1885 Prix de Rome, he was awarded a medal and a bourse de voyage for his
entry at the Salon, Sardanapalus (Sardanapale). This enormous canvas, later destroyed through neg-
lect in the Algerian museums, was a highly theatrical scene teeming with drunken or distressed nude
women and dark-skinned musicians plucking strange harps. The central figure, the king, danced in
a manner the prominent academician Bouguereau found disgraceful.30 The debt to Delacroix’s 1827
picture is clear in the array of beds and divans, and the work also exhibits some of the pandemonium
(if not the expert drawing) of the orgiastic Orientalist subjects in which Georges Clairin specialized
at the time. Recurrent illness kept Prouvé from taking up his bourse de voyage until early 1888, when
he made an exploratory three-month journey to Tunisia, probably drawn there by the ancient
Carthaginian heritage, popularized by Flaubert’s novel Salammbô. Passing through Constantine,
Prouvé and his painter friend Jouas based themselves in Tunis for two months. As Françoise-Thérèse
Charpentier points out, Prouvé, very likely inspired by Gustave Guillaumet’s Tableaux algériens, first
published in 1886, took his sojourn in North Africa as an opportunity to purify his sensations before
nature. He exclaimed to his mother: “Before beginning anything serious, you have to force yourself
to break with the usual palette so as to render the astonishing color of these white streets, a white un-
known to our European eyes.”31

Prouvé was interested in the indigenous people he saw, making notes about the Arabs of Tunis as

138 Traveling Scholarships

“less beautiful than those of Constantine” and remarking that the many ethnicities whose caravan
business brought them to the city “redeem the picturesque.”32 It is not surprising that Prouvé took
the train south along the coast to see more of these people. He passed through Sousse and Sfax be-
fore reaching the town of Gabès in a journey lasting just ten days. Numerous pencil drawings sur-
vive from the first visit, on such standard Orientalist themes as fantasias, Aïssaouas, snake charmers,
and caravans as well as semitopographical landscapes from Carthage, Gabès, and Menzel.

Like Dinet, Prouvé felt a need to consolidate what he had encountered on his first, apparently
unofficial, voyage to North Africa.33 The artist had had an ulterior motive on that first journey: gain-
ing inspiration for the designs he was to do for Emile Gallé’s exhibit at the 1889 Paris Universal Ex-
position. His major work was a large jardiniere in sculpted pear wood and fine timber marquetry en-
titled Flora Marina, Flora Exotica. A typical collaboration between Gallé the entrepreneur (who
suggested the rocaille form, shellfish, plants, and birds), the carver Louis Hestaux, and the draftsman
Prouvé, with his decor of palm fronds, cactus, and two reclining “Ondines,” the work had consid-
erable success with critics.34

His return to Tunisia was apparently brought about by issues more painterly than matters of de-
sign. Judging by his regular reports to the director of fine arts on this second, state-funded, visit,
Prouvé devoted himself to oil painting as well as drawing, planning to execute one or more paint-
ings, making numerous oil sketches, and “familiarizing myself with the ebb and flow of Arab life.”35
After four months he was ready to move south again to Gabès. Described by the Guide bleu as one
of the most interesting oases in North Africa, Gabès, established in the days of Carthaginian power,
was a few kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. Its wells fed date groves, gave it magnificent gar-
dens, and supported a string of old indigenous villages like Djara and Menzel.36 By 1890 Gabès had
a European administrative and military settlement. Prouvé described Gabès in his letters to the di-
rector as “a corner of the country that is very picturesque and rich in characteristic subjects,” and an
“inexhaustible source of études where everything is unexpected.”37 In Menzel the old Mosque of Sidi
Boul Baba, made of reused classical architectural fragments, had survived the French bombardment
of the resisting town in 1881. A short distance away were the sandy beaches of the Gulf of Gabès,
popular with European travelers for sea bathing, its reefs rich in sponges and coral.

The literary legacy of this second voyage is considerable, for Prouvé kept a written journal,
intending to make a book illustrated with his own drawings. Other tasks swamped him when he
returned to France, however, and he published only one illustrated pamphlet, De Gabès à Douïreth,
notes de voyage.38 The young man’s ardor quickly transformed his dutiful meteorological observa-
tions into pure enthusiasm: “Behind us, on the Bou Saïd side, the sea is shimmering pale green, the
sky turning to lilac with lilac streaks in the sea in the foreground. Setting sun, fire kindling the hori-
zon. We leap, we bellow, we are beside ourselves. Wagner alone in art responds to these harmonies,
so marvelous, magical, and improbable.”39 Not surprising for an admirer of Wagner, Prouvé knew

Traveling Scholarships 139

of impressionist theory and admired Claude Monet. On another occasion, when describing the rarest
e¤ect of color in the Tunisian sky, he expostulated: “It’s insanely difficult to do that. There is no one
but Monet who, with his knowing palette, could manage to give that sensation.”40

Yet the art of Prouvé in Tunisia cannot be called impressionist in any strict sense. He was a more
active draftsman than most impressionists (as befits his academic roots) and made extensive use of
semitopographical pencil sketches, giving a precise account of the land and tropical vegetation. His
small oil sketches can be rather wan in their range of olive greens and gray-blues. Prouvé’s brush-
work lacks the febrility and varying texture in that of the major impressionists. Indeed an early com-
mentator distinguished Prouvé’s Tunisian work from impressionism. He added, “You will seek in
vain in his landscape for a ‘state of the soul’; in him all is colored movements and symphonies, flows
of thick earth and drifting skies.”41

Prouvé’s focus on figural subjects also marks him as subscribing to other, specifically Orientalist,
traditions. He undertook a series of fantasias, with some extremely open and fluent pen sketches of
rearing horses and scimitar-wielding riders; his large watercolor Fantasia, dramatically framed to
place the viewer in the midst of the action, recalls Besnard in its acid tones of yellow, lime, and bur-
gundy (Fig. 60). The Tunisians Prouvé encountered while traveling from Gabès to Douïreth are,
with the landscape, the focus of his travelogue. He devoted two pages to Tunisian women, compar-
ing their billowing costume to the “torturing corset that makes ignoble mannequins of our women”
and evoking the scene of women washing in the oued Gabès—a “laughing, screeching little world”:
“All those torsos glimpsed, from the fat matron crushed into a succession of rolls and chubby masses
to the pure young girl: simple lines, pert breasts making fine folds in her robe. . . . And the negresses!
Large negresses, the triumph of bronze! And what torsos they have, what arms, what legs!!! No one
has ever done this. . . . We feel small, incapable. . . . We stagger home. . . . Furiously we set up, and
with enthusiasm prepare our poor palettes to do what we can.”42 The eroticized visual excitement
Prouvé’s words express never found an equivalent in his pictures. On his second journey, however,
as he recorded these impressions, Prouvé produced some impressive compositions. His Caravan
(Study) (La caravane [étude]; Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy) makes full use of the height of the canvas
and gives the sense that the shrouded women tower in their attatichs, the enclosed traveling chairs
on the backs of camels. Viewing figures from below became Prouvé’s specialty in his many ceiling
decorations.

Prouvé produced, however, what is probably his finest figure painting—of a male horseman—
to record the strangest and most daring stage of his journey as a boursier (see Plate 8). At the invita-
tion of Commandant Rébillet of the military region of Médénine, eighty kilometers south of Gabès,
Prouvé made a horseback journey in the July heat to Douïreth, probably never before seen by a French
artist. He spent nine days in the spectacular town, its cave dwellings built into the side of the peak,
working on a large study until a harsh east wind interrupted him. In the evenings Prouvé and his

140 Traveling Scholarships

figure 60
Victor Prouvé, Fantasia,
watercolor, 1888.

friend Ollier rambled around “this strange peak, seeking to discover something in these mysterious
habitations, half construction, half grotto. . . . Many old men, but in these nine days it is impossible
for us to see even the nose of a woman; they are unbelievably reclusive.” As a visual trophy Prouvé
published an Arabic document replete with calligraphic and legal flourishes, registering his and Ol-
lier’s presence in Douïreth by permission of the caliph of the town.43

It was probably on his return to Médénine that Prouvé painted his Arab Horseman (Cavalier Arabe),
which his daughter described as “one of his best paintings, an Arab horseman . . . with an immense
red hat pressed onto his wild head.”44 Prouvé uses backlighting to convey the diaphanous character
of the man’s robes (the kind of visual e¤ect he noted in his journal). Details of the rider’s harness

Traveling Scholarships 141

figure 61
Victor Prouvé, At the

Menzel Fountain,
lithograph, 1895.

(rifle discreetly stowed, leather cartouches, water bottle) have all the ethnographic validity of a Dinet,
but the technique with which they are rendered—the long fluid strokes—unlike Dinet’s more stolid
representation, energizes the eye rather than arrests it.

No doubt this was the work Prouvé exhibited as the centerpiece of his display (eight works in all)
in the first Salon of the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1893. Returning from his bourse, he
had shown two landscapes, of Gabès and Menzel, in the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-
Arts in 1891,45 thus throwing in his lot (like many younger progressives) with the newly formed Sa-
lon (which had split in 1890 from the Société des Artistes Français). The Nationale ’s radical privi-
leging of the decorative arts favored his work as well as that of his countrymen Gallé and Louis

142 Traveling Scholarships

Majorelle. Evidently the only other time Prouvé exhibited his Tunisian work was in 1895, again at
the behest of the Orientalist Painters; alongside his Nancy friend Emile Friant, Prouvé showed sev-
eral studies and a rare lithograph, At the Menzel Fountain (A la fontaine de Menzel, Fig. 61).46 He ex-
ecuted this work of memory five years after leaving Tunisia for the special album of prints by the
Orientalist Painters. Always the ceramist, Prouvé on his first Tunisian trip had studied earthenware
jars and female jar carriers at the Oued Gabès at Menzel. Something of his newly synthetic vision of
the body in motion may be seen in this print, which escapes academic vision, moving toward broad
rhythms of interlocking planes and lines.

