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

figure 78
A. Delannoy,
Marcel Sembat,

ca. 1910.

undefeated Morocco, a vestige of the precolonial past that retained a distinctive ethnic and political
actuality, indeed an air of potential threat. The visual typing of Matisse ’s subject is conventional: the
standing portrait of a soldier in his finery was itself a standard image in Orientalist painting from
Alexandre Gabriel Decamps’s Arnaut guards to the meticulous Bashi-Bazouks of Gérôme, and more
recently the harem guards of Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte de Nouÿ and Ludwig Deutsch. Matisse
and his patron, the Socialist politician Marcel Sembat (who published an article on the artist in April
1913), discussed the Riffian’s sartorial splendor and martial ferocity (even though he appears un-
armed). The painter told his teenage daughter, Marguerite, that he had begun “the portrait of a Riffian,
a magnificent mountaineer type, savage as a jackal.”61

In a similar vein Sembat saw in him a reflection of the “splendid barbarians” of the Song of Roland:
“And the Riffian! How splendid he is, this great devil of a Riffian, with his angular face and his fe-
rocious build! How can you look at this splendid barbarian without thinking of the warriors of days
gone by? The Moors in the Song of Roland had this fierce expression!”62 This text, so nonchalant in
referring to a “barbarian” and noting the literary parallel to the medieval lay of the Franco-Saracenic

178 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

wars, surprises in conceding nothing to Sembat’s own radical position on colonialism. Sembat, as a
specialist on French foreign a¤airs in the Chamber of Deputies (he was deputy for Montmartre, the
artists’ quarter) and as a member of the parliamentary Socialists, had a history of opposing French
colonial aggression (Fig. 78).63 So in 1907 he and Edouard Vaillant had tried in vain to debate bloody
French reprisals against the Beni-Snassen, a Berber people east of the Rif Mountains who had skir-
mished with the French across the border in Algeria. In 1910 Sembat spoke in favor of self-government
and eventual independence in French Indochina. During the Moroccan crisis of Agadir in 1911 he
was one of the Socialists who reluctantly voted to ratify the pact in which Germany recognized
France ’s Moroccan interests, in return for French concessions in West Africa. At the time Sembat
declared he would vote for the treaty only “as a promise of future reconciliation” in the face of the
threat of war, which “must prevail over all the scruples that would counsel us to reject the treaty
through aversion for colonial enterprises.”64 Finally, in an address to a Socialist Party congress con-
temporary with Matisse ’s first weeks in Tangier, Sembat condemned the French “aggression against
Morocco” as an “unhappy example of piracy.”65

Yet one year later Sembat waxed eloquent before Matisse ’s picture of the Riffian, an artifact of
French culture made possible by the history of that very aggression. This is not a case of Sembat’s
disingenuousness, but rather of the conception of cultural activity as distinct from and somehow
above political operations. Sembat the collector of Matisse—he and his wife, Georgette Agutte, had
commissioned the Seated Moroccan Woman and purchased the View of Tangier (Vue de Tanger), now
both in the Grenoble museum—separated matters of art from the world of politics, at least where
colonial topics were concerned.66

In a similar vein, one could argue that Matisse took steps to prevent viewers from reverting to the
anecdotal when they read the two paintings of Riffians. Such a reading might bring with it too many
troubling reflections on the historical actuality of his sitter. Matisse does not specify location, and,
more important, he uses color and facture to abstract the image. In the smaller bust, the cognitive
work of making the unexpected mottlings of green, tan, and gray that constitute the surface of the
Riffian’s head cohere into a readable face overrides the image ’s psychological presence. Similarly the
tension between the loosely brushed panels of apple green and the decorative silk fringes of the man’s
djellaba provides visual activity in itself. The material plenitude of paint forestalls the admiration for
the materiality of costume elicited by the works of Gérôme or Deutsch.

This modernist procedure may be related to Matisse ’s reworking of the symbolist precept that re-
jects literal description of an object in favor of gradually evoking it in graphic or literary equiva-
lents. In the hands of a modernist painter of the immediate prewar years, the work’s “aestheticist”
impulse licenses painterly means independent of any material reference, a process at its most extreme
in the Moroccan triptych painted for Ivan Morozov.67

This is the second phase of the argument concerning Orientalist painting in the hands of a mod-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 179

ernist like Matisse: such painting, more abstracting and allusive than its nineteenth-century coun-
terparts, whether academic (Gérôme) or independent (Renoir), potentially alters a work’s political
implications. If the realist language of traditional Orientalist painting relates to the spirit of the colo-
nialist venture, descriptive and appropriative,68 modernist aestheticization might mollify that spirit:
by suspending the anecdotal realism of nineteenth-century painting, it reorganizes troubling subject
matter into a supposedly neutral abstraction.

The process is most fully developed in two works of the Moroccan triptych, On the Terrace (see
Fig. 75) and The Casbah Gate (La porte de la Casbah; see Plate 11). Both appear to relate closely to
outdoor scenes (whether or not they were executed outdoors) in that both give specific information
about the fall of light. That is the legacy of the highly attuned, single-minded perceptualism Matisse
manifested in Algeria and brought to his visits to Tangier. He commented on both of his Tangerine
sojourns in letters home about the weather and its e¤ect on his painting: the torrential rains on his
arrival prevented his working outside, then brought the compensation of the luxuriant vegetation,
and so on. A symptomatic letter to Charles Camoin (who was to paint with him in Tangier) reads:
“Until now the weather has been very beautiful, and I am profiting from it. I have begun a Moorish
woman on a terrace . . . but a lot of wind and an irritating model worked against me. . . . I have to
do a painting that is decorative, and I think that it will be that, but not to the extent I would like.”69
The artist’s dependence upon weather conditions merges here with a symptomatically modernist is-
sue of abstraction: what Matisse calls the decorative character of his work. To construct an aesthet-
ically controlled unity of line and color with the elements in the scene before him for Matisse meant
attaining the decorative. That it required abstracting the features of the sitter was no hindrance to
the painter, who remarked in an interview in 1912, “I seldom paint portraits, and if I do, only in a
decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.”70

The portrait that best exemplifies this decorative approach is On the Terrace, which Matisse ex-
hibited as the centerpiece of the Moroccan triptych at Bernheim-Jeune. Zorah, belying the distress-
ing circumstance that explains her lack of a veil—her presence in the bordello—kneels smiling at
the center of a composition of brilliant aerated blues and greens. Both she and the objects around
her—a floating pair of ornamental babouches and some goldfish in a bowl (a prop also associated
with Matisse ’s Parisian paintings of the period)—coalesce with the background. The crumbly pal-
lor of the terrace and its pervasive blue air seem abstract in the extreme, yet the triangle of cream
paint in the top corner pulls the viewer back into observed reality, reading as a slab of white light
traversing the terrace wall.

The abstraction here or in the still more schematic and ethereal Casbah Gate seems to be gener-
ated by an analogy between Casbah architecture, with its vertical planes and whitewashed surfaces,
and the surface of the canvas to be painted, rectilinear and severe. Indeed for other modernist Ori-
entalists, notably Paul Klee, the rapport between North African buildings and pictorial architecture

180 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

was the occasion for deliberate experimental play.71 For both artists the knowledge of cubism was
close at hand—Matisse ’s two pictures could be likened to an attenuated cubism of continuous, rather
than disjunctive, lines.

Casbah

Matisse ’s visual experiment was most extreme in Tangier’s zone of architectural antiquity: the Cas-
bah. It is possible to read in the preferences and exclusions of Matisse ’s works his inscription of cer-
tain relations of power between the French colonizers and the Moroccan people. The townscape of
Tangier was a contested space, where buildings, streets, gardens, and market precincts became to-
kens in a microgeography of power. Painting beyond the Hôtel Villa de France at the edge of the
European zone involved pragmatic decisions. Significantly, Matisse avoided the commercial zones.
The Grand Socco beyond the English church, an open-air market maintained by country people, was
recommended to artists for its ethnographic interest: traditional costumes, colorful goods, and novel
transactions.72 It was the almost exclusive outdoor subject of Hilda Rix. The market was safe enough
for a woman willing to brave the occasional antagonism (and frequent curiosity) her work and pres-
ence aroused—the hotel and European police were never far away. The Petit Socco, on the far side
of the Medina gate, was “the daily rendezvous of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.”73 It sheltered the
English, French, and Spanish post offices, the last visible in a postcard Matisse sent to Gertrude Stein
in Paris with the facetious inscription “I am sending you the most Parisian quarter of Tangier.”74

Matisse ’s words emphasize that he chose to paint the least European aspects of Tangier. As in
Biskra, Matisse was uninterested in colonial modernity. Like most Orientalist painters he e¤aced in
his works the material and social depredations of the colonial process.75 The preservationist imagi-
nation required traditional Moorish architecture (and recognized Moroccan ethnic “types” like the
Riffian). The study of such architecture meant painting in the Casbah, which Loti had already noted
as superior to casbahs in Algeria. In all the cities of the Maghreb, the casbahs are the indigenous strong-
holds, centers of tacit and at times active resistance to the European colonial presence. The Casbah
of Algiers was always a fearsome place for Europeans—Evenepoel and his artist friends armed them-
selves with revolvers to visit it. André Suréda interpreted it as sinister in a suite of nocturnal images
contemporary with Matisse ’s work: his lithographic series Evenings in the Casbah (Soirées dans la Cas-
bah). Narrow passageways are rendered threatening by the inky darkness of late evening, by
shrouded, huddling figures. Suréda’s titles convey the spirit of the series: The Murdered Man (L’homme
assassiné), Fear (La peur).76

The Tangerine Casbah lacks the mythic quality and notoriety of the Algerine. It is smaller and
has a longer-standing accommodation with Europeans. But Tangier’s Casbah and Medina complex
is nevertheless a tough residential quarter and a symbolic center of Moroccan life. Even today little

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 181

figure 79
Henri Matisse, Landscape

Viewed from a Window,
oil on canvas, 1912–13.

sign of European presence is discernible, and one has a tangible sense of intruding if one is a non-
Arabic-speaking foreigner. One enters the Casbah with caution, and preferably with a companion.

Matisse, clearly determined, made many quick pen drawings and based four canvases on his per-
ambulations about the Casbah.77 The striking absence of figures in those works is best explained by
the artist’s discretion in view of Islamic scruples against painting human beings and animals. Many
Europeans painting in Morocco focused on liturgical architecture: the often humble saints’ tombs, or
marabouts; the grander theological colleges, or medersas; and mosques—all exemplifying for the
French the highest expression of a now moribund Moorish architectural and decorative genius. Fol-
lowing his Andalusian experience, Matisse too focused on religious buildings, constrained, like other
Europeans, by his exclusion from them. Rare was the building whose exterior could fit into a single
architectural view. European painters interested in casbah architecture thus home in on the fragment,
the rare decorated form that distinguishes the stucco walls from northern Mediterranean vernacular

182 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 80
Bab el Assa, Tangier,
1991.

buildings. In most cases that fragment, a site of revealed di¤erence, is the opening between inside
and outside: portal, doorway, window—from the monumental Bab Mansour at Meknès, as painted
by Delacroix and Benjamin Constant, to the lowly grills concealing the dweller in a domestic harem.

Matisse emphasized the horseshoe arch as a visual marker for Islam, fixing on the same motif as
dozens of Orientalist painters before him in what is the greatest of the Moroccan pictures, The Cas-
bah Gate (see Plate 11). In terms of the geography of power in Tangier Casbah Gate presents an appar-
ent reversal of his perspective from the Hôtel Villa de France, site of the Landscape Viewed from a
Window (Paysage vu d’une fenêtre, Fig. 79). A recent photo shows that the artist, in framing The Cas-
bah Gate, was seated just inside the Casbah, looking back through a double-arched portal across the
Medina to the European zone beyond (Fig. 80). Of course it is not the true “insider’s” view of the
Casbah that one of the rare Maghrebian painters of the day, like Azouaou Mammeri, might have painted.

