Painter · Algeria
Mohammed Khadda
Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) was an Algerian painter, sculptor and writer, one of the founders of modern Algerian art. Self-taught at first, he worked as a typographer in Mostaganem before spending ten years in Paris. Back in independent Algeria he became the leading figure of the "painters of the sign", who built an abstract art from the shapes of Arabic script and Amazigh signs, and defended that art in his writing.
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From the print shop
Mohammed Khadda was born in Mostaganem, on Algeria's western coast, in 1930. His family was poor, and as a boy he went to work in printing. One biography says he was hired in a print shop in Aïn Séfra in 1944, and that he later worked as a pattern maker and typographer in several print shops. Handling lead letters every day gave him a lasting sense of the shapes of writing.
He taught himself to draw and paint, took evening classes, and spent his free time with a friend from Mostaganem, the painter Abdallah Benanteur. In 1953 the two young men left together for Paris, where Khadda attended evening drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Paris
Khadda spent ten years in Paris, working at odd jobs, painting and meeting other artists and writers. He exhibited in Paris from the late 1950s, and had his first solo exhibition in 1961. During those years his painting moved from figuration towards abstraction, and he looked for a modern language that would come from Algeria's own visual culture rather than from the orientalist images of the colonial period.
Painting the sign
In 1963, after independence, he returned to Algeria. His mature work is built from signs: the curves and strokes of Arabic letters, which he freed from their meaning, alongside Amazigh motifs, the shapes of olive trees and the colours of the Algerian landscape. In 1967 he also took part in Aouchem (the Arabic word means tattoo), a movement of Algerian artists who drew on popular signs. The poet Jean Sénac called him and the artists working in the same direction the peintres du signe — the "painters of the sign".
How to look at a Khadda: read the stroke before the sign. A line that begins as a letter becomes a branch, a wing or a figure, and the surface holds both readings at once; the pictures are built on a rhythm of black or earth-coloured marks against open ground. That reading is this site's own.
Khadda argued for this kind of abstraction at a time when the state wanted art to be realist and patriotic. He wrote essays on art, among them a 1964 essay in Révolution africaine, the first of three statements titled Éléments pour un art nouveau on the artist's role after independence. He was a founding member of the national union of visual arts in 1964 and took part in the Aouchem movement of 1967, painted murals and designed posters and book covers. He also made sculpture.
Legacy
He died in Algiers on 4 May 1991. Today he is regarded, with his friend M'hamed Issiakhem, as one of the two great founders of modern Algerian painting; his work is in the national museums of Algeria and in collections across the Arab world, and in March 2020 Google marked what would have been his 90th birthday with a Doodle. Like the Khartoum School in Sudan and the Casablanca School in Morocco, he showed how Arabic script and local signs could become a modern art.
Where to see the work
The Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers holds Les Casbahs ne s'assiègent pas (1961–82). The Dalloul Art Foundation (Dafbeirut) and Galerie El Marsa publish biographies and works, and Google Arts & Culture includes him in its story on four iconic Algerian artists; we have not confirmed which other pieces are on view, so ask the museum in Algiers. The Doodle article in The National is a short introduction.
See also
M'hamed Issiakhem and Bachir Yellès; the Algerian painter Baya; North African art; and our lists of Algerian artists and Algerian painters.