Even if Prouvé in France generally ceased to deal with Orientalist subjects, the body of his Tunisian
work is considerable. In the final estimate, the bourse de voyage was a turning point in his career. In
Tunisia he began to paint the landscape of observation, and, more important, he gave up the sepia
tones of his studio paintings, like Sardanapalus, for the decorative colorism that marks his portraits
and murals of the 1890s: only after his return did Prouvé adopt a high-color palette equivalent to
that of contemporary impressionism and even Bonnardesque post-impressionism.

The Villa Abd-el-Tif and the School of Algiers

An important event in the history of the intellectual colonization
of Algeria was the foundation of the Villa Abd-el-Tif. . . . Its e¤ect
was to oppose the habitual wanderings that directed young Algerian
artists toward the metropole and above all the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
For twenty years the Villa Abd-el-Tif, as an institution of art and of
decentralization, has achieved results aesthetically superior to those
of the Villa Medici.
– v i c t o r b a r r u c a n d , “Les Abd-el-Tif,” 1928

With government bourses de voyage and additional grants administered by the Society of French Ori-
entalist Painters and its sister institution, the Colonial Society of French Artists, or Coloniale, met-
ropolitan France enabled its artists to leave the country on voyages of aesthetic discovery to the
colonies. Besides this movement from the center out into the world the colonial system had another
dimension—the colonies’ own measures to assure the prosperity of local visual arts.

I have already mentioned Tunis, with its active cultural center, the Institut de Carthage. In Alge-
ria, most populous of the colonies, elementary institutions were in place by the turn of the century,
at least in Algiers: the small Municipal Museum of French Art, the National Museum of Antiquities
and Muslim Art (established in 1892 at Upper Mustapha), the municipal Ecole des Beaux-Arts (es-

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tablished in the 1880s), and the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, founded in 1897 on the
model of the Parisian exhibiting society.

In Algiers there was also a small but influential group of French amateurs of visual art—including
scholars (Georges Marye, Georges Marçais), men of letters (Victor Barrucand), and businessmen
who were collectors (Louis Meley, Frédéric Lung). Such figures actively promoted local culture, both
French and in some cases, more surprising, indigenous. Some of them were active in the Commit-
tee for Old Algiers (Comité du Vieil Alger), a historical society and lobbying group that furthered
the study of precolonial monuments and protected what today would be called the heritage values
of the old city.47

In 1900 a new governor-general of Algeria was appointed, Charles-Celestin Jonnart, whose as-
pirations for the colony and attitude toward cultural matters so di¤ered from those of the mass of
French Algerian colonists that he was called a Turk and an Arab.48 Concerned about the parlous state
of the visual arts in the colony, Jonnart commissioned an independent report by the respected art
critic for Le Figaro in Paris, Arsène Alexandre. Alexandre ’s “Reflections on the Arts and the Arts
Industries in Algeria,” published in the leading progressive weekly L’Akhbar beginning 15 February
1905, became an influential document in the development of art in the colony.49 It was reissued as a
pamphlet two years later by Victor Barrucand, the editor of L’Akhbar and himself a significant figure
in the cultural history of the colony, who deserves brief introduction here.

Barrucand had been a dramatist, poet, and journalist who worked on the famous symbolist Revue
blanche in Paris. After covering the Dreyfus a¤air in Rennes for the League of the Rights of Man in
1899, he was assigned to combat the influential antisemitic movement of Edouard Drumont in Al-
geria, arriving there in 1900.50 In 1902 he purchased the recently defunct L’Akhbar (founded in 1839),
aiming to make it “a humanitarian weekly for Franco-Arab union” that would combat the “obscu-
rantism of the colonists’ mind-set.”51 It became the colony’s first bilingual newspaper and, despite
being predictably embattled, lasted until its editor’s death in 1934. The great traveler, writer, and cul-
tural go-between Isabelle Eberhardt was Barrucand’s main journalistic collaborator until her death
in 1904. Barrucand had “discovered” and published her collected works in four volumes starting in
1906. L’Akhbar’s in-depth coverage of the arts is exemplified by regular reviews of the local Salon
and occasional items like Alexandre ’s report for Jonnart.

Although Alexandre conceived of his enquiry as having two aspects, he gave far more space to
furthering the indigenous arts than those of Europe (see Chapter 8). An energetic proponent of tra-
ditional handicrafts, Alexandre was skeptical about assimilating indigenous and European art and
proposed instead a series of initiatives to shore up local traditional industries. He pronounced the
European arts in the colony “very weak.” “There should have been a School of Algiers. It did not
exist.” Excepting the works of Maxime Noiré and one or two others, “one quickly arrives at the works
of amateurs or the e¤orts of beginners.” Alexandre indicts local art school teaching on the one hand,

144 Traveling Scholarships

the lack of supportive organizations on the other. He wrote that the local Society of Algerian and
Orientalist Artists “does not suffice for and cannot be extended to create an artistic movement.”52 A
vitalizing influx of French artists to the colony was needed, and Alexandre points out the paradox of
the many Orientalists who painted in Algeria yet whose work, shown in Paris, was little known in
the colony itself.

What was needed above all, Alexandre wrote, was a center in the colony, modeled on the Künst-
lerhaus in Munich, where visiting professional artists could gather. That proposal resulted in the found-
ing of the Villa Abd-el-Tif: “Algiers should have, beyond its museums, a Maison des Artistes. . . . Its
site exists, and how marvelous it is: the house of the Abdeltifs [sic], above the Jardin d’Essai. It is ad-
mirable but falling into ruin. This residence, still ravishing despite its dilapidation, is situated so that
the artist has at hand the finest lessons of light and nature. Its terrace, its colonnade, its interior court-
yard still decorated with brilliant ceramics, its surroundings of luxuriant verdure would make of it an
enviable abode.”53

The villa was one of the increasingly rare substantial buildings from the Turkish era to survive in
the urban zone of Algiers (Fig. 62). Under the Turkish regime it had served as a residence to suc-
cessive dignitaries, the last of them the Abd-el-Tif family.54 Unoccupied and in sore need of restora-
tion, the villa nonetheless had much to commend it: its historical cachet and its site, “buried in
magnificent greenery, just a few minutes from the Jardin d’Essai with its opulent fronds, so dear to
the memory of many painters.”55

Governor Jonnart was quick to act, and by April 1907 the villa had been requisitioned by the gov-
ernment, restored, and let out to the first two artists, recruited by a competition in Paris.56 Almost
immediately the press—both local and Parisian—began to refer to it as an “Algerian Villa Medici,”
likening the institution to the building near the Spanish Steps in Rome that had housed the French
school since the seventeenth century.57 Such nomenclature suggests that French artists and com-
mentators saw the exotic site and its program as a new rival to classical study. But there were im-
portant di¤erences between the two villas. Jean Alazard, a specialist in Renaissance art and the fu-
ture director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, was well qualified to see them: “The
Villa Medici has an administrative organization and stays faithful to powerful traditions. At the Villa
Abd-el-Tif there is no supervision . . . the residents are their own masters and, excepting the gov-
ernment functionary who takes care of purely material questions, the only authority is that of the
more senior appointee.”58

Jonnart’s “bourses de voyage en Algérie” were set up so that each February in Paris a competi-
tion was held, open to painters, sculptors, printmakers, medal makers, and architects, as long as they
were French citizens under the age of thirty-five.59 Initially two scholarships, each with a value of
three thousand francs, were available for one year; from about 1910 they ran for two years, so that
four artists occupied the Villa Abd-el-Tif at any one time. That the Paris competition and its jury

Traveling Scholarships 145

figure 62
Jean Bouchaud, The Villa

Abd-el-Tif Overlooking
Algiers, gouache, 1925.

were organized by the president of the Society of French Orientalist Painters is not surprising, given
Bénédite ’s expertise and his regular visits to Algiers. Competition works were exhibited at the Ori-
entalists’ Salon, and several Abd-el-Tif artists went on to become regular exhibitors there. The ini-
tial jury of four was soon expanded to include members of the Orientalist Painters and, more im-
portant, former Abd-el-Tif artists.60 After World War I “les Abd-el-Tif ” dominated the selection
process, preferring a relatively traditional pictorial realism among prizewinners during the 1920s and
1930s: Sabine Fazekas and Elizabeth Cazenave agree that the group of Abd-el-Tifians was, in that
sense, self-perpetuating.61

146 Traveling Scholarships

From the outset, then, the Villa Abd-el-Tif depended on metropolitan expertise, and its aim, made
clear in Alexandre ’s report, was to draw on metropolitan artistry to raise the level of colonial cul-
tural production in the visual arts. The colony had the visual “raw materials” in nature, while the
home country provided the expertise: the colonial paradigm thus translated readily into the visual
realm. As for the villa, the numerous articles devoted to it in the Algerine and even Parisian press
underscore its impact on the colony’s cultural life. It was a vital addition to the colonial art scene.
Cazenave documents the numerous connections between the villa and the broader nonindigenous
art world in Algiers, from the patronage of major private collectors like Lung and Meley to the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts and the National Museum of Fine Arts (after 1930), whose director, Alazard, she de-
scribes as virtual master of the villa, with his residence at the back of the museum just a hundred me-
ters from the villa’s grounds.62

A significant number of Abd-el-Tif artists, graduates of Parisian art schools with no previous
calling for Eastern subjects, became professional Orientalists thereafter. Numbers of them contin-
ued to visit the colony regularly; several settled in Algiers. The two inaugural prizewinners in 1907
were the sculptor-painter Paul Jouve and the painter Léon Cauvy, who stayed on in Algiers and in
1910 was appointed director of the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a post he held until his death in
1933.