Although Matisse made pencil drawings of other Casbah and Medina doorways, there are no stud-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 183

ies for Casbah Gate. The numerous corrections retained on the canvas convey the artist’s physical
engagement with the pigments used in the image. The predominance of blue is deliberate, to match
that of Landscape Viewed from a Window and On the Terrace. Again in Matisse the contrast of white
stucco and pervasive blue produces a sense of light. (A blue-tinted wash is in fact often used to paint
stucco walls in the Casbah.) The more radical expedient of painting a carpet of cherry red across the
portal floor (the white disk is a stone manhole cover) uses the energy of the contrast of color to trans-
late the directional fall of light. The crouching figure on the left (a portal guard or an artisan) is vir-
tually e¤aced by the blast of color, an emblem of how, in the colonial situation, the problematic of
light focuses on aesthetic problems to the exclusion of all else.

Landscape Viewed from a Window, in contrast, was painted on the edge of the new town. It can be
read as a metaphor for the spectatorial position of a foreign tourist, looking out from the opulence
of a colonial hotel, with its reassuring flowerpots, and surveying in complete security, across the roof
of the English church, the sky, sea, and the sand-colored Casbah, where Matisse ’s aspirations for
painting the Orient primarily lay. The blue window partly obeyed a topographic impulse (a defining
feature of much Orientalist painting), but ventured more by deliberate artifice—the blue paint that
connects the room’s interior to the landscape, assuredly not blue, links the work to Matisse ’s signa-
ture open windows that bespeak the self-enclosed, as much as the outward-looking, nature of his
experimentation.

The largest and most ambitious of the Casbah pictures, the Moroccan Café (Fig. 81) is the closest
of all the Matisses to traditional Orientalist thematics. The leitmotif of the café scene was fixed early
on in Fromentin’s descriptions of Algiers and in the pictures of Decamps, whose Turkish Café was
reviewed by Gautier: “There is a white wall with stone pillars, and the eye looks between them into
a cool transparent shade, in which the Turks are smoking opium in an attitude of such exotic idle-
ness that the most active of men must envy them.”78 Here the European self-image of constructive
action is contrasted with stereotypical ideas about the idleness of Muslim man, who won his social,
musical, and hashish-inspired café pleasures at the cost of cloistering subjected Muslim women in
the home. The café scene typically inscribes a double-edged European trope: the superiority of the
European, who nonetheless envies the Oriental. Such a precept may help explain the steady popular-
ity at the Salons of the Orientalist Painters of Moorish and Turkish cafés as subjects—whether painted
in Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, or Istanbul.

If Matisse ’s theme typifies French responses to North African society, it di¤ers in the pictorial
conception of the image. In Moroccan Café Matisse explores a development he had introduced into
the syntax of modernism with paintings like Harmony in Red (Le dessert: Harmonie rouge) of 1909
or Dance (La danse) and Music (La musique) of 1910: indicating space by unified fields of color. Ma-
tisse ’s handling of pictorial form in Moroccan Café is most radical in the undi¤erentiated green field
that collapses perspective other than that implied by the seated figures’ diminishing size. (Yet that

184 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 81
Henri Matisse,
Moroccan Café,
distemper on
canvas, 1912–13.

perspectival diminution does remain a controlling feature of Western pictorialism.) Matisse reduces
material incident to flat tempera color: unmodulated brown for the limbs of the figures, apple green
for the remainder. A row of babouches, painted over by Matisse, can still be discerned at the base of
the painting, evidence of a decision to remove material that might imply an anecdotal sequence of
events on the part of the café patrons.79

This large decorative canvas provides much the strongest case for the influence of Islamic art. Ma-
tisse’s device of visual rhyming with circular and oval forms—establishing relationships between the
heads of the figures and the circles in the false frame—accords with decorative painting fully responsive
to Islamic ornamentation. Matisse’s attitude toward the Islamic visual arts is a pressing issue in the ab-
straction of these paintings. If, as is often maintained, Matisse’s aesthetic owes something to the study
of Islamic art, his sympathetic identification with the culture of his Moroccan sitters may require that
we reassess their status in his work and recast the general problem of his Orientalism.

Matisse ’s encounters with Islamic art in exhibitions and his personal collecting of artifacts (be-
ginning with his 1906 visit to Algeria) are well documented. The painter often spoke of the inspira-
tion such art provided, while scholars from Alfred Barr to Rémi Labrousse have sought to define the

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 185

relation of his work to specific art forms. Thus fundamental features of ceramic tiles and textiles, such
as the rugs that he had begun collecting in Algeria, and of the borders of miniature paintings—a
love of pattern, the repetition of ornamental motifs, and the predominance of arabesque line—found
echoes in Matisse ’s painting in the postfauve period. Rugs themselves exemplify principles of con-
trasting color composition and the generation of pictorial relief by juxtaposing flat patches of color.
Matisse successfully transferred those principles from his Parisian paintings, where rugs were mo-
tifs, to works such as Zorah Standing that were conceived as jigsaws of clashing chromatic forces. Fi-
nally, Matisse is known to have admiringly studied Persian and Mughal miniature painting at exhi-
bitions in Paris and Munich (even if he did not collect it). The miniatures’ complex enframing devices,
the suspension or distension of perspective, the employment of color fields, and the rendition of the
figure in unmodeled curvilinear silhouettes all found echoes in Matisse ’s paintings before 1914. The
bodies in Moroccan Café and, to a lesser extent, the figure in On the Terrace (see Fig. 75) exemplify
those renderings.

Matisse used such pictorial devices most intensively, however, in the metropolitan French works
of 1910 and 1911 such as the Interior with Eggplants (Intérieur aux aubergines), painted in controlled
studio environments, rather than during his Tangerine rambles or in his presumably denuded hotel
studio-room. Apart from the Moroccan Café, a pseudo-Islamic element appeared most clearly in Ma-
tisse ’s Moroccan gardens, painted during the first trip to Tangier (see Fig. 83). Much Islamic deco-
rative art that is not based on geometric pattern involves the schematic interpretation of vegetation
in the complex foliate interweavings of the arabesque. The arabesque appealed greatly to Matisse as
a device for organizing the flat surfaces of landscape painting,80 and as such it had a role in his Mo-
roccan gardens. Yet these paintings of contemporary Tangier also belong to a distinct tradition of
Orientalist painting, exemplified by Renoir, in which sumptuous vegetation serves as a marker for
travel and the exotic experience.

Tropical Gardens

In the static world of the Orientalist picturesque, certain plants carry associations with particular
climes, the date palm, for example, signifying an oasis. But the reality of plant life in colonial situa-
tions was complex. Treated as a resource, plants may be shifted from their natural habitat and in-
stalled elsewhere to satisfy scientific, economic, or ornamental interests. European botanical gardens
had long cultivated plants from the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific. (The Jardin d’Acclimatation at
Nogent, established in 1897, was a recent example.) Conversely, colonial settler societies, for cultural
and economic reasons, sought to grow crops, plants, and trees from the home country (or other
colonies) in the new setting.

In French North Africa the jardins d’essai, or botanical testing grounds, were of particular inter-

186 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

figure 82
E.-A. Séguy, Mass of
Anthuriums in the Garden
at Hamma, Algiers, 1921.

est to painters. The most famous was the Jardin d’Essai at Algiers: Renoir had painted its palm groves
in 1881, and when Matisse was in Tangier, Abd-el-Tifians like Jules Migonney and Charles Dufresne
were designing decorations and basing easel pictures on its exotic plants, a fashion that continued
well into the 1920s (Fig. 82). Matisse ’s Moroccan gardens belong to that tradition. He was enrap-
tured by the luxuriant vegetation of Tangier,81 yet the garden where he executed his landscapes was
even less a native one than the Jardin d’Essai. Like a horticultural microcosm of Tangerine society,
it was a site of heterogeny. Matisse worked in the garden of a Scottish expatriate, Jock Brooks, who
lived in a neighborhood of villas inhabited by wealthy Europeans. The location of Villa Brooks and
its protection, as a private garden, from potential confrontations made it a secure “European” space.

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 187

figure 83
Henri Matisse, Moroccan
Garden, oil, pencil, and
charcoal on canvas, 1912.
Photograph © Museum of
Modern Art, New York.

(It was like Count Anteoni’s Biskra garden in Hichens’s Garden of Allah, which Europeans, but not
the indigenous, were encouraged to visit.) Matisse ’s letters home indicate that the Villa Brooks gar-
den had sections of lawn and flower beds containing European varieties. Matisse seems to have avoided
these European sections of the garden, however, to focus on tall trees entwined with green flower-
ing vines and on fleshy ground plants like palms, aloes, and acanthus. Those features were enough,
short of jungles, to indicate an African location. (And they were thus consistent with Matisse ’s pref-
erence for indigenous architecture.) The painter later recalled that the Villa Brooks garden “was im-
mense, with meadows as far as the eye can see. I worked in a part which was planted with very large
trees, whose foliage spread very high. The ground was covered with acanthus. I had never seen acan-

188 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

thus. I knew acanthus only from the drawings of Corinthian capitals I had made at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts. I found the acanthus magnificent, much more interesting, green, than those at school!”82

These recollections evoke the Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape (Les acanthes, paysage marocain) can-
vas, one of Matisse ’s greatest landscapes (see Plate 12). The classical associations of the acanthus are
consistent with French thinking about North Africa as part of the former Carthaginian and Roman
empires, still evidenced by the extensive ruins at Volubilis in Morocco, Tipasa in Algeria, and El Djem
in Tunisia. (Colonial rhetoricians like Louis Bertrand were happy that France had reclaimed from
the Arabs these territories of the original “Latin” people.) Such cultural memories were endemic to
classically educated French artists traveling in North Africa: Moroccans in burnouses had reminded
Delacroix of Roman senators; live acanthus reminded Matisse of Corinthian columns.

In his Acanthus Matisse uses the artifice of intense purple tonalities to evoke the sensuous exuber-
ance of the luxuriant vegetation he had seen. The painting is nevertheless tightly disciplined: the acan-
thus shrubs in the foreground establish a horizontal emphasis, while the verticals of the tree trunks
hold air and earth together. Matisse is at pains to communicate the fall of light in the exotic garden:
the palm shrub in the right foreground is in shadow, while its neighbor basks in sunlight. If the dap-
pled ivy leaves and bright patches of bark evoke the precision of impressionist observation, the um-
brellas of yellow and orange foliage in the pink distance recall the willfully colored trees of Matisse ’s
1906 Bonheur de vivre.

The arabesque legacy of Bonheur de vivre is more apparent, however, in Moroccan Garden ( Jardin
marocain, Fig. 83). In it the strange pu¤ed forms of the foliage, hillside, and curvilinear pathways,
which seem divorced from any observable reality, recall the conventionalized landscapes of Mughal
illuminated miniatures (if not, indeed, the landscapes of Chinese scroll painting). Despite the ap-
parent spontaneity of Matisse ’s brushwork, an infrared photograph reveals that the image conforms
to a meticulously drawn layout in pencil that detailed individual leaves and periwinkle blooms.83 The
arabesque sense of design, curving tree trunks and pathways bound together, was already evident at
that formative stage.

It could be argued that features like arabesque linearity and repeated patterns have a wide cur-
rency in Matisse’s art and cannot be attributed definitively to Eastern representational devices. Matisse
is an artist who digested and assimilated sources with uncommon completeness so that they appear
as indefinable inflections of the master style. (The same problem attaches to Matisse ’s primitivism.)
Perhaps for that reason Pierre Schneider, in his 1990 essay “The Moroccan Hinge,” o¤ered the term
“orientality” to define how Matisse, under the stylistic influence of Islamic art, advances the deco-
rative and abstracting elements in his painting. Matisse, for Schneider, “changed the character of al-
lusions to oriental art made in the West: he discarded the picturesque in favor of the pictorial or, if
you wish, orientalism in favor of orientality.”84

So Schneider contrasts the orientality of Matisse with “orientalism,” a term he never actually defines

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 189

but uses to designate picturesque and anecdotal nineteenth-century painting in the tradition of Pros-
per Marilhat and Gérôme. Thus he introduces a new version of the dichotomy (first suggested by
early-twentieth-century critics like Apollinaire), common in the modernist historiography of art, be-
tween avant-gardist painting—which eschews the descriptive and anecdotal to cultivate the aesthetic
problems of “pure painting”—and literary painting, primarily academic art that elaborates a narra-
tive and calls for the traditional techniques of illusionism, including the mastery of anatomical rep-
resentation and archaeologically exact costume.

In light of what I have argued it no longer seems possible to maintain that separation. Matisse ’s
links with the conventions of anecdotal and picturesque Orientalist painting are too profound for his
Moroccan oeuvre to be excluded from its ranks. To neglect those links—a standard procedure of art
historians committed to the modernist version of their aesthetic heritage—is to avoid the contra-
dictory historical situation of avant-garde art. Although the abstraction typical of Matisse ’s mod-
ernist Orientalism modifies what his stock themes signify, it does not divorce the works from the com-
plications attendant on European artists painting in colonial North Africa. The great modernist
painters like Matisse are by no means sovereign agents detached from the flow of history, whose works
share nothing with either middle-brow academic paintings or the popular postcards and picture al-
bums that helped make North Africa more available to French colonial interests. To insist on that de-
tachment is to give aesthetic activity a utopian reading, to believe that art can proceed without mount-
ing up any debt in the political sphere.

190 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

8 Advancing the
Indigenous Decorative Arts

T he interest Matisse evinced in Islamic art about 1910 was by no means the product of an
isolated aesthetic revelation. The institutional ground for his receptivity had long been pre-
pared in both colonial and metropolitan spheres. By the time he left Tangier in 1913, the
Algerian and new Moroccan governments were embarked on linked campaigns to “revive” local dec-
orative arts traditions. Those campaigns were a response to the growing dismay at the damage the
European presence had done to such arts, coupled with an awareness of their economic potential and
their value as a likely source of inspiration for French decorative artists. Matisse, with greater depth
than anyone else, incorporated the aesthetic suggestions born of such art into a new version of mod-
ernism, as we have seen. In doing so, he was making an aesthetic move called for as early as 1893,
with the Muslim Art Exhibition (see Chapter 3) that had taken place when he was studying painting
in Paris.

The Muslim Art Exhibition, which established a context for the public appreciation of Islamic art,
came about because of a disaster of colonial negligence and rapacity in Algeria.1 In 1846 the French
government was planning an Algerian museum in Paris, to be stocked largely from the booty of mil-
itary operations (euphemistically referred to as razzias, or raids) carried out against Abd-el-Kader

191

and subsequent leaders of the Algerian resistance. The Paris museum was never realized, and the
historical collections of arms, carpets, and decorative arts assembled by successive French administra-
tions had become the property of the municipality of Algiers, in a time when the hostility of settlers
toward indigenous Algerians was hardening. In 1888 the city, in a gesture of contempt for its indige-
nous heritage, sold o¤ this neglected part of its long-established permanent exhibition through a group
of antique dealers in the Casbah, at derisory prices. The sale set o¤ a scandal and a ministerial inquiry
directed from Paris. The archaeologist Georges Marye was appointed to sequester for the state what
little remained, and the recovered property was included in the embryonic National Museum of
African Antiquities and Muslim Art established in Algiers in December 1892. A key motive for the
massive exhibition of 1893 in Paris was to garner gifts for this new Mustapha Museum, so named for
the building, in neo-Moorish style, that was finally opened on the heights of Mustapha in April 1897.2

Governor Jonnart and Associationist Policy

Such a turn toward Islamic tradition illustrates a change in the French colonial tradition itself. New
ideas about colonial governance were inspiring a cultural sympathy for indigenous peoples among
the upper echelons of colonial administration, in North Africa and elsewhere. Paul Cambon, the Al-
gerian governor-general who oversaw the building of the Mustapha Museum, was an early, if cau-
tious, figure in this change. Cambon, a friend of Pierre Loti’s, had previously been resident-general
in the Protectorate of Tunisia, which was administered more progressively than Algeria. I read such
gestures as founding the Mustapha Museum and supporting Islamic art in Paris as analogous to the
emerging colonial politics of association—the theory that reducing disturbances in the local cul-
ture preserves some semblance of a functioning society—which runs counter to the cultural vio-
lence attending traditional hard colonial policies of assimilation to French exemplars.3 Assimila-
tionist policy had aimed to redirect the habits of colonized peoples—legal, economic, linguistic, and
cultural—toward French models. It was a colonialism of forcible change, exemplified in North Africa
by the Algerian experience. The theory of association, inspired by British practice in India, instead
posited government by a cooperative alliance between indigenous authorities and the colonists, one
that would maintain local structures of power, so as to minimize social disruption, yet would serve
the colonizing power as ultimate master.4

The strikingly di¤erent course of colonialism in Algeria and Morocco shows the imprint of these
political alternatives. French Algeria was a long experiment in the policies of assimilation and Mo-
rocco, the most salient example of government by association in the French colonial empire. After
setting up their Protectorate of Morocco in 1912, the French took far greater pains than they had in
Algeria to maintain the political and cultural integrity of the society they now controlled. The po-
litical basis of the colonial presence also di¤ered: in Morocco a French resident-general, General (later

192 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

figure 84
Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve
Lyautey, 1931.

Marshal) Hubert Lyautey (Fig. 84), shared rule with the sultan and his government forces (the
makhzen). Algeria, in contrast, which had been in French hands for almost eighty years, was ruled
directly from Paris, with six of its own (nonindigenous) elected members in the French Chamber of
Deputies and a governor-general appointed by the metropole. As the propaganda had it, Algeria was
part of France, a continuation of France across the Mediterranean.

Indeed parts of the physical and cultural fabric of French Algeria had been made over in Euro-
pean style. Architecture gives the quickest illustration of the point. The archaeologist Georges Marçais
lamented in 1906 that the French, since their arrival in 1830, had destroyed significant parts of the
Roman archaeological heritage. (He gave as an example the dismantling by military engineers in 1845
of a functioning Roman amphitheater.) Suggesting that the French approach to Islamic monuments
was more destructive still, Marçais noted that “the Algiers of the Corsairs [had been] cut up, the cap-
ital of the deys refashioned on the model of a Marseille suburb.”5 Even more forcefully, the English
traveler Elisabeth Crouse reported in 1907 that since 1830 four hundred mosques around the coun-
try had been destroyed or converted to other uses.6

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 193

Such expressions of colonial regret and concern for preservation were surely encouraged by the
mentality of the governor-general who replaced Cambon in 1900: Charles-Celéstin Jonnart. He held
the post for a decade, exiting briefly in 1901–3, then governing until the arrival of Lutaud in 1911.7
As we have seen, Jonnart was also reappointed by Georges Clémenceau for a year in 1918–19 to
reestablish order after World War I. Early in his administration Algiers enjoyed a modest cultural
renaissance, evident in the new buildings using a neo-Moorish vocabulary, the establishment of the
Villa Abd-el-Tif, e¤orts to reorganize the indigenous arts industries, and the encouragement of the
Comité du Vieil Alger. That heritage body for old Algiers (see Chapter 9) was a cross between a
local-history society of almost Pickwickian picturesqueness and today’s heritage activist groups pit-
ted against commercial development.

Jonnart had gained familiarity with Algeria during a decade spent as secretary to Governor-General
Tirman in the 1880s. His belief that culture marked a colony’s maturity is evident in a speech of 1900
in which he claimed that Algeria, having confronted the “ordeals of pacification,” was now ready to
construct a new image of itself: “Algeria is a second France, it is full-grown, it does not wish to be
merely a land of merchants preoccupied with the price of wine, sheep, and cereals. . . . It is France,
and as a consequence should . . . be the prolongation of the image of ‘la douce patrie ’ that has re-
mained the queen of taste, of letters and the arts.”8 Although he said nothing here of indigenous cul-
ture, Jonnart came to be regarded as an Arabophile by many colonists and as a friend by parts of the
indigenous community. The historian Ali Merad attests to Jonnart’s good standing with that com-
munity, citing his e¤orts to improve social services for Muslims and to encourage higher education
(for example, by founding new medersas, or Islamic colleges, in Algiers and Tlemcen in 1904 and
1905), which assured his popularity among Muslim Algerians.9 Jonnart’s goal, in the polarized po-
litical situation of Algeria, appears to have been to reconcile the settler and indigenous communities
through the policies of association.

Jonnart’s directive that new public monuments and schools should be designed using Moorish ar-
chitectural forms—rather than the previously standard neoclassical or neobaroque styles—reflects
that cultural and political sympathy.10 Although earlier buildings (such as the Mustapha Museum de-
vised by Cambon) had employed such a language, concessions to local vernacular were rare before
the rise of what François Béguin calls the architecture of arabisances, which he defines as the “Ara-
bization of architectural forms imported from Europe” in an intellectual climate “associating these
operations of hybridization to certain forms of sympathy for the Arab world.”11 The new architec-
tural regime was so distinctive that the residents of Algiers began to refer to a Jonnart style.12

Prominent examples of the style included the new prefecture on the waterfront, the medersa built
in 1904 just above the old Mosque of Sidi Abd-Er-Rahman (that popular site for painters), the offices
of the newspaper La Dépêche algérienne, and the massive Central Post Office in downtown Algiers.13
Marçais described the program as taking inspiration “directly from preexisting Muslim architecture,

194 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

reproducing the dispositions of the plan and the exterior forms of Turkish edifices.” The function
of the medersa, to take one example, was to prepare one hundred students from the indigenous elite
for the magistracy, administration, and interpreting. Designed by the government architect Henri
Petit, it “modified the silhouette of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie with great success,” while its gateway
and interior ornamentation, inspired by medieval Maghrebian models, had to be adapted to the Turk-
ish floor plan.14 Such a heterodox mix of sources betrays confusion about the value of di¤ering Islamic
traditions among early exponents of arabisances. It is not surprising that younger French architects,
particularly those active in Lyautey’s Morocco, criticized the concentration on lavish exterior decor
in such buildings.15

Comparable attitudes toward indigenous heritage were evident in Jonnart’s provisions for the in-
digenous arts industries. Jonnart was receptive to the Islamic decorative art espoused by Georges
Marye and his successor at the Mustapha Museum, the archaeologist Stéphane Gsell. Soon after tak-
ing office Jonnart commissioned the Parisian specialist Marius Vachon to survey the arts industries.
Vachon, employed previously to study decorative arts reform in European nations from Great Britain
to Bosnia-Herzegovina, published articles in the prestigious Revue des arts décoratifs, illustrated with
engravings of traditional Algerian silver jewelry (Fig. 85), that show his keen awareness of the threats
to such industries from counterfeit metalwork imported in bulk from Germany or contraband car-
pets carried over the Tunisian and Moroccan borders. According to Vachon sixty-five hundred work-
ers were involved in the Algerian textile industries (excluding the family workers who were the back-
bone of the cottage industry). Against the economists who predicted the death of such handicrafts
with mechanization, Vachon asserted the vital potential of this Algerian workforce, these “thousands
of artists, artisans, and workers of the Other France who . . . merit our esteem and have a right to
our protection.”16

Arsène Alexandre ’s second, more sustained, inquiry resulted, we saw in Chapter 6, in the found-
ing of the Villa Abd-el-Tif, although his main focus had been resuscitating the indigenous arts in-
dustries. Alexandre, seeing considerable artistic aptitude in indigenous Algerians, asked how best to
harness it. Education was a key issue for the critic, who weighed traditional forms of apprenticeship
against the more professional teaching of drawing and design according to French models. Convinced
that drawing was the “basis of everything,” Alexandre hoped with the right instruction to liberate
the natural talent of indigenous artists from the tendency to “perpetually retrace traditional models”
as well as the “templates [poncifs] that guide the hand and dispense with all mental initiative.”17

The critic, however, dismissed as sterile the academic instruction of the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-
Arts. Nature was the great teacher for Alexandre, and he urged the governor-general to promote
drawing classes outdoors, either before the live model or before the uniquely abundant plant life of
North Africa. The cultural disinclination of Muslims to make pictures before nature never once en-
tered Alexandre ’s discourse. On the contrary, he stressed the place of vegetative motifs in Islamic

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 195

figure 85
Gold and silver Berber
jewelry from Algeria,

ca. 1901.

art and went so far as to suggest a mixed-race drawing school at the Jardin d’Essai, where students
could observe “the di¤erences between the two geniuses, the two temperaments, with a view to an
Algerian art properly so called, that dreamed-of art, maybe impossible to realize, where everything
that is luxurious and sumptuous in the oriental temperament will unite with all that is clarity and
rhythm in the temperament of the European.”18 This moment of idealism, this wish for a seamless
cultural synthesis between colonizer and colonized fades elsewhere, as Alexandre sketches more pa-
ternalistic arrangements oriented toward separate development.

Workshop schools, or ouvroirs, for girls, where handicrafts had a prominent role, were sympto-
matic. The most important, in view of its antiquity and descriptions of it by several commentators

196 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

figure 86
Mme Luce Ben-Aben’s
embroidery workshop,
Algiers, ca. 1907.

besides Alexandre, was the ouvroir of Mme Luce Ben-Aben, a prominent member of the Comité du
Vieil Alger (Fig. 86).19 As early as 1845 Ben-Aben’s great-grandmother Mme Luce had set up the
first French-run workshop for embroidery made by indigenous girls. Her almost proto-feminist aim
was to “assure a new source of revenue for the poor classes and to help lift up the Muslim woman,
to draw her from her inaction, to give her a nobler and more useful role in her family.”20 Indeed the
philanthropic aspect of Luce Ben-Aben’s modern operation was much remarked, but the issue is com-
plex: late-twentieth-century Westerners might equate the ouvroir with child labor, notwithstanding
salubrious conditions or the widespread tradition in North Africa and the Middle East of employing
female children for rug making. The photograph of the Ben-Aben house in the Casbah shows small

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 197

unveiled girls at their embroidery frames under the watchful eye of a fully veiled woman. The chil-
dren are seated on rugs in the tiled, arcaded court of the Ben-Abens’ villa, “saved from the pickaxe
of the demolition teams” on the Rue Marengo near the medersa.21

Since the early nineteenth century European textile industries such as shawl making at Paisley or
Lyon had been premised on the imitation of Eastern (Kashmiri) models, like a good deal of later tex-
tile design.22 The first Mme Luce had translated the study of material exemplars to Algeria, collect-
ing fine examples of various Maghrebian laces and embroideries. Those antiques had always served
as models in the family workshop.23 In the Algerian situation the revival—or “reinvention”—of tra-
dition in indigenous hands was the aim: the Luce family practice went on to become a key policy plat-
form in the French Maghreb. Around 1905 Jonnart’s team was beginning to assemble pattern books
for carpets and embroidery and old recipes for textile dyes. The administration moved haphazardly
to disseminate these, partly through ouvroirs and schools for girls and partly through the workshops
for indigenous boys annexed to the communal schools, run by Jeanmaire, rector of the Academy
(later University) of Algiers.

The indigenous view of these matters is hard to trace in French texts. The complex system of
Algerian workshops that produced Berber jewelry, copper ware, embossed leatherwork, lace, car-
pets, and inlaid furniture (the last the specialty of the Racim family in the Algiers Casbah) was not
even described in most of the French texts. French views of the contemporary (as opposed to ad-
mired historical) arts resound with charges of vaguely perceived “decadence” that could be reversed
only by French intervention. But Vachon recognized a strong indigenous push for reform, based on
memories of a school for Kabyle artists set up in 1864 at Fort-l’Empereur that had folded in the re-
bellions of 1871. For Vachon “the indigenous people themselves, through their caids [leaders] . . .
demand, more than the colonists, the immediate organization of professional teaching for the
colony’s arts industries.”24

Jonnart’s most substantive response was to establish an umbrella organization, the Office of In-
digenous Arts, by 1908. Its activity in Algiers was coordinated by Prosper Ricard, the prolific au-
thor of French guides to North African architecture, decorative art, and cultural geography writ-
ten during the 1920s (when he was based in Morocco). Ricard, an exemplary cultural broker of the
modern colonial era, was employed by successive North African governments. In his many books
he is an indigenophile, writing with easygoing authority on Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Ricard
was a pivotal figure in the developing careers of both Mohammed Racim and Azouaou Mammeri
(see Chapter 9). Apparently Algerian-born, he was a graduate of the Ecole normale de Bouzaréah
(just inland from Algiers), an important institution for training teachers of both French and in-
digenous schoolchildren.

In about 1908 Ricard, then an inspector of indigenous education, was hired to run the Cabinet de
dessin for the new Office of Indigenous Arts in Algiers. Its task was to document traditional artwork

198 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

figure 87
Edouard Herzig, Trial
Creation of a Carpet in
Hispano-Moorish Style,
ca. 1907.

from around the country—primarily architectural details and fine-quality handicrafts—by photo-
graphs and drawings. These were re-presented as models and distributed to workshops and ouvroirs
around the country. The teenage Mohammed Racim was one of the talented indigenous draftsmen
Ricard employed as a copyist,25 a position subordinate to that of French artists also working for the
office who had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Their job was to design master copies for deco-
rative work to be executed in the native workshops. One exponent of such designs was Edouard
Herzig, a painter of unremarkable academic scenes of oriental life in Kabylia. More interesting, Herzig
doubled as a specialist in the design of arabesque patterns and illuminated pages (for example, a
Moorish-style carpet, illustrated in Alexandre ’s report [Fig. 87]). He became particularly active in

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 199

the 1920s, when the Algerian arts industries achieved a firmer footing. But French writers like C. Bayet
at the time protested Herzig’s patronizing role in teaching the Arabs their own art.26

Lyautey’s Morocco

Compared with the Moroccan situation, to which I now turn, that of Algeria—the details of heritage
and the indigenous arts—seems but vaguely glimpsed. A great deal more is known about Resident-
General Lyautey, his motivations and his policies, than about Governor Jonnart, a surprisingly obscure
figure in colonial histories. Lyautey has long enjoyed the reputation of being a reformist colonial
governor of genius during his tenure (1912–25). Yet the “genius” did not act alone: I believe that many
of his cultural initiatives in Morocco elaborated on ideas sketched by Jonnart and his sta¤ in the pre-
ceding decade.

Lyautey’s initiatives, more explicitly than Jonnart’s, reflect the associationist theory of relations
between colonizer and colonized. In Lyautey’s case one can specify precisely when it appeared on his
intellectual horizon. It was partly a function of the split between the French military elite, who ran
the Bureaux arabes and sought an accommodation with the indigenous people, and the colonists, who
were far less tolerant of their interests. As an intellectually cultivated young officer posted to the Con-
stantine region of Algeria from 1879 to 1882, Hubert Lyautey professed to despise the settlers and to
be fascinated by the Arabs, whose language he learned and whose religion he studied.27 His politi-
cal ideas were further shaped during his years as a rapidly rising army officer in Indochina (1894)
and then in Madagascar (1896–1903), both in the service of General Joseph Gallieni. It was Gallieni
who first applied the theory of colonial governance by association, drawing inspiration from the ideas
of the governor of Tonkin, J.-L. de Lanessan. Under Gallieni, Lyautey had supervised the arming
of Indochinese villagers, enabling them to defend themselves against indigenous “brigands” (that is,
forces opposed to French rule) and thus help secure the country. In Indochina parts of the machin-
ery of Mandarin administration, taxation, and the legal system were left standing, a model being se-
lectively adopted in the Protectorate of Tunisia and being expounded theoretically by authors such
as Joseph Chailly-Bert.28

Lyautey became closely affiliated with the members of the powerful Committee for French Africa
in the French government, led by Eugène Etienne. A brilliant officer, Lyautey had been poached from
Madagascar by Governor Jonnart to lead the French military activities at Aïn Sefra in southern Al-
geria in 1903. The two men by then shared an associationist ideology as well as a vision for a unified
French North Africa that might in the future include Morocco. In the end, Lyautey’s reward for su-
pervising a decade of French attrition of Moroccan sovereignty from his power base in southern Al-
geria was the high command, as resident-general, once the Protectorate of Morocco was declared.29

Since its inception, Lyautey’s administration in Morocco has been the subject of largely approv-

200 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

ing scrutiny, a tradition begun by the skillful propagandist himself through the favorable writings of
journalists and officials, many of them, directly or indirectly, his own appointees. In the cultural sphere,
scholars like Janet Abu-Lughod, Paul Rabinow, and Gwendolyn Wright have scrutinized Moroccan
urban planning and architecture.30 Lyautey’s intense personal interest in urban planning led him to
appoint young architects like Henri Prost, whose modernist experiments in Morocco could scarcely
be matched in the first world at the time. I briefly sketch these initiatives for their relevance to the
decorative arts, particularly the legal controls and systematic administration they brought to heritage
and arts issues.

Urban planning in Lyautey’s Morocco was at once retrospective (focusing on architectural her-
itage) and prospective (looking to new building). Architectural matters were regulated by a Di-
rectorate of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, established in its initial form just eight
months after the foundation of the French protectorate in March 1912 (the time of Matisse ’s arrival
in Tangier). Its first director, appointed by Lyautey, was the artist Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, then
traveling in Morocco. De Lunel and the inspectors he hired produced an extensive classification of
buildings and town precincts as monuments historiques (using legal instruments based on, but in some
ways exceeding, those of the eponymous French government service). The regulations, drafted by
Guillaume de Tarde, made it illegal to pull down classified buildings, setting a heavy fine as penalty.31
The aim was to preserve the existing Moroccan built fabric from the worst physical depredations
of colonialism seen in Algeria (an approach applauded in 1913 by the Comité du Vieil Alger).32 The
work of the inspectors included making renderings of monuments, producing copious photographic
records, and restoring key icons like the Tour Hassan in Rabat. Paul Rabinow summarizes both the
process and its implications for the future: “By strict restoration of the individual buildings and of
the site itself, the French turned these ‘artistic vestiges of a shining civilization’ into monuments.
The groundwork was laid for tourism, the museumification of Moroccan culture and a new histor-
ical consciousness.”33

The prospective part of the protectorate ’s activity was a massive building program that set up
entire small cities, nouvelles villes, for the European communities and those prosperous members of
Moroccan society who could a¤ord to live in them. The French new towns were located initially on
the coast, in the then small port of Casablanca and in Rabat, an ancient city and one of the four im-
perial capitals. Lyautey based his government in Rabat, where he also undertook the most extensive
urban transformations. Later in the decade new towns were added to the remaining imperial cities of
Fez, Meknès, and Marrakech, separated from the ancient precincts by a cordon sanitaire still evident
today. Although the intent of the separate-cities approach has been debated—was it urban apartheid
or a recognition of Moroccan cultural integrity?34—its e¤ect in preserving these ancient cities can-
not be disputed.

The controls applied to new building were increasingly strict. As early as 1914 a dahir (an official

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 201

regulation prepared by the French administration but countersigned by the sultan) to control new
building types was in place. Lyautey, presuming relations would improve if the Moroccan people
continued to feel “at home” in their physical environment, not only guaranteed the protection of his-
torical monuments, but also ruled far more strictly than Jonnart that all new administrative buildings
be built in sympathy with the “local style.”35 From the earliest days of the protectorate, architects
like Prost and Albert Laprade practiced an arabisances that Béguin and Wright have argued showed
more discipline and originality than the ornamental excesses and facadism of the Jonnart style in
Algeria.

The combination of historic preservation and neo-Moorish fabrication also informed the Moroccan
decorative arts. According to a French academic tradition extending back to the Roman architect Vi-
truvius, ornament and decoration were subsidiary to the construction of buildings proper. Prost took
a utilitarian and hierarchical attitude toward the impressive handicraft traditions of Morocco: “We
are the architects, and Morocco furnishes us with artisans. The Frenchman establishes the structure
of the edifice, considering its function, and the indigenous decorative art will truly be his collabora-
tor.”36 Prost’s remark makes it clear that the motive for salvaging Moroccan handicrafts was not mere
aesthetic passion. The industries concerned—small ceramic tiles (zeligs), carpet weaving, leatherwork
(the famous maroquinerie still popular in France today), clothing manufacture, silver- and copper-
ware industries, Berber jewelry, and inlaid furniture—had very considerable financial potential, even
aside from the new building.

