Art in the Service of Colonialism

French Art Education in Morocco 1912-1956

Hamid Irbouh

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781780760360
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738592
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956), the French established vocational and fine art schools, imposed modern systems of industrial production and pedagogy and reinvented old traditions. Hamid Irbouh argues that the French used this systematic modernisation of local arts and crafts regulation to impose their control. He looks in particular at the role and place of women in the structures of art production and education created by the French- that transformed and dominated Moroccan society during the colonial period. French women infiltrated the Moroccan milieu, to buttress colonial ideology, yet at critical moments, Moroccan women rejected traditional roles and sabotaged colonial plans. Meanwhile, the contradictions between reformist goals and the old order added to social dislocations and led to rebellion against French hegemony. Irbouh examines and analyses these processes and demonstrates how Moroccan artists have struggled to exorcise French influences and rediscover an authentic visual culture since decolonisation. This book reveals that the weight of colonial history continues to weigh heavily on artistic practice and production.

PART ONE: CLASSIFICATIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS

CHAPTER ONE: FRAMING MOROCCO’S CRAFTS

For the French Protectorate to survive in Morocco, Hubert Lyautey, the first Resident General (1912-1925), allowed the Moroccans to evolve in a state of quasi autonomy. He kept the different Moroccan ethnic groups isolated, Arabs in the medinas (walled cities) and the Berbers in the countryside. At the same time, he protected and attempted to modernise their traditional industries of craft production, consisting of leather goods, carpet weaving, pottery, brass and metal smithing, ceramics, and wood and plaster carvings. He hypothesised that this initiative would enable Moroccans to gain economic independence and allow the French to freely pursue their agenda. Modernised Moroccan industries would easily find buyers in French and other European markets. In this task Lyautey drew theoretical and polemical support for his initiatives from the writings of French Orientalists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and Arabists, or what M. Bourgeois, an administrator in the Protectorate Administration, called “the eminent” and “distinguished specialists,” including Prosper Ricard, Jacques Berque, Henry Terrasse, George Hardy, Roger Le Tourneau, J. Hainaut,¹ and others. Some of them had already served in the Algerian and Tunisian colonial administrations. Their texts offered Lyautey the required scholarly support. In an attempt to partially assimilate Morocco into France, they created a direct ideological link between the protector and the protected. They “unearthed” Berber regions either as a “Western country inhabited by Orientals,” or as a “chunk of Spain,” as the “Andalusia of Africa,” or as the natural extension of France, the successor of the Roman Empire. Above all, they claimed that the Arabs had conquered and subjugated the Berbers by force.²

These assumptions lie behind this chapter, which concerns the methods with which French scholars studied and catalogued Moroccan crafts. They grounded the general methodological framework of their arguments in what Janet Abu-Lughod has called a “chain of transmission” among themselves. Abu-Lughod, in examining and criticising a number of Western scholarly texts which purported to extract the essence of “the Islamic city,” showed how these works took on the form of Isnad, or transmission. During his lifetime, the Prophet Mohamed ordered the Koran to be written down but not his Sunnah, or traditions, including his conduct and sayings. Hence, after his death Muslims located their statements and narratives about his Sunnah in a sequence of connections reaching back to the first person who witnessed the Prophet’s acts or enunciations. Western scholars authenticated their claims about the Islamic city by employing a strategy similar to Isnad in that they positioned their contentions in “a chain of authenticity,” alongside a body of literature by their forerunners.³

In this chapter I argue that French scholars who dealt with the Moroccan craft industries and guilds substantiated their arguments by drawing on the authority of each other. Because they were concerned with the “criteria of authority,” their subsequent essays and books purporting to describe the essence of Moroccan crafts constantly reiterated several themes. They constructed a theoretical justification that kept these crafts divided within ethnic zones, arguing that they lacked the high quality of Western art, and that the guilds were archaic institutions that needed reforms. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to set the stage for a discussion of subsequent French interventions, the subject of the following chapter.

French Colonial Analysis of Moroccan Crafts

In a paper given at the Paris Conférence économique Impériale (1935), Prosper Ricard, then Head of the Moroccan Craft Bureau, recapitulated the different positions he had embraced since his arrival in Morocco in 1912-1913 from Algeria, where he had occupied a similar office. His views became the foundation on which later French scholars constructed their arguments. He defined Moroccan crafts as the product of local traditional industries,⁴ thereby constructing these craft productions congruent to Lyautey’s goal to intervene in, but not overly disturb, the economy of the medinas. Ricard conflated the nature of craft and industry, and then used this equation to characterise the nature and processes of producing crafts. He presupposed that craftsmen transformed either local or imported raw materials into utilitarian objects des-tined largely for local use and the tourist trade and, more sporadically, for foreign markets. Second, he underlined a claim that runs throughout writings of other scholars namely that, as the backbone of the Moroccan economy, guilds controlled crafts. The scholars explained that in the medinas guilds provided salaried occupations to half the population who made their living from practicing crafts. In addition to their economic functions, guilds, as social institutions, structured the social and moral life of Moroccans. Though crafts had existed for almost a millennium, no written documents or oral traditions provided any evidence for the rules and regulations of the guilds. Consequently they suffered from archaism and disorder. Ricard argued that Moroccan crafts had survived not because of sound politics of organised labour, but because “the country has remained introverted and folded on itself, preserving intact its aesthetics, its tastes, and its traditional needs.”⁵

