Painter · Algeria
Bachir Yellès
Bachir Yellès (1921–2022) was an Algerian painter, stamp designer and teacher from Tlemcen. Trained in Algiers and Paris, he led the national school of fine arts in Algiers for about twenty years, training generations of Algerian artists, and designed postage stamps for his country. He died in Algiers in 2022 at the age of 100, honoured as the dean of Algerian painters.
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Bachir Yellès was born in Tlemcen, in western Algeria, on 12 September 1921. He went to secondary school at the Collège de Slane in Tlemcen, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers from 1943 to 1947 and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1947 to 1950, where his teachers included Eugène Narbonne and Nicolas Untersteller. He was one of the very few Algerians of his generation to receive a full academic art training under colonial rule.
After that training he devoted much of his life to teaching. He directed the school of fine arts in Algiers from 1960 to 1980 according to one biography, and Radio Algérie called him the first director of the national school of fine arts. These were the years in which independent Algeria built its own art institutions, and many of the country's later painters passed through his hands. He also designed postage stamps for Algeria, and one academic abstract lists miniatures and plastic panels among his work. His own painting — portraits, landscapes and scenes of Tlemcen and Algerian life — stayed close to the figurative tradition in which he had trained, though the same biography says he kept to local themes while experimenting with Cubism, Expressionism and Fauvism.
How to look at a Yellès: look first for the subject, which is usually a person or a place he knew, and then at how the colour is organised. The Odalisque, a gouache of 1956, and the Portrait de Georges Marçais, named among his principal works, show the mix of academic drawing and bright simplified colour. That reading is this site's own.
Yellès died in Algiers on 16 August 2022, aged 100. Algerian media called him the dean of the country's painters, and in homage one of his pupils, Boubekeur Sahraoui, produced 66 miniatures.
Where to see the work
The Musée national des beaux-arts d'Alger is the natural place to ask, though we have not confirmed what it holds; auction houses have sold his gouaches. See his younger contemporaries M'hamed Issiakhem and Mohammed Khadda, and our lists of Algerian painters and Algerian artists.
