Ahmed Cherkaoui

Biography

In the summer of 1967 Ahmed Cherkaoui decided to return from Paris to Morocco for good. He said that he had gone to Paris looking for fame, that he was now giving it up, and that he wanted to teach the children of his own country. A few weeks later, on 17 August, he was dead.

He was born on 2 October 1934 in Boujad (Bejaâd). His mother came from the Berbers of the Middle Atlas, