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

ognized the importance of Mammeri’s Koranic Class while casting aspersions on the students and de-
preciating the institution itself. For Pierre Angel, “the sti¤ness of certain poses contributes to the
truthfulness of the whole. And the somewhat absent look of the master, dominating these little round
heads in which as yet untroubled minds doze, is interestingly opposed to the naively questioning eye
of the young pupil in the foreground. All the others remain absorbed, as if turned in on themselves,
already claimed by a world they cannot escape.”26 The partiality of this colonial reading, which sees
the teacher as “absent,” the students’ minds as “untroubled,” and the boy looking out as “naive,”
is striking in its denigration of the picture ’s subject.

The current rediscovery of Mammeri’s work by art experts from the Arab world encourages the
reading of grains of resistance in his work. The Museum of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris re-
cently purchased Interior of the Karouiine Mosque, Fez (Intérieur de la mosquée kairouiine à Fès). For
the curator Brahim Alaoui, himself a Moroccan, the interest of this image is its presentation of Is-
lamic piety from the perspective of a practicing Muslim.27 It is possible to recognize precise signs of
Islamic observance, such as the red and green colors of the devotional flags and the way the imam
occupies the niche of the mihrab, turning away from, rather than facing, the viewer. That is hardly
a picturesque device of the Orientalist tradition—in its severity it contrasts with Gérôme ’s or
Leighton’s views of Turkish or Egyptian mosque interiors that, despite their architectural detail, stress
gaudy costume and show the worshipers in frontal poses. The preference for frontality often led to
worshipers’ being shown incorrectly, facing away from the mihrab—an error the Turkish painter
Hamdy Bey, in contrast, usually avoided. Visiting mosques was and is forbidden to nonbelievers in
Morocco; yet Alaoui believes Mammeri could have painted this scene because of his high standing
as a member of an “important marabout family” whose own piety was unimpeachable. Paintings such
as this and the Interior of a Koranic School (See Fig. 99) suggest that Mammeri positioned himself be-
fore his French audience as a man of faith who, fascinated by the European pictorial language, used
it to improve the comprehension of Maghrebian culture.

Alert French critics were flattered by Mammeri’s strategy of emulation, yet aware of its con-
tentiousness. “This is the first time that a Muslim artist o¤ers us an exhibition of painting, and of
painting fully conceived with our Western vision and methods,” wrote Bénédite (his first claim prob-
ably erroneous). He recalled his own “stupefaction” on learning, in 1917 at the Pavillon de Marsan,
that Mammeri’s Fez landscapes had been signed by an Arab artist. Aware that oil painting hardly ex-
isted in the artist’s culture of origin, Bénédite explained how Mammeri, a practicing Muslim, had ob-
tained a virtual theological dispensation to paint in the vicinity of Fez:

His scruples led him to consult the most learned tolba [young male religious scholars]
concerning the liberties he might be accused of taking, and they agreed with his inter-
pretation of the famous passage of the Koran banning the reproduction of images.

What is forbidden is to reproduce images that “cast a shadow,” that is to say,

228 Mammeri and Racim

sculpted figures, which could become idols. In any case the ban in force in the ancient
days of idolatry would, according to Islam’s open minds, no longer apply to the art of
sculpture as it is generally conceived in modern times.28

Bénédite noted that Mammeri’s advent marked a significant stage in the “ascent . . . of Muslim minds
toward European culture,” along with distinguished contributions in medicine and the sciences re-
cently made by certain Algerians and Tunisians. Countering the supposition that religious belief had
closed the domain of art to Arabs, Bénédite wrote that Mammeri had “the courage to leave familiar
pathways, and to show his coreligionists the pathway to the future.”29

There is evidence that cultural sensitivities may have made Mammeri generally reluctant to paint
the human image close-up, at least in his earlier career.30 He was essentially a landscapist, and some
of his surviving views resemble the typical images of tourist photography; others share elements
with contemporary French colonial painting. View of Fez (Vue de Fez, Fig. 100) was one of the early
canvases by Mammeri to achieve the accolade of purchase by the French government. This for-
bidding image in fact shows one of the notable picturesque sites in Fez; photographers like those
from the French Service of Historical Monuments used the same crumbling ramparts to frame the
panorama of the city (Fig. 101). Prosper Ricard subsequently used this view to illustrate his 1924
book Les merveilles de l’autre France, in which he evoked the “northern panorama of Fez, seen from
the top of the Hill of the Merinids,” with its “cascade of terraces . . . from which the green koubbas
[pyramidal roofs] of the sanctuaries and the tall minarets of the mosques emerge.” The leitmotif
of both the painting and the photograph is the “salient of the old defensive wall of the Almohad
dynasty, mutilated but still standing, and as such, a powerful symbol of the thousand-year-old
city.”31

In this passage, Ricard, a man charged by colonial authorities with overseeing Moroccan indige-
nous art and its traditions, betrays a passion for Moroccan antiquity and history that Mammeri shared,
albeit for di¤erent reasons, as I have already mentioned—a congruence that also links Mohammed
Racim with his French supporters. By 1921 the Tharauds and Bénédite, no doubt having learned of
Mammeri’s desire to experience Maghrebian culture in all its richness in conversations with the artist
himself, suggested that it had led him to immigrate to Morocco. It was commonly thought (and still
is) that Morocco, far more than Algeria, managed to preserve a large part of its traditional culture as
well as its ancient architectural fabric.32 The power retained by the sultan’s makhzen, which forced
an accommodation with the French, and Lyautey’s progressive urbanism (with its nouvelles villes,
new towns built adjacent to, rather than replacing, existing towns) ensured that result.

Yet the visual conformity to European criteria of the picturesque exhibited in Mammeri’s exact
and technically conservative View of Fez complicates interpretation. To what extent could Mammeri
be seen as a creature of the French presence—educated in the French system, taught painting by
Herzig and Carré, supported as both teacher and artist by the Lyautey regime? His actual painting,

Mammeri and Racim 229

figure 100 Azouaou Mammeri, View of Fez, oil on canvas, ca. 1920.

unlike that of Mohammed Racim, had no engagement with indigenous traditions of image making.
Mammeri risks being seen as a cultural apostate, a mere Francophile imitator with powerful patrons.

Certainly one progressive French critic, writing of Mammeri’s inclusion in a wide-ranging ex-
hibition in Paris, Morocco Seen by Contemporary Artists (held in 1922 to coincide with the National
Colonial Exposition of Marseille)33 viewed his Occidentalism with suspicion. Contrasting an ear-
lier display of fauvelike landscapes by the young Tunisian painters Terzi ben Hasnaoui and Mo-
hammed ben Macri Roached at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Gustave Kahn wrote: “This is not the
first time we have been shown new Arab art inspired by our methods. At Bernheim-Jeune, the fine
painter Antoine Villard . . . showed us entertaining decorative pages by his indigenous students. . . .
But those youthful productions clearly derived from Oriental art. M. Mammeri paints in a completely
Occidental manner, armed with precepts nourished by the Salon [de la Société] des Artistes Français.
And that’s a shame.”34 Mammeri’s “Occidental manner” here implies a denial of roots, a whole-
hearted embrace of European visuality. The way out of this interpretative impasse, however, lies

230 Mammeri and Racim

figure 101
Fez from the tombs of
the Merinids, 1922.

in recognizing the di¤erences that can be masked by an apparent visual equivalency. Extravisual
questions of the context of production and of reception are crucial in establishing such a play of
possible di¤erences.35

A colonial subject painting in a realist mode—especially in 1921, when many painters associated
with the conservative, neorealist “Return to Order” movement were eschewing avant-gardism any-
way—demonstrated his cultural accomplishment in terms recognized by the new authority. And
Mammeri received accolades from the French, some patronizing, some not. In addition, it is quite
likely that for him and his presumably small indigenous audience the language of mimesis was a sat-
isfactory and respectful way of documenting observable truth. I have argued elsewhere that a pref-
erence for realist painting is marked among today’s Islamic collectors of Orientalist art. Such an at-
titude may have been emerging in Mammeri’s day.36

During the 1920s Mammeri’s painting developed away from the harshly detailed description of
landscape in the View of Fez to a more measured summary that connects with modernist practice.

Mammeri and Racim 231

figure 102
Azouaou Mammeri,
The “Montée des Rats”
at Fez, oil on canvas,

ca. 1920.

When he moved from Fez to Rabat in 1919, he left the center of traditional culture for the new seat
of French government, undergoing transformation with the addition of a new town near the medi-
na. Mammeri again elected to paint the streets and terraces of that ancient part of the city. His “Mon-
tée des rats” in Fez (La “Montée des rats,” à Fès), with its play of strong tones in relief and its severe
planarity, exemplifies his aesthetic (Fig. 102).

In 1921 Mammeri began exhibiting such work in his old home of Algiers, earning the approval of
local critics like Victor Barrucand: “The prodigious feeling for values and oppositions, the austerity
of the impression, the weighty value of the planes commend his views of Rabat, which display a
primitive purity and a monastic intensity. This is the real Morocco, and a good deal better than it was
in Benjamin Constant. . . . The Salon des Orientalistes o¤ers . . . [nothing] better suited to its brief

232 Mammeri and Racim

than the work of this indigenous painter, who wants no more than to copy what he sees, but who
does so in such a way that you couldn’t mistake his manner for anyone else ’s.”37 The process of de-
scribing Mammeri’s paintings by employing a standard language of art criticism—Barrucand’s “val-
ues” and “primitive purity,” or the “feeling for linear and aerial perspective” and the “envelope” ad-
mired by Bénédite in Paris38—were crucial in inducting Mammeri’s work into the art world, giving
it status despite the artist’s indigeneity. Approving his “pagan joy in seeing,” one critic even likened
the Mammeris to Camille Corot’s famous impressions of Italy from the 1820s and 1830s. Virtually
no one, however, likened Mammeri’s work to paintings that very likely conditioned his: those of one
of the more progressive Orientalists, Bernard Boutet de Monvel.

A racy exponent of art colonial, a regular of Parisian Salons who began visiting Morocco during
World War I, Boutet de Monvel first exhibited together with Mammeri in 1918 at the Hotel Excelsior
in Casablanca.39 In the early 1920s he purchased a number of Mammeri’s landscapes of Rabat.40 A
painter of heavily robed Moroccan figures arrayed symmetrically in marketplaces, and of the severe
architecture of Moroccan fortified casbahs also studied by Jacques Majorelle, Monvel had a style much
like Mammeri’s own, as Barrucand described it in 1923: “In a precise, well-outlined manner, M. Mam-
meri’s is an Orientalism unconcerned with the romance of the sun. It takes e¤ect by geometric lines
and the contrast of flat tints.”41

An excellent example of Mammeri’s work in this later manner is the hypnotic View of Moulay-
Idriss (Vue de Moulay-Idriss; see Plate 13). The view of the city, dramatically placed in a gorge, re-
minds one of El Greco’s famous image of the city of Toledo. In fact Mammeri had traveled to paint
in Toledo on a bourse Hispano-Mauresque in 1924. Then again, this physical vantage point overlook-
ing Moulay-Idriss was one favored by photographers like those who worked for Ricard. Mammeri
framed the view with a dark repoussoir of angular rocks and silhouetted cactus plants, while in the
shadows, two heavily draped figures stand immobile, like mysterious guardians of the holy city, which
was (and is) o¤-limits to nonbelievers.42

A little history of the site helps establish a range of resonances for this painting. Moulay-Idriss is
dedicated to Moulay Idriss El Akbar, who in the eighth century escaped his Abassid rivals in Arabia
and founded the first Arab realm in the Maghreb. His son Moulay Idriss El Azhar established the city
of Fez. In the foreground of the painting, rendered with great precision and giving every sign of its
careful upkeep, is the zaouïa (religious establishment) of Moulay Idriss, “a sacred place, forbidden
to infidels, in which the saint’s tomb, a mosque, and Koranic schools are located and whose priests
are Idrissid Cherifs, descendants of the illustrious ancestor.”43

The picture focuses precisely on the sacred precinct’s greenish copper roofs. Not only was Moulay-
Idriss a religious center famous well beyond Morocco, but it was also situated in the Zerhoun, a re-
gion where the autochthonous Berber presence continued to be strong. For such reasons the view
may have had added ethnic and religious resonance for the Berber Kabyle, Azouaou Mammeri. Paint-

Mammeri and Racim 233

figure 103
Si Azouaou Mammeri,
Muslim artist and drawing
teacher . . . Rabat, 1921.

ing emerges as a celebration, a commemoration of a place and a way of life presented, not as touris-
tic in a territorial, predatory sense (as one might say of much Orientalist art by Europeans), but as
participatory, awash with specific associations, cultural memories, and even a sense of belonging.

The extent to which Mammeri was able to integrate his realist painting with his broader life is ev-
ident in his returning to serve his traditional community as caïd, or administrator, to the Aït-Yenni
people in Kabylia from 1922 to 1927. These are years when the French interest in his art was at its
height, when he was showing in group exhibits at the Algiers Salon and the 1922 National Colonial
Exposition of Marseille and in a solo show at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. According to Mam-
meri’s son, at Taourirt-Mimoun his portraits “excited interest and admiration among local people,”44
a memory confirmed in 1925 by Bénédite, who described how Mammeri would receive his constituents,
“palette in hand, on the doorstep of his studio, to hear their reports or their complaints,” or they

234 Mammeri and Racim

would “salute” him deferentially when they encountered him set up en plein air before his portable
easel.45

This is Mammeri the skilled cultural broker who had himself photographed for the French mass-
circulation weekly L’Illustration, which devoted a two-page article to him in 1921 (Fig. 103).46 He
appears in Arab costume, seated with palette and paintbrush in hand before his easel and canvas. A
chaplet of prayer-beads connotes religiosity, while an ornamented Moroccan tablecloth and the fine
metalwork globe of an incense burner exemplify traditional Maghrebian artistry. There is nothing
of the grimy bohemia standard in French artists’ portraits, but rather an impeccable toilette and dis-
creet signs of wealth. Oriental identity and occidental activity combine in the person of one man,
viewed in impassive profile and dubbed for the occasion “First Muslim Painter.” It is as if Mammeri
wished to forestall any impression of cultural apostasy that might arise from the sight of his occi-
dentalist paintings. His very e¤ort to use that system of expression, to master its language, can be
considered empowering, an accession to arenas of status usually proscribed the “native.”

We have seen that Mammeri did accede rapidly to success and recognition: at least three one-man
shows between 1921 and 1931, extensive critical coverage, biographical articles. Yet holding the post
of caïd may have counted against Mammeri in nationalist indigenous circles in Algeria and may help
explain, Pouillon suggests, his return to Morocco in 1927.47 There he took up official posts in Fez and
Rabat before a one-man show in Rabat “earned him the position of inspector of indigenous arts in
Marrakech” in 1929.48 Thus began the final Morocco-based phase of his career, through to his re-
tirement in 1948 (he died back in Kabylia in 1954). His presence in Marrakech and the growth of his
own family gave him a new confidence with the human figure. His large Cheikhates (Les Cheikhates;
location unknown) shows a group of male and female entertainers gathered in a private house. One
critic attributed surprising elements like the strong gaslight and cast shadow of the dancer to Mam-
meri’s familiarity with the local scene.

If Mammeri bettered the garish productions of traveling Orientalists with his Moroccan landscapes
and scenes of women at home and men at the market, he did so “because he lives among them and
understands them.”49 In other words, Mammeri had beaten the colonizers at their own visual game.
It proved impossible, however, to extricate such plaudits from the knowledge that Mammeri had been
promoted by the Franco-Moroccan administration and had chosen a path, as an artist, that suited the
status quo of the colonial regime in matters cultural.

The Path of the Hybrid: Mohammed Racim

Mohammed Racim never had that problem. The language of expression he chose elicited both ad-
miration and uncertainty from the French: the traditional Islamic miniature, modified in ways that
accommodated Western modes of seeing. The road to success in European terms was harder for Racim

Mammeri and Racim 235

than for Mammeri, but his reputation has lasted longer. Unlike Mammeri, who has virtually disap-
peared from the history of art, Mohammed Racim became a major figure in Algerian culture from
the 1930s until his death in 1975.

In contrast to his countryman Mammeri, Mohammed Racim did what an “indigenous” man was
supposed to do when it came to art: practice the Islamic decorative arts, and with distinction. He was
born into an Algerine family of artisans of Turkish origin, whose precolonial prosperity had been
undermined by the French regime ’s confiscation of property.50 By 1880 Racim’s father had reestab-
lished a wood-carving and copper-working business in the Casbah of Algiers; his father’s brother
engraved decorated tombstones. The Racims won commissions for decorating public buildings and
the pavilions of French colonial exhibitions; indeed Arsène Alexandre mentioned the “calligraphies
of the Racim brothers” in his 1905 report on the indigenous arts in Algeria.

Mohammed Racim was born in 1896 and raised “in an art milieu frequented by erudite people and
indigenous notables.”51 Like his older brother, Omar, he was schooled to enter the family workshop,
being sent, as Mustapha Orif explains, to “a school designated ‘for the indigenous,’ where he fol-
lowed studies strongly oriented toward manual work, developing his drawing above all.” Complet-
ing this schooling in 1910, Racim evidently was noticed for his exceptional work by Prosper Ricard
of Jonnart’s new Service of Indigenous Arts. Ricard o¤ered Racim a position as draftsman in the
service ’s Cabinet de dessin. Racim recalled: “From the age of fourteen, I spent part of my days mak-
ing copies and composing carpets, Arab embroideries, ornaments on copper, and sculpted wood des-
tined to furnish models for schools, the workshops of Algeria.”52

Racim’s participation in this state-sponsored program of cultural revival gives his identity a sub-
altern element early on. His visual research into Maghrebian decorative art was fostered by French
colonial interests, albeit of an associationist, even Arabophile cast. This condition of tutelage was
nevertheless matched by Racim’s personal heritage, his family background of artisanal excellence
stretching back to the era of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers. His position as a historical actor be-
speaks a complex confluence of interests. The indigenous neotraditionalism of his art making gave
him the means to navigate many of its potential pitfalls.

Racim seemed drawn by the European concept of the artist, as an escape from the routine work
that racialist ideas about ability assigned the indigenous—as Orif has noted, creative roles at the Ca-
binet de dessin were reserved for Beaux-Arts–trained Frenchmen like Herzig. Racim’s first attempts
at painting were criticized for “having the principal fault of a love of detail, pushed almost to a ma-
nia,” whereas the high art of painting, as the French conceived it, required breadth of scale.

Racim discovered Persian miniatures at this time: an art remote in time and place from contem-
porary Algeria, which was virtually without a local tradition of painting. He first saw such minia-
tures after Ricard’s departure for Morocco in 1914, in a volume at the Cabinet de dessin: “I observed
that they contained a large quantity of details . . . and asked myself if what constituted a defect in

236 Mammeri and Racim

painting might not be a positive quality in the art of illumination.” Racim’s first essays in miniature
painting were guided by technical advice from his uncle and the encouragement of the eminent Ori-
entalist Dinet.

With Dinet a second plank of European tutelage was put in place—an Orientalist painting devoted
to narrating the lives of Algerians, using the language of realist mimesis. According to Racim, Dinet’s
intervention was decisive for his career. But before I turn to the figural miniatures that best express
Racim’s aesthetic hybridity, I want to give an account of his illumination work. Dinet o¤ered Racim
his first commission, to design fifteen full-page decorative medallions containing Koranic inscriptions
in Arabic. These were to ornament the Vie de Mohammed, prophète d’Allah, being prepared by Sli-
man ben Ibrahim and Dinet (whose thirty color plates reproducing paintings I discuss in Chapter 4).

Racim’s illuminations, also printed in color, follow tradition in being ornamented frames for specific
suras, or verses of the Koran (see Plate 14). Stemming from the artistry of the Arabic calligraphers,
such illumination is the oldest of the Islamic arts, carrying with it the religious prestige of the tran-
scribed holy word. Racim’s abiding interest in such illuminations (which he continued to produce
into the 1940s) parallels that of his elder brother. Omar Racim not only practiced such calligraphy
almost exclusively, but early on devoted his life to religion and politics. He became a hezzah, or re-
citer of the Koran, at the mosque and in 1903 was one of those who welcomed the politically con-
tentious Egyptian reformer Sheik Mohammed Abdou to Algiers. In 1912 Omar made a trip to Egypt
and Syria, bringing back with him various Korans and specimens of Arabic illumination.53 By 1913
he was publishing political tracts,54 and during World War I he was arrested by the French security
services for his political activities. He was initially banished, then sentenced to prison “in perpetu-
ity.” Helped no doubt by the interventions of his brother Mohammed (who agitated for Omar’s re-
lease, making gifts of miniatures to people in influential posts), he was later given amnesty and re-
habilitated, to the extent of being o¤ered work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he ran courses on
illumination for indigenous students. Omar Racim was “always the ‘political’ member of the fam-
ily, while his younger brother got on well in French ‘progressivist’ milieux.”55

In this family and in the broader Algerian context, Racim’s involvement in the Vie de Mohammed
and his continuing illumination work can be seen as a moderate ’s affirmation of Islam, as well as the
revival of an art very little practiced in the Maghreb. From the outset Racim was sensitive to the tra-
ditions of illumination from di¤erent parts of the Islamic world and sought to di¤erentiate them in
his titles: thus his second exhibition, in 1918, contained an Illumination in Egyptian Style (Enlumi-
nure de style égyptien) and an Illumination in Persian Style (Enluminure de style persan).56 Racim’s titles
indicate his awareness of being a latecomer, the practitioner of an art without an indigenous tradi-
tion whose revival was based on the study of classical sources.

Illumination was Racim’s bread and butter during the eight years he spent in Paris (1924–32) work-
ing on the page decorations for Henri Piazza’s massive edition, in twelve volumes, of the Thousand

Mammeri and Racim 237

and One Nights in the Mardrus translation. Léon Carré (Mammeri’s old teacher) did the figurative il-
lustrations, Racim the countless page decorations (Fig. 104), a task, he later recalled with bitterness,
that had precluded creative work on miniature painting.

Dinet certainly facilitated the transition from works of textual illumination to the art of minia-
tures. According to Racim, in 1916 “Dinet’s presence was important to me: in this painter’s work the
documentary side and the sense of color delighted me—these were the two qualities I most wanted
to acquire. I hoped to use the image to fix the memory of Algerian costumes on the point of vanish-
ing, as well as scenes of an Arab life in the process of transformation.” Dinet’s subject matter, though
largely contemporary—scenes of indigenous life near Bou-Saâda, key moments from the religious
calendar—also included illustrations of desert folklore. Apart from his rather lurid palette, Dinet re-
jected the tenets of Parisian avant-gardism and worked in a realist, documentary, and perspectivally
correct manner not uncommon among French colonial artists. Racim, while learning from such im-
ages, declared he had “decided to take inspiration from the mise en page of the Persians and to apply
their technique”—a stylistic preference that definitively privileges the oriental over the occidental.
The first time Racim’s work garnered published comment was at the 1919 Salon of the Society of Al-
gerian and Orientalist Artists (where Mammeri also exhibited from 1922). He exhibited a pair of Ko-
ranic illuminations, as well as miniatures like his Persian Hunt (Chasse persane), structured in the Per-
sian manner (Fig. 105). Raoul d’Artenac of La Dépêche algérienne welcomed Racim’s “elegant
arabesques” and “prodigious prolixity,” praising him for reviving the traditions of Persian and Egyp-
tian illumination and predicting (accurately, it turned out), “Here is a young master who could form
a school and give life to an art that is soon likely to disappear.” For Edmond Gojon, Racim “bril-
liantly discredits those who pretend that art dies out in Muslim countries.”57

Those repudiations of conservative theories of cultural decline mesh with Jonnart’s official pol-
icy of encouraging indigenous arts. Like Mammeri, Racim must have seemed to some a living
justification of their hopes for a productive culture of association. Mustapha Orif argues persuasively
that Racim was guided in his program of nostalgic recovery of a precolonial past by the thinking and
publications of the Comité du Vieil Alger. Since its founding in January 1905, this surprising lobby-
ing group of academics, public servants, and enlightened businessmen had been revaluing the in-
digenous heritage by attempting to safeguard the surviving precolonial buildings and monuments of
Algiers. It was established after Henri Klein, a young correspondent for La Dépêche algérienne, un-
dertook a press campaign against the destruction of Turkish buildings and a poor appreciation of lo-
cal history. Klein appealed to the heritage of Algiers as the Roman settlement named Icosium, as well
as a site of old French heroism. (It was there, for example, that Charles V’s attack on the Ottoman
Regency had failed to take the corsair capital in 1541.) In 1905 Klein’s campaign was rewarded by
an initial grant from a retired French officer, which set o¤ a spate of subscriptions to the fledgling
society (of which Klein was secretary): from Governor-General Jonnart; the mayor; the deputy of

238 Mammeri and Racim

figure 104 Mohammed Racim, frontispiece for Les mille nuits et une nuit, 1930.