I will provide a detailed discussion of guilds below, but for now I wish to emphasise that they did play an important role in harnessing solidarity among craftsmen. They had enough force to mobilise them into a unit and encourage them to respect a whole set of traditional tenets, codes, as well as aesthetic judgments. The French authorities contended that they had to protect these social institutions from the shocks which the sudden introduction of mass-produced Western goods and the new mechanised means of production would ultimately bring. Ricard and other scholars addressed local craft productions according to a system of practices and beliefs that a group of craftsmen shared. They further segmented the craftsmen according to their ethnicity, class, and gender. The scholars added mythological beliefs to this system of categorisation, as when Renée Bazet, head of the Rabat vocational school for Moroccan women, took on the study of the Rabat carpets and women’s weaving production (Chapter Five). As a self-fulfilling prophecy, the principal forms of such grouping, which appeared in the texts by the scholars, reflected Lyautey’s divisive colonial vision. The scholars pinpointed which social beliefs and cultural practices belonged to a group of crafts-men, and the rules that governed each member of the group. In studying Moroccan crafts in this fashion they drew the following generalisations:

a) Artistic elements found in the craft produced by an ethnic group were widely and commonly shared by each member of the group.

b) Artistic elements of each craft systematically cut groups off from each other.

c) These assumptions in turn represent the central components of the conceptual scheme in the belief system of the group and have a deep influence on the behaviour of each group.

In this scheme of essentialising and sectarian categorisation, the scholars contrasted “urban” with “rural” crafts. Ricard viewed “urban crafts” as “Islamic” in essence, and not Moroccan proper. They reached Morocco from Syria and Persia as Muslim conquerors moved into North Africa in the eighth century. Arab Muslims in Morocco practiced them in the large cities. The steady contact urbanite Muslims kept with the Middle East through commerce, the pilgrimage to Mekkah, the holy city in the Arabian Peninsula, gifts Moroccan Sultans exchanged with their Middle Eastern counterparts, as well as the introduction of foreign women into local harems, caused these crafts to undergo a continued, but not substantial, change.⁶ The scholars held that urban crafts, including carpets and pottery, displayed floral designs, and polygonal intricate laces, all deployed in either supple or rigid epigraphy. Ricard labelled urban crafts as commercial in nature, because artisans in real professions, generally grouped in guilds, produced them. Rural crafts, on the other hand, Berber in essence, belonged to Morocco. They had longer histories than urban crafts, and Berbers produced them in isolated regions in the mountains. These crafts comprised carpets, mats made of reeds, pottery, jewellery, blankets, cabinet making among other items, and they manifested artistic expression and authenticity.⁷ Always immutable, they exhibited an almost exclusive use of geometric patterns and linear motifs.

The scholars completed this categorisation with a subcategory consisting of female crafts practiced by both rural and urban women. For Ricard, these crafts “by their very nature belonged to outsiders,⁸ because women made them for personal ends, and they remained relatively free from all external control. Also free from all commercial rules, they became very expensive.

The scholars claimed that Arab and Berber crafts did not seem to have interacted. Just as the French authorities maintained that Arabs and Berbers belonged to two different ethnic groups, each with its particular culture, the scholars, too, sustained a rigid separation between their crafts. The scholars nevertheless defined the properties of the two types loosely; and they investigated, but rarely substantiated, the inter-connections between the craft practices of each ethnic group and its belief system. As a rule, the scholars defined Moroccan crafts in opposite terms to Western arts, and therefore exalted a traditional Orientalist view.⁹ Arabs and Berber crafts alike lacked what the French and Westerners considered a “style,¹⁰ because Moroccan aesthetic concepts and technical know-how had developed little through the ages. Though Arab crafts had a trait of epochal differences, their fundamental attributes did not change.

According to Henri Terrasse, a French archaeologist and art historian, Moroccan Arab craftsmen had no reflective abilities. They produced essentially utilitarian artefacts and could not imagine other roles these items might have played. To justify this claim, Terrasse charged that Moroccan Arabs could conceive of an external world, but could not conceive of their own existence and, hence, primitive desires and tendencies framed their lives. They submitted to their passions, but could not stipulate them. They failed to specify the artistic taste of their “race,” and could not define the elements and ideas that inspired the craft productions surrounding them. They practiced crafts they did not originate, and their social and cultural practices were dictated by an uncompromising general view they held of society and the role of the artefacts they made. This view of society and of the self hindered and rendered ineffectual the progress of any programmatic credo that their crafts could have had; that is, the action program Arab craftsmen relied on consisted of not interfering in the cultural practices and artistic traditions they inherited from their ancestors.