Lyautey’s procedure in organizing this complex manufacturing field resembled that of Jonnart in
Algeria to the extent that Lyautey must have used Jonnart’s methods as a blueprint. Lyautey and his
sta¤ surely knew the Alexandre report (published in L’Akhbar by Barrucand soon after the death of
Isabelle Eberhardt, Lyautey’s and Barrucand’s mutual friend). In Morocco, however, theory and ex-
periment were converted into practice in a highly organized, legalistic fashion modeled on provi-
sions for architectural heritage.

Like Jonnart, Lyautey commissioned a report on the traditional arts, written just one year after
the French came to power. Jean Gallotti documented declining production rates and the breakup of
the traditional organization of these industries.37 He attributed that state of a¤airs to competition
from an increasing volume of European imports, seen as inferior to Moroccan products. For three
or four decades Morocco had been subject to economic incursions by rival European powers seek-
ing markets for their own clothing and arts industries, in particular “English cotton goods, silks from
Lyon, sheets from France and Germany, Swiss and Italian floral cloth, machine-made carpets from
Manchester, glassware from Bohemia,” and Italian ceramic tiles rivaling the traditional zeligs.38 Cou-
pled with this “inundation of the Moroccan markets,” Gallotti claimed, was a loss of traditional ex-
pertise, with concomitant loss of quality and hence a further shrinking of markets—despite such
great decorative projects as the building of the Bahia, the new palace of Ba-Ahmed, grand vizier at
Marrakech, at the turn of the century.

202 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

To redress the situation, Lyautey arranged a transfer of expertise from Algeria to the new pro-
tectorate. Helped by the poaching of the intercolonial specialist Prosper Ricard (who joined Tran-
chant de Lunel and the Orientalist painter Joseph de la Nézière in the Moroccan Office of Indige-
nous Arts Industries after 1914), proposals to reform the arts industries were quite sophisticated from
the outset. For example, Alfred de Tarde, a young French sociologist who was a lieutenant in Lyautey’s
army and the founding editor of the official illustrated journal France-Maroc from 1917,39 launched
that journal’s extensive arts coverage with an imaginary dialogue entitled “A Renewal of the Moroc-
can Arts.” Two Frenchmen debate whether Moroccan art is terminally decadent or can be revived.
One argues that the secrets of decorating the great Merinid monuments—wooden fretwork screens,
beehive plasterwork, fine ceramic tiles, and so on—have been lost forever: “All one finds here are
gross imitators who endlessly copy models from the old days. Their dexterity has been spoiled, and
they must confine themselves to the simplest models. We are witnessing the slow dissolution of a
race. But it is precisely this miraculous immobilization of the past that attracts me.” Such theories of
cultural degeneration were endemic to settler colonies and their intellectual rationales well into the
twentieth century. De Tarde, however, saw things otherwise, arguing that the traditional arts are merely
dormant in a country still full of potential. One needs to consider how the people live to detect the
vitality of their art: “It dominates their daily lives, from the richest city dweller to the humblest
Bedouin living in his tent: it is visible in the most minute detail of his dress or his furniture, in the
carpet he treads underfoot . . . in the worked leather of his saddle. . . . In fact style here marks the
least productions of the least artisans.”40 De Tarde traces that vitality of style to the social continu-
ity of Moorish life, popular art, and religious tradition.

Not admitting that the French presence might have disrupted that cultural mix forever, the author
seeks to prove his case with the drawings of an eleven-year-old boy in one of the bicultural Franco-
Arabic schools set up recently in Fez (Figs. 88, 89). The student, a certain Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi “dis-
covered” by Prosper Ricard, is asked by his teacher to draw flowers, on one occasion a bouquet of
four blooms in a vase, on another a humble daisy. The boy first copies the daisy in “correct” Euro-
pean perspective, but he soon tires of that exercise and instead reinterprets it on the same sheet as a
delicate, curling arabesque (see Fig. 88). His second motif, the bouquet of flowers, is more elabo-
rate, becoming a decorative composition of cursive arabesques extending in perfect symmetry from
top to bottom of the schoolbook page, on which the teacher’s note “T.B.” (très bien) is evident (see
Fig. 89). De Tarde delights in such confirmation of his idea of cultural conditioning:

This child looks at a bouquet, and he sees a work of art in accordance with the great
ornamental traditions in which he is born and raised.

That is why this little drawing reiterates, for me, the whole theory of Moorish
art. . . . One finds in it the distancing of the real, the progressive elimination of the
concrete required by Arab art.

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 203

figure 88
Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi,
A Daisy, pencil, 1917.

De Tarde defends that abstraction by citing Rodin to the e¤ect that the distortion of nature is the ba-
sis of true art. “I would submit the drawings of the young Bennâni to the meditations of the cubists,”
he suggests in conclusion.41

Such demonstrations of cultural vitality, sensitive to the aims and traditions of Moroccan aesthetics,
did not address the practical problems facing the arts industries in Morocco. To do so Lyautey founded
the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries mentioned earlier. It existed in embryo in 1915, the year of
Casablanca’s Exposition Franco-Marocaine, in which the pavilions of Rabat-Salé, Mogador (now Es-
saouira), Marrakech, Meknès, and Fez each contained examples of regional artisanal products. Two
museums and two inspectorates of indigenous art were set up at that time, in Fez and Rabat.42 The
office itself was formally established under the umbrella of the Service des Beaux-Arts in 1916, and
its first director was Joseph de la Nézière, the well-traveled Orientalist painter and writer with exten-
sive experience in Indochina and North Africa who had exhibited regularly with the Society of French
Orientalist Painters in Paris.

De la Nézière appointed both male and female inspectors of indigenous art as liaisons with Mo-

204 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

figure 89
Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi,
A Bouquet of Flowers,
pencil, 1917.

roccan artisans,43 themselves already part of a venerable and strictly organized guild system. The in-
spectors obtained work by two methods: in the great arts capital of Fez, they commissioned pieces
from the best artists in a given corporation or guild, sometimes giving them models to follow but en-
couraging them to work in their own studios without supervision; and in Rabat, Meknès, and the re-
vitalized pottery center Safi, they set up state workshops, provided materials, and placed expert arti-
sans on salary.44

The carpet industry best exemplifies how the office operated. Carpet manufacture was the object
of special interest under the Lyautey administration; it was acknowledged as “the principal and most
widely practiced of the Moroccan arts industries,” which could become “one of the country’s prin-
cipal resources.”45 The major coastal cities had their own traditions of high-pile carpets, with those
of Rabat in particular famous throughout North Africa for their precision weaving and sumptuous
design, thought second only to those of Persia. The Rabat workshops, although they originally based
their floreated designs on classical Persian precedents, had long given distinctive local inflections to
such models (Fig. 90).

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 205

figure 90
Classic Rabat carpet,

mid–nineteenth
century.

Berber carpets (either flat-weave kilims or rough hand-knotted shag), constituted a second great
heritage. They were (and are) made both in the populous Moroccan hinterlands, such as the Beni
M’Guild or Zaïan regions, and in the mountainous regions of the Moroccan Atlas among the Glaoua
and other peoples. Kilims, although more coarsely made of poorer materials, were said by the French
to have escaped Arab influence; they instead exhibited ancient geometric designs linked to the tattoo
patterns of Berber women. Progressive French commentators on the Moroccan arts at the time pre-
ferred these “tribal” rugs to Rabat carpets, partly because they perceived in them an affinity with
contemporary French art—a taste disputed by some indigenous city dwellers, who considered them
crude.46

206 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

Like much textile making in Algeria, carpet weaving had traditionally been the province of women
in Morocco, where the métiers, run by ancient corporations, were usually divided along gender lines.
All stages of the manufacturing process seem to have been performed by women and their female
children, from the initial carding and spinning of the wool, through the dyeing process, to the weav-
ing of the finished product. The three stages of manufacture were executed by distinct groups, with
poorer families predominant in the first two stages. The labor of children was crucial: in weaving
households, girls from six to twelve years were often the main manual workers (partly because of
their tiny fingers). Their younger sisters played music or served tea while the maallema, or senior
craftswoman, usually a mother or aunt, directed the proceedings.47

The administration responded with cultural sensitivity to the gynocentric organization of the
carpet industry: the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries appointed a group of female inspectors
authorized to enter the homes of the weavers, provide them with materials, and direct their activi-
ties (Marie-Louise Gallotti was one of them).48 Following the experience in Algeria passed on by
specialists like Ricard, practical research had to be undertaken. The first task was finding good dyes.
To cut costs in a declining market, carpet makers had begun using aniline dyes from Europe that
produced harsh colors that degraded quickly in light.49 At the Medersa of the Oudayas in Rabat the
protectorate set up a small dye works to recover the vegetable dyes, calling upon the expertise of
older women who still knew the recipes.

The next step was to gather examples of the finest old Rabat carpets as exemplars for future pro-
duction (following the Luce family’s practice). An enquiry located “certain women who were weav-
ing cheap carpets [tapis de pacotille] who still possessed some of the skills of fine weaving.”50 An ar-
tisan designated the best maallema by the pasha undertook to copy an antique model, counting the
number of knots per centimeter to replicate the design exactly. “The first copy was mediocre,” writes
Gallotti, “the second was less so, and the third was much better than the second. Finally we had proof
that remaking old Rabat carpets was not impossible.”51 A number of such copies from the Oudaya
ateliers were exhibited next to their exemplars in the 1917 Exhibition of Moroccan Arts in the Pavil-
lon de Marsan, to be discussed shortly. In a 1919 Paris exhibition such copies were a triumph (Fig. 91),
according to one critic: “The exposition o¤ers us twenty really beautiful carpets, in which the weave
is tight . . . the design sure. . . . Apart from Persian carpets I know none that can equal them.”52

But the real test of the reformed industry’s vitality had to come from carpets that went beyond
copying old models to using designs the weavers themselves had invented (Fig. 92). Such “inven-
tion” had to take place within limits, however: in a massive undertaking, Prosper Ricard (by 1923
head of the Service of Indigenous Arts) and his sta¤ documented all the known kinds of Moroccan
rug and published them in the illustrated Corpus de tapis marocains, set out in four volumes between
1923 and 1934.53 The books present Moroccan rugs region by region, starting with those sections of
the country that fell earliest under French control (Rabat, followed by the Middle Atlas) and ending

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 207

figure 91 Joseph de la Nézière, photo of the Exhibition of Moroccan Carpets at the Pavillon de Marsan,
Paris, 1919.

with territories in the High Atlas that resisted longest. For these last information remained only par-
tial at the time of publication; much of it was provided by military officers, some of them with ethno-
graphic training—a notable complicity of the arts administration in intelligence gathering for mili-
tary uses.54 Those officers did their best to answer questionnaires, whereas for Rabat and some Middle
Atlas rugs, interviews with female rug makers themselves yielded valuable nomenclature and infor-
mation on specific motifs. Ricard’s work contains high-quality photographs, detailed analyses of rugs,
and black-and-white plates registering in diagrams all the known decorative motifs, knot by knot, that
make up the official corpus (Fig. 93). Each volume publishes the dahirs that collectively protected these
designs, the most important being the dahir of 22 May 1919 (21 Chaabane 1337) “instituting a state
stamp to guarantee the authenticity of origin, the good quality, and the indigenous character of Mo-
roccan carpets.”55

A work of remarkable scholarship and taxonomy, the Corpus de tapis marocains was also an in-

208 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

figure 92 Rabat carpet of modern manufacture, ca. 1920. figure 93 Analysis of the design of a Zaïan
carpet, 1926.

strument of surveillance that sought to maintain an art form within certain limits. Although Ricard,
as a connoisseur, knew that subtle variations of traditional formulas, weavers’ inventions, and the
vagaries introduced by unreliable raw materials provided variety in Moroccan rugs, the Corpus was
prescriptive, driven by the need for quality control at the heart of protectorate policy governing in-
dustry. Experts knew that traditionally new carpets had been sold at auction in the Moroccan souks
by a dellal, or town crier. A strict system of quality control was enforced by the mohtaseb, a senior
city official or “provost of merchants who put his visa on every piece worthy of being sold in the
bazaar and cut up all the other pieces.” In 1919 Raymond Koechlin, curator of the Museum of Dec-
orative Arts in Paris, noted how “the administration has reintroduced the custom of the visa. Hence-
forth the seal on the back of any carpet is like a passport of honor.”56 The protectorate legislated so
that only carpets so accredited could be exported, thus supposedly excluding the pacotille that damaged
the standing of such products in the marketplace. It also enabled Ricard, at the end of the 1920s, to

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 209

calculate exactly the increase in accredited carpet production: from six thousand carpets in 1920 to
thirteen thousand seven hundred in 1930 (with a combined surface area of almost half a million square
meters).57

The protectorate ’s reorganization of the Moroccan carpet industry must be considered a partial
success in that sixty years later in independent Morocco the mixture of traditional practices and official
commerce was still fully evident. As I found in Fez, the ancient tanneries and dye works were still in
pungent production, and the state-sponsored carpet manufactory was turning out monotonously crisp
examples of Zaïan-style flat-weave rugs. But the most interesting quirky rugs, of irregular design
and uneven materials, were sold outside the government net, in cavelike boutiques in the medina of
Fez or, better still, by the roadside at the encampments of seminomadic Berbers.

