Art movement · Morocco
The Casablanca Art School
The Casablanca Art School was the group of artists and teachers who, from 1962, transformed the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca under its director Farid Belkahia. With Mohamed Melehi, Mohamed Chabâa, Toni Maraini and Bert Flint, they built a modern Moroccan art from carpets, jewellery, painted wood, calligraphy and Amazigh signs, and in 1969 took it into public squares.
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A school turned around
Morocco became independent in 1956. In 1962 the painter Farid Belkahia, aged twenty-eight, became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, which until then had followed a French academic curriculum.
In 1964 he brought in two painters, Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa, and two art historians, the Italian Toni Maraini and the Dutch Bert Flint. Together they rewrote the teaching.
Crafts as modern art
The new curriculum treated Morocco's own visual heritage as a living resource. Students studied and photographed rural carpets, Amazigh (Berber) jewellery and tattoos, painted wooden ceilings, ceramics, calligraphy and architecture — not as folklore to copy, but as a vocabulary of abstraction that was already Moroccan.
The artists' own work followed the same logic. Melehi became known for hard-edged, wave-like abstractions in bright colours. Chabâa worked across painting, graphic design and architectural decoration. Belkahia moved from hammered copper to paintings on stretched leather coloured with henna.
Art in the square
In May 1969 the group — Belkahia, Melehi, Chabâa, Mohamed Hamidi, Mohamed Ataallah and Mustapha Hafid — staged Présence plastique: open-air exhibitions on the Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech and, a few weeks later, on a public square in Casablanca. Paintings stood among street performers, traders and passers-by. The statement was clear: modern art belonged to everyday Moroccan life, not only to galleries.
The artists also designed for print and public space. Melehi created covers for Souffles, the influential literary and political magazine founded in 1966, and the group's graphic language spread through posters, books and murals.
Rediscovery
For decades the school was known mainly in Morocco. Recent exhibitions in Europe, including at Tate St Ives and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, have presented it as one of the major avant-gardes of the post-colonial world.
Related
The closest parallel is the Khartoum School, where script and craft were also turned into modern form. Outside the school, Chaïbia Talal and Hassan El Glaoui followed their own figurative paths, and the Algerian Baya is another North African modernist; see also our list of Moroccan painters. For the musical tradition of Marrakech's squares, read about gnawa, and for the region as a whole, North African art.