Terrasse criticised Moroccan Arabs for manufacturing and consuming handicrafts without analysing either production or consumption methods. Their crafts, though rich and abundant, remained, nevertheless, vague, imprecise, and their aesthetic properties undefined. Craftsmen expressed themselves through arabesque, a configuration of monotonous and repetitive forms, an art expression mostly found in the medinas. Terrasse condemned the whole country as “the kingdom of arabesques” and admonished arabesque as an “art of dreaming,” as the “enemy of variation,” because it “lull[ed] all energy and desire for artistic creation.” Above all, arabesque underlined for Terrasse the “troubled soul” of the “mysterious,” yet “voluptuous,” “languishing,” yet “decadent” Morocco.¹¹

For this reason Georges Hardy, the second General Director of Public Education, in agreement with Ricard, argued that French scholars interested in studying Moroccan crafts, had to focus their investigations not in the Arab medinas but in the Berber mountains. Far from viewing the decline of the Moroccan craft industries as the result of the invasion of foreign mass-produced goods, Hardy charged that, as a general rule, the “decay” resulted from the manner in which Arabs fossilised their crafts in their daily lives. He acknowledged the decorative value of Arab crafts, but contended that their decorativeness had no soul and embellished utilitarian objects only. Urban crafts survived in dwindling guilds, and craftsmen concerned themselves mainly with earning a living without disturbing old forms and without spending too much energy. The intensity of Berber handicrafts production, however, despite its “technical imperfection,” its clumsy composition, and general linearity, delivered much richer, varied, and grander objects.¹²

The scholars gave value to separate traditions, and never allowed Arab and Berber crafts to intermingle. The two, they claimed, evolved independently in peculiar circumstances and had qualities proper to their distinct natures. Though the scholars championed Berber crafts as superior to Arab crafts, they maintained that neither had the properties of Western art. For Terrasse and Hainaut, another French archaeologist and art historian, Western art history was inscribed in a set of art movements, while Berber crafts derived from sets of different tribes, and hence, they belied cohesive aesthetic notions and values which would have endowed them with the attributes of Western art. In them, Berber artisans confused artistic expressions with technique, the procedures of composition, and know-how, which varied from one tribe to another, underscoring differences in geographical locations and their independence from Arab influences.¹³ For Hardy, Arab craftsmen failed to understand art’s programmatic sense as Western artists did, in that art has its own rules of aesthetic expression which required periodical changes and necessary decentralisations of pictorial elements. Arab craftsmen, he explained, “neglected the production of life [and] even renounced symbols.”¹⁴

Jacques Berque, a sociologist and M. Delmas-Fort, an administrator, asserted much more cynically a generalisation that characterised both Arab and Berber artisans. Berque alleged that the peculiarities of Moroccan craftsmen included their “holy inertia”¹⁵ their “archaism”, their “over-proud traditionalism,” the “tranquillity” in which they fossilised for centuries, and their “incompatibility with the Western rhythm” of production.¹⁶ For Delmas-Fort, the dilemma of Moroccan industries had its roots in the country’s essential particularism, which consisted of “anarchism,” “xenophobia,” and “introversion against all external influence.”¹⁷ Well after the Protectorate, historian, Roger Le Tourneau, still reiterated in the mid-1960s the charge of sclerosis, demonstrating that the numbers which Leo Africanus, during his travels through Morocco at the turn of the sixteenth century, had given of the people involved in the Fez craft industries equalled the number found in the 1898 French consulate reports and also those found in the official census twenty years after the establishment of the Protectorate.¹⁸

Moroccan Arab architecture, the sum of a number of crafts including stone and wood sculpting, painting, mosaics, and calligraphy, met the same fate in French literature. In spite of the abundant mosques, madrassas (schools or universities attached to mosques), palaces, and houses, the scholars viewed urban architecture as having a degenerate artistic expression compared to that originally found in its Eastern Islamic ancestor. For Terrasse and Hainaut, throughout its history, Moroccan architecture “had little to express, for it neglected to represent the signs of [an active] mind as well as those of [an active] life. It remained purely decorative, devoid of concepts; always resembling itself, it was applied to the palace and to the mosque never more than a splendid external cloth.”¹⁹ Similarly, Ricard argued that all attempts to locate a desire for artistic renewal in a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Epigraph Page
• Contents
• Archive Centres and Libraries Mentioned in the Text
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Classifications and Associations
• Chapter One: Framing Morocco’s Crafts
• Chapter Two: Diffusing Colonial Order
• Part Two: Design and Process of Colonial Education
• Chapter Three: Colonial Mass Education
• Chapter Four: Vocational Schools for Men and the French Infiltration of Morocco’s Traditional Industry
• Chapter Five: Women’s Vocational Schools: The French Organize the Feminine Milieu
• Part Three: Originality, Drawing, and Colonial Exploitation
• Chapter Six: Vocational Training and Patriotism in France
• Chapter Seven: Drawing as an Apparatus of Exploitation
• Chapter Eight: The Open Workshops and the Casablanca School of Fine Arts
• By Way of Conclusion: The Burden of Cultural Decolonisation
• Notes
• Bibliography