On the threshold of the Tunis School

On the occasion of the inauguration of the first gallery founded by artists in Tunis, the painters Moses Levy, Pierre Boucherle, Antonio Corpora and Jules Lellouche published in 1936 a manifesto affirming their autonomy, beyond mercantile logics and national assignments. However, a national reading of their works prevailed in the press, at that time. This article proposes to put this founding event of the « École de Tunis » into context, by reinscribing it in a century-old history. This past is marked by the presence of French and Italian artists between 1840 and 1880, by the failure of a policy of asserting a French artistic model with an aborted project for a French museum around 1890, and by the affirmation of an artistic life characterised since the 1910s by its pluralism and even its eclecticism. This article thus intends to contribute, through the example of pictorial production, to the historicisation of discourses on the plurality or cultural identity of Tunisia, which are still today objects of debate.

“Moses c’est le maître à nous tous”:

The paper focuses on the artistic work of Moses Levy (Tunis, 1885 - Viareggio, 1968), painter and printmaker active in Italy, Tunisia and Paris. A peculiar figure of cosmopolitan painter, whose father was British and the mother Italian, and whose art eludes attempts at univocal classification. On the contrary, it remains emblematic of the fruitfulness made possible by the encounter between different artistic traditions, as well as the reciprocal enrichment offered by the plurality of cultures. Deeply linked by birth to the Jewish community in Tunis, he moved to Italy at a very young age, where he came into contact with the major exponents of the Tuscan school of painting around the turn of the century, starting with Giovanni Fattori. Constantly commuting between the two shores of the Mediterranean, he became an example of dialogue between different worlds, between his African roots, his Tuscan upbringing, his French-speaking culture and his stays in Paris, where he met Chagall and Picasso and could not fail to find a natural identification with Matisse’s pure rhythms and solar charge. A regular exhibitor at the Salons Tunisiens, in 1936 he was a co-founder of the Le Quatre group and later one of the promoters of the École de Tunis. Thus, the local artists saw in Levy the master who had been able to promote the birth of a modern art that was representative of Tunisian culture and people, but free from any easy Orientalist stereotype or folkloric flavour.

Les premières années du Salon des Humoristes à Alger (1924-1930) :

My contribution focuses on the early years of the Salon des Humoristes held in Algiers in the 1920s. This event contributed to the development of caricature in Algeria in the wake of the First World War. Although it is difficult to trace the careers of all the caricaturists because of a lack of biographical information, we shall see that those present in the first editions of the Salon des Humoristes in Algiers were most often born in Europe where they trained before settling in Algeria, while some others were born in the French departments of Algeria. The first edition of the Salon des Humoristes d'Alger took place in 1924 and was hailed with success by the Algerian press. This initiative had a precedent in Paris, notably with the Salon des Humoristes held in the French capital in 1907. My paper aims to explore this echo between the Algerian and the Parisian Salon and to discuss the impact of caricature in the early years of this event. My objective is to understand to what extent the training and artistic background of the exhibitors determined and/or allowed the development of Algerian caricature and what its relationship with the Parisian exhibition was.

Au seuil de l’École de Tunis.

On the occasion of the inauguration of the first gallery founded by artists in Tunis, the painters Moses Levy, Pierre Boucherle, Antonio Corpora and Jules Lellouche published in 1936 a manifesto affirming their autonomy, beyond mercantile logics and national assignments. However, a national reading of their works prevailed in the press, at that time. This article proposes to put this founding event of the « École de Tunis » into context, by reinscribing it in a century-old history. This past is marked by the presence of French and Italian artists between 1840 and 1880, by the failure of a policy of asserting a French artistic model with an aborted project for a French museum around 1890, and by the affirmation of an artistic life characterised since the 1910s by its pluralism and even its eclecticism. This article thus intends to contribute, through the example of pictorial production, to the historicisation of discourses on the plurality or cultural identity of Tunisia, which are still today objects of debate.

Une diplomatie du concert.

Although the place of music in the French political imagination has recently been the subject of fruitful research, it remains a blind spot in the study of French cultural exchange. This can be explained by the non-verbal nature of musical events, or the relative technicality of their study. This article shows how the Association d'expansion et d'échanges artistiques contributed to the promotion of French musicians in Cairo between the late 1920s and the late 1930s.

Sauveur Galliéro et la Génération du Môle :

This article addresses the question of identity issues underpinned in the affirmation of an Algerian painting through the figure of Sauveur Galliéro (1914-1963). As a self-taught artist and leader of the "Generation of the Môle of Algiers," he was a major intercessor between European and indigenous communities. At the heart of artistic, political and social issues, he holds a singular and plural position. The personal archives of the artist and a review of the colonial press allow us to analyze the reception of his work between Paris and Algiers, with the assumption that it bears the seeds of an open “Algerianity”. Free of any colonialist perspective, taking up elements of North African and European traditions, it is indeed anchored in a local and universal topos: the artist's relationship to the sea.

The Political Basis of Abstraction in the 20th Century As Explored by a Painter

The political nature of abstraction presented from an artist’s point of view – one who considers the most advanced task is the exploration of the language of pictures. Such exploration is understood as a separate discipline from the many others that employ pictures for practical functions. The author examines the development of 20th century abstraction as an effect of revolutionary social motion. Historic steps to abstraction, taking shape as rising and receding artistic movements, are correlated to revolutionary motion. The materialist underpinning of abstraction is distinguished from the idealism of Post-Modernism. The paper ends with an examination of contemporary discourse in the Western art world that attempts to erase the internationalism of abstraction and, thereby, marginalize non-Western practitioners.

Hamed Abdalla: Talismanic Modernism

Hamed Abdalla (1917–85) is a key figure in Egyptian modernism and postcolonial art history. His experimental inventions around the Arabic Letter reflected over thirty years of aesthetic debate in the region – often identified as related to the concept of Hurufiyya and its artistic network. Abdalla’s much more political and militant use of the Arabic Letter places him as almost as a unique case. By giving shape to an exiled modernism (Cairo, Copenhagen, Paris, Beirut…) his practice is paradoxically affected by his complex exchange with the West. For instance, with Paul Klee, whom he sees with distance and a critical look but still studies him as a “visual translator” of Oriental(ist) and Egyptian sources.