Contemporary visual arts in Algeria Research Papers (original) (raw)

It was at the moment of independence, as Tunisian artists clashed over
the definition of a new cultural identity, that Pierre Boucherle, encouraged by several of his associates, co-founders of l’École de Tunis [‘the Tunis School’] in 1949, gave an interview to the daily newspaper La Presse de Tunisie in 1964. In the interview, he recalled the origins of this movement that, in the spirit of l’École de Paris, sought to bring together ‘quelquesuns des meilleurs peintres de Tunis sans distinction de tendance, de race et de religion’. This quotation often finds its way
into retrospections on art in Tunisia by writers who wish to show the salience of the principles of tolerance in Tunisian society in the aftermath of World War II. In the context of radicalizing nationalist movements and an unravelling colonial system, Tunisian artists from various class and religious backgrounds came together to create a heterodoxic space autonomous from the institutional Salon de Tunis, at a time when, in neighbouring Algeria, the modes of inter-community collaboration seemed to be increasingly compartmentalized.
Despite this remarkable difference, we nevertheless find that in order to gain recognition in both countries, Muslim artists ('artistes de culture musulmane') ‘Some of the best painters in Tunis regardless of artistic style, race, and religion’.
Jewish‒Muslim Interactions often depended on an asymmetrical system in which an elite of Europeans and assimilated Jews normally mediated access to the local art scene, given their fluency in cultural codes and their easy access to social networks. But the two decades from 1940 to 1960 also saw the rise of independence movements, and, with these, the emergence of a new avenue for the social and political emancipation of Maghribi artists. These developments coincided with the
introduction of abstract aesthetics in the Arab world in general, a dominant trend in contemporary European centres where most Maghribi artists trained. Historically associated with cosmopolitanism and universality, abstraction, by virtue of its non-referential aspect, would express the progressive ideas of an internationalist avant-garde, reaching the apex of modernity in the process. Still, the concept of abstraction must nevertheless be analysed through the mechanisms of competition and solidarity that are imposed on artists in their struggle for recognition.
This study will seek to identify the social, political, and artistic factors
that restored and preserved inter-community solidarity in the Maghribi art world from the 1940s to the early 1960s, often opposed to the exclusionist nationalist politics used as a cudgel through which to reverse the power relations between the ascendant Jewish minorities and European expatriates and the underprivileged Muslim majorities. And although there are similar elements in both colonial Tunisia and Algeria, notably in the differentiated legal status accorded to the Jewish and Muslim populations – the extension of French citizenship to Tunisian Jews was limited primarily to an educated and Westernized minority on the fringes of society whereas the Crémieux Decree automatically granted citizenship rights to the entire Algerian Jewish
community – we will approach them distinctively, in recognition of the uneven nature of the colonial penetration (colonial protectorate and settler colonial) into local social structures in these two countries.