239

figure 105
Mohammed Racim,
Persian Hunt, gouache
heightened with gold,

ca. 1920.

Algiers; writers like Barrucand and Alexandre; the artists Dinet, Rochegrosse, Mme Ben Aben, and
Herzig; and senior civil servants, magistrates, and businessmen. Most of the Comité du Vieil Alger’s
work over the next decade was campaigning (with mixed success) to preserve the Turkish heritage:
to protect or restore Moorish buildings, renew the tile work of public fountains, erect monuments,
and affix commemorative plaques in the streets of Algiers. Its statutes called for it to “safeguard every-
thing that gives a picturesque attraction to our city, and discover ways of fighting the banality that
new constructions give it.”58 The many lectures and walking tours the committee organized to sites
of architectural or historical merit formed the bulk of Klein’s fascinating annual, the Feuillets d’El-

240 Mammeri and Racim

Djezaïr. Beginning publication in 1910, these annuals are contemporaneous with Racim’s early work
at the Cabinet de dessin, and as Orif suggests, he was very likely taken by the Feuillets, “in which
the stories of a rais, . . . a dey, . . . a saint, or a building were told.” In return, it seems likely that the
first buyers of Racim’s works were members of the Comité du Vieil Alger.

The tendency of the colonizer to o¤er packaged notions of national heritage back to the colo-
nized is one that Racim both imbibed and had to contend with.59 His personal strategic historical con-
sciousness is nevertheless illuminated in his later comment: “I hoped to use the image to fix the mem-
ory of Algerian costumes on the point of vanishing, as well as scenes of an Arab life in the process
of transformation.” Connoisseurs in Paris helped Racim enrich his knowledge of Oriental minia-
tures. His publisher, Piazza, was instrumental in introducing Racim during the 1920s to a group of
collectors and scholars of Persian and Mughal miniatures. Known already to Orientalists like
Delacroix and Ingres, Persian miniatures had been shown at intervals in the great expositions, and
by the 1893 Muslim Art Exhibition, collections were held by connoisseurs like Louis Gonse and Hakky
Bey. After 1900 Oriental miniatures were displayed more often, with exhibitions in Paris in 1903,
1907, and 1912.60 Indeed Racim’s identification with the Persian miniature might even be seen as an
implantation of Western connoisseurship. But one must guard against arguments that reduce Racim
too much to the position of subaltern. One could argue with equal force that he instrumentalized the
Parisian collectors, just as he had used the information-gathering resources of the Cabinet de dessin
and the Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr to extend his knowledge of Turkish history and heritage in Algiers.
After Gabriel Esquer’s monumental Iconographie historique de l’Algérie was published in 1929, Racim
probably used it in a similar way.61

In his 1960 book on Racim, which reworks an article for the prestigious Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
Georges Marçais (professor of Islamic art and architecture at the University of Algiers) stresses the
artist’s profound sense of what he had lost to the colonial era. In Algiers, he wrote, the public mem-
ory of the “historic days of the corsairs . . . [was] not completely lost.” Racim’s images of women,
such as Casbah Terraces (Les terrasses de la casbah, Fig. 106) or The Day after the Wedding (Le lende-
main du mariage), do more than pay homage to Delacroix’s Women of Algiers and the iconography
of Orientalism. Marçais affirms: “These are the marriage feasts at which he was present with his fa-
ther, or those intimate gatherings of women that he witnessed as a small boy.”62

Racim’s images of women, like those of his coreligionist and countryman Mammeri, rewrite the
degrading protocols of Orientalist painting. When out in the street, women of high standing are
shown with the full veil; when pictured in their own interiors or on rooftop terraces, their faces are
revealed, albeit on miniature scale. A precise grasp of manners and gesture pervades these scenes of
gently smiling figures. Clearly Racim, unlike most French Orientalists, had never studied the live
model, and for that reason his image of the female body is stiffly decorous, closer, indeed, to the
seventeenth-century Mughal models he admired than to the academic figure.

Mammeri and Racim 241

figure 106
Mohammed Racim,
Casbah Terraces, gouache
heightened with gold,

n.d.

Perspective is a great marker of hybridity in Racim’s work. As Marçais notes, “Living in the twen-
tieth century, Mohammed Racim could not pretend to the complete absence of . . . laws of perspec-
tive that the Persian miniaturists did not possess. He had to find . . . artifices that rendered perspective
implicit without imposing it on our attention. This he achieved by placing the horizon very high, . . .
by recalling the convergence of lines, . . . by the paving of a courtyard or the carpets in a room.”63
Yet Racim seldom employs a perspective that reads as correct to the point of transparency. In some
of his early compositions, such as his miniature The Hunt (La Chasse) in the National Museum of Fine
Arts of Algiers, the horizon is so high that the figures of horsemen are laid out up the space with lit-
tle diminution of scale—an appropriation of classical Persian compositions.

More usually Racim employs a bird’s-eye perspective to contain a panoramic view. In such works,
subtle distortions of perspective are evident. In Casbah Terraces the foreground is tipped up sharply
toward the viewer. Beyond the four women, in the vista of Casbah rooftops descending to the old Al-
giers port, the view slips down and out, curving back up to a horizon of hills and a sunset that seems

242 Mammeri and Racim

figure 107 Bayot, Terraces of Algiers, lithograph, 1837.

the only perspectivally solid element in the picture. Racim’s lavish foreground evokes a-perspectival
Mughal miniatures, while his panorama refers to the European topographical tradition. That tradi-
tion is exemplified in an early view of a comparable motif by the artist Bayot (Fig. 107), from Berbrug-
ger’s classic volume Algérie historique, pittoresque, et monumentale (1843), surely available in the Al-
giers National Library, if not the Cabinet de dessin itself.64 Racim uses “perspective as symbolic form”
(Panofsky’s phrase): his refusal to draw in irreproachable perspective (as in Bayot) richly asserts his
Maghrebian painterly identity. The worthy emulator Mammeri took pleasure in reiterating his mas-
tery of perspective, while the virtuoso hybrid Racim enjoyed teasing its codes.

Despite Racim’s working in a medium that was marginal in the hierarchy of European visual arts,
a public in Algiers began to form for this artist who exemplified simultaneously a preservationist men-
tality and, more clearly than Mammeri, the possibility of exalting the indigenous. The breakthrough
year was 1923. Exhibiting at the Salon of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, Racim was
awarded a grant from the municipality of Algiers, and the medal of the Society of French Oriental-

Mammeri and Racim 243

ist Painters of Paris (linked with the colony through Dinet, Rochegrosse, and many others). The
jury for Racim’s awards included local Orientalists and figures from the Algiers arts establishment.65
Press coverage was extensive, with warm appreciations in L’Afrique du Nord illustrée and La Dépêche
algérienne, whose critic Barrucand, previously a supporter of Mammeri, claimed, “Nobody today,
not even in Tehran, composes the faithful rhythms of a Persian miniature better than he.”66

Barrucand’s perspective is once again worth singling out. Considered a “militant indigenophile”
by some colonists,67 Barrucand was receptive both to the miniature as an art form and to the histori-
cist material in which Racim specialized. In 1924 he wrote the following appreciation of miniatures
on the themes of Moorish Granada and old Algiers:

The Oriental miniature . . . has found in our North Africa a representative who will
make his mark. M. Mohammed Racim exhibits at the Orientalists two admirable com-
positions, distinguished by their sense of spectacle, their luxury, and their tradition.
The Splendor of the Granada Caliphate (Splendeur du Khalifat de Grenade), with its
surround of Andalusian verses, is at once visionary and nostalgic, while the Moorish
Idyll (Idylle maure) of old Algiers is equally a page of precious visual poetry. The
ornamented presentation of the first sura of the Koran is a marvel of coloration and
ritual exactitude. For this vitrine alone, the exhibition of Algerian artists deserves to
be called Orientalist.68

For Barrucand, Racim’s work exemplified an “Orientalist” art better than the e¤orts of any Euro-
pean artist traveler, with their hackneyed perspectives.

Notwithstanding praise from such a quarter, one must suppose that the Algerian colonial author-
ities found nothing subversive in Racim’s work: like Mammeri and the Moroccan administration (but
less energetically), they used Racim’s art to exemplify government aims at the next great Parisian ex-
position, the Arts Decos in 1925. Racims of the preceding generation had showed at expositions,
but only as decorators or traditional arts manufacturers. When Mohammed and Omar Racim were
included in the Algerian hall of the North African pavilion, they were presented as exponents of the
newly licensed art of the miniature.69

It is worth recalling Barrucand’s expression of pride in what he considered the gem of the Al-
gerian contingent at the Arts Decos: “The beautiful ornamented inscriptions of Omar Racim leave
those of the other sections far behind.” One must assume that Omar had been not only released from
prison but also rehabilitated by the regime of the newly appointed progressive, Governor-General
Violette. Edmond Gojon, while praising Mohammed Racim’s work, expressed a desire to see “more
durable monuments” come from his brush.70 Gojon’s ambivalence about the value of the miniature
exemplifies the responses that dogged Racim before he was awarded the Grand Prix Artistique de

244 Mammeri and Racim

l’Algérie in 1933. That was the first such award to an “indigène.” Soon after, Racim was named pro-
fessor of drawing at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, where he inspired an entire gen-
eration of Algerian artists in miniature painting.

François Pouillon has written, “The heart of Orientalist artifice . . . consists . . . in presenting a
society as virgin—as if at the moment of unveiling—with the corruption of history and of contact
with the foreigner systematically erased.”71 Racim’s work redefines that convention. The subjects of
his miniature history paintings are all situated specifically, in the time before the French invasion of
North Africa, in the heroic days of the corsairs of the Barbary Coast, and the still earlier Moorish
caliphate of Andalusia. In his reconstruction of those far-o¤ times, everything was new: time had not
yet eroded, nor the European invaders struck at, the pristine polychromed buildings and their ex-
quisite details.

A little history of precolonial Algeria is needed here.72 Racim’s particular love is the splendor of
the corsairs, the state-sanctioned privateers of Algiers whose profession was the systematic pillag-
ing of European and thus Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. The most famous corsairs were
the brothers Barbarossa (“Redbeard”), of Levantine origin. They were called by the people of Al-
giers to fight against the Spanish, who since 1492 had been a growing force along the North African
littoral and by 1516 threatened Algiers. The Spanish had built a fortress called the Peñon on the largest
of the port’s islets, which gave the city its name (El-Djezaïr = Algiers; djezaïra = island). The elder
Barbarossa failed to take the Peñon but consolidated his strength by forming alliances along the Bar-
bary Coast. In 1529 his brother Khaïr Ed Dine succeeded in destroying the Peñon with the aid of the
sultan of Constantinople, who placed Algiers under Ottoman protection.

Barbarossa fortified the port and made Algiers a sort of military republic, led after his death by a
series of outstanding corsair beys. Placed under increasingly direct Ottoman control, the Barbary
state of Algiers went on to flourish for almost three centuries on the proceeds of its maritime activ-
ity, whether described as brigandage or holy war. In its heyday during the seventeenth century Al-
giers held up to thirty thousand European captives, slaves used to man its galleys and serve its house-
holds and hostages held for ransom. The great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was ransomed
by his family after five years’ captivity, a tale that makes a fascinating episode in his Don Quixote.73

Following Orientalist convention (even stereotypy) from the other side, Racim’s work avoids such
unsavory topics. Instead it abounds with brisk martial feeling and positive images of the corsair cap-
ital, the famous triangle of its white buildings rising up from the blue sea, a topography that seems
to have been inspired by the many old views and maps of Algiers—all made from a vantage point
at sea—that had been published in Europe. Racim must have closely studied the Turkish and Bar-
bary galleys recorded in old books and engravings (Fig. 108). He meticulously details such craft in
works like Galleys Fleeing before the Storm or the remarkable Naval Battle (Bataille navale, Fig. 109).

