Painters in North Africa by Barnaby Rogerson

Travelling through North Africa you do not need paintings. The streets are so triumphantly full of life, the markets so full of colour and the land so filled with light that you come indoors for a visual rest not an arresting statement. On domestic walls you will find a framed photograph of the political boss (be he King, President or Colonel), the local football team, a black and white photograph of grandfather and a Koranic verse in a sweeping rowing-boat of calligraphy.

None of these hold the eye as surely as the light. Typically, as you wait for tea to be brewed - the time-honoured gesture of Maghrebi hospitality - a slow-moving shaft of sunlight pours down through the arabesque swirls of an iron window-grill and transfixes the traveller with its meditative quality.

Only hotels, bars and restaurants bother to furnish their walls with pictures and this largely for the benefit of foreign visitors, some more successfully than others. At its best in a kasbah-hotel amongst the pre-Saharan sands of southern Morocco you live among the works and fresh stretched canvasses of Farouj el Hassani and Fatima Hassani. Their music, poetry and camel-loving sons look after the guests. Elsewhere you are more likely to be faced with tourist posters, lush alpine scenes or faded prints of Klee's watercolours which mocks the vivacity of the original

Contemporary North African art, as we in the West acknowledge it, finds its natural home in the cool, well-shaded villas of a small, highly educated urbane minority. Local artists have looked to their own indigenous traditions in a determined attempt to free themselves from cultural dependence on Europe. Their role models are much more likely to be from Syria, Egypt and Iraq, even if many of the artists are often exiles living in Paris or London. Art, especially in North Africa, can never be freed from politics. And when you see how the European painters treated North Africa, you can see why.

The first European painters came to North Africa on the back of 19th-century colonial conquest. Though many were of the artistic avant-garde they seldom, if ever, demonstrated any political sympathy with the people of North Africa. Their quest was for the effect of light on colour and their dialogue was essentially with each other. Indeed they fit neatly with the colonial process of extracting resources. Instead of phosphates and olive oil they sought colours, subjects and images with which they could enrich their studios back home. They found that Arab cavalrymen and harem girls sold well.

The earliest images of the Orient, though not specifically North African, were created by two French painters, Ingres and Gros, who never left the European shore. It is almost as if this state of ignorance allowed them to capture the collective imagination of Christendom more perfectly. The bathetic harem girls of Ingres and the swirling clouds of Napoleonic cavalry depicted by Baron Gros set standards against which subsequent painters would be judged whatever the reality of their observations. Eugene Delacroix would follow in their footsteps. Inspired by the romantic poetry and example of Byron he would create such emotional and highly coloured masterpieces as ‘The Massacre of Chios’ and the ‘Death of Sardanapulus.’ His combination of cruelty, sexuality, rich textiles and indolence virtually define the term Orientalism.

In 1832 Delacroix was given an opportunity to see for himself. Due to a friendship with an influential actress, Mademoiselle Mars, he was invited to join the delegation to Morocco led by her lover Comte de Mornay. The embassy landed at Tangier and then rode south across the hills of the Western Rif to the city of Meknes, then still entirely restrained within its monumental walls. Delacroix had six months in which to observe the Empire of Morocco in all its undisturbed purity.

It was a highly charged period. France had invaded Algeria two years before and would soon drift towards war with Morocco. Delacroix reported that "their prejudices against the art of painting are great" and "one always has to be escorted by soldiers. I am escorted every time I go out by an enormous crowd of spectators who do not spare me the insults of dog, infidel and who push towards me to grimace with contempt". On the other hand they were everywhere entertained with fantasia, the celebrated mock cavalry charges of Morocco, and lodged in traditional palaces. He wrote, "I am like a man dreaming and who sees things he is afraid will escape him". There was no need to fear, for he would ultimately complete 80 pictures with North African themes.

Delacroix was the first to discover that the Maghrebi daylight, far from acting in the presumed manner as an intense illumination of the true depth of colour, in fact acts as a filter which reduces the contrast of colours. Baudelaire was able to describe Delacroix's ‘The Sultan of Morocco’, first exhibited at the Paris salon of 1845, as "grey as nature, as grey as the summer atmosphere when the sun spreads over each object a sort of twilight film of trembling dust". By contrast the domestic interior of the ‘Women of Algiers’ flickers with jewel-like intensity so that even the shadows are filled with colour. Although he was never to return to North Africa, the sketchbooks and notes he made during his travels remained a lifelong inspiration. He was still working at ‘The Collection of Arab Taxes’, a haunting stage-set with its elegant figures caught in a dream sequence, on the year of his death.

Delacroix had written, "the most beautiful pictures I have seen are certain Persian carpets" and Gauguin later declared,
"O painters who are looking for a color technique, study rugs. You will find all the necessary knowledge there". But aside from these visionaries the gulf of European ignorance about Islamic art remained almost total. Surprise remained the dominant emotion for travellers as they discovered for themselves the extraordinary range and antiquity of Maghrebi architecture, the ancient textile traditions and the equally rich heritage of decorative art. The wider public would have to wait even longer for its education. The first exhibition of Islamic carpets in Europe was only held in Vienna in 1891. The Munich exhibition of Islamic Art in 1910 came with all the force of a revelation.

It was this "Extraordinary exhibition at Munich", as he called it, that motivated Matisse to explore the Moorish architecture of Spain, at Seville, Granada and Cordoba, the following year. He then determined on a trip to Morocco in the next year. He had visited North Africa once before, in May 1906, but the fortnight trip had not been a success. He made the classic traveller's error of moving too far, too quickly. Matisse had travelled due south from Algiers to the Saharan oasis of Biskra. In any case he found that "the light is blinding" and produced just one sketch. It would take him a year to digest his experiences and produce ‘Nu Bleu’, that disturbing blue odalisque set against a backdrop of Biskra palms.

Biskra oasis had become a central destination for travel long before Matisse's visit. For aside from serving as the sensuous background to Andre Gide's ‘L'Immoraliste’, it was a celebrated centre for prostitution. The young women of the Ouled Nail tribe raised their dowry-money by prostitution. Once they had acquired enough money they took to the veil, and the honourable seclusion of the home, with a vengeance. European painters, who found it virtually impossible to paint Muslim women or gain access to domestic space, were given a unique opportunity at Biskra to hire models. Matisse complained that the profligacy of British artists had pushed the price of models to unaffordable levels.

By the time Matisse landed in Tangier on 29 Januray 1912 he was better prepared. He knew Morocco through the works of Delacroix and the descriptive passages of Pierre Loti's ‘Au Maroc’. Once again he was not alone. Tangier in this period had become the sketching ground par excellence. He met up with an old student friend, the Canadian artist James Wilson Morrice, who was staying by coincidence in the same hotel. In another incident he backed quickly out from renting a studio when he discovered that the building also housed eleven budding Belgian artists.

Apart from riding in the surrounding countryside, there was nothing intrepid about his trip. Matisse stayed in Room 35 of Tangier's Grand Hotel de la Villa de France, which was kept in scrupulous style by a Mme Davin. His ignorance of local affairs was nearly total. His time in Tangier coincided with the death throws of Morocco (the last independent state in North Africa) which was in the process of being absorbed into the French colonial empire. There is no mention of this in Matisse's correspondence, which instead dwells obsessively on the weather - a nasty patch of 15 days rain followed by an extraordinary verdant spring. Three days after he left Tangier, "thrilled by the flowers", the entire European community in Fez was massacred in a popular insurrection. Matisse would not have made a good newspaper correspondent.

He returned to Tangier that October for another four months of painting. His technique was to sketch prodigiously in order "to gain possession of his subject" after which he settled down to paint. He painted mostly flowers as well as the view from his hotel window, the doorman of a neighbouring hotel and (with the permission of Mme Davin) a local prostitute, named Zohra.

Tangier proved to be an exceptionally productive time and is now regarded as the culmination of his fauve period.

It is now almost impossible for any European painter to approach North Africa except through Matisse's vision. That triptych composed of ‘Porte de la Kasbah’, the prostitute Zorah ‘sur la Terrasse’ and the celebrated ‘Paysage Vu d'une Fenetre’ (the view of the Anglican church of St Andrew set against the old walled city of Tangier the White) has become a triple archway into North Africa. His regal green portrait of a humble tribesman, ‘Le Rifain debout’, soon acquired an iconic status that was to be confirmed by the heroic Rif rebellion of the 1920s. But perhaps the one image that best represents Matisse's power is ‘Café Marocain’, the largest, most abstract and contemplative of his Tangier pictures. It has a serene, ethereal quality as well as a disturbing affinity with Ingres' Oriental visions. Matisse described his work as "the search for myself through the probing of various motifs." It is a brutally honest confession of the limited role North Africa played in the making of a major European artist.