Decorative Arts Exhibitions and Associationist Aesthetics

The spiraling productivity of the carpet industry in the 1920s was all very well, but for colonial pol-
icy makers the significance of reforms in the Maghreb would have been limited if new markets, in
France and beyond, had not also opened up. Exhibitions of decorative arts played a crucial role in
the commercial and cultural dissemination that was part of official protectorate policy. We have al-
ready seen how French expositions and trade fairs were a dynamic interface between distant colonies
and the urban public in Europe. The place of colonial decorative arts had been limited in the great
expositions of Paris and Marseille—the French could not yet rival the productive richness of British
Indian handicrafts and textiles, for example. But in the 1920s—a decade so much associated with mod-
ernizing decorative arts that the term “art deco” was coined to describe them—the colonial decora-
tive arts that had developed in Algeria and Morocco were widely recognized. It will suffice to focus
on just two exhibitions, the modest Pavillon de Marsan display of 1917 that revealed the new pro-
tectorate ’s products for the first time and the celebrated International Exposition of Modern Deco-
rative and Industrial Arts of 1925.58

During World War I, just one year after the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries was founded,
the leading French design body endorsed Moroccan reform e¤orts. The Paris-based Central Union
of the Decorative Arts helped mount the Exhibition of Moroccan Arts in 1917, in the Pavillon de
Marsan along the Rue de Rivoli at the Louvre.59 That distinguished location housed the Museum of
Decorative Arts (launched in 1903 by the Islamic art show organized by Gaston Migéon). Like the
previous fairs held in Rabat, Casablanca, and Fez, this was partly a commercial venture, but with a
uniquely charitable goal. Sales from the exhibition were dedicated to supporting the families of Mo-
roccan soldiers wounded on the Western Front. It was presumably de la Nézière who involved the
Society of French Orientalist Painters as cohosts. Members of the society exhibited dozens of can-
vases of Moroccan scenes.60 Another small room contained photographs by the Service of Histori-

210 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

cal Monuments of Moroccan architectural treasures, some of which were undergoing restoration, if
not outright excavation (as in the case of the Roman city of Volubilis near Meknès, then being dis-
interred by German prisoners of war).

Beyond painting and photography the Marsan exhibition focused on historical Moroccan art. Many
pieces were lent by prominent Frenchmen and -women established in Morocco—Mme Lyautey, for
example, sent an assortment of Moroccan lacework for display, and her husband, the French war min-
ister in 1916–17, some exquisite damascened daggers, long swords, and Rabat carpets. Several dis-
tinguished Moroccans, from El Hadj Thami Glaoui, pasha of Marrakech, to M’hammed el Tazi, the
sultan’s representative in Tangier, also took part as lenders. Their participation was no doubt meant
to attest to the policy of power sharing under the protectorate. De la Nézière matched the antiques
with their modern-day equivalents, produced and shipped by the Office of Indigenous Arts and In-
dustries. Classic examples of Rabat carpets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were exhib-
ited alongside the newest re-creations from the protectorate’s workshop of the Oudayas in Rabat.

In war-torn France, with the usual season of cultural events dramatically curtailed, the Exhibition
of Moroccan Arts (and its attendant lecture series and documentary film screenings) had considerable
novelty value. This was the fist time the art of France’s newest colonial possession had been o¤ered
to the capital’s public. Critics were enthusiastic, and several considered at length the new Moroccan
carpets prominently displayed in the great hall of the Pavillon de Marsan, as they subsequently were
again in 1919.61 That second, larger peacetime exhibition, devoted exclusively to carpets, conveyed to
the public the advances made in just a few years of industry reform. Despite some critical uncertainty
about the quality of the protectorate’s new carpets, it was a big commercial success: all three hundred
carpets imported from Morocco were sold in 1919, confirming a growing taste in France for this item
of sumptuous domestic ornament. The rugs were also becoming fashionable among settlers in the
new colony: “Frenchmen established in Morocco,” Koechlin pointed out, “are very taken with rugs.”62

The idea of catering to the taste of French colonists with indigenous artisanal products gathered
momentum during the 1920s. The Moroccan authorities flirted with it in 1922, in the vast Marseille
colonial exposition, where Morocco was a significant presence for the first time.63 Lyautey’s admin-
istration sought to highlight its achievements in a pavilion that was a modified Atlas casbah, “a ver-
itable fortress on whose crenellated walls one would hardly be surprised to see long rifles suddenly
appear.” The exhibition converted the country’s political unrest to romantic attraction: “rough Mo-
rocco, whence every day news comes to us of the systematic struggle against the dissidents.” The
interior displays maximized this topicality, with exhibits of the French army and costumed mannequins
of Zaïan guerrillas. At the casbah’s center was the Moroccan courtyard, “a ravishing patio executed
following an interior from Fez” using only authentic zeligs of Moroccan fabrication, carved timber
balustrades and beehive plaster capitals and cornices (Fig. 94).64

The character of exhibition displays, which I evoked briefly in relation to the Algerian pavilion

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 211

figure 94
Central Patio of the
Moroccan Pavilion,

Marseille Colonial
Exposition, 1922.

at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, requires some attention here. The display at Marseille, a fac-
simile of an indigenous living space with rooms nearby containing isolated examples of Moroccan
artisanship, consolidated ideas of turn-of-the-century exposition practice. In contrast, the 1925 In-
ternational Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (or Arts Decos) challenged this
piecemeal conception, with its stress on authenticity. At the same time, it produced a prestigious plat-
form on which to promote new Moroccan arts and crafts. The aestheticist tenor of the Arts Decos
exhibition, a high-brow display of luxury industries, meant that two attractions previously central

212 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

to the “exhibitionary complex” were marginal: live ethnographic entertainments and large-scale tech-
nological attractions. The pavilions were smaller in 1925, and exhibits emphasized finished products
(rather than the productive process), beautifully displayed in specially built interiors. These were in-
spired by the installations in major Parisian department stores and by the model apartments shown
at expositions and annual Salons at least since 1900.65

Most histories of the Arts Decos concentrate on the pavilions of the great French department stores
(Printemps and Galeries Lafayette) or design houses (Lalique), or those of radical modernists (such
as Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit nouveau or Konstantin Melnikov’s pavilion for the U.S.S.R.).
The presence of colonial pavilions has been largely unremarked—an amnesia evidencing the prej-
udices of modernist historiography. The colonial arts, excluded from the prestigious main site for
the design house pavilions (on the axis of the Invalides) and the foreign sections around the Grand
and Petit Palais, were relegated to the exhibition’s edge, along the right bank of the Seine. There the
smallish pavilion buildings of North Africa, French West Africa, French Asia, and the Pavilion of
French Colonial Art each encompassed a range of ethnicities and geographical regions. Indochina
opted for a mandarinic building form rather than the usual Khmer temple, French Africa deployed
a more discreet Senegalese fort than in previous expositions, and North Africa, a two-story Moor-
ish palace with courtyard.

This colonial precinct in 1925 was probably included in the exposition because of a proactive
Ministry of the Colonies; it also answered the needs of contemporary design. In the 1920s l’art nè-
gre became thoroughly fashionable, and Far Eastern and North African arts also had some impact
on modern design. Great Parisian tastemakers like the couturiers Paul Poiret and Jacques Doucet
were part of the movement. Poiret’s well-known a¤ection for orientalizing costume dates back to
the preceding decade and the era of the Ballets Russes.66 In 1919 he made a two-month trip through
the Protectorate of Morocco, whence he returned “loaded down with marvels: antique pottery, price-
less carpets, veils, scarves, belts, and embroidered dresses.” He immediately set about putting them
all to use in “the adaptation of Moroccan art to contemporary fashion.”67 The wealthy collector
Jacques Doucet also invested in Oriental and African visual art, particularly textiles, furniture, and
ceramics. His exquisite modernist studio in Neuilly (near central Paris), containing masterworks by
Matisse, Picasso, and other leading School of Paris painters and sculptors, gave an important place
to colonial arts (Fig. 95). Besides collecting—for example, the Moroccan ceramic bowls visible in his
stainless steel vitrines—Doucet also commissioned new work. The cabinetmaker Pierre Legrain made
furniture inspired by French West African ceremonial chairs and stools for Doucet and others.68

The organizers of the Arts Decos were interested in such procedures of colonial adaptation. Their
official report of 1925 defined three sorts of colonial art: “The first, which best corresponds to the
exact meaning of the word, is indigenous art; but another colonial art is that practiced by European
colonists, incorporating or juxtaposing to primitive civilizations the imprint of their needs, their sci-

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 213

figure 95 The “Studio orientale,” apartment of Jacques Doucet at Neuilly, ca. 1929. Moroccan ceramics
in vitrines.

ence, their aesthetic. Finally, the same name is appropriate to European works influenced by exoti-
cism.”69 The Pavilion of French Colonial Art was devoted to the middle term. A building with up-
turned eaves that resembled the Indochinese pavilion in more than one way, it contained “furnished
ensembles and decorations inspired by indigenous styles, executed with primary materials of colo-
nial provenance and destined for colonial habitation.”70 The decorators’ ensembles, by all accounts
the least successful of the colonial installations, were attacked by the official report itself. The de-
signers “lacked information on colonial life and knowledge of the climate and its e¤ects. They pre-
sented us with a bedroom and a dining room whose veneers would not have lasted six months in the
tropics and with overstu¤ed furniture instead of seats and beds appropriate to the hottest latitudes.”71

The adaptations of the French to colonial conditions engendered one set of compromises, the clash
between traditional arts and the modern, another. Indeed alert visitors to the Arts Decos saw dis-
crepancy in displaying tradition-oriented arts in an exposition based on a “strict obligation imposed

214 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

on the exhibitors to produce nothing but the new.” So Victor Barrucand, covering the exposition for
L’Akhbar, concluded that people, paradoxically, “had to make the new with the old. The result in the
international sections is a crowd of bizarre things” that he likened to prewar cubist-inspired furni-
ture and decoration. Cynical about what is now called art deco design itself, Barrucand nonetheless
praised the colonial e¤ort. “Morocco and Tunisia have tackled the question with courage,” he wrote,
“seeking to make the most of the indigenous arts by adjusting them to the requirements of the mod-
ern home.”72 An alert observer from Indochina, Henri Gourdon, remarked that modernization was
improving the lifestyle of indigenous people in the colonies, with moves from rural to city life and
an embourgeoisement that he believed was transforming the everyday setting of their lives.73

The collaboration postulated here could be termed associationist aesthetics in that it recognized
unique indigenous traditions but hoped to see them fruitfully adapted to European uses. Europe was
automatically considered the source of the modern: the generator of new technologies, the culture
that privileged innovation and monopolized creativity, in contrast to its colonial dependencies.74 Gour-
don was uncharacteristic in conferring the epithet “originality” on indigenous art products in 1925:
“They have the potential to be original, and they are by no means out of place in an exposition of
modern decorative arts.”75

The main vehicle for such exchanges in 1925 was the modern domestic ensemble in which items
were tailored to a guiding aesthetic. Such ensembles surely o¤ered the colonials the best chance of
finding a place in the European market for the industries de luxe. Two of the three North African in-
stallations, those for Tunisia and Morocco, had this ensemble character. The Tunisian section pos-
tulated the decoration of the home of a wealthy Muslim évolué, with rooms or spaces designated
“dining room,” “harem,” “office,” “bedroom,” “guest room,” and “central courtyard.” Several rooms
had a specific focus: the harem, for example, displayed lace and textiles, while the dining room, re-
produced in a number of publications, was devoted to “the arts of marble, stone, and ceramics” and
featured gray limestone from the Djebel Oust.76 Modifying traditional Tunisian dining practice, the
room o¤ered a waist-high U-shaped table with designer place settings. Banquettes were set into walls
on the table’s three sides, in niches decorated with large ceramic tile panels painted with floral motifs
reminiscent of Iznik design. The main stone and tile work was done by a firm of Italian name (per-
haps not surprising given the strong Italian presence in the colony), with a dozen craftsmen and -women
responsible for other elements.