Racim’s erudition is evident in this image, where a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon struggles

Mammeri and Racim 245

figure 108
Barbary Galley,
Flemish engraving,
seventeenth century.

figure 109
Mohammed Racim,
Naval Battle, gouache
heightened with gold,

ca. 1932.

246

with a Barbary galleass flying the distinctive Turkish colors. The painting depicts the fiercest rivals
in the Mediterranean, the sailors of the Catholic kings of Spain who, having expelled the Moors from
Andalusia, were now losing control of the Barbary Coast to their Turkish-led allies.74 In such a scene
Racim went far beyond the Islamic miniature, reworking models probably studied in the museums
of Europe, in particular the Dutch masters of marine painting who occasionally depicted such com-
bats.75 A visual sophisticate, he evidently used his sources pragmatically.

Racim’s early interest in Barbarossa had been cemented by a failed commission to illustrate the
life of the “Bey of Beys.”76 The artist went on to paint Barbarossa in a variety of miniatures—as
commander on the forecastle of a gilded galliot; as protector of the city (in his two-page miniature
History of Islam); and as the subject of a posthumous portrait, inscribed “Barbarossa, Founder of the
Algerian State.” Here is unequivocal heroizing, with all the schemata of political icon making. From
the Maghrebian perspective, a figure who for many was the “Scourge of Christendom” is the found-
ing father of a state that had begun to take on the lineaments of nationhood as a result of Khaïr Ed
Dine ’s rule. It is easy to see how Algerian nationalists came to prize such imagery before and after
they ousted the French in 1962.

Similar in inspiration is the portrait of the late-eighteenth-century figure Rais Hamidou, in The
Rais (Le raïs; see Plate 15). Georges Marçais o¤ers a “folkloric” explanation of such images: “The
rais . . . is a master of a corsair ship, a member of the powerful corporation . . . on which the fortune
of Algiers rests. Traditional rivals of the Turks who make up the militia . . . among [the rais] one
finds native-born Berbers [like Hamidou] and Levantines like Barbarossa . . . and people from Eu-
ropean countries who, . . . thanks to a more or less sincere conversion, have embraced the adven-
turous but lucrative career of Barbary pirate.”77 Hamidou stands before an exact reconstruction of
Algiers harbor, a figure of great dignity, a dynamic leader acting under the aegis of the sovereign
Algerian nation. The exalted character of Racim’s portraits of the rais is all the more evident given
the fear these captains inspired in Europe. In these works Racim betrays a fondness for images of
strong patriarchal leadership. But even as he reveals a nationalist aspiration, he employs a Western
iconography to express it: the full-length portrait for military leaders that originated with Renais-
sance painters like Titian. That is the double bind Benedict Anderson detected: in colonial situations
Western technologies of communication (painting is one of them) normalize and intensify ideolo-
gies of nationhood around key concepts and historiographical figures.78

In reviews of Racim’s exhibitions in Algiers and Paris the French critics, who broadly approved
his work, as has been seen, seemed not to detect the political resistance that is apparent from a post-
colonial pers5pective. After all, Racim repudiated colonial modernity by using documents to recon-
struct Moorish buildings demolished by the French and to people them with figures of a respectful
ethnic exactitude. Such was the fabric of Racim’s imaginary counter-nation. And in heroizing Bar-
barossa, the rais, or the Andalusian caliphs, he deals in images of nations as embodied by their
leaders.

Mammeri and Racim 247

But “nation” must be understood broadly here—whether it comprised the smallish Regency of
Algiers, ultimately under imperial Ottoman protection, or the much grander Maghrebian cultural
and political unity, which once stretched all the way from Tripoli to the palaces of Granada and Toledo.
The nationalists of the Etoile Nord-africaine movement (initially banned because of its close asso-
ciation with the anticolonial French Communist Party) called for complete independence from colo-
nial rule for all the nations of the Maghreb—not only Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, but also Tripoli-
tania (Libya), which had been annexed by the Italians. The leading polemicist, Ferhat Abbas, used
the nom de plume Abencerage—after a great Moorish family of Granada—in 1931 to sign his Jeune
Algérien, a text that codified his modernizing, pro-bilingual, yet Islamic movement (modeled on
the Young Turks of Kemal Atatürk). Even the famous slogan of the popular Algerian reformist
theologian Abdelhamid Ben Badis in 1931—“Arabic is my language, Algeria my country, Islam my
religion”79—conveys the importance of transnational cultural and religious considerations in the con-
sciousness of Algerian colonial subjects in Racim’s era.

Although Racim was himself a cosmopolitan political moderate who was close to the French cul-
turati and had married a Swede, his art suggests that he shared some of the nascent Algerian cultural
nationalism of the day. In 1932 an indigenous Arabic journal associated with the Islamic reformist
movement characterized Racim in politicized terms as an “Algerian Muslim painter who has raised
the head of Muslim and Arab Algeria with pride, thanks to the inspiring beauty of his art and his
original paintings, in which he sets out the most brilliant and most beautiful pages of Islamic civi-
lization, pages of glory and pride in this world.”80 Three decades later, with the revolution of 1962
and the ousting of the French, nationalist appreciations of Racim proliferated, as Pouillon has shown
by citing the writings of Bachir Hadj Ali and later authors. For Bachir, Racim’s Casbah Terraces, as
reproduced in La Nouvelle Critique, reflected the recent period of turmoil: “This painting at once
constitutes an accusation against colonialism and proves . . . that all national art produced under the
occupation is politically engaged art.”81 Dreaming away the modern colonial reality of twentieth-
century Algiers, Racim issued an invitation to recapture, in images of the past, a cultural focus that
might outlast the reality of colonial occupation.

248 Mammeri and Racim

10 Colonial Museology in Algiers

T he paintings of two indigenous évolués were a small a¤air, a marginal matter in overall
views of North African culture provided by the French. In the most significant collec-
tion of painting assembled in a French overseas possession—that of the National Mu-
seum of Fine Arts of Algiers—Racim and Mammeri were but curious footnotes to the grand nar-
rative of French art. When that museum opened in 1930 and for decades afterward, it was far from
being an instrument of bicultural association. On the contrary, it privileged European vision in the
forum of elite French culture—a forum that virtually excluded indigenous participation. Rather
than propose a history of art on a model of equal representation for the diverse peoples of Alge-
ria, the Algiers museum upheld French art as the one great exemplar of civilization. The museum
was an instrument—at best, to educate the indigenous, but primarily to disseminate imperial
largesse to colonials remote from the metropole.

The Algiers museum and its context make a fitting close to this book on painting in North Africa
from the 1880s into the modern era. The museum was a key monument of the French celebration of
the centenary of Algeria. The great International Colonial Exposition at Vincennes (on the eastern
edge of Paris) was itself pushed back to 1931 by its commissioner, Marshal Lyautey, “to avoid any

249

interference with the grandiose ceremonies envisaged in 1930 for the Centenary of French Algeria.”1
Although the Vincennes exposition has deservedly been the subject of much study, few scholars have
inquired into its predecessor on North African soil.2 The Vincennes fair left one permanent monu-
ment in Paris, the Museum of the Colonies (now the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts).3
But a more considerable built legacy—a whole suite of museums and smaller cultural centers, at the
heart of which is the Algiers museum, foremost among all state representations of Orientalism—
remained after the centenary of Algeria.4

The Centenary of French Algeria

The panoply of Algerian museums is inseparable from the political context of the centenary for which
they were built. Plans had been developing at a government level since 1922, and as the prominent
historian Charles-Robert Ageron has shown, they were a political football for much of the decade.5
The centenary meshed the sense of French grandeur in imperial achievement with the vexed ques-
tion of political representation for a disenfranchised indigenous population. The main liberal vision
of the centenary was that of Governor-General Maurice Violette, a left-leaning appointee who had
made his reputation by exposing administrative abuses in French Indochina in 1913. From 1925 un-
til late 1927 (when, forced from his post in Algiers, he returned to Paris to serve in the Chamber of
Deputies) Violette pressed for new laws that would give a greater political voice to the marginalized
indigenous majority of Algerians.

The version of the statut indigène (legislation on the status of the indigenous) in force since 1919
precluded voting by all indigenous Algerians (except Jews); it imposed double the usual single year’s
military service and limited travel outside Algeria. Although the growing number of indigenous Al-
gerians who could prove their competence in spoken and written French could apply for naturaliza-
tion as French citizens, fewer than seven hundred of them pursued that option between 1919 and 1925.
(As Patricia Lorcin has pointed out, naturalization meant abandoning the tenets of Islamic law—a
form of apostasy that discouraged many.)6 Thus most indigenous Algerians were unable to partici-
pate in electing the three senators and six deputies who represented their country in the parliament
in Paris. Moderate indigenous movements like that of Ferhat Abbas’s Jeunes Algériens, pursuing mod-
ernization and francophony, campaigned for the creation of an equal number of indigenous deputies
and senators. It took a “Frenchman from France” like Violette to acknowledge the frustration of the
évolués:

There are in Algeria one hundred thousand indigenous people on whom one can
count absolutely. . . . It would be a mortal error to continue to treat these men as
subjects. A lawyer or businessman who knows he is in appearance and coi¤ure

250 Colonial Museology in Algiers

almost indistinguishable from the European . . . judges himself humiliated when his
full civil and political capacity is doubted. Six out of ten such men are ready to adopt
the French homeland [patrie] without an afterthought, but if the French homeland
refuses them, . . . they will find a homeland for themselves, and we will have been
responsible for it.7

Prophetic words, but for most French Algerians the indigenous vote was to be resisted at all costs.
They reasoned that if the indigenous were given equal rights, they would outvote the settlers, whose
position would become untenable. In Paris French-Algerian interests easily blocked all but the most
insignificant improvements in political representation for the indigenous.

The painter Etienne Dinet, who by the 1920s was known as both the most prominent Orientalist
in Algeria and a steadfast supporter of indigenous interests, had the ear of Governor-General Vio-
lette during his brief tenure.8 Dinet comments on several issues related to the coming centenary,
confiding to his sister after Violette ’s dismissal:

As for the centenary itself . . . I am certain that no honest reform in favor of the Mus-
lims will be made. Success in the eyes of the world is assured (except in its treatment
of the Muslims) because France has realized an admirable work, but all the hearts of
truly honest Muslims will be profoundly sickened. . . . The centenary should be the
occasion for reforms cementing the union of the French colonists’ Muslim brothers
by the blood that all these heroes shed side by side during the war. . . . If it is not,
Bolshevism will conquer the ten to fifteen million Muslims in North Africa.9

The reforms Dinet had in mind are evident in Violette ’s 1928 bill in Paris calling for the celebration
of the centenary “as the liberation of the Barbary States; let us not speak of conquest,” he advised
the Chamber of Deputies. Violette proposed creating centenary schools and hospitals, abrogating
the law on indigeneity, equalizing military service, and electing just two indigenous deputies (one
Arab, one Kabyle) to the Chamber in Paris.10

The centenary that eventuated was far from such a conception. As presided over by André Tardieu
(French minister of the interior) and his newly appointed governor-general Pierre Bordes, it had a
triumphalist ethos (Fig. 110). The centenary sought to demonstrate to Algerians, the metropole, and
the world that the French had wrested a vast country from misery, ignorance, and political anarchy
and had made it the hyperproductive jewel in a new French imperium. Incessantly drawing parallels
with North Africa as the ancient breadbasket of the Roman Empire, the centenary was in a sense the
apotheosis of the colonial novelist and polemicist Louis Bertrand’s campaign, conducted in his writ-
ings since at least 1900. Bertrand, now a member of the Académie Française, in 1930 published a novel

Colonial Museology in Algiers 251

to mark the centenary (Le roman de la conquête). His earlier Villes d’or, in the meantime, was cited
as authority by the celebration’s proponents: “The French Africa of today is Roman Africa. . . . As
Frenchmen, we can only rejoice that it is so. Returning to Africa, we have done nothing more than
recuperate a lost province of latinity.”11

According to the logic of latinity, the Regency of Algiers, so dear to Racim, was indigent. The
rhetoric of French triumphalism infiltrated even the respected Revue des deux mondes in Paris: “The
Arab, the intruder, the invader, has brought into North Africa only misery, ruin, decomposition, and
death. As Latins, descendants of its first and unique civilizers, inheritors of their e¤ort, we represent
the highest and most ancient Africa. We have not conquered; we have taken back what has been
wrenched from us.”12 Such writing, with its parallels to the antisemitic language of the Fascist regimes
in Italy (whose claims in colonizing Tripolitania, or modern Libya, took similar lines), is an extreme
version of the thinking di¤used by the centenary propaganda machine. Ageron has shown that out
of a budget of over ninety million francs, the centenary earmarked six million for propaganda, us-
ing the press, radio, books, conferences, and the visual media of posters and stamps.13

Two of the visual propaganda images show the more moderate, conciliatory face of the cente-
nary as promoted by its commissioner, Gustave Mercier. The commemorative medal designed by
the Orientalist sculptor Pierre-Marie Poisson (Fig. 111) shows two powerfully masculine figures, a
Kabyle chief and a French colonist in a topee, shaking hands before a pillar formed of Roman lic-
tors’ fasces topped with the bonnet rouge, French symbol of liberty. Thus the image, with antiquity
as a backdrop, recalls the principles of fraternity and liberty of the French Revolution and expresses
the mutual respect in which, as Mercier’s report puts it, the steady gaze of the two men “says that
each knows what he owes to the other.”14

The most widely distributed of five large centenary posters, by Dormoy, also uses this image of
fraternity. (A version of Cauvy’s poster [see Fig. 63] was another popular centenary image.) One
hundred and twenty-five thousand copies of Dormoy’s poster were printed; the maquette is illus-
trated in Figure 112. In this paean to Algerian agricultural production, another helmetted colonist
stands before a bearded indigenous farmer, against a backdrop of blue sky and wheat fields worked by
a burnous-clad figure on a late-model tractor. Pictorially the colonist dominates the Algerian, a sym-
bol for the way the French, historically, had appropriated and worked (with indigenous manpower)
almost all the arable land. The foreground cornucopia of grapes, olives, wheat, tomatoes, citrus, and
stone fruit is common in the iconography of the centenary.

The main set piece of the celebrations was the Exposition of Oran, the second largest city in Al-
geria. Drawing on the well-worn precedent of metropolitan expositions and colonial fairs, it empha-
sized agricultural produce, mining, and new machinery for colonial work in the Algerian provinces,
French Indochina, and West Africa. The centenary’s grand narrative of colonial mise en valeur and
development was also evident in the new radio transmitter at Les Eucalyptus, outside Algiers, one

252 Colonial Museology in Algiers

figure 110 The Monument aux morts, Algiers. Boy Scouts salute the fallen of World War I, 1930.

figure 111
Pierre-Marie Poisson,
Centenary of French
Algeria medal, 1930.

253

figure 112
Dormoy, Algeria, Land

of Great Agricultural
Production, maquette for
centenary poster, 1930.

of the most powerful in the world, designed to send reports of the festivities as far afield as Hanoi
and Washington.15

The greatest irritant to the indigenous population was apparently the raft of temporary festivities
for the Algerian tour of French President Gaston Doumergue. Despite the warnings of authorities
like Louis Massignon, the organizers of the centenary pressed ahead with a program of “fireworks,
illuminations, nautical jousts, galas, and carousels,” a visit by the French fleet, and extensive military
reenactments.16 Indigenous involvement in various ceremonies was sought, and in some cases ob-

254 Colonial Museology in Algiers

figure 113 Indigenous Chiefs Await the President of the French Republic, 1930.

tained (Fig. 113).17 Mercier’s official report was illustrated with equestrian fantasias and French and
native soldiers in the costumes of 1830. The one party that planned a protest and boycott of the cen-
tenary, the Communist-aligned and Paris-based Etoile Nord-africaine, had been outlawed in 1929.
Well before the festivities Dinet condemned the official flattery of the indigenous leadership: “It is
not by dubbing all the Bach-Aghas who are illiterate in French and Arabic Grand Knights of the Le-
gion of Honor for ‘exceptional service ’ that we will revive the prestige of France!”18

The tangible benefits of the centenary for indigenous Algerians were slim: five million francs’ worth
of works, less than the budget for propaganda. The main project, seen by the government as pro-
viding both cultural recognition and the hope of earnings, was the creation of workshops for the
production of indigenous art in Kabylia. Experience dating back to the Jonnart regime must have as-
sured the French that such schools, dedicated to pottery and weaving, were politically productive.
The remaining funds were used to build a few housing estates for the elderly in Algiers and Oran,
and to provide a few subventions to hospitals and mosques. As for gestures toward indigenous rights,
little occurred beyond the reinstatement of two traditional titles for Arab leaders and the disman-
tling of a court considered biased. Given the paucity of these reforms, the military reenactments were
all the more o¤ensive. As the reformist Muslim theologian Ben Badis put it: “A century would have

Colonial Museology in Algiers 255

figure 114 The Salle Pierre Bordes, concert hall in Algiers, 1930.

been enough to heal the wounds, but today heartless men seek to resuscitate these distant memories
and to revive hatred and rancor. All these military marches and vain parades in which the pride of
the vanquisher finds satisfaction constitute a supreme attack on our dignity and an insult to the mem-
ory of our glorious fathers.”19

The largest sum in the budget was allocated for constructing the permanent cultural institutions
that would commemorate the centenary. The Salle Pierre Bordes, a state-of-the-art concert hall in
Algiers, was one of them (Fig. 114), but more than fifteen million francs was spent building muse-
ums in the three great centers, Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. That of Oran, the Demaeght Mu-
seum, combined a museum of fine arts (housing both antiquities and European paintings) with new
facilities for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the municipal library. Its grandiose structure cost more
than five million francs to erect. In Constantine, after a failed attempt to wrest a Turkish palace from
the army administration, the new Gustave Mercier Museum was built. It had a historical and ar-
chaeological focus.20 The Algiers museum complemented the others. It exhibited modern French
painting and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This modernist brief of the Algiers museum, however, needs to be seen against the flurry of muse-
ological works undertaken in Algiers for the centenary. Existing historical collections at the Mustapha
Museum were improved, and the installation of the Bardo Museum, emphasizing prehistory and Al-

256 Colonial Museology in Algiers

figure 115 Installation of the Armée d’Afrique, Casbah Museum, 1930.

gerian ethnography, was completed. Based on the famous Bardo Palace museum in Tunis, the Bardo
Museum was housed in a gracious Turkish villa purchased by the government in 1926. Finally, the
new Museum of the Casbah was installed in a deconsecrated mosque to display souvenirs of the orig-
inal Armée d’Afrique and the “great indigenous families” that had assisted the French (Fig. 115).
Equivalent displays were planned for the metropole: at the Petit Palais in Paris important paintings
from Versailles and the Louvre vied with paraphernalia lent by the descendants of the French high
command. Also in Paris, this time in the Louvre itself, Raymond Escholier organized a major retro-
spective of Delacroix’s art.21

Prehistory of the Museum of Fine Arts

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers was more than a creation of the centenary that funded
its construction, however. It was the result of a late-nineteenth-century proposal that paralleled the
e¤orts of many regional towns in mainland France to endow themselves with such monuments to
self-improvement and civic identity.22 But in the vexatious environment of a settler culture estab-
lished by military rule, it had taken some sixty years to set up the first museum in Algiers, the Mustapha
Museum, devoted to Roman antiquities and Islamic objets d’art. During the liberal governor Cam-

Colonial Museology in Algiers 257

bon’s administration, about 1897, the new Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists called for a mu-
seum of painting and sculpture. At the time, a diverse collection of pictures was scattered—in the
town hall, the municipal theater, and the Society of Fine Arts, “a hall with a rough and repellent char-
acter, somewhat like a barn.”23 As the author of the first catalogue of the Municipal Museum recalled
in 1911, “the inadequate space, the lack of security for the pictures, and the bad light prevented this
embryo from developing. Because word of these limitations had been conveyed to the minister of
public instruction and fine arts [in Paris], Algiers was systematically excluded during the annual dis-
tribution of works acquired by the state.”24 The author understands the French government’s pol-
icy on transferring works of art to provincial museums, which, as Daniel Sherman has shown, since
the Napoleonic era had served the ideological function of disseminating enlightenment to French-
men far from the capital. To qualify for the transfers a town needed a museum building meeting pro-
fessional standards of security, lighting, and conservation. Under the Third Republic a team of in-
spectors toured France assessing museums: very likely the Algiers municipal collection had been
inspected under this system and found wanting.25

When Arsène Alexandre reported on the Algerian arts in 1905, he devoted two pages to the as yet
unbuilt museum of painting and sculpture, suggesting the grounds of the Palais d’Eté as a site and,
surprisingly, stressing the aesthetic hazards of accepting state transfers of contemporary works.26 In
1908 the campaign for a fine arts museum gathered weight with the petitioning of municipal authorities
by members of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists. They lamented that the capital of
French North Africa—center of government and tourism—had no museum and was thus deprived
of gifts from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and generous donors. They empha-
sized the loss of a potential market: “Winter tourists, on somber and morose days, have no distrac-
tion and are confined to their hotels.” And they pointed to another, future, audience: “A museum is
completely indispensable to the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts and is one of the most powerful ways
of imbuing the neo-French generations with the spirit of our race and, as a result, joining the mother
country and her adopted children.”27

Such arguments for cultural reconciliation had an e¤ect: Mayor Altairac of Algiers and his coun-
cil moved in February 1908 to purchase and renovate the old Campement Militaire, an army admin-
istration building in the downtown Rue de Constantine. When the work was completed, the build-
ing was inaugurated on 30 May 1908, with the mayor and Léonce Bénédite presiding.28 Bénédite had
traveled from Paris primarily in his capacity as curator of the Luxembourg Museum, representing
the French state and remarking in his address that the state would no longer show toward Algiers the
“prudent parsimony” it had in the past.29

Bénédite ’s presence at the birth of the Algiers museum indicates yet again his sway over the in-
stitutions of Orientalism. His prediction about state largesse proved right: the Algiers Municipal Mu-
seum’s catalogue in 1911 listed some one hundred and ten paintings, with a full quarter of the works

258 Colonial Museology in Algiers

“gifts of the state,” including classical canvases attributed to Paris Bordone and Claude Lorrain, some
second-string Barbizon painters, and academic Orientalists such as Hippolyte Lazerges and Victor
Prouvé (with his redoubtable Sardanapalus, discussed in Chapter 6). State transfers of contempo-
rary art were avoided, following Alexandre ’s advice. Works on French subjects were lent by the lo-
cal Fine Arts Society, while the Comité du Vieil Alger lent one of several paintings of the Mosque
of Sidi Abd-Er-Rahman, by Alfred Chataud. The second major gifting body to the Algiers Munici-
pal Museum was the Paris Society of French Orientalist Painters, which donated over a dozen works.
Bénédite had surely organized both this donation and that of the state, making him responsible for
almost a third of the collections of the embryonic museum. Local artists or regular visitors of note
such as Dinet, J.-L. Antoni, Charles Cottet, Maxime Noiré, Georges Rochegrosse, and José Silbert
had also personally presented works.30

E¤orts were made, consonant with long-standing French tradition, to represent key monuments
of classical art at the Municipal Museum: modest city funds made it possible to buy casts of antique
statuary from the Louvre and Greek medals from the British Museum. With the addition of draw-
ings, prints, photographs, art books, and a collection of casts of French sculpture from the twelfth
to the fourteenth century funded by the director of fine arts in Paris,31 the heterodox Algiers mu-
seum collection was in place, even if quartered provisionally on a site that, according to the mayor,
would one day see “monuments of fine architecture . . . destined to house the library, the museum,
the école des beaux-arts, and the future conservatory of music.”32 In 1930 the Algiers Municipal Mu-
seum did become the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers.

Alazard and the Centenary Building

Tant vaudra le conservateur, tant vaudra le musée.
– a r s e` n e a l e x a n d r e , Reflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907

In the meantime, however, a casino was built on the Algiers Municipal Museum site, symptomatic of
the building campaigns and values brought on by the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. The fine
arts continued to be a minor a¤air in the capital until the centenary, with its propagandist initiatives.
Officers in charge of the centenary budget, urged on by the dynamic new curator of the museum,
Jean Alazard, assumed the financial burden. That action made the new Algiers National Museum of
Fine Arts a reality.

Alazard is a substantial figure in the history of twentieth-century colonial art. He is known to spe-
cialists in Orientalism for his careful history, L’Orient et la peinture française au XIXe siècle, d’Eugène
Delacroix à Auguste Renoir, unrivaled before the publication of Philippe Jullian’s book in the 1970s.

Colonial Museology in Algiers 259

figure 116 Regnier and Guion, National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, 1930.

Alazard’s book was in fact a by-product of his assembling, in record time, a representative collec-
tion of French Orientalist art for the centenary celebrations, crowned by the opening of the Algiers
museum in 1930. Unlike his predecessors at the Algiers Municipal Museum, Alazard was a profes-
sional scholar of proven credentials. He is still remembered for his thesis on the Florentine portrait
from Botticelli to Bronzino. First published in 1924, it was issued in an American edition as recently as
1968.33 Alazard published eighteen books, ranging wide over Italian art, with significant publications
on Orientalism and a surprising sideline in political essays.34 In about 1922 he left the Institut Français
in Florence to take up a post lecturing in the history of art at the University of Algiers. He soon in-
volved himself with the contemporary Abd-el-Tif artists and thus with issues of Orientalism.35 In
1926 he was made curator of the Algiers Municipal Museum and began to campaign for a new build-
ing. In 1927, supported by the Friends of the Algiers Fine Arts Museum, Alazard began negotiating
with M. Brunel, the financial director of the Algerian government who soon became a senior official

260 Colonial Museology in Algiers

for the centenary, and the mayor of Algiers.36 Brunel supported the project, and Violette approved
the provision of five million francs for the new museum late that year, quite possibly with some hesita-
tion, given Alazard’s Francophile interests.

The prestigious site selected for the new museum was calculated to have maximum impact: above
the Jardin d’Essai at Hamma, a place popular with tourists and painters ever since the days of Fro-
mentin (Fig. 116). The official architects were the local firm of Regnier and Guion that since 1914
had overseen the improvement and restoration of the Jardin d’Essai. Above the familiar section, with
its avenues of figs, dragon palms, and other vegetation, the architects had installed a French garden,
with lawns, ornamental ponds, and flower beds. They sited the museum overlooking this new French
garden, giving it “marvelous views over the whole of this magnificent national park.”37

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers rises above the formal gardens like a massive Ital-
ian villa—a European monument to European painting. Paul Guion employed a typical 1930s Beaux-
Arts plan for a museum building, with a central portico and pavilions at either end. Unornamented,
its rectilinear windows severe, it could almost be called neo-Greek in inspiration,38 a resonance that
makes sense given the centenary’s mythologizing of the Latin heritage of France in the Mediterranean.
The building’s overall statement is one of grandeur, restrained modernity, and permanence—French
Algeria without end. (Few among the French, however, would have concurred with the saying pop-
ular among the indigenous at the centenary: “The French are celebrating the first centenary of French
Algeria. They will not celebrate a second.”)39

The building did make a few gestures to local architecture. The two narrow lower floors, each
with a seventy-meter-long sculpture gallery, back onto a cli¤ and support the main floor, which ex-
tends into the hillside. That upper floor contains the painting galleries, library, and offices. Between
the central library and the wings are two large courtyards containing “Moroccan gardens,” behind
a colonnade and pergola from which there are spectacular views of the Bay of Algiers (Fig. 117).40
In this courtyard zone Guion made use of Mediterranean architectural vocabularies. The peristyle
invokes ancient Roman pleasure gardens; the orientalizing columns, an invented order, have elements
of primitive Doric and neo-Egyptian design in the capitals; the polychrome tiles used to decorate the
shafts of the columns are a North African reference, as is the extensive tile work (by the French-
Algerian ceramist Delduc) of the museum’s floors, the mosaic on the ground floor, for example, in-
spired by the patterns of Berber carpets (Fig. 118).

Such historicizing references were subsumed in the restrained modernity of a building aiming at
a state-of-the-art technical installation. Regnier and Guion, admirers of Auguste Perret, employed
a steel-frame structure with stone and concrete cladding. Skylights, electric lighting, and a system of
filtered and heated air were installed;41 ornament and decorative detail were kept to a minimum so
that “paintings and sculptures alone hold the gaze,” as the curator put it.42

The museum is far from the florid Jonnart style of prewar Algiers or the more refined arabisances

Colonial Museology in Algiers 261

figure 117
Paul Guion, design for
the terrace of the National
Museum of Fine Arts of

Algiers, ca. 1928.
figure 118

Hall of plaster casts,
National Museum of Fine
Arts of Algiers, in 1948.

262

of Lyautey’s protectorate, discussed in Chapter 8. The ethos of the Algerian centenary, which stressed
technological modernity, glancing backward toward the Latin heritage and scanting indigenous in-
terests, made arabisances an implausible option. One visitor from Paris declared the museum “one of
the most noble public monuments of North Africa. Its style is at once resolutely modern and Ori-
ental, yet with nothing of that bazaar frippery that official architects often arrive at.”43

Alazard’s Collections

Jean Alazard, in his various pronouncements on the Algiers museum, conceived the French com-
munity as its principal (if not only) beneficiary.44 He mentioned no other potential constituencies,
either among the indigenous population or among the numerous settlers in Algeria from Italy, Spain,
and Malta. In its prewar petition the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, more inclusively,
had targeted the “adopted children” of the mother country as well as the “neo-French generations.”
And Commissioner Mercier declared the museum an opportunity for the “new Algerian genera-
tions . . . to imbue themselves with the traditions of the French spirit, and European travelers to in-
terest themselves in the vestiges of our past.”45 Other voices spoke of alternative visions. Victor Bar-
rucand, for example, proposed a more exclusively North African focus that would include indigenous
art: “Our Algiers museum must now seek its way in the documentary past—including the manifes-
tations of old indigenous painting; in the labor of contemporaries, and in the character of the country
magnified by the vision of artists. In my opinion the museum of Algiers should not resemble others;
North Africa wants to find within it the luminous revelation of its own sensibility.”46

The collection Alazard assembled between 1927 and 1930, however, imposed the idea of a museum
of French art as appropriate for the colony. It being financially impossible, he reasoned, to collect
works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,47 he focused on building a modern collection. In
it three emphases emerged: modern French painting after 1850 (with a special focus on impression-
ism); French sculpture from the later nineteenth century to 1930, and French Orientalism to 1930.
Although the uneven collections of the old Algiers Municipal Museum required “a harsh weeding
out,”48 they did contain the mixture of French landscape and Orientalism that Bénédite, about 1911,
had established as a logical collecting focus for Algiers. In both his curating and writing Alazard as-
sumed the mantle of Bénédite (who had died in 1925) and continued to apply his historiographical
model in purchasing the works of Orientalists.49

The heart of the collection is a run of later-nineteenth-century French landscapes, from the Bar-
bizon painters through the impressionists. Théodore Rousseau’s Corner of a Forest (Coin d’un fôret)
is followed chronologically by a more substantial Gustave Courbet, The Old Bridge (Le vieux pont),
purchased from a 1929 exhibition in Paris. Landscapes by Camille Corot and Stanislas Lepine es-
tablished the lyric view of the French countryside, and the art of portraiture was well represented

Colonial Museology in Algiers 263

figure 119
Claude Monet,
Rocks at Belle-Ile,
oil on canvas, 1886.

by Henri Fantin-Latour and Gustave Ricard. Fully two rooms were devoted to impressionism, an
area in which Alazard had to purchase extensively. Beginning with two impressive views of French
ports by the “ancestors” Eugène-Louis Boudin and Johan Jongkind, Alazard presented his pièce de
résistance, an 1886 Rocks at Belle-Ile (Les rochers de Belle-Ile), a scene of stormy weather painted by
the “animator of impressionism,” Claude Monet (Fig. 119).50 The Monet sat with Alfred Sisley’s
Bridge at Moret, Winter (Le pont de Moret, e¤et d’hiver) and Camille Pissarro’s Woman at the Win-
dow (Femme à la fenêtre)—all key works in the collection. To these were added a small Renoir land-
scape of Cagnes, a Berthe Morisot interior, and a well-constructed view of the Seine by Armand
Guillaumin. Neo-impressionism was represented by Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac, and Maxi-
milien Luce rather than by Georges Seurat; the suite of modernists closes with a minor Gauguin oil,
Brittany Landscape (Paysage de Bretagne), and a “rather blurry” late pastel of dancers by Degas that,
according to Barrucand, would hardly enable one to form an exact idea of Degas’s “cruel yet witty
spirit.”51

From today’s perspective Alazard’s collection of French art after 1900 seems highly conservative;
yet it was comparable to that of the Luxembourg and of other leading museums. The avant-garde,
from the fauves through the cubists to the surrealists, was avoided entirely. Alazard referred to them
obliquely when he wrote that “many bizarre things” were excluded in preference for works “inspired

264 Colonial Museology in Algiers

figure 120
Antoine Bourdelle,
La France, at National
Museum of Fine Arts
of Algiers, in 1948.

by the French tradition.”52 Thus one finds an Interior (Intérieur) by Pierre Bonnard, a large sketch by
Maurice Denis for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1912), and a small Cagnes landscape of Renoir’s
garden from the period of Matisse ’s apparent dotage in the early 1920s. There were numerous works
by popular artists of the School of Paris from the 1920s like Maurice Utrillo, Maurice de Vlaminck,
Henry de Waroquier, Jacqueline Marval, and Suzanne Valadon.

In a telltale discussion of his extensive collection of the “national art” of sculpture, Alazard com-
pared the “audacious” tendencies of modern painting unfavorably with the calm sense of tradition
in new French statuary, which “hardly participates at all in that unhinging of sensibilities and intel-
lects” evident in recent painting.53 For one visitor to the Algiers museum, “the gallery of sculpture
is the grand attraction. . . . It would be difficult to find in France the equivalent of this collection in
which the most vigorous bronzes . . . by Rodin, Bourdelle, Maillol, Despiau . . . would be presented
in a more impressive ordering or a more flattering light.”54 There were two groups by Antoine-Louis
Barye and a selection of Rodins, his “admirable Age of Bronze (L’âge d’arain), Meditation (Médita-
tion), Springtime (Printemps), and good busts and several works of smaller dimensions.”55 The cen-
terpiece of the gallery was Antoine Bourdelle ’s massive Heracles (Héraklès), a monument to French
ideas of antique valor in an expressionist idiom. Bourdelle ’s vigilant statue France (La France) was
installed at the museum’s entrance (Fig. 120). As contemporary photographs show, an extensive cast

Colonial Museology in Algiers 265

collection occupied the entire ground floor, with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Rodin’s Saint John
the Baptist (Saint Jean Baptiste; see Fig. 118) prominently in view.56

The link between such works and the “Latin heritage” of Roman statuary assembled in the mu-
seums of Mustapha and Constantine (or at the archaeological sites Djemila and Cherchell) formed
part of the curator’s rationale for the focus on sculpture.57 The Islamic community in the Maghreb
had never had a tradition of figurative sculpture, the medium to which the Koran’s theological in-
junction against image making most surely applied. One can imagine the discomfort of an observant
Muslim in galleries of figurative works. But the French in Algeria had long imposed three-dimensional
monuments in more public spaces, starting with the statue of the duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gou-
vernement (1845) and finishing with the various monuments to the Armée d’Afrique and the fallen
military installed for the centenary celebrations.58

How Alazard could have assembled such an impressive collection in so little time is an interesting
question, whose answer reveals the close rapport between the colonial art institution and the metro-
politan art nexus, both commercial and bureaucratic. Records at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-
Mer show that by mid-1928 the centenary budget had made available to Alazard the substantial sum
of one million francs for the purchase of artworks.59 Eventual purchases totaled more than a million
and a half francs, and in the four years following the centenary, substantial further funds must have
been allocated.60

To bridge the physical and communications gap between Algiers and Paris, Alazard asked the di-
rector of fine arts to recommend a panel of experts in Paris to identify works for purchase. Those
experts (senior museum men and advisors to the Luxembourg Museum) encouraged dealers to give
the fledgling museum good prices. Alazard was careful to legitimate his recommendations through
that panel: “I believe that when one is charged with constituting the collections of a museum, it is
best to surround oneself with authorities; this establishes tranquillity for oneself and, what is more,
ensures acceptance on the part of the public, so often ill informed.”61 So, for example, in extolling
his important Monet seascape to Commissioner Mercier, Alazard quoted Raymond Koechlin, pres-
ident of the Council of National Museums, who advised: “I would be very happy for you to acquire
it. The sea is truly admirable; at the price you quoted, it is not dear; it would have a great impact in any
gallery” (his emphasis).62

The prices Alazard paid reflect his aesthetic priorities. The top eight purchases accounted for two-
thirds of his initial centenary budget of one million francs. Only two works exceeded one hundred
thousand francs in value: Delacroix’s Giaour Pursuing the Abductors of His Mistress (Le giaour pur-
suivant les ravisseurs de sa maîtresse, one hundred forty thousand francs) and the Monet seascape
(one hundred thirty thousand francs). His other major purchases, in descending order, were Fantin-
Latour, Courbet, Pissarro, Rodin, and Gauguin (fifty thousand francs each) and Alexandre Decamps,
Gustave Ricard, Berthe Morisot, and Henri-Edmond Cross.63 The curator mobilized two other major

266 Colonial Museology in Algiers

figure 121
François Barry,
Inauguration of the
Statue of the Duc
d’Orléans in the Place
du Gouvernement in
Algiers, 1846, oil on
canvas, n.d.

sources in assembling his collection: gifts of private patrons, and state deposits. The guarantee of the
new building and the sense of occasion provided by the centenary garnered gifts from prominent
figures associated with Orientalism, like Baron Arthur de Chassériau, now president of the Society
of French Orientalist Painters. Wealthy individual Parisians with interests in Algeria also assisted,
for example, the comte de Polignac, who gave both contemporary and rococo works, and the banker
M. David-Weill.64 Finally, prominent members of the Algiers community were donors: Frédéric
Lung, a friend of Dinet’s and patron of the Abd-el-Tifians, gave Albert Besnard’s Fountain at Kouba
(Fontaine de Kouba), and other donations followed.65

Alazard also accelerated the program of state deposits by petitioning the Louvre and Versailles
for old masters and historical works that had a special relevance to Algiers. Thus François Barry’s
Inauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers, 1846 (an 1860s
picture celebrating an earlier event; Fig. 121). From the Château de Versailles, it was unveiled in a
cannily organized interim exhibition of new gifts and purchases that seems to have encouraged the
release of further funds. Barrucand applauded the policy, concluding of the Barry: “See how this
canvas, unnoticed at Versailles, suddenly takes on value when returned to Algiers, where it both il-
lustrates and is incorporated into its history. . . . How many other works of North African inspira-
tion or fabrication sleep in the museums of France?”66

The growing collection of Orientalists di¤erentiated the Algiers museum from any other.
Alazard, taking his cue from Bénédite, acknowledged this as “one of the original features of the Al-

Colonial Museology in Algiers 267

giers museum: for surely it is here, at the doorstep of African exoticism, that one should be able to
study the diverse tendencies of Orientalism.”67 Museums are instruments of instruction, so that a
museum in a North African location that was to foster memory and self-awareness demanded North
African subjects. Here again the Algiers museum replicated in an exotic context the collecting pref-
erences of nineteenth-century French provincial museums, which commonly solicited works from
Paris touching on the history of their region.

The sense in which Algiers was a “national” museum is relevant here. Alazard sought and ob-
tained that official designation, upgrading the museum from “municipal” to “national,” a status re-
quiring the approval of both Algerian and Parisian authorities.68 It meant the museum was one of
the prestigious French “Musées nationaux,” a group that exists to this day. To that extent it symbol-
izes how Algeria, legalistically, was an extension of French territory overseas. But the designation
“national” also meant that the Algiers museum represented the “nation.” If that nation is France,
the museum’s obligation to provide a history of French art is understood. If it is French Algeria,
however, Orientalism’s preeminent role becomes clearer: e¤ectively Alazard, in seeking the change
in status and name, stated that the aesthetic record of the French cultural presence in Algeria was,
simply, the painted European vision of North African peoples and places. The designation “Musée
National” was retained even after the Algerian war of independence and the flight of the French (who
repatriated much of the collection, ultimately restored to Algeria in the late 1960s owing to the e¤orts
of the pro-independence pied-noir director who replaced Alazard, Jean de Maisonseul).69 Severed
from the French Musées nationaux, the institution now stood for the fine arts in the newly indepen-
dent Republic of Algeria.

In 1930, however, the North African component was confined, as Barrucand said, to French works
“of North African inspiration or fabrication.” Two important historical exhibitions were timed for
the opening of the museum by President Doumergue in May 1930: Alazard’s own Peintres de l’Ori-
ent au XIXeme siècle and the documentary Exposition historique du Centenaire, assembled by the head
of the National Library of Algeria, Gabriel Esquer.70 For the first of them Alazard had envisaged “a
Delacroix room, a Chassériau room, a Fromentin room, a Dehodencq room, and a Renoir room.”71
Those rooms were the focus for the eighty works assembled for the temporary exhibition, although
the “Renoir room” was reduced to just two small oils (Algiers Garden [ Jardin d’Alger], lent by the
artist’s son, and Algerian Figures [Types algériens; see Fig. 16], lent by Durand-Ruel). Monsieur Au-
guste, Narcisse Berchère, Decamps, Gustave Guillaumet, Albert Lebourg, Prosper Marilhat, and
Henri Regnault also figured prominently.

In his purchases Alazard tried to assemble much the same canon of master Orientalists. Almost
half of his centenary purchases of paintings were Oriental subjects, less expensive than the works of
the impressionists. He spent a large sum on Delacroix’s Giaour to begin the collection but for De-
camps and Marilhat was unable at first to obtain works of “exotic” inspiration. Chassériau’s and Fro-

268 Colonial Museology in Algiers

mentin’s cases were happier thanks to both a group of drawings Chassériau made on his trip to Al-
geria in 1846 and Fromentin’s Fountain at Kouba and Souvenir of Algeria (Souvenir de l’Algérie), with
Arab horses running before a ruined Roman aqueduct. Dehodencq was well represented in the per-
manent collection by three paintings and five drawings formerly owned by Gabriel Séailles and a Ne-
gro Dance (Danse nègre) given by the Louvre.72 Alazard was frank about second-rate museum pos-
sessions: his one Regnault, a drawn study of prayer in a mosque, he considered “precise and cold.”

The impressionist Lebourg was a strong point of the Algiers collection. Following Bénédite,
Alazard was convinced of his importance and managed to obtain several small yet typical Algerian
Lebourgs, probably from the family after the artist’s death in 1928. As for the Orientalist Renoir, one
of the two temporary exhibition pictures, the familiar panel with studies of Algerian figures, was ap-
parently given to the museum by Durand-Ruel through the intervention of Koechlin.73

Alazard included the work of contemporary Orientalists resident in the country under the title
of School of Algiers: “Undeniably there is already a pictorial tradition in Algeria. I am thinking of
Etienne Dinet, who became the painter of Bou-Saâda, of Rochegrosse, of Suréda, of Antoni . . .
or that curious lover of scintillating visions, Maxime Noiré. I am thinking of Albert Besnard who,
before crossing India, traveled through Algeria. . . . For thirty years Orientalism has been renew-
ing itself. The Villa Abd-el-Tif, of which the museum o¤ers a complete history, has contributed
much to this renewal.”74 In e¤ect Alazard employed the School of Algiers in the museum to sum-
marize the history of recent French painting. The Villa Abd-el-Tif was central to that venture: since
its inception in 1908, one or two of the best works by each of its residents had been allocated to the
Municipal Museum.75 Equally influential was the modernist painter Albert Marquet, who, having
married a French Algerian author, Marcelle Marby, often painted views of the ports of Algiers and
Bougie on his frequent visits to Algeria (Fig. 122). Alazard later recognized that Marquet’s tech-
nique “has seduced many young artists in Algeria” and that any definition of the School of Algiers
would have to accord him a generous place.76

An interesting minority position among the School of Algiers artists whose works Alazard pur-
chased in 1930 was that of two women inspired directly by Islamic decorative arts. Both were rela-
tives of artists: as noted in Chapter 6, Ketty Carré had first traveled to Algiers when her husband,
Léon, won the Abd-el-Tif scholarship. As early as 1912 she purchased traditional textiles from south-
ern Algeria and the Sudan.77 Ketty Carré’s small-scale paintings have a clear affiliation to Léon’s work
as an illustrator, from his 1912 Jardin des caresses to The Thousand and One Nights, on which the cou-
ple ’s friend Mohammed Racim collaborated. The typical work by Ketty Carré is a gouache figuring
an interior of women’s apartments or courtyards with fountains, a milieu of “mosaics and tiled paving,
divans and beds, floral faiences, amber rosaries, . . . exotic birds, and rush mats.”78 Using vivid poster
colors, she paints such places with both a decorative sense of fabric patterns and an ability to render
crisply delineated surfaces in perspective. Her mastery of the details of traditional costume and dec-

Colonial Museology in Algiers 269

figure 122 Albert Marquet, The Admiralty Dock at Algiers, oil on canvas, ca. 1930.

orative arts shows a sympathy with the aims of Racim. Yet her skilled figure drawing and perspec-
tive and the reserve of her decorative sense give works like her Courtesan (La courtisane; see Plate
16) a di¤erent, more opulent appeal. Alazard bought Arab Woman in a Garden (Femme arabe dans un
jardin) for his museum and exhibited two gouache oriental scenes in Brussels in 1931.79 Carré had the
vigorous support of Barrucand, who saw her as a savior of North African art: “The gouaches of Ketty
Carré are the most oriental and incisive works North Africa has produced. . . . Her rare pieces are
considered, meditated poems, as expressive and naive as a smile. They flatter our attention by a sec-
ondary exoticism, not that of direct observation, but that of spiritual transposition. . . . [Hers is] a
personal, rounded, and refined art that uses details and accessories only to symbolize the idea or to
set it on the page in an ingenious fashion.”80

A woman with a higher official profile in Algiers (yet perhaps less admired among tastemakers)
was Yvonne Herzig (later Kleiss-Herzig). Not an émigré like Carré, she was a pied-noir artist, born
in Kabylia, the daughter of the painter and designer Edouard Herzig. Trained by Cauvy at the Al-
giers Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she was thus a second-generation School of Algiers artist, despite trav-
eling to Paris in 1913 for further study.81 A regular at the Salon of the Society of Algerian and Ori-

270 Colonial Museology in Algiers

entalist Artists, she had exhibited decorative art alongside her father’s easel paintings as early as 1912.82
Kleiss-Herzig won prizes and scholarships through the 1920s, becoming the sole female winner of
the prestigious Grand Prix Artistique de l’Algérie in 1928 (five years before Racim).83 Her subject
matter of semiclad women and pet exotic animals in Turkish courtyards is similar to Ketty Carré’s,
even if her gouaches are blanched in tone, their technique more pristine, their execution more redo-
lent of academic drawing skills.

Although the distance from a women’s Orientalism so in sympathy with Islamic art to the col-
lecting of indigenous Algerian painters would not seem far, Jean Alazard was hardly a member of
the indigenophile camp, and the brief of the centenary museum, as he expressed it, required no ges-
tures toward the indigenous. He could claim that traditional decorative arts were the province of the
Bardo and Mustapha Museums; only Algerian art that approached French “fine art” might merit in-
clusion in the art museum. In his final round of purchases a few months before the museum’s open-
ing, Alazard included a single modest canvas by Azouaou Mammeri, Arab House (Maison arabe). His
commitment to Mohammed Racim, who had the solid support of the Algiers cognoscenti, was greater:
he paid the considerable sum of ten thousand francs for a group of Racim miniatures.84 Although
the status of miniatures as fine art had been contested, Alazard could incorporate them with the draw-
ings and other graphic works he collected. The Racims included the significant Barbarossa and His
Fleet before Algiers (Barberousse et sa flotte devant Alger) and The Caliph and His Entourage (Le caliphe
et sa suite).85 An additional Racim and a Mammeri were transferred to the Demaeght Museum in Oran
in early 1930, and by 1937 Racim’s early Hunt Scene (Scène de chasse) was in the Algiers collection.86
Orif plausibly suggests the centenary purchases were made to placate the indigenous camp that was
so angered by the celebrations, but there was perhaps more to it than that: Alazard was favorable to
both artists in his writings of the day.87

The fate of Dinet, that critic of the centenary, was still less auspicious. Alazard declined to pur-
chase a single canvas of his for the new museum.88 A small number of Dinets had previously been
donated to the Municipal Museum, but competition from the embryonic Dinet Museum may have
discouraged further purchases. François Pouillon has revealed the vicissitudes of e¤orts to establish
a Dinet museum, proposed for a location in the Algiers Casbah soon after the artist’s death in 1929
by a committee led by Jeanne Dinet Rollince (who was married to a French general). The future lo-
cation was soon changed to Bou-Saâda at the insistence of Sliman ben Ibrahim, Dinet’s sole
beneficiary. But a museum as such was not built in Sliman’s lifetime, and Sliman gradually sold o¤
the memorabilia and collections. The Dinet Museum finally opened in 1993 at Bou-Saâda (only to
be trashed soon after, probably by the Armed Islamic Group).89

As Pouillon conjectures, Alazard was no supporter of Dinet’s art and opposed the establishment
of a museum of Orientalism that would rival his own. In all likelihood Alazard’s pro-impressionist
aesthetic made him uncomfortable with the academic precision of Dinet’s technique, and, no great

Colonial Museology in Algiers 271

indigenophile, he was probably also unsympathetic to the artist’s politics. Alazard actually transferred
one Dinet, Old Arab Women (Vieilles femmes arabes), which the artist himself had donated to the Mu-
nicipal Museum before 1911, to the Demaeght Museum in Oran in 1930.90

Given the immense cortege that had assembled just months before the centenary to bury Dinet in
his Bou-Saâda koubba, or sepulchre, according to the Islamic rite, such neglect seems even more ex-
traordinary. Numerous French citizens, officers, and dignitaries were present on that occasion, along
with thousands of indigenous Algerians moved by the death of the first French convert to Islam to
have accomplished the hadj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.91 Governor-General Pierre Bordes himself de-
livered the eulogy, whose text, widely di¤used, presents Dinet’s conversion without rancor—indeed
as a model of the “Franco-Muslim” identity that for most Frenchmen remained hypothetical:

A great French artist, the painter Etienne Dinet, has died a Muslim in faith. . . . He
who consecrated his life and his talent to magnifying this country and its indigenous
people has the right to a public homage at the moment he comes to sleep his final
sleep.

Dinet’s conversion to Islam in no way touched his patriotic faith. Just as he re-
mained Dinet in becoming Nasr’Edine, the great friend of Islam remained a son of
France. Never did he separate the duties which devolved upon him from this double
personality. And surely that is the supreme lesson we should draw from his life.92

The perspective of the eulogy makes all the more remarkable Alazard’s inability to accord Dinet,
that symbol of bicultural reconciliation, more than a small place in his museum of fine arts. As we
have seen, Dinet was pessimistic about the centenary after the sacking of Maurice Violette. He would
agree to participate only by serving on the Commission on Muslim Arts (along with Prosper Ricard),
and he regretted doing even that. In any event, he died before witnessing the “ugliness” and “ig-
nominy” he feared in the centenary.93

One may ask finally just what kind of institution the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers
was. Neither ugly nor ignominious, it was instead a focus for cultural life planted in an equivocal set-
ting. For thirty years the Algiers museum had been of small account, a municipal a¤air with insub-
stantial collections and no dedicated space. It was not only provincial (in the prejudicial sense), but
also colonial. The transformations of the centenary rapidly led to a quite di¤erent institution: in all
of France (colonies and metropole included) the latest and most glamorous structure built as an art
gallery at a time when there were still relatively few. The high level of professionalism in the plan-
ning and execution of the project resulted from the close rapport between central and colonial au-
thorities. A genuine monument, with distinction in both its design and siting, the Algiers museum had
the potential to be an icon for a new society.

272 Colonial Museology in Algiers

Its failures stemmed from the narrow audience the institution recognized and produced. Both the
building and its collections embody all the prejudices of the mission civilatrice. If something like a
politics of multiculturalism had been available at the time, one can readily imagine a very di¤erent
program for the museum (even in the same classicizing, modernist building)—one that might not
have repudiated the claims of French painting, strongly represented by Alazard, but would have less-
ened the place of French sculpture out of cultural sympathy for Algerian Muslims. The proportion
of Spanish and Andalusian art would have been increased, as would displays representing the Ital-
ian and Maltese communities. Above all, generous spaces would have been given over to the indige-
nous visual arts, in a way that contemporary scholarship had not yet conceived. Such changes, how-
ever, would have required modifying the very French notion of beaux-arts—painting, sculpture, and
graphics—to include not only miniature painting but also calligraphy, inscriptions, and the best in
inlaid furniture, carpets, and jewelry. Rapidly the culturally specific fine art museum would have been
replaced by a more universal museum where the presentation of the ancient and the indigenous arts
is equal to that of European fine art. But in 1930 the logic of French museology meant that those relics
were represented separately, at the refurbished Bardo and Mustapha Museums; given lower status;
and displayed like ethnographic material.

Thus one sees more clearly the Francophile nature of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Al-
giers, which, one imagines, was seldom visited by audiences other than those the texts of the day im-
plicitly courted: the French and pied-noir middle classes, tourists to Algiers, and groups of indige-
nous schoolchildren exposed to the benefits of modern European culture. How the museum
developed after its inception, in the decades leading up to and following the struggles of decolo-
nization, awaits detailed study. What is plain, however, is the exceptionally strong hand given the
curator, Jean Alazard, who actively held his post until his death in 1961. With regular curatorial ges-
tures toward the more easygoing among contemporary School of Paris and School of Algiers artists,
Alazard remained true to the centenary brief, building art collections for an Algeria that was
French.94

Colonial Museology in Algiers 273



Conclusion

T o propose some concluding reflections on this history of Orientalist art, let me return to
the notion of the spy satellite, both authorial and anachronistic, mentioned in the first pages
of my introduction. A satellite gives ubiquity of vision, but its cameras need always to have
direction, and its images require interpretation. Stationed over the northern Mediterranean, its lens
would be directed toward Algiers and Paris with equal clarity. Strange perturbations would have been
visible in the prosperous colony in 1930, as people rushed into the unaccustomed activity of the cen-
tenary. New roads were carved into the mountains, great buildings of cement and steel thrown up
in the capital—concert halls, museums, apartment blocks. A close-up of the building site at Hamma
reveals Jean Alazard, sunburned and bustling, directing the completion of the Algiers museum.
Wooden crates are seen being unloaded on the docks of Algiers: inside are varnished oil paintings,
patinated bronze sculptures. The crates are trucked up to Hamma by Algerian workers, men who
care less than usual about the things inside—foreign, even blasphemous things, not destined for
them; things made by and for the French. Working for the French centenary prompts a resentment
that constricts the chest. The satellite observes that indigenous people lie low during the festival year
of 1930.

275

Piercing the rain clouds over Vincennes, in eastern Paris, the camera sees another vast construc-
tion site. Around the banks of Lake Daumesnil, the muddy beginnings of the International Colo-
nial Exposition can be discerned. Foundations are laid for the ultramodern Cité des Informations,
and the more stately Museum of the Colonies, which will receive an astonishing facade of relief carv-
ings of exotic and colonial scenes by the sculptor Alfred Janniot. Dozens of colonial pavilions in lath
and stucco go up slowly, their visual extravagance exceeding that of any pavilions built in the past:
the plaster-cast fantasy of Angkor Wat; the symbolic bullock horns of the Malagasy tower. In the
thatch-roofed enclave of French West Africa, French artisans endow the huts with carved and painted
“native” decorations, drawn by the architect L. A. Fichet. Elsewhere, skilled workers from Indochina
supply architectural details. Quarters are made ready for the hundreds of colonial performers to come.
Although the mustachioed, aging figure of Hubert Lyautey, exposition commissioner and supposed
conciliator, is seldom visible on the site, his influence is everywhere evident. At Vincennes, unlike
Algiers, the French are much concerned with the trappings of indigenous culture.

But to no avail, this courting of indigenous interests. Like the camera-toting agents doing sur-
veillance for the French police, the satellite observes activity in other parts of Paris. Members of the
French Communist Party, among them a number of leading surrealists, having judged the colonial
exposition, organize a counterexposition, La vérité aux colonies, with funds from the Communist
International. Housed in a monument to Communist radicality—Melnikov’s Soviet pavilion, left over
from the 1925 Arts Decos exposition—the counterexposition opens in late September 1931. It o¤ers
a large display of indigenous artworks, kitsch European religious objects ridiculed as “fetishes,” doc-
umentation of French atrocities in the colonies, and placards from Marx and Lenin denouncing the
oppression of one people by another.1

Although surrealists like André Breton and Paul Eluard were the main authors of the radical tracts
Ne visitez pas l’exposition coloniale and Premier bilan de l’exposition coloniale, indigenous activists were
cosignatories (though unnamed for reasons of safety). Young intellectuals from Senegal, Indochina,
the French Antilles, and Algeria, many of them members of the Communists’ Union intercoloniale,
helped distribute such texts near the approaches to “Lyauteyville” (as a lampoon named the exposi-
tion). Other indigenous activists composed even more virulently anticolonial pamphlets. Such
protests expose the exposition as an exercise in propaganda like the Algerian centenary. A significant
moment in the formation of independence movements among the French colonies, the anticolonial
protest against the exposition anticipates the decolonization of the 1950s.

I shift the picture now from exhibition and protest activity to the fine arts at the Vincennes expo-
sition. At once a culmination and a résumé of the period and the policies studied in this book, the
roll call of artists, curators, and critics present could stand as aide-mémoire to the main actors, is-
sues, and institutions in this history of French Orientalism. The three main fine arts displays at Vin-
cennes were housed in the Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, designed by the architect

276 Conclusion

figure 123 Charles Halley, Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, Paris Exposition, 1931.

Charles Halley with a black modernist peristyle (Fig. 123), and the other two in the Museum of the
Colonies. That second building, retained after the exposition, is now the Musée National des Arts
d’Afrique et d’Océanie. In the Museum of the Colonies there was a large scholarly exhibit of objects,
prints, and memorabilia documenting the history of the French colonies from their origins as well
as a “Historical Retrospective of Orientalist Art,” displaying museum art selected by Gaston Bern-
heim de Villers in collaboration with Jean Alazard from Algiers.2

The protagonists of the first two chapters of this book were amply represented in the retrospec-
tive: Delacroix, with his great Rubensian fragment the Lion Hunt from the Bordeaux Museum, the
Montpellier Fantasia, and two dozen watercolors; and Fromentin, that ever-eager proselytizer of the
Orient, with eight characteristic hunts and landscapes. Chassériau was present in canvases lent by his
family, Belly in his Louvre Pilgrims Going to Mecca. Marilhat, Géricault, Dehodencq, Lebourg, and
Guillaumet were all on display, some in works lent by the new Algiers museum. (Alazard was doubt-
less delighted to advertise its existence.) Renoir appeared, firmly ensconced in the Orientalist canon.
By 1931 he was recognized as the only major impressionist to have painted in the East, and his Ori-
entalist oeuvre was finally becoming known. Jean Alazard had just devoted the final chapter of his
new monograph on the movement to Renoir, and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery had bought and sold
the work of this artist, whose status (following his death in 1919) had risen to new heights in the 1920s.3
In the Museum of the Colonies were nine canvases, from all phases of Renoir’s career, including the

Conclusion 277