For Paul Klee, North Africa was not just a passing motif, however obsessive and productive, but a baptism into colour and light. It is all the more surprising that this famous connection between artist and landscape happened during a two week sketching tour of Tunisia in 1914. Klee never returned.

Although his journey was organised by a friend, Louis Moilliet, who had already visited Tunisia in 1908 and again the following year, it is clear that Klee was equally motivated. A scheduled trip in 1913 had to be cancelled so Klee put special energy into making sure that they would travel to North Africa in 1914. He was not interested in travelling alone but wished to be in the company of fellow artists, "with each of us giving stimulation and ideas to the other." In January Klee travelled down to Lake Thuns to confer with Louis Moillet and August Macke and set a firm date for their travels. Moilliet was also friend enough to help Klee raise the passage money by arranging for the sale of some of his pictures to an art collector in Berne.

They all met up again at Marseille on 5 April and reached Tunisia two days later. Moilliet had arranged that they all stay with a Swiss doctor, Ernest Jaggi, who lived in a neat villa in the colonial garden suburb of St Germain. Klee described his host as "comical, dry, sober, feels alienated. Can only feel climate and money. Yearns for Switzerland and is stranger to me than any Arab beggar." Fortunately they were able to escape their host, with his archetypal expatriate attitudes and spend their days by the docks and within the medina, the old city of Tunis. Here narrow alleys snaked past the silent whitewashed exteriors of the traditional houses. In his diary one can read, "My head is full of the impressions of last night's walk…went to work at once and painted in watercolor in the Arab quarter". Like Delacroix before him, his safety was only assured by a police guard. For several years now the streets of Tunis had been rocked by demonstrations, ostensibly about local issues, but in reality, the first re-awakening of nationalism. Dr Jaggi drove his guests out to the ruins of Carthage and from there to the hilltop village of Sidi Bou Said.

After seven days with the good doctor they made their escape. They took a train south to the quiet walled town of Hammamet which overlooks a shore of white sand. In the 1920s and 30s it developed into a glamorous resort populated by rich aesthetes, dissident intellectuals and artists. A generation later, it would transform itself into a considerably less exclusive, but very profitable, beach resort. None of this was apparent to the artists who viewed the one hotel in town (run by a mercenary French woman) and decided to push onto Kairouan.

The holy city of Kairouan was the culmination of Klee's exploration of North Africa. The semi arid steppe-land that surrounded the walled city, the cubist-like abstraction of its houses, the repetition of strong squat domes over mosque, zaouia and mausolea, had an almost ecstatic effect on Klee. He wrote in his diary: "What an aroma, how penetrating, how intoxicating, and at the same time simple and clear. Nourishment, the most real and substantial nourishment as well as delicious drink. Food and intoxication. Scented wood is burning." The following day in Kairouan Klee wrote "Colour possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are at one. I am a painter". It is an unequivocal acknowledgement of the effect the majestic beauty of North Africa had on the soul of a delicate European.

There is an obvious affinity between the work that the three artist-friends produced. Right from the first they had hoped that they would excite and influence each other. They suggested subjects to each other and often sketched the same subject in pairs. Looking beyond their similarities, the differences also become apparent. Moilliet delighted in larger fields of colour, Macke preferred more powerful hues with brighter contrasts while Klee was drawn towards greater abstraction. Although Klee made many water-colours and sketches throughout the trip it is fairly certain that his most celebrated Tunisian watercolors, such as ‘Red and White Domes’, ‘View of Kairouan’, ‘In the style of Kairouan’,
‘Transferred to the Moderate’ and ‘Garden in St Germain’ were painted on his return to Munich. ‘Before the Gates of Kairouan’ is one of the few watercolors that he painted in North Africa.

We can be reasonably sure of these attributions, for unlike his two companions, Klee kept a diary of the trip. He was also a near obsessive keeper of journals, inventories, lectures, notes and accounts, which he reviewed and edited throughout his life. This has left a formidable resource for art historians who this year will publish the third and final volume of his catalogue raisonné. This allows access into the workings of one of the most powerfully imaginative minds of this century. Klee's images seemingly come as much out of his own rich internal imagination as the external world. In his own words "Art does not render the visible: rather, it makes visible".

European painters still flock to the North African light, most for as short a period as Klee. It seems unlikely that North Africa will ever play the same pivotal role it did in the careers of those three masters, Delacroix, Matisse and Klee. The excitement of the future, lies rightly with the artists of North Africa themselves, to produce works of organic integrity in their own land.