Morocco’s exhibit, a two-story apartment coordinated by Tranchant de Lunel, in contrast, focused
on decoration in Moroccan taste for a European (Fig. 96). Thus its “vestibule,” “hall,” “petit salon,”
“bedroom,” “bathroom,” and “office-studio” appear to address a French émigré with a taste for in-
digenous art settled in one of the new towns, rather than a Moroccan évolué who might be, say, an
administrator in the indigenous government. The small scale of the interiors promoted a sense of in-
timacy associated with the modern home for writers like Gourdon, who called this series of rooms

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 215

figure 96 Office/Smoking-Room and Bathroom, Moroccan section, Paris Exposition of Decorative
Arts, 1925.

the “most interesting and original ensemble” in the entire pavilion. Barrucand likewise praised Mo-
rocco for its “creativity,” especially endorsing the little mosaic bathroom.77

Written criticism such as theirs easily glosses over the contradictions of an associationist aesthetic.
Not everyone accepted the rhetoric: a skeptical correspondent in the Monde colonial illustré pointed
out the radical di¤erences between French and Berber civilizations (with corresponding di¤erences
in the “instruments of domestic life”). He found the idea of seeking a harmony flawed in itself: “It is
an error to believe a new style has ever been obtained by the addition or the mixing of styles. . . . The
art of primitives imported home has never ‘realized’ anything. In modern art, the only original cre-
ations are due to new materials: iron and reinforced concrete. The rest, particularly in furniture and
decoration, is nothing but hybrids.”78 This charge of hybridity has a derogatory sense no longer cur-
rent in today’s debates on globalized art: of hybrids as the ill-formed o¤spring of mismatched parent-
age, of combinations that devalue their sources.79 The writer had a clear sense that traditional eth-
nic and geographical identities should be respected—he criticized the octagonal bathroom Barrucand
had loved for featuring a Persian tiled dado with a cypress motif rather than something of Moroc-
can inspiration.

Both indigenous work and collaborations between indigenous and European craftsmen had a large

216 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

place in the festival of associationist intentions that was the North African pavilion. Tunisia favored
the indigenous, Morocco the collaborative. The guiding principle was more liberal than Henri Prost’s
subaltern conception, that the Frenchman controls design while the native applies ornament. As
Lyautey optimistically declared in a statement on urbanism elsewhere in the pavilion: “French pol-
icy in Islamic countries is one of reciprocal respect, of esteem, of the penetration of the two civiliza-
tions.”80 If there is a kernel of truth to this propagandistic declaration, the actuality of events far
from the banks of the Seine should not be forgotten: the French in Morocco had recently joined forces
with the Spanish army in the northern zone of the country to take on Abd el-Krim in the War of the
Rif, which extended south to the very gates of Fez. Outgunned on the ground and confronted with
European airpower, the nationalist leader surrendered in 1926. But the Arts Decos’ visually splen-
did displays of indigenous industry from the pacified sections of the Maghreb e¤ectively placed such
issues at arm’s length. In other words, the message of the exposition was business as usual.

It is curious to see the point Algeria, the colony with which I began this discussion of decorative
arts policy, had reached by 1925. The Algerian display in the North African pavilion contained clear
signs of a continuing paternalist, rather than collaborative, approach to the indigenous arts. Unlike
Morocco and Tunisia, Algeria had no coordinating designer for its section other than the official ar-
chitect, Charles Montaland. Rather than a suite of decorated rooms, Montaland o¤ered a conven-
tional open exhibition hall with a central arcaded Moorish court, roofed and hung with elaborate neo-
Moorish vitreous lamps (designed by the painter Dinet’s sister, Jeanne Rollince).

Neither did Algeria attempt to put items of indigenous craft together in a functional, decorative
aggregate. Instead the main displays—of carpets, lace, and embroidery—were contained in tall vi-
trines along the walls, supplemented by heavy pieces of freestanding furniture inlaid with mother-
of-pearl and precious woods. The focus on textile industries attested to the proliferation in Algeria
of schools and ouvroirs employing female labor: the schools were usually run by female French school-
teachers, the workshops by missionary sisters such as those of Notre Dame d’Afrique.

French designers of “indigenous” art played an important role in Algeria. In particular Edouard
Herzig of Algiers, whose work during the Jonnart era I discussed earlier, was a pervasive presence
in 1925. He was now designing in several media and, according to the Algiers critic Edmond Gojon,
doing so “in the tradition of Islam: algebra, geometry, mathematics.”81 Herzig’s patterns were exe-
cuted in carpets, in copper ware, furniture, embroidery, and even the metal jewelry of the semidesert
regions.82 The jewelry, designed for execution by Kabyle artisans, responded to the Arts Decos brief
for modernity of vision. In an extraordinary passage Gojon viewed it as a liberation from an op-
pressive history:

One cannot but applaud the influence exercised over our Arab workers by a valued
Orientalist. Thus a barbaric art becomes more supple and purified. . . . There was
the sound of slavery in this heavy Kabyle jewelry, as weighty as pieces of armor. . . .

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 217

figure 97 Léon Cauvy, Carpets and Their Manufacture, mural, Algerian section, Paris Exposition of
Decorative Arts, 1925.

Under the hammer of our modern artisans, these jewels have been freed from an
insulting symbolism . . . earrings, arm and foot bracelets . . . cease being a sumptu-
ous torture. All the while conserving their hereditary splendor, they have become
more seductive, given the spiritual ennobling conferred upon them by French
grace.83

French design liberates jewelry from association with slavery—either the implied subjection of Berber
women or a broader association with the shackles of the slave trade. Yet one can hardly imagine this
“improved” Berber jewelry appealing to French purchasers more than the “genuine article.” While
Herzig’s carpet designs were inspired by floral motifs in old book illuminations, his patterns for cloth-
ing exhibited by the Myrbor Studios of Paris had a more evident “orientation toward the future,” as
Gojon put it: “Muslim art applied to fashion here casts o¤ its ritual forms. The eternal motifs that it
o¤ers take on a new accent, transposed onto a shawl, a scarf, a dress whose modernism is itself in-
spired by the forms of the gandourah [a sleeveless tunic worn under the burnous] . . . or the caftan.”

218 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

Even though Herzig’s clothing is no longer available to study, there was an influential precedent for
his intent in metropolitan fashion, in Paul Poiret’s Orientalism, introduced to the French before World
War I.

If the Algerian pavilion did less to advance indigenous interests than the pavilions of the two pro-
tectorate states, it did integrate the arts of painting and the miniature with decorative arts proper.
Two prominent members of the School of Algiers, Léon Cauvy and André Suréda, were commis-
sioned to paint murals inside the pavilion. Cauvy executed twelve murals representing the Algerian
arts industries: rather than have live exponents demonstrate the carpet weaving, copper beating, and
so forth (as in previous expositions), the Arts Decos environment called for them to be illustrated
(Fig. 97). Cauvy’s murals, running around the upper walls like a frieze, so caught the attention of
Governor-General Maurice Violette of Algeria that he had them reinstalled in the ceremonial hall
of his Summer Palace in Algiers (see Chapter 6).

The Algerian organizers gave the illuminated miniature, an art unique to their country in the
Maghreb of the 1920s, a special place. Among the visual arts Barrucand saw assembled on the banks
of the Seine, he seemed most enthusiastic about the illuminations of the Racim brothers: “The beau-
tiful ornamented inscriptions of Omar Racim leave those of the other sections [i.e. Herzig’s] far be-
hind. In them the artist is able to enclose the mystery of thought in the elegance of the arabesque.”84
The work of Mohammed and Omar Racim appears in the chapter that follows as the pinnacle of the
movement toward cultural self-determination on the part of Maghrebian artists. The paradox is that
it was a movement facilitated in crucial respects by the colonial experience. Mohammed Racim
emerged from the very milieu of the antiquarian study of the decorative arts tradition promoted by
Governor-General Jonnart and the Office of Indigenous Arts he devised to promote a productive
“association” with Algerian indigenous subjects.

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 219



9 Mammeri and Racim,
Painters of the Maghreb

Two Paths
Maghrebian artists of the early twentieth century who chose the medium of painting, rather than
decorative arts, rapidly advanced to visibility. No longer near-anonymous artisans, they could aspire
to the privileges painting could bring: recognition, brisk sales, publications. The assessment of in-
digenous pictorial art is shot through with the complexities of the colonial situation. The arts of paint-
ing and photography were colonial imports, whose practice was central to representing the colonized
and hence bringing them into the purview of Europeans. To control such representations was to shape
perceptions of colonized peoples, their country, their traditions. An indigenous person behind the
camera or at the easel might redress, if only for a moment, the superficialities and prejudices informing
the typical Orientalist picture. For a Maghrebian addressing the French such a corrective had con-
siderable possibility—as long as the work itself was professionally competent and the picture was
ratified by exhibition and disseminated by publication.

Yet indigenous Maghrebians adopted the practice of mimetic painting almost as slowly as that of
photography.1 For religious reasons there was virtually no recent tradition of painting scenes and
figures, aside from court portraitists to the beys of Tunis (linked to the Ottoman court in Istanbul).2
Both mural work and painting in oils on canvas were done almost exclusively by Europeans. The Al-

221

gerians Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim were among the first practitioners of painting to
be recognized by the French, from 1920 on. If from today’s perspective their work symbolizes Maghre-
bian self-affirmation in the face of the colonial presence, it also raises a question: How might a non-
European artist fashion the visual tropes of painting in the modernist era and negotiate between West-
ern aesthetic models and the desiderata of local cultures and traditions?

When these two young Algerians from privileged backgrounds took up the art of painting in about
1915, each followed a di¤erent cultural option. Mammeri chose emulation—modeling his manner of
painting closely on a dominant European mode, the perspectival landscape view. He painted the Mo-
roccan cities of Fez and Rabat seen from a distance, the streetscapes and rooftops of their old cas-
bahs, and he generally avoided the figure.3 Displaying a fine compositional competence and an irre-
proachable grasp of single-point perspective, Mammeri summarized detail in a racy geometric manner
that he shared with certain colonial painters of the 1920s. From the outset he was encouraged by the
administration of General Lyautey’s new Protectorate of Morocco, which promoted his exhibitions
in Paris as the fruit of the French “civilizing mission” and a newly respectful association with the
Muslim elite. Thus the sense that Mammeri was co-opted by colonial authorities mingles with admi-
ration of his e¤ort to prove that a North African could excel at the colonizer’s mode of expression.

The miniaturist Racim, in contrast, chose what might best be described as an indigenous neotra-
ditionalism. His language of expression was a source of both admiration and uncertainty among the
French: the Persian and Mughal miniature, modified in ways that accommodated Western modes of
seeing. He painted the frames of his tempera miniatures with great learning, in traditional arabesque
decoration, but the pictures themselves, with their vistas of old Algiers and scenes of precolonial
Muslim life, construct a perspectival picture space. The result was a hybrid, a cross-cultural marriage
of manners, that spoke, apparently more persuasively than Mammeri’s, to di¤erent constituencies.
Racim, founder of a school of miniaturists, was embraced successively by the colonial regime, by
Algerian nationalists after the war of independence, and later by the pan-Arab Institut du Monde
Arabe, which in 1992 mounted a retrospective of his work.4 Mammeri, the “emulator,” in contrast,
though he exhibited frequently in the 1920s, has hardly been studied since the demise of the Moroc-
can and Algerian colonial regimes in the 1950s.

In using such terms as “emulation,” “hybridity,” and “ambivalence,” I make reference to the cri-
tiques of colonial identity elaborated by Homi Bhabha.5 He o¤ers useful ways of discriminating finely
the play of allegiances in a practice of representation. In the cases of both Racim and Mammeri, I
wish to estimate the extent to which indigenous practice converges with European models, swerves
away from them, demurs, and sets its sights on alternative models. I investigate indigenous practice
in order to reveal its positive affiliations yet also to recognize the grit of a nascent resistance (how-
ever implicit it may be in the political context of an accommodation, even identification, with the col-
onizer). The interstitial space of the colonial mimic, the gap between the ideal of exact modeling and

222 Mammeri and Racim

the actual impossibility of assimilating the self to the European other, is a space supremely open to
interpretation. And in cases where visual documents are relatively abundant but expressions of in-
tent rare (if not entirely absent), the task of interpretation is all the more urgent.

The Path of Emulation: Azouaou Mammeri

The prominent arts administrator Prosper Ricard, in describing contemporary Algerian painting for
the 1930 Guide bleu, found only two artists worthy of specific mention, both of them Muslims: “One,
M. Racim of Algiers, preserves in his magnificent illuminations the technique, the patience, and the
imagination of the Persian school of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, adapted to Algerine and
Andalusian subjects. The other, M. Azouaou Mammeri . . . a child of the Kabylian mountains, is in
contrast a strikingly modern artist, concerned with questions of light, color, . . . and construction;
he makes a clear break from all the old traditions of Orientalism.”6 That ringing endorsement shows
how a specialist in Islamic art and architecture could much prefer indigenous work to the cultural ex-
pressions of French colonial amateurs or the latter-day Orientalists whose work filled the annual Sa-
lons in Algiers. Of those, Ricard wrote merely that the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Villa
Abd-el-Tif “attract numerous French artists, among whom certain have generated a good deal of in-
terest.” Ricard’s fidelity to his two former protégés—he helped both Algerian artists at crucial mo-
ments in their careers—also expresses, more broadly, a fascination for indigenous cultures that had
its roots in the associationist regimes of Jonnart and Lyautey.

Under those two French governors Mammeri’s career as a teacher and artist took wing. He was
born into a privileged family of hereditary caïdats among the Aït-Yenni at Taourirt-Mimoun, in the
mountains of Kabylia south of Algiers.7 This region of Algeria was historically much favored for
government educational programs for the indigenous, such as the short-lived school for artists men-
tioned previously. Mammeri’s biographers, Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, who were prominent literary
travelers in colonial North Africa, record that he studied under “an old French schoolmaster, become
almost Kabyle himself after thirty years in the region.”8 Very likely that teacher was Verdy, whose
training of dozens of future Muslim schoolteachers from 1883 to 1906 angered settlers.9 Mammeri
qualified for the teachers’ training college outside Algiers, the Ecole normale de Bouzaréah, spent
three years there, and taught at a series of isolated schools from 1910 to 1913.

A speaker of Kabyle, Arabic, and French, Mammeri was an évolué, to use the term the French fa-
vored to describe (usually elite) indigenous people who adopted elements of the colonists’ culture.
A loaded term redolent of social and racial Darwinism, évolué also implied that in “evolving” toward
the culture of the metropole, the indigenous moved toward modernity.10 Certainly the Jonnart and,
more particularly, Lyautey administrations, with their colonial policies of association, wished to fos-
ter the indigenous elite. In the cultural correlate of associationist policy, the French language was the

Mammeri and Racim 223

“gift” that gave Maghrebians access to European modes of knowledge, to be maintained beside the
Arabic, which provided social cohesion. Mammeri can be said to have acquired a second cultural good,
drawing and painting in the French manner, a tool of visual communication that addressed prima-
rily Europeans.

How Mammeri came to practice oil painting is an intriguing question that modifies the reading
of his art of emulation. Precise information is hard to come by. Although drawing would have been
part of the syllabus at Mammeri’s secondary school and most likely, the Ecole normale, his expo-
sure to painting was more unpredictable. According to Louis-Eugène Angéli, Mammeri was ini-
tially self-taught, and after his graduation from teachers’ college and return to Taourirt-Mimoun,
he sent a sample painting to the inspector of artistic education in Algeria, the ubiquitous Prosper
Ricard. Ricard commended Mammeri to two French painters then working at Taourirt-Mimoun,
one of them Edouard Herzig, the Orientalist painter and designer who worked with Ricard. Herzig
apparently o¤ered fruitful lessons. In 1913, when Mammeri want to a new posting at La Gouraya
on the coast near Bougie, he encountered the young Abd-el-Tifian Léon Carré, who had settled in
Algeria a few years earlier with his wife, Ketty. According to Angéli, Carré gave Mammeri friendly
instruction in oil painting for eight months.11 Their association may also have been fueled by Carré’s
interest in Moorish culture, already established by his illustration of the recently published book
Jardin des Caresses.

In the account of the Tharaud brothers, Carré’s intervention was an epiphany, in which the Eu-
ropean provided the gift of painting, like some divine fire, to the native.12 But visual evidence is hard
to detect: Carré as a landscapist was a kind of latter-day Pissarro, and it is hard to see much of his
fluid style or brushwork (see Chapter 6) in Mammeri’s blockier, more dryly executed work. If any-
thing, Mammeri’s work looks more like Herzig’s—but then the earliest photographs are of Mam-
meri’s later works, from about 1917, after he had immigrated to Morocco.

He quit Algeria in 1916, enabled by the teaching profession to make that great shift in his life. Some
authors suggest that he found the colonial authority in Algeria oppressive. His destination was the
ancient Moroccan imperial city of Fez, where his cousin Mohammed Mammeri was a prominent
teacher. Mohammed became tutor to the sultan’s three sons and eventually an influential vizier when
the youngest of them, Mohammed ben Youssef, ascended the throne in 1927 as Mohammed V, the
sultan who in 1957 became king of an independent Morocco.13

Mohammed Mammeri had apparently written to Azouaou extolling the beauties of Fez, where, in
contrast to an Algeria transformed by settler colonialism, Muslim life retained its full splendor.14 In
the Tharauds’ words, Azouaou Mammeri found there “a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants
where Arabs were not ‘wogs’ ( bicots) but possessed money, prestige, and power; where everyone went
to the mosque; where the purest Arabic was spoken; where one saw elegantly clad men and women
who lived in houses far more luxurious than those he had been able to see in Algiers!”15 With his Al-

224 Mammeri and Racim

figure 98
Azouaou Mammeri,
The Fountain, crayon,
ca. 1917.

gerian passport and French connections Mammeri prospered: he apparently began a small primary
school to teach the children of the Fassi elite in French. Primary school teaching remained his main
employment until 1919, so that his status as an artist was that of an amateur. In that year, however,
the Moroccan authorities, recognizing his artistic skills, appointed him drawing master at the Col-
lege Franco-Musulman in Rabat.

Mammeri’s complex attitudes toward the colonial process are indicated in several short articles
he wrote for the French government’s magazine France-Maroc, which, we have seen, was an impor-
tant instrument of associationist culture (often publishing articles by Moroccans), art scholarship,
and propaganda.16 The articles are illustrated by awkward but forceful crayon drawings—Mammeri’s
earliest published artwork, which caught the attention of Marshal Lyautey himself (Fig. 98).17 Treat-
ing the traditional life of Fez, its architecture and its schools, they give an idea of the sensitive mis-
sion of the cross-cultural broker Mammeri, who had traversed borders between Algeria and Morocco,
between Islam and the Catholic roumi (as the Europeans were called in Arabic), between the Arabic
language and the French. From the perspective of the Fassi, one may speculate, Mammeri might have
seemed a representative of French interests. It is important to recall that in Fez just five years earlier,
in 1912, part of the small European population had been massacred. (That event had precipitated the
French invasion.)

The first article, recounting a typical day in the kind of bicultural primary school that had proved
so contentious in Algeria, suggests Mammeri’s acceptance of modern French culture as superior. The
Moroccan boys’ morning begins with two hours of Koranic lessons from a “severe” teacher, or faïh,

Mammeri and Racim 225

who sits with his students on traditional mats and teaches with handheld chalkboards. The afternoon
French class, in a di¤erent room replete with benches and maps of France, is run by a “gentle French-
man,” a culturally sensitive soul who can “speak Arabic and eats . . . without asking for a chair.” Mam-
meri implies that the boys prefer the tales of La Fontaine and their lessons in arithmetic to the Ko-
ranic class, concluding, “Thus the image of . . . noble France floats above these little heads being
guided on the path of civilization and progress.”18

Yet Mammeri’s drawings contradict this conclusion, in that all of them picture traditional elements
of the school: boys with the faïh in Moroccan garb and boys with schoolboys’ pigtails playing in the
courtyard. To that extent Mammeri follows the strategy of most Orientalist art addressing a Euro-
pean audience: focusing on indigenous traditions, he pretends the invader is absent. He writes and
draws, however, from the vantage of a participant rather than an ethnographer, and the rationale for
his work is more to proselytize and teach than to record the picturesque.

The artist-teacher’s second article sympathetically explains a traditional Koranic (rather than bi-
cultural) school for the French readership. Not uncritically, Mammeri details a pedagogy that he ar-
gues provides the fundamental moral and religious education of all Muslim men, as well as ensuring
“universal” literacy (for males, not females).19 These illustrated articles form essential background
to several paintings on the subject that featured in Mammeri’s first one-man exhibition in Paris, in
1921 at the Galerie Feuillets d’art “under the high patronage of Marshal Lyautey.”20 One drawing
records an important early oil that I have traced to the Cleveland Museum of Art (Fig. 99).21 De-
spite a certain sti¤ness in the drawing of the figures (I assume Mammeri had had little exposure to
life drawing), Interior of a Koranic School (Intérieur d’une école coranique) engages its subject in a sober
and convincing way. The suprisingly young bearded faïh and the cluster of boys working at their
writing boards are engrossed in their task, all save one who directs a piercing glance toward the artist
and viewer—this boy with short black hair symbolizes intellectual alertness, the productive educa-
tional process Mammeri understood so well.

The exhibition in 1921 was the second of Mammeri’s Parisian shows. In the 1917 Exhibition of
Moroccan Arts at the Pavillon de Marsan, discussed in Chapter 8, he had shown two small landscapes
in oils of Fez. Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, so admired them that he showed
them to the minister of the colonies and the proindigenous French president Georges Clémenceau,
who agreed to their purchase for the state collections.22 Judging by a later reproduction, one of them
showed the distant city of Fez seen beyond low wooded hills, with no figures apparent. It is an agree-
able composition of interlocking planes of muted color.23

Mammeri’s scenes of Muslim religious life, taxed with a certain “artificiality” by critics like the
Tharauds and Bénédite, nonetheless attracted appreciative comments: “These compositions, which
have the grace of things born to a fresh mind . . . appear to me like dreams made true. . . . All these
young boys assembled around a Muslim master . . . have the gestures and thoughts of the most veridi-

226 Mammeri and Racim

figure 99 Azouaou Mammeri, Interior of a Koranic School, oil on canvas, ca. 1917–18.

cal Islam.”24 Such comments suggest a sympathy for la France musulmane in metropolitan France in
the aftermath of World War I, in which Moroccan and other colonial soldiers had served with great
distinction on the Western Front. But among emergent indigenous political movements of the in-
terwar years (whether the reformist theological movement of the oulémas or Ahmad Messali Hajd’s
radical Etoile Nord-africaine) the Koranic school was considered a social institution instrumental in
organizing resistance to colonial rule.25 Thus in 1921 Mammeri quietly promoted to a tolerant and
receptive French elite an aspect of traditional society that later political conditions (intensified by
Abd el-Krim’s anticolonial War of the Rif in 1925–26) would make more controversial. Certainly in
1930, the time of the much-debated centenary of Algeria (see Chapter 10), another French critic rec-

Mammeri and Racim 227