Painter · Morocco
Farid Belkahia
Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) was a Moroccan artist and a founder of Moroccan modernism. As director of the Casablanca School of Fine Arts from 1962 to 1974 he turned it into a centre of experiment, and from the 1970s he painted on stretched leather with henna and natural pigments, using signs drawn from Amazigh and Arab visual traditions.
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Training abroad
Farid Belkahia was born in Marrakech in 1934. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1950s (sources give 1954 or 1955 to 1959), then stage design at the Prague theatre institute from 1959 to 1962, and later at the Brera Academy in Milan in 1965–66. Europe gave him technique; it also convinced him that Moroccan artists needed something other than European painting on canvas.
Running the Casablanca school
In 1962, at twenty-eight, Belkahia became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, a post he held until 1974. He brought in the painters Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa and the art historians Toni Maraini and Bert Flint; Tate dates their arrivals from 1964 (Melehi and Maraini), 1965 (Flint) and 1966 (Chabâa), while one French catalogue says all four came in 1964. Maraini devised Morocco's first modern art-history course, and Flint, an anthropologist, taught classes on Arab, Amazigh, Islamic and Mediterranean heritage. Together they rebuilt the teaching around Morocco's own arts — carpets, jewellery, ceramics, painted wood, calligraphy and architecture — treating them as modern resources rather than folklore.
This is what became known as the Casablanca School. Belkahia and his colleagues took their work out of galleries altogether with Présence plastique, open-air exhibitions in the Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech and the 18 November square in Casablanca.
Copper and leather
In the early 1960s Belkahia turned away from oil painting and the easel and worked mainly with large hammered copper. From the mid-1970s he turned to the material he is best known for: animal skin, treated with traditional techniques and stretched over shaped wooden supports — circles, arches, irregular forms — then coloured with henna and other natural dyes.
The surfaces carry signs: symbols drawn from Amazigh (Berber) writing and tattooing, Arabic letters, hands, eyes and bodies. Henna, which in Morocco marks weddings and celebrations on the skin, here marks a skin of another kind.
How to look at a Belkahia: look at the edge of the leather, where the skin was stretched and the shape follows it, and then at the colour, which sinks into the surface instead of sitting on it. The signs are placed like marks on a body: a hand, an eye, a line of tattoo. That reading is this site's own.
Legacy
Belkahia showed that modern art could be made from the materials and signs of North Africa without nostalgia. Recent exhibitions of the Casablanca art school in Europe have brought his work and that of his colleagues to new audiences. The Farid Belkahia Foundation in Marrakech, which manages his estate, named a 2017 show on his school years Farid Belkahia et l'École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca 1962–1974. He died in Marrakech on 25 September 2014.
Where to see the work
Tate, Mathaf in Doha and the Barjeel Art Foundation all have pages on him; the Fondation Farid Belkahia in Marrakech is the main place to ask about his work and archive, and Mathaf showed Farid Belkahia and the School of Fine Arts of Casablanca, 1962–1974 in 2018–19. In 2023 Tate St Ives presented the first major museum exhibition of the Casablanca Art School. Ask each institution which works are on display.
Related artists and music
Belkahia's use of writing and symbol has a close parallel in the calligraphic work of Ibrahim El-Salahi and the Khartoum School. Among the painters he brought into the school was Mohamed Hamidi; for a Moroccan painter who went her own way, see Chaïbia Talal, and for another Maghreb modernist, the Algerian painter Baya. See also our list of Moroccan painters. For the sound of Marrakech's squares, read about gnawa.