Cauvy, who triumphantly exhibited the fruit of his Abd-el-Tif stay—fifty works in all—at the
1909 Orientalist Painters’ Salon in Paris,63 became one of the most representative artists of School
of Algiers painting after World War I. Earlier he had focused on scenes of daily life in the foothills
of Kabylia beyond the plain of the Mitidja, its agricultural and pastoral ways. But he specialized dur-
ing the 1920s in market and port scenes in the capital. Cauvy concentrated on indigenous people in
traditional garb but often made no attempt to dissimulate the presence of modern colonial buildings,
machinery, or shipping: in that sense he is a colonial “realist,” more at ease with a multicultural sit-
uation than most touring artists. Cauvy interpreted such anecdotal scenes in an agreeably modern
style. He used a high-color palette and broad segments of color for descriptive purposes, rather like
the cloisonnist poster artist David Dellepiane from Marseille, who made posters in a similar manner
for the 1906 exposition, although Cauvy’s technique has also been linked to that of the Anglo-Belgian
Orientalist Frank Brangwyn. Indeed Cauvy’s imagery was appropriated by the government for its
official advertising, as his poster Wintering—Tourism—Algeria (Hivernage—Tourisme—Algérie,
Fig. 63) indicates; his related poster for the centenary of Algeria in 1930 was widely di¤used in France
and overseas. From his position as professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Cauvy made his colonial
cloisonnism the virtual lingua franca of the Algiers studios in the 1920s, a¤ecting such artists as Ma-
rius de Buzon, J.-L. Antoni, and the young indigenous painter Abdel-Halim Hemche.

Other Abd-el-Tifians had a material influence on local art by taking up lesser teaching positions
in Algeria and selling paintings to the local gentry, some of whom no doubt lionized them socially.

Traveling Scholarships 147

figure 63
Léon Cauvy, Wintering—

Tourism—Algeria, color
lithograph poster, ca. 1930.

As a condition of their tenure the Abd-el-Tifians gave one significant work to the governor-general’s
office. (Eventually all these works went to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers.)64 Those
boursiers selected before World War I had the greatest impact in Algeria and Paris. Léon Carré, one
of the most interesting Abd-el-Tifians (Fig. 64), was elected in the third round of scholarships (1909).
He was unusual in having regularly visited Algeria, his first work produced there the Arab Market
(Marché arabe) that won him the Prix Chenavard in 1905.65 A Breton by origin who had trained un-
der Léon Bonnat and Luc-Olivier Merson, Carré had a solid realist technique in rendering Parisian
street life and the zoo animals at the Paris Jardin des Plantes. After setting up at the Villa Abd-el-Tif

148 Traveling Scholarships

figure 64
Léon Carré painting
in a garden overlooking
Algiers, ca. 1913.

with his wife, the artist Ketty Carré, he made a number of sympathetic paintings of her in the villa’s
garden. In Tea in the Garden (Le thé dans le jardin) a lavish still life of European tea service and fruit
serves as a foreground to Ketty, with her terrier lapdog and opened correspondence, seated before a
frieze of aloes and nasturtiums that discreetly symbolize the subtropical Mediterranean.66

Such works are unusual among “Orientalist” productions, if the word may indeed be used here,
in that they image the European, rather than the indigenous, presence in North Africa. Even more
remarkable in this sense are Carré’s 1910 studies of Algiers workingmen, Spanish or Maltese by their
dress, not Arab. In his Mule Driver (Type de muletier) and Muleteer (Le muletier, Fig. 65) a tough mus-
tachioed worker in a slouch hat pauses, holding a cigarette and a goading stick, to rest his four mules,
heavily laden but gaily caparisoned. Behind him several other workers, in turbans, labor with other
mules beyond a mass of prickly pear. As Jean-Marie Carré (the artist’s brother?) noted at the time,
Carré’s exoticism “has nothing of the traditional turqueries” or romantic subjects of Delacroix and
Fromentin. His is “an ethnic Orientalism. He studies the races who rub shoulders on the Mediterranean
coast . . . be they Spaniards or Arabs.” Léon Carré’s favorite reading at this time was the Notes de route
by Barrucand’s friend Isabelle Eberhardt, so stripped-down in their narratives, so unsentimental.67

With Léon Carré producing many drawings as he traveled as far south as Biskra (and west to Spain,
where he worked in 1911), and Ketty Carré pursuing her own projects (see Chapter 10) at the villa,

Traveling Scholarships 149

figure 65
Léon Carré, The Muleteer,

oil on canvas, 1910.

the couple decided to base themselves permanently in Algiers. Carré was opening himself to new
influences: painting in the Kabylian hills around La Gouraya (on the coast near Bougie) in 1913, he
befriended Azouaou Mammeri, a French-speaking Kabyle schoolteacher and self-taught artist, to
whom Carré gave valuable painting lessons (see Chapter 9). At this time Carré established a lyrical
and decorative approach to pastoral subjects, exemplified in the moonrise scene, all rich greens and
distant purples, that he executed as a commission for Armand Dayot of L’Art et les Artistes.68

Carré by this point was already in contact with the Orientalist and Islamophile circle of Victor
Barrucand (illustrating Barrucand’s Hindu drama Le Chariot de terre cuite).69 Most likely through Eti-
enne Dinet, Carré was commissioned to do the first of his illustrated books for Henri Piazza of Paris
(who had published Dinet’s illustrated books for a decade), Le Jardin des Caresses by Henri Tous-
saint, the first French translation of a collection of tenth-century Moorish love poems written in An-
dalusia. Painted in 1912 and exhibited to some acclaim at the Society of French Orientalist Painters
in February 1913, Carré’s original illustrations for Toussaint’s book were published in chromolith-
ographic splendor the following year.70 In Nude Dancer (La danseuse nue; see Plate 9), despite the
stylization of the pale-skinned girl, a nerveless proto-flapper replete with headdress from the Ballets
russes, one cannot but notice Carré’s care in developing the Islamicizing decor. Exquisite tile panels

150 Traveling Scholarships

of Turkish inspiration and rugs of mixed character (Berber in the foreground, vaguely art nouveau
on the wall behind) are in evidence. The school of Islamicizing illustration exemplified by these works
is discussed in Chapter 9 (on Mohammed Racim); it suffices to say here that they represent a marriage,
not yet anticipated in Alexandre ’s 1905 report, of Islamic visual traditions and the activities of the
Abd-el-Tifians.

The selection of Algerian boursiers ceased with World War I but was renewed in 1920, when two
of the decade ’s most successful Orientalists were nominated. One was the painter Jean Launois and
the other, Paul-Elie Dubois, who achieved fame with his large canvases of Touareg tribesmen. At
the same time, the alumni of the villa organized a large exhibition of their work in Algiers, Abd-el-
Tif and Its Friends. This expression of group solidarity was very favorably viewed by Barrucand,
who isolated two distinct manners of painting, one stylized, with generalized detail (like that of
Cauvy), and the other based on observation and minute attention to detail. Barrucand concluded that
the Villa Abd-el-Tif “will have richly served the colony in helping broadcast its beauty. Thanks to
[it] . . . Algeria is no longer just a cellar and a grain store.”71

During the twenties the Abd-el-Tifians took the lion’s share of commissions to decorate public
buildings and design the sculptural monuments that the French, as part of the process of colonisa-
tion intellectuelle, “intellectual colonization” (as officials called it), insisted on as the colony pros-
pered. One major work, still remarkably intact today, stands out: the mural decorations for the former
Summer Palace of the Governor-General, today the Palace of the People of Algiers. This impressive
monument was intelligently altered and renovated in the colonial period. The government archi-
tect Darbéda made a series of additions to the eighteenth-century Moorish palace at the request of
Governor-General Lutaud around 1913. The most surprising elements of Darbéda’s design are the
neo-Gothic southern facade, based closely on the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, and the grand ceremonial
hall on the first floor, which Jean Alazard rightly described as neo-Byzantine in inspiration, not least
because of the extravagant use of highly colored mosaic.72

The mural paintings above the windows of the main hall, on the walls of the ceremonial stair-
cases, and in the reception chamber are the work of the most prominent School of Algiers artists of
the 1920s (Fig. 66). The murals, either in true fresco, transferred canvas, or mosaic, are in an excel-
lent state of preservation.73 Fernand Antoni did a series of eighteen small panels in the upper reaches
of the vast Salle des Fêtes. Both inaugural Abd-el-Tif laureates had a role in the extensive decora-
tions, with Paul Jouve, the animal painter, designing Peacocks in the Gardens (Les paons dans les jardins),
a mosaic over one of the palace ’s two ceremonial staircases. Cauvy’s lunettes of traditional Alger-
ian métiers above the hall windows, first painted for the International Exposition of Modern Deco-
rative and Industrial Arts (Paris, 1925), are discussed in Chapter 8. The two main muralists were Léon
Carré, with his panoramic Muslim Life (La vie musulmane), and Marius de Buzon, with scenes of Kabyle
customs in a highland setting. The major Carré panel in the presidential antechamber shows a fam-

Traveling Scholarships 151

figure 66
Léon Carré, Murals in
Presidential Antechamber,
Palais d’Eté, Algiers,

ca. 1923.

ily group—two mature women, a boy, and an old man before an aged oak tree. The decorative ele-
ments of striped pantaloons and white Moorish palace and garden beyond complete this carefully in-
tegrated multifigured composition (Fig. 67). At the feet of the woman in the foreground a ewe with
her lamb and a hen with brood bespeak family values, but no potentially troubling vigorous Alger-
ian man is seen. The image, easeful bucolic decoration for a summer palace, omits any discord.

De Buzon, the other main muralist, from Bordeaux, first went to Algiers with an Abd-el-Tif schol-
arship in 1913. After serving in World War I, he relocated to Algeria, where his bright palette and
energetic painterly touch made him one of the best-known painters of the School of Algiers. De Bu-
zon’s imagery of Kabyle agriculture and customs was appreciated to the extent that newly reappointed
Governor-General Jonnart commissioned him to paint murals for the palace staircase. His scenes
of Kabyle life, the Kabyle Cortege (Cortège kabyle) and Return from the Market (Retour du marché,
Fig. 68), mirror long-standing French preferences by privileging this industrious community of
farmers and shepherds. In a setting of high rolling hills dotted with olive trees, the figures of men,

152 Traveling Scholarships

figure 67 Léon Carré,
Muslim Life, Palais d’Eté,
Algiers, ca. 1923.

mules, and horses form, as Alazard writes, “the point of departure for many a precise study of Kabyle
habits and customs.”74

Pouillon, however, grasps the contradictory political message of these panels, which mummify
traditional life. For him they evoke “traditional indigenous society in a bucolic frame, the pacified
springtime of rural prosperity . . . at a time when indigenous society survived—and in what a state!—
only in the interstices of European cities, or on the Saharan periphery. . . . Yet here it is, impeccable,
haunting this palace from an operetta, speaking the essence of a land that no longer resembles any
of this, an essential Algeria made to flourish for eternity.”75

It would be wrong to associate the Villa Abd-el-Tif exclusively with latter-day exponents of an
“academic exotic” enlisted to furnish the iconographic and decorative needs of the Algerian govern-
ment. Especially in the years before World War I, some distinctive personalities also had their tenure
there, and their art broadens the scope of Orientalist painting in the twentieth century. Probably the
only unequivocal modernist (if not a member of the consecrated avant-garde) there was Charles

Traveling Scholarships 153

figure 68
Marius de Buzon,
Return from the Market,
Palais d’Eté, Algiers,

ca. 1923.

Dufresne. Descended from a family of Norman sailors and trained as an engraver and sculptor,
Dufresne largely taught himself painting after moving to Paris, where he spent evenings sketching
in the dance halls and café-concerts and entered a set of pastels on this modish subject (favored at that
time by Georges Rouault) at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, where they were noticed by Louis
Vauxcelles. Around 1908 he is thought to have met Dr. Joseph Mardrus, translator of the Thousand
and One Nights, who introduced him to the circle of Islamists that included Bénédite and Dinet. No
doubt they encouraged him to apply for the Abd-el-Tif scholarship, for which (as an exhibitor at the
Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts) he was selected in 1910.76

Dufresne ’s Algerian gouaches and watercolors count, after Matisse ’s Moroccan canvases, as the
most stylistically advanced images of North Africa by a French artist before World War I. Dufresne,
an habitué of the Salon des Indépendants and thus familiar with fauvism and the beginnings of cu-
bism, spent his two scholarship years based in Algiers, working in watercolor and gouache in the
Jardin d’Essai and producing oil paintings of women on terrace rooftops—those somewhat con-
ventionalized scenes of Moorish life, influenced by Gauguin, were among the first works he had at-
tempted in the medium.

A talented draftsman, Dufresne undertook a series of meticulous but stylish pencil drawings of

154 Traveling Scholarships

figure 69
Charles Dufresne,
North African
Landscape—the Oued
at Bou-Saâda, pen and
ink, ca. 1910–12.

the topography of the oasis town of Bou-Saâda (Fig. 69), where he was no doubt Dinet’s guest. (It
is interesting that Dufresne produced these more literal drawings there, given Dinet’s intolerance of
avant-garde experiment.) Frédéric Lung, a rich viticulturist with contacts in Bordeaux who was
Dufresne ’s most assiduous patron and a major protector of the Abd-el-Tifians, bought several line
drawings,77 as well as three large gouaches of the Bou-Saâda oasis, an informal triptych on the themes
of tropical vegetation, running water, and the low-key human presence of women who wash clothes
or bathe. In the most descriptive of those works the rocky terraces of the oued at Bou-Saâda are rec-
ognizable; the least literal is a tapestry of interlocking palm fronds, spiky trunks, and green canopies
(Fig. 70).78 The Bou-Saâda suite parallels other decorative works concerned with botanical exoti-
cism by Dufresne ’s contemporaries Jules Migonney (another progressive Abd-el-Tifian) and Henri
Matisse; as one critic wrote, Dufresne’s “entanglements of Algerian greenery seem to have been elab-
orated more for tapestry cartoons than any other reason.”79

Dufresne ’s Oriental Scene or Bathers (Scène orientale or Baigneuses; see Plate 10) is a more syn-
thetic invention based on the oasis motif, with date palms, cacti, washerwomen, and a pair of oxen
suggesting Dufresne did not insist on the purity of “African” fauna but could include marks of colo-
nial settlement and agriculture. The standing nudes in the center of the composition unmistakably

Traveling Scholarships 155

figure 70
Charles Dufresne,
Algerian Oasis, gouache,
pastel, Chinese ink, pencil
on cream paper, ca. 1912.

quote Henri Matisse ’s bronze sculpture Two Negro Women (Deux négresses), exhibited with fanfare
at the 1908 Salon d’Automne. The quotation calls attention not only to Dufresne ’s reworking of the
fauve figure style but also to his departure from mere observation, the better to achieve a careful bal-
ance of intersecting lines, figures, and color patches. Eschewing the intense color of both fauvist and
some Orientalist art, he holds in place the subtle tonalities of this work—a harmony of tans, olive
greens, and muted blues—with one piercing note of cherry red, the veritable bull’s-eye of this su-
perb composition.

Returning to France in late 1912, Dufresne exhibited Algerian works at the 1913 Salon of the Na-
tionale and, in considerable numbers, the Salon of the French Orientalist Painters. Although some
critics, like Mauclair, chastised them for their experimentalism, others, like René Jean, responded
enthusiastically: “M. Dufresne, who received the Algeria scholarship in 1910, is showing a suite of
watercolors and canvases that are as eloquent as biblical tales, vibrant with warm and muted tones
in which purples play, and greens and pinks dominate. In his harmonies, in his sometimes unexpected

156 Traveling Scholarships

perspectives, the magic of an Oriental dream unfurls: human bodies of the most diverse races, var-
ious stu¤s, plants of capricious form.”80

Jean’s last sentence captures the mood of Dufresne ’s subsequent painting on Oriental themes, for
although he spent little time in Algeria after his scholarship, with the intervention of the war and the
burgeoning of his career thereafter, he was one of those for whom a generalized Orient became a
main source of subject matter. It was the pattern of Delacroix revisited, and indeed Dufresne’s scenes
of the hunt and of battle in North Africa recall the imaginative and recollective thematics of
Delacroix and Fromentin.81 Dufresne ’s wartime friend Dunoyer de Segonzac encouraged his rhyth-
mic cubist style. Even the apocalyptic animal imagery of the Blue Rider artist Franz Marc is a rele-
vant parallel to Dufresne ’s art. As a critic later remarked, “one does not find him among the fauves,
although he adopted their lively palette. One does not find him among the cubists, even though he
applies their reconstruction of post-Cézannian space.”82

The Villa Abd-el-Tif was the most positive of all the initiatives studied in this chapter on travel-
ing scholarships and the history of Orientalism. It initiated careers in Orientalism, injected exper-
tise into the Algerian arts community (by way of both teaching and government commissions), and
o¤ered goals and a focus for the local art scene. The villa extended its programs in 1925 (when sev-
eral new artists’ studios were added), and it continued to function into the contemporary era: despite
the turmoil and danger of the war of independence, Abd-el-Tif scholars were named up to 1962
(even if they could not always take up their residencies).

The exclusionary practices of the Villa Abd-el-Tif program remain striking today. For “practi-
cal” reasons women could not be lodged there, although in principle they could compete for the bourses.
More particularly, Algerians, whether of indigenous or pied-noir descent, could not apply. The in-
stitution remained faithful to Arsène Alexandre ’s 1905 scenario and to Governor Jonnart’s ruling: it
would advance the arts of painting and sculpture exclusively by implanting an aesthetic expertise de-
termined by the home country. Around 1914 pied-noir and indigenous artists could receive scholar-
ships to study in Spain, and the Casa Velázquez was established in Madrid. (Early scholarship hold-
ers of the 1920s included Mohammed Racim and Azouaou Mammeri.) But a program equivalent in
largesse to the Villa Abd-el-Tif funding Algerians to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris was
never established. The government chose to encourage cultural progress in the colony by o¤ering
traveling scholarships primarily to the talent of mainland France.

Traveling Scholarships 157



7 Matisse and Modernist
Orientalism

T he activity of a modernist artist like Henri Matisse yields valuable lessons when compared
to that of exponents of the academic exotic. For at first blush the weight of evidence ac-
cumulated in the preceding chapters is enough to cast his three North African voyages—
to Biskra in 1906 and to Tangier in 1912 and 1913—as entirely within the ambit of an Orientalist
practice. Interesting overlaps and excesses appear when Matisse ’s North African experience and pic-
torial production are pressed against the Orientalist template. For a start he traveled, not as a novice
on a government grant, going abroad to sow the wild oats of his inexperience,1 but outside that cy-
cle of official patronage, having sidestepped it beginning in 1899, when he ceased exhibiting at the
Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and presenting (if he had ever done so) subjects that
would have qualified him for a government bourse de voyage.

His self-funded travels reflected the same professional success and earning power that had enabled
the travels of other Orientalists, from Gérôme and Renoir to Besnard. Matisse ’s voyage to Biskra in
1906 came on the heels of good sales at the Salon des Indépendants, and by 1911, when he went to
Tangier, he had one of the highest incomes of contemporary artists, with wealthy Russian, Amer-
ican, and German patrons. Several of his Moroccan pictures were commissioned and thus already
sold. When he returned to Paris, he did not need to submit his works to the vagaries of the annual

159

Salons, or even to the Orientalist Painters (imagining for a moment that Bénédite might have ac-
cepted them). Instead he managed a feat neither Renoir nor Monet had accomplished with their
Mediterranean canvases—displaying them as a coherent group in a one-man thematic show at a pres-
tigious gallery. Only Albert Besnard, whose showmanship far exceeded Matisse ’s, achieved the same
coup with his immensely successful Indian exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1912.2

Matisse ’s North African experience was not in itself the determining moment in a nascent career.
Matisse, unlike Albert Lebourg and Victor Prouvé, was not thereby converted to a resonant high-
color palette. That had already happened during Matisse ’s fauve years in France. Like Renoir, Ma-
tisse was a mature artist who responded to a new stimulus in a largely preexisting language, although
North Africa gave him, far more than Renoir, thematic inspirations that remained relevant through-
out his career (as two recent exhibitions have demonstrated).3

As for Matisse ’s Moroccan work itself, nothing painted in the first half-century under the aegis of
exoticism was further from the appearance of humdrum French realist Orientalism, from the routine
academic exoticism that still cluttered the Salons of the Société des Artistes Français and the Orien-
talist Painters. Yet it should be no heresy to suggest that behind this radicality deep cultural conti-
nuities persist and that the conception of these Maghrebian subjects and the very discursive bound-
aries within which Matisse conceived his abstracting, high-color visual treatment both owe much to
Orientalist traditions. It is salutary to deprive the artist of the pedestal on which modernist hagiog-
raphy has placed his North African works, splendid though they be. A postcolonial criticism must
work against the historical amnesia typical of dominant accounts of the artist’s work.4

Biskra, or the Impossibility of Painting

No longer a part of the desert, Biskra is the queen of the oases no more.
She has been deposed and sullied; her jewels are paste. Now she’s a mere
figurehead for the crowds to ogle, estranged from the deep and mystic
soul of the Sahara.
– i s a b e l l e e b e r h a r d t , “Desert Springtime,” ca. 1902

Matisse ’s first North African excursion is an event of considerable resonance for this history of Ori-
entalism, even though—or indeed because—it occasioned no significant work. The centrality of Ma-
tisse ’s destination, Biskra—an iconic site of Orientalist experience—his traveler’s impressions, and
the reasons for his “failure” are all symptomatic of the Orientalist predicament. And because his much
greater output of work in Tangier six years later continued that deferred project of painting the East,
the earlier experience is worth considering.

Matisse, going to Africa in 1906, did something more commonplace for a French artist than trav-

160 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

eling to London to paint. I have already indicated how many hundreds of mainstream painters and
sculptors made the trip, but progressive artists from Matisse ’s immediate generation did so in
significant numbers that included Bernard, Lévy-Dhurmer, René Piot, and several of Matisse ’s col-
leagues formerly at the studio of Gustave Moreau: Henri Evenepoel, Raoul du Gardier, Georgette
Agutte, and in due course Albert Marquet and Charles Camoin, who also painted in Tangier around
1912. Evenepoel’s 1898 journey in particular, overlooked in writing on Matisse, is a telling precedent
for the trip to Biskra.5

Knowledge of North African travels by two of Matisse’s artist heroes, Delacroix and Renoir, joined
to Evenepoel’s recent experience, counted for much when Matisse, for the first time, was in a finan-
cial position to leave France. He had other reasons to travel in 1906, in particular the National Colo-
nial Exposition of Marseille (see Chapter 5). Matisse visited it on his way to Collioure in late spring;
his old friend the Marseillais Charles Camoin had been given the honor of exhibiting in the section
of Provençal painting.6 The Marseille exposition also o¤ered a major Orientalist retrospective that
included works by Chassériau and Fromentin, as well as by painters Matisse is known to have ad-
mired: Delacroix’s Lion Devouring an Arab and a watercolor of the Moroccan sultan; Renoir’s Arab
Festival, Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, and another Algerian portrait; and, equally relevant to
the fauve artist in 1906, landscapes from Martinique and Tahiti by Paul Gauguin.

The exotic dance theater, moreover, attracted Matisse (he later recalled watching the Ouled-Naïls)
along with his colleagues Derain and Camoin and no less a personage than Auguste Rodin, who made
a special trip from Paris to Marseille to continue sketching the court dancers in the troupe of Sisowath,
king of the French protectorate of Cambodia. Faced with the multitude of facsimile Orients in the
Algerian pavilion and the Palace of Fine Arts, Matisse might have decided, like Gauguin in 1889, to
depart immediately for North Africa, just twenty-four hours away by the steamers of the Compag-
nie de navigation mixte or the Société Paquet.

Thus instead of traveling as usual to Collioure after visiting his in-laws at Perpignan, Matisse took
the weekly steamer service from Port-Vendres for Algiers, leaving on 10 May 1906.7 He returned to
France after spending much of his stay, just over two weeks, traveling, having visited Algiers, Con-
stantine, and Biskra. After landing at Algiers, he would have taken the train to join the East Alger-
ian Line, which stretched from Philippeville (today’s Skikda) on the Mediterranean coast south to
Biskra in the near Sahara. The line passed through the spectacular hilltop city of Constantine in the
coastal highlands, from which Matisse sent a typically brief and emphatic postcard to Derain: “Nice
place! But the heat! I shall have to get the hell out of here without having managed to do anything!”8
Chassériau had painted in Constantine sixty years before, and an encounter on the train that Matisse
describes (probably with a young Kabyle notable) sounds like an encounter with the resplendent caliph
in Chassériau’s famous Versailles portrait: “I lunched opposite a magnificent Arab, a sort of Arab
prince, fair-skinned with wavy hair and fine blue eyes, and a remarkable purity of expression.”9

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 161

figure 71
Biskra, with old
indigenous village in the
foreground, new town
beyond, before 1933.

figure 72
Henri Matisse,
Street in Biskra, oil
on canvas, 1906.

162

Passing through El Kantara, the line went down to the oasis of Biskra—all country celebrated in
Orientalist painting. El Kantara, “a sudden breach in the mountains, as if cleft by a formidable sword
stroke,”10 had been the subject of innumerable photographs and Orientalist canvases; its literary con-
secration had begun with Fromentin. The oases of the Zibane some fifty kilometers south, Tolga and
Biskra above all, had also been painted repeatedly since the 1880s by artists like Guillaumet, Lan-
delle, Dinet, and Leroy. As Prosper Ricard, a specialist in North African architecture and art, ex-
plained, “Because of its mild climate, its proximity to the great steppes, and its important oasis, Biskra
is a winter station that is much frequented. Next to the oasis a hybrid town has been created, whose
activity is fortunately more interesting than its architecture.”11 Biskra, once a Roman settlement, had
been occupied by the French since 1849, its “hybrid town” laid out on a grid abutting the Fort St.
Germain (Fig. 71). Here was the Biskra that for Isabelle Eberhardt had been “sullied and deposed,”
complete with town hall, church, military club, and numerous buildings dedicated to tourism, from
the Palace Hotel to the Biskra Casino. The casino, in Moorish style, boasted “gaming rooms, café-
concerts, and indigenous dances.”12 The resort’s public gardens and racecourse competed with the
attractions of ethno-tourism: the quarter of the Ouled-Naïls (next to the market), the “Moorish bath”
and the “Negro village,” and camelback excursions to the desert organized by the Comité d’hiver-
nage de Biskra. If Eberhardt refrained from engaging this environment in her short stories, it was
nevertheless the setting of Robert Hichens’s popular 1904 novel The Garden of Allah (in which Biskra
is detailed prior to an account of adventures in the desert farther south) and, as we will see, of An-
dré Gide ’s Immoraliste.13

The several scattered indigenous settlements of nearby Old Biskra, “strange villages of earth, al-
ways crumbling, ceaselessly rebuilt,” attracted painters, as did the “oasis of 150,000 palm trees, slen-
der and superb, o¤ering their blooming aigrettes to the sun, [and] the innumerable seghias that flow,
brimful, along earthen levees.”14 Such scenes were the subject of paintings like Guillaumet’s Orsay
Seghia, Biskra (see Fig. 20) and of most picturesque photographs of the oasis. At the annual exhi-
bitions of the Orientalist Painters in Paris between 1893 and 1911, thirty-five painters exhibited many
dozens of pictures—landscapes, interiors, figure paintings—from Biskra. In 1893 (the year André
Gide first visited, in the company of Renoir’s friend Landelle) no fewer than seven painters showed
Biskra paintings at the Orientalist Painters. The oasis was a veritable Barbizon—or, better still, a
Pont-Aven—of the exotic landscape.

Many features of the Biskran picturesque are evident in the one painting that survives from Ma-
tisse ’s Algerian trip, the little oil sketch on panel Street in Biskra (Rue à Biskra, Fig. 72). In a classic
view up a street, Matisse marshals a shaded wall as the right-hand coulisse. In the shadow an Arab
man sits, sheltering from the sun in a posture immortalized by Fromentin’s Street in Laghouat. To the
right and left are the inevitable date palms, etched against the sky with gestural strokes. Houses are
visible, the pitched roof of a European-style dwelling at left, and in the center distance the open arches

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 163

of a large Moorish building, marker of the exotic. Matisse later defined the motif himself: “On a road
near the oasis, in the vicinity of the mosque, I did a small size 5 painting. The mosque in the back-
ground, a palm, and the street running between two walls.”15 Matisse handles the subject as a fauve
painting, revising the conventional Biskra picturesque according to the dissolving, scattered brush-
work of his own exacerbated pointillism.

One could argue that in 1906 no painter ought to have been better equipped to approach the prob-
lem of desert light and color than Matisse, who, as Maurice Denis noted, had pursued the image of
sunlight well beyond the findings of either the impressionists or the neo-impressionists in a series of
exaggerated colored “equivalents” that, rejecting the normative imitation of e¤ects of light, instead
juxtaposed patches of color, whether contraries or unrelated, to produce luminous sensations. Out
with “local color,” and in with colored equivalents to sensations of light.16

In fact Matisse found it almost impossible to apply his system in such an unfamiliar situation. “I
went from one surprise to the next, but without being able to distinguish whether my astonishment
came from . . . the new customs or types of people I saw or from purely pictorial emotions.”17 Ma-
tisse collapses the cultural and ethnic di¤erences between himself and the locals into the schematic,
almost phantasmatic “customs and types” standard in Orientalist texts. He goes on to use the cate-
gories of detached avant-gardist aestheticism, writing of his “purely pictorial emotions.” Later in
this detailed letter to Henri Manguin (written after his return to France) one sees Matisse the trav-
eler automatically comparing what he sees, the unfamiliar, with what he already knows. So he char-
acterizes the desert at Biskra (like other artist travelers) by relating it to the seashore at low tide.18
“The desert surprised me, imagine an immense beach . . . of sand and pebbles. I kept looking for the
sea on the horizon. Because of the sun, and it’s almost always like this, the light is blinding. As a
painter I saw many interesting subjects, but of course my stay was too short. The Biskra oasis is very
beautiful, but I know that one must spend several years in these countries in order to extract some-
thing new and that one cannot just take one ’s palette and one ’s system and apply it.”19 Matisse knows
that his “palette”—an aesthetic system developed in another clime (largely the South of France)—
is inadequate to the representation of African conditions. That the ghost of Fromentin’s aesthetics
hovers over these remarks is perhaps not surprising for a devoted student of Gustave Moreau, one
of Fromentin’s closest friends. Matisse had certainly read Fromentin,20 but he also had the historical
advantage of seeing the works of more recent painters like Guillaumet, Dinet, and Gauguin, virtual
émigrés to the pays de la lumiére who had indeed “spen[t] several years in these countries.”

So Matisse experienced the impossibility of painting Biskra. Even if he failed in the practicalities,
Matisse the eloquent conversationalist left a mark, on an art-loving Frenchman who owned an em-
porium in the Casbah of Algiers. M. Le Glay and his wife feted the artist there before his return to
Collioure. “Come back soon,” he wrote to Matisse. “Oriental painting may be in fashion, but except
for one or two, we have strictly speaking no artists here who know how to paint with light. Given the

164 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

temperament I recognized in you, there can be no doubt that you will succeed on a grand scale.”21 It
is perhaps fortunate for M. Le Glay that Matisse had no painting to show for himself—given the art
scene in Algiers, his fauve work would have looked even more intolerable there than to the bour-
geoisie of Paris.

Matisse ’s perceptions of life in Algeria have an unsentimental, even acerbic, ring reminiscent of
Evenepoel’s:

How they have wrecked this country! How the place has become vile, disgusting,
ugly, you can’t imagine! . . . I except the old quarter of Algiers, the mosques (they
couldn’t knock them all down), the Jardin d’Essai, and the rare corners where nature
is still mistress! But downtown, the suburbs, their surroundings . . . chimneys disgorg-
ing smoke of every hue, and everywhere, on the heights, are barracks, prisons, mental
asylums, six-story buildings . . . ships’ sirens wailing up from port. . . . And a mixed
population of fringe Parisians and Spaniards, thrown in [abâtardi] with Italians, Corsi-
cans, Jews, and Arabs.22

Matisse likened the new Algerian towns to a Paris that was “filthy, not cleaned for a long time.” The
indigenous people he encountered, he described thus: “The Arabs who were nice to me at first dis-
gusted me in the end—I found them too downtrodden.”23 With the typical double-face of the im-
perial mentality, Matisse expects of the Arabs the fierce pride for which the French had long admired
them, yet he speaks as if their being “downtrodden” was their own fault, rather than that of his coun-
trymen. He also reserved a comment for women, or at least women considered as exponents of eth-
nic dance: “As for belly-dancing, I didn’t even bother to look for it in Algiers, and I saw it by chance
for a quarter of an hour in Biskra. The famous Ouled-Naïls, that joke? One has seen it a hundred
times better at the Exposition.”24 The irony of his remark is that the dances, like everything else at
the expositions (Matisse doubtless referred to that of Marseille, although Ouled-Naïls had also been
present at Andalusia in the Time of the Moors in 1900), were often themselves decried for convey-
ing a lack of conviction.

The “famous Ouled-Naïls” of Biskra were just as notorious for their prostitution as for their danc-
ing, which brings us to a further reason for the fame of Biskra as a wintering place for Europeans:
what is these days called sexual tourism. This facet of colonial experience has received scant atten-
tion in the literature on Orientalist art.25 More discreetly, no doubt, places like Biskra and Tangier
were the Bangkoks and Manilas of the late nineteenth century. Gauguin’s philandering in Tahiti and
the Marquesas is one of the rare cases of an artist’s sexual adventurism in the colonies to remain on
record: his blunt avowals escaped the screen of late-Victorian etiquette. More pertinent to North Africa
is André Gide ’s novel L’Immoraliste, published in 1902, in which the theme of homosexual love is

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 165

figure 73
Etienne Dinet,
An Ouled-Naïl, oil
on canvas, before

1906.

made evident, if with discretion. The book was informed by the author’s own trip to Biskra in 1893
to undertake a convalescence and by subsequent visits during which Gide renewed friendships with
teenage boys in the town.26 The Immoralist has been seen as a precedent for Matisse ’s visit, but in a
way that avoids any mention of the lineaments of the plot.27 Gide ’s “immoralist” is a young French
philologist, recently wed, who travels to the desert warmth of Algeria for reasons of health. In the
winter resort (station hivernale) of Biskra he forms a sexual relationship, and his partner is a teenage
Arab boy. As Joseph Boone shows, the idea of the complete anonymity of action possible in a for-
eign place, with a member of another, far poorer people, is persuasively presented.28

Plentiful information exists to suggest Matisse ’s heterosexual preferences, and at Biskra the pos-

166 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

sibility of the heterosexual encounter was incarnated in the figure of the Ouled-Naïl woman. As I
have previously noted, among the Ouled-Naïl there was a class of women for whom prostitution was
a socially sanctioned manner of gaining wealth. Skilled entertainers who worked unveiled, the Ouled-
Naïl women were renowned for their dance and their complex costumes. Etienne Dinet devoted a
book, illustrated with his paintings, to the group, entitled Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Naïl (Fig. 73).29

In this 1909 text, co-authored with Sliman ben Ibrahim, Dinet recounts the life of the young itin-
erant performer Khadra, traveling in a small troupe of Ouled-Naïl under the watchful eye of an eld-
erly woman (Thaous) and a male guardian. One of the last locations they visit is Biskra, where they
must compete with foreign dancers from North Algeria—one was even a Maltese—masquerading
as Ouled-Naïl and massacring their stately dance in the process. In a narrative previously devoid of
contact with the French, nonindigenous clientele appear only at Biskra. In Dinet’s account they are
perverse, so that Khadra and her friends are “sickened by the demands, unhealthy curiosities, and
erotic fantasies of certain of these Europeans.” Remarkably, Dinet exempts one group from this
charge: artists and writers, who alleviate the disgust of the Ouled-Naïl: “These men loved in them
the grace of their postures and of their draperies, the sparkle of their eyes, the sculptural beauty of
their bodies, the volupté of their flesh. . . . Far from o¤ending them, their company charmed them,
and their homage flattered them. Sadly, they rarely had much money, and they were swiftly expelled
by Thaous.”30 One wonders how far Dinet was defending artists like himself by a form of special
pleading (which incidentally implies that his caste were rarely sexual customers of the Ouled-Naïl).

Matisse’s dismissive remark that he had encountered the famous Ouled-Naïl “by chance” in Biskra
suggests he was well aware of this cultural iconography. One begins to wonder about the precise na-
ture of the “souvenir” of Biskra he evoked in the only other work associated with the Algerian trip, his
celebrated 1907 canvas Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Painted well
after his return to France, it was exhibited under the nondescriptive modernist title Picture III
(Tableau III) at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants.31 In 1920, however, Marcel Sembat, Matisse ’s friend
and a collector who admired his Moroccan work, published the picture under the title Odalisque, a
term clearly associated with the Orient and with ideas of sexual availability. The title Nu bleu (“Souve-
nir de Biskra”) appeared in 1931 in authoritative exhibition catalogues, where it was apparently given
at Matisse’s suggestion.32 Thus late in life Matisse revived the Biskra association, which, given this
voluptuous image, is in part an erotic one. It hardly matters whether the painting clandestinely in-
scribes the memory of an actual sexual encounter (something that would hardly have been excep-
tional for a lone Frenchman in Biskra) or a hypothetical one that resulted from the crossing of Ouled-
Naïl availability with the pictorial ambition to do a tropical odalisque. But this atmosphere of erotic
possibility must be added to recent accounts of the Souvenir of Biskra that rightly pursue African el-
ements in the image, whether they attribute them to Matisse’s contemporary study of black African
sculpture or the confused signs for racial typing, which “simply do not add up in Matisse’s painting.”33

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 167

Tangier: Colonial Atmospherics

The story of Matisse ’s encounter with Tangier is one of the will to paint triumphing over conditions
of a kind that had made painting impossible in Biskra. The artist dealt determinedly with the difficulty
of obtaining models, with torrential rains, with the unfamiliar light. Over two seasons of painting,
he stayed in one location, Tangier, until he had seized images that constitute what is today considered
one of the finest bodies of all Orientalist painting, approaching that of Delacroix in aesthetic im-
port. Matisse exhibited them briefly as a group at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris on his return,
and they were quickly dispersed to the wealthy patrons who had already bespoken the majority.34

Commenting on that first exhibition of 1913, the progressive poet and critic Guillaume Apolli-
naire wrote that Matisse ’s Moroccan Café (Café marocain) and Casbah Gate (Porte de la Casbah) are
“among the rare tolerable works inspired by contemporary North Africa.” Most likely the relative
lack of anecdotalism in these pictures as well as Matisse ’s abandonment of illusionism for the disci-
pline of abstraction impressed Apollinaire, a champion of cubism vehemently opposed to the “lit-
erary” element in modern art. Other alert critics of the day also assessed the formal qualities of these
pictures, René Jean seeing in them “a sort of colored music that goes to the extreme limits of the pic-
torial domain.”35 The anecdotal, by tradition, was plentiful in Orientalist pictures. Matisse’s Moroccan
works should have qualified for exhibition at the Orientalist Painters—his titles, like Moroccan Café,
Zorah, and On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse; see Fig. 75), were indistinguishable from those of many
society members. In the 1890s Renoir had seen no problem in joining the Orientalist Painters’ ranks
to exhibit his views of Algiers, but that attitude could be considered a sign of the aging Renoir’s
conservatism. In the days of fauves and cubists the aesthetic divide was suddenly more pronounced.
I would argue that by deliberately isolating his Moroccan paintings from populist contexts such as
that of the Orientalist Painters, Matisse proposed a reading of them that most commentators, from
Apollinaire and René Jean in 1913 to Pierre Schneider in 1990, have endorsed.36 Their isolation sug-
gests that the abstracting and avant-gardist character of Matisse ’s works of modernist Orientalism
di¤ers fundamentally from that of the Orientalist Painters and has di¤erent implications in cultural
politics.

For one may read Apollinaire ’s “rare tolerable works” as implying that paintings of North African
subjects were usually reprehensible for their style or for the odium attached to painting the colonial
scene. Such an attitude would not be unusual among the left-leaning Parisian intelligentsia, as we
have seen. But the experience of modernist artists who actually made colonial voyages, like Gauguin
or Matisse, suggests a more ambivalent attitude that turns on issues of authenticity and the preser-
vation of the di¤erence of the Other, today described as “colonial nostalgia” in literary studies and
as the “salvage paradigm” in critiques of anthropology.

Pierre Loti is an example pertinent to Matisse’s case. Few writers were more openly anticolonial
(except perhaps Loti’s younger colleagues, like Isabelle Eberhardt and Victor Segalen). Loti’s romances

168 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

of the exotic were based on his exploits as an officer in the French navy. Situating his books in loca-
tions as diverse as Tahiti, Japan, Senegal, and Turkey, Loti often decried colonialism’s modernization
of those cultures because it destroyed their authentic character and di¤erence. Concluding his trave-
logue Au Maroc of 1890—a signal text because Matisse had read it before visiting Morocco—Loti in-
toned: “O somber Maghreb, stay, for a long while yet, walled in, impenetrable to things new. Turn
your back upon Europe and immobilize yourself in the ways of the past. . . . May Allah conserve for
the Arab people its mystic dreams, its disdainful immutability, and its gray rags!”37 Loti, who would
call for a halt to the march of colonialism, shared this preservationist attitude with a number of mod-
ernist artists whose work, like his, colonialism itself paradoxically made possible. The trouble
Evenepoel took to shun the stews of Algiers and escape the tourists by going to Blida (where he painted
mostly traditional life) and Matisse, to flee south to Biskra (even if he could not paint there) bespeak
similar attitudes. The Tangier Matisse represented in 1912–13 is the romanticized one the Orientalist
and touristic mentality proposed to him: largely scenes of traditional Moroccan life and characters
that could still be found in the casbah of a town whose other districts were cosmopolitan, polyglot,
and modernized.

Indeed Tangier was one of the most domesticated corners of the Islamic Orient available to a Eu-
ropean artist. In Au Maroc, Loti introduced the city as the gateway to the south:

It is very close to our Europe. . . . In three or four hours steamships arrive there, and
a great quantity of tourists is disgorged each winter. Today it has become truly
banal, and the sultan of Morocco has made a point of half abandoning it to foreign
visitors. . . . Seen from the sea, it seems almost smiling, with its surrounding villas
built in gardens in the European style. It . . . remains a good deal more Muslim than
our Algerian towns, with its walls of snowy white, its high turreted Casbah, and its
minarets tiled with old faience.38

For four centuries Tangier had been a strategically important port jointly held by some combination
of European powers along with Turkish, and later Moroccan, authorities. By 1889, when Loti vis-
ited, French ambitions to create an “Afrique française” were well advanced. The journey of Am-
bassador Paternôtre to present his credentials to the sultan (Loti accompanied him as a famous man
of letters sympathetic to Islam) turned out to be just a prelude to a long series of impingements on
Morocco’s territorial sovereignty that resulted in the protectorate, declared on 30 March 1912.39 But
in refusing to discuss “politics” or modernization in his book, in making it purely descriptive, Loti
himself presented Morocco in an Orientalist, aesthetic guise, in deliberate confrontation with
Delacroix, an artistic predecessor on an identical itinerary.40

As with Loti, so with Matisse: “I found the landscapes of Morocco just as they had been described
in the paintings of Delacroix and in Pierre Loti’s novels. One morning in Tangiers I was riding in a

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 169

meadow: the flowers came up to the horse ’s muzzle. I wondered where I had already had a similar
experience—it was in reading one of Loti’s descriptions in his book Into Morocco [Au Maroc].”41 Trav-
eling overland on horseback from Tangier south to Meknès and Fez, Loti repeatedly evokes vast mead-
ows of springtime flowers, inviting his readers to “step up beside me on my brown horse . . . across
the wild plains carpeted with flowers, through deserts of iris and asphodels.”42 Matisse ’s account of
the Lotiesque meadow confirms Said’s contention that the discourse of Orientalism precludes any
unstructured encounter with its objects. As a result, all European e¤orts to know foreign cultures are
constrained by the perspectives of Eurocentrism.

Formalist art is a complex expression of that Eurocentrism, with its narrow band of subjects and
its suspension of anecdotal detail in favor of iconic types. The resemblance between Matisse’s Maghre-
bian subjects and Renoir’s—Moorish architecture, exotic gardens, costumed types—is not fortuitous:
a similar aestheticist orientation meant Matisse saw such subjects, quite unlike those, for example, of
Dinet. John Elderfield has argued that Matisse, in his letters and postcards home, betrayed scant con-
sciousness of the fraught Moroccan political situation or the condition of his sitters. His chief pre-
occupation was the weather and how that a¤ected his art.43 What for Elderfield was a biographical
fact supporting his own stance on formalist exegesis in reality exemplifies the bracketing of the extra-
aesthetic that characterizes the artist on tour in his country’s colonies—the specialized conscious-
ness that makes the colonizing aesthetic possible.

That specialized consciousness had two consequences: first, it led to the painter’s curiously sus-
pended engagement with the culture he had chosen to confront, so that in the very act of obtaining
sitters, Matisse reproduced the notion of the colonial subject typical of Orientalist painting. Second,
it gave new significance to the process of abstraction, a feature of Matisse ’s finest Moroccan works,
which also constitutes the chief interpretative challenge of modernist Orientalism. I will treat these
two issues in turn.

Among the sixty pen sketches produced alongside Matisse ’s grand canvases, one image stands out
for its self-consciousness about the artist on tour in the colonial situation (Fig. 74). Matisse whimsi-
cally insists on the discrepancy between himself, in bowler hat and tails, and the Moroccan woman
in traditional robes and full veil standing behind him. The theme of the drawing is cultural di¤er-
ence, investigated with a willingness to parody oneself that seems in advance of most ethnographic
works of the day.44 Cultural di¤erence is not just a matter of contrasts in costume, however, since
the artist’s representational system for tabulating his observations is specific to his own culture: once
again it is necessary to recall that Maghrebian Islamic society had no tradition of illusionistic paint-
ing, so that Matisse (and hundreds of other Western painters) violated indigenous Moroccan codes
of behavior in the very act of painting, which he undertakes with the sovereign self-assurance of the
colonialist as he transcribes the floral arches of the saint’s tomb before him. The action the sketch
records resulted in a painting, the small streetscape entitled Marabout, Tangier (Marabout, Tanger;
private collection).

170 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 74
Henri Matisse,
H. Matisse by
Himself, pen and
ink on paper,
1912.

Neither that Moroccan canvas nor any other describes the situation of the artist by including his
own image; rather, all the works pretend that the painter formulated self-sufficient pictures as he en-
countered them. Thus they emphasize the fabular aspect of painting, drawing on the iconographic
repertoire that constitutes the Orientalist dream. In the paintings by Matisse that represent women,
for example, the itinerant artist confronted the second, more urgently binding, code of Moroccan
behavior as it a¤ects painting: the law of the veil, obliging women moving outside, in the public realm,
to cover their faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. As Pierre Loti explained in his 1906 novel Les
Désenchantées (a treatise on what seemed to Loti the unhappiness of modern Muslim women),45 the
eyes of veiled women became an instrument of intensely focused seeing, necessitating a new ex-
pressiveness in the look cast upon others.

The usual expedient of the Christian colonial image maker working in North Africa, however,
was to strip o¤ the veil in making paintings or their mass-market relatives, picture postcards. As Malek
Alloula argued, doing away with the veil was a fundamental violation of Islamic laws of propriety.46
Photographers and artists forming images of unveiled women for European consumption purported
to show either Islamic women in the harem (the private domestic interior no foreigner could see,
which Western imagination nonetheless endowed with epic sensuality) or women not bound by the
law—Jewish women and prostitutes. Almost all the models who posed unveiled belonged to those
two categories.

Matisse’s paintings of the unveiled Moorish girl Zorah by implication oscillate between these poles.

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 171

figure 75
Henri Matisse,
On the Terrace, oil on
canvas, 1912–13.

The few members of Matisse ’s Parisian audience sufficiently aware of the North African colonies to
understand what it meant to discard the veil could presume Zorah, in her traditional dress, was a pros-
titute or else a Jewish girl. Other painters in Tangier at the time were acutely aware of such issues.47
But with the passage of time, the specific reading fell away in the “universality” of the audience for
modernist art. For today’s audiences, On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse, Fig. 75) shows a smiling girl whose
physical context is carefully generalized. Such is the obfuscation of the conditions of production
brought about by Orientalist practice. In late spring 1912 Matisse expressed concern in a letter that
his teenage model, Zorah, if her brother found her posing for the artist, might be killed48—eloquent
evidence of the transgression involved in obtaining an authentic sitter, and of the artist’s apparent
willingness to endanger his model for the sake of his art. But by Matisse ’s second trip to Tangier, in
October 1912, Zorah had apparently become a prostitute—he found her, only after a long search, in
a brothel. The paintings themselves give no clue to that drama.

172 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

Matisse ’s willingness to take trouble to obtain a true sitter contrasts with Renoir’s use of Euro-
pean models in about 1880, calling into question the ethnic authenticity of his painted “types.” Renoir,
it seems, was untroubled by myths of authenticity, and though he complained about the problem of
obtaining models, he was happy to produce a variety of images of women in mixed North African
costume based on whoever—including the children of French acquaintances—was available to him.

It is worth pointing out how conventional Matisse ’s staging of the “Moroccan Woman” was. The
small jewel-like painting he executed for the Sembats (with their limited budget), the Seated Moroc-
can Woman (Marocaine assise; Musée de Grenoble), has the absolutely standard format of a woman
seated cross-legged on the ground. The many similar images include both postcards for European
tourists, like those reproduced in Alloula’s book, and middle-of-the-road Orientalist pictures. For
the European audience the cross-legged women in them, in billowing robes or breeches, might—
under a putatively ethnographic recording of di¤erent ways of sitting—subtly encode the North
African women’s apparent physical ease as erotic.

Matisse presumably executed a set of standing single-figure paintings near his hotel (whose pro-
prietor had apparently o¤ered him a studio-room). On both trips to Tangier, January–April 1912 and
October 1912–February 1913, Matisse stayed at the Hôtel Villa de France, a somewhat luxurious es-
tablishment catering to distinguished foreign guests. The hotel was also the base for Hilda Rix, a tal-
ented young Australian artist who worked in Tangier in 1912 and 1914 and described its ambience.49
As I found during a visit in 1991, its position is crucial in the layout of Tangier: it still stands on a
steep slope on the border between the Europeanized town and the old Tangier of the Medina and
Casbah, with the modernized port downhill to the north. Behind the hotel are European buildings—
hotels, consulates, and businesses, while to the west over the ridge the many European villas men-
tioned by Loti nestle among the greenery. The hotel’s best rooms overlook the Anglican Church of
St. Andrew and, beyond it, old Tangier, with the large market (Grand Socco) and the Medina, or indige-
nous precinct, ascending the slope toward the far hill with the fortifications of the Casbah.

In this hotel precinct Matisse probably painted Zorah Standing (Zorah debout), Fatma the Mulatto
Woman (Fatma, la mulâtresse), and Amido, which bears a generic similarity to Renoir’s Ali, the Young
Arab, posed three decades before. Matisse, like Renoir, had found a boy willing to pose for a sus-
tained period and painted him with an antipicturesque casualness in a street costume that marks him
as less an exotic than a cultural go-between of the polyglot city zone. In Amido Matisse apparently
worked from the same model as Hilda Rix, also staying at the Hôtel Villa de France. Both artists men-
tion painting an employee of the nearby Hôtel Valentina; Rix called him Harmido.50 His clothing fits
the description Rix gave of the employees of her hotel, “silent footed be-turbanned servants [who]
move about their duties.” Harmido was reliable as a paid model to the extent that Rix praised him as
“a brick” who “keeps absolutely still,” unlike almost all the other models with whom she had to con-
tend in Tangier.51

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 173

While Matisse seemed content to paint Amido in his work clothes, he went to more e¤ort to doc-
ument ornamental costumes in female figure studies. Fatma the Mulatto Woman and Zorah Standing,
painted on canvases the same size as Amido, can be considered parts of an informal triptych of cos-
tumed figures. Standing figures of saints from Russian icons, which had impressed Matisse in
Moscow in 1911, are thought to have helped inspire these works.52 Zorah Standing, in particular, is
static, confronting, hierarchized. The playing-card flatness of the image meshes with the schematic
rendition of the subject’s body (the forearms and hands are little more than vague strokes of paint).
Yet the intense expression of Zorah’s face, squeezed in at the top of the canvas, is abetted by the en-
ergy invested in planes of contrasting colors. Matisse had pioneered this strategy of chromatic com-
position with his 1905 Portrait of Madame Matisse: The Green Stripe (Portrait de Madame Matisse: La
raie verte; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), making hues that wrestle on the picture plane a
metaphor for intensity of character. Modeling is absent here, with the embroidered trim of Zorah’s
caftan helping divide up the canvas. The partial return of modeling in Fatma contributes to the awk-
wardness of a figure in which passages of decoration—such as the embroidered waistband and the
colored cloth panels beneath the caftan—are paramount. Unlike Dinet, Gérôme, or even Renoir,
Matisse no longer relies on the literal description of sumptuous costume to animate the work; clothes
instead become a staging point for chromatic fantasies of the painter’s inventing.

Orientalist painting relies on the successful control of costume—not only the clothes sitters hap-
pen to wear, but the whole “science” of using dress to make an image more convincing. Costume in
this specialist sense was an element of academic art instruction, one that Matisse would have absorbed
in his training under Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Matisse ’s comments on the archaeologi-
cal accuracy of costume in Orientalist painting are pertinent to this element of pictorial rhetoric:
“Rembrandt treated biblical subjects using real Turkish items from the bazaar, and his emotion was
there in them. Tissot painted his Life of Christ with all the possible documents, even going to Jerusalem.
His work is false, however, and has no life of its own.”53 Matisse was clearly familiar with James Tis-
sot’s vast series of watercolor illustrations of the 1890s, exhibited to acclaim (while Matisse was a
student) prior to the publication of Tissot’s volume La vie du Christ. The series had been favorably
reviewed by another Moreau student who commented on Orientalist art, Ary Renan, who approved
the premise (based on his father’s famous text) of accurately reconstructing the ethnic types, the cos-
tume, and the landscape of Christ’s life on the basis of travel in Palestine and archaeological research.54

For Matisse, however (like Arsène Alexandre writing in the 1890s), the authenticity of represen-
tation depended on what the artist sees and how plausibly his imagination transforms it, rather than
on any “reality” of documentary observation. None of Tissot’s learned study of costume and ma-
nipulation of ethnic types would convince viewers unless the artist’s transformative “emotion” was
involved.

Matisse was thoroughly modernist in thus recognizing the artifice of pictorial representation, the

174 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 76
Henri Matisse,
The Standing Riffian,
oil on canvas, 1912.

limited claims of realism, and the unique space of decorative painting. Nevertheless, his Moroccan
paintings and drawings do respect a traveler’s visual experience. Most of the pictures are more em-
pirically grounded than Matisse ’s Parisian works of the same period, and in later years Matisse ’s trav-
els to Morocco ratified for him his more imaginative reworkings of Orientalist subjects. In an inter-
view of 1929, the artist justified painting the odalisques of his Nice period (a masquerade of French
models in studio costumes) by referring to that earlier experience: “I know that they [odalisques] ex-
ist. I was in Morocco. I have seen them.”

Among Matisse ’s most “documentary” Moroccan works are two paintings of Riffian tribesmen,
The Standing Riffian (Le Rifain debout, Fig. 76) and the large Seated Riffian (Le Rifain assis). Both
draw on the rhetoric of authentic experience. (Their veracity of costume is shown in recently pub-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 175

lished comparative photographs, including a hand-tinted postcard the artist sent to his son.)55 It was
difficult for painters to obtain male as well as female sitters, partly because of the injunction against
depiction and the fear some Muslims had of attracting the evil eye by allowing themselves to be
painted. (Hilda Rix left graphic descriptions of the hunt for sitters who would acquiesce to having
their portraits made.)

Men of the Rif

The Riffian tribesman Matisse persuaded or paid to sit was not a Tangerine townsman but rather a
figure whose presence in the city resonates with the political problems between France and Morocco.
For centuries Tangier had been the object of rival ambitions: Spanish, then English, and most re-
cently French administrations had dominated the strategically placed city. Germany disputed the
French ascendancy in Morocco after 1900, siding with the sultan to counter French interests. French
diplomacy received a major setback when Kaiser Wilhelm made an impromptu visit by ship to Tan-
gier in 1905 and issued a proclamation supporting Moroccan sovereignty. The Franco-German rivalry
reached a crisis point in early 1911 when a German gunboat entered the southern port of Agadir.
While the French and Germans renegotiated their positions, sections of the Moroccan populace, in
particular the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains whose affiliation to the makhzen (or government
forces) of the sultan was perennially uncertain, were e¤ectively at war with France. The establish-
ment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in March 1912 was only partial and largely excluded
the Atlas, which was only gradually “pacified.”56 Newspapers contemporary with Matisse ’s visit in
early 1912 reported that French military columns in the Moroccan countryside were engaged in “mop-
ping up” tribesmen described as rebels. That operation explains why Matisse hardly stirred from the
international port of Tangier—at the time he traveled a French civilian could venture beyond the
northern tip of Morocco only at some risk.57

Matisse lacked the martial air of certain members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters or
the Colonial Society of French Artists. He was an unadventurous bourgeois approaching middle age.
(His wife, Amélie, accompanied him on his first trip.) The only side trip Matisse undertook was the
daylong mule ride to nearby Tétouan, a spectacular city in the Spanish zone of Morocco, in the foothills
of the Rif mountains. The painter and architect Howard Ince preferred it to Tangier: “Tetuan, a day’s
journey to the east, is a larger and in every way more interesting town. There tradition is more jeal-
ously guarded.”58 The trip, a standard diversion for serious winter tourists, was described in glow-
ing terms by Hilda Rix, who traveled to Tétouan with the distinguished African American artist from
Philadelphia, Henry Ossawa Tanner.

Most of the Riffians in Tangier were merchants or workers from the impenetrable mountains that
formed an autonomous political zone south and east of Tangier and Tétouan. In Matisse ’s time the

176 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 77
Abd el-Krim (at left), 1922.

region was dominated by Sharif Raisuli, whom he called a “well-known bandit” in a color postcard
to his son: “I am sending you a chap from the village of Raisuli . . . who robbed travelers in the Tan-
gier region some years ago. To quiet him down, the sultan gave him a province to govern. In that way
he has become an official thief who bleeds those under him.”59 As late as 1924 a French text could
describe the Riffians as a people “stubbornly unsubmissive that has conserved its Berber idiom and
pretends never to have been vanquished by the Arabs. Spain has not yet been able to quell it.”60 Mil-
itary campaigns and political maneuverings by Field Marshal Lyautey and his Moroccan allies grad-
ually brought neighboring chunks of country into occupied Morocco. The Riffians, though nomi-
nally in Spanish territory, continued to symbolize Moroccan resistance to colonial domination. The
nationalist leader Abd el-Krim (Fig. 77) inflicted a defeat on the Spanish in 1921 at Anoual. From
1925, having disposed of Raisuli, Abd el-Krim directed the broader war of the Rif against French
Morocco, taking his jihad, or holy war, to the gates of a well-protected Fez. Only in 1926 did much
greater combined forces from Spain, led by General Franco, and France, led by the future Vichy gen-
eral Noguès, force Abd el-Krim’s surrender and exile.

From this perspective then, Matisse ’s Riffians painted in 1912–13 might be said to symbolize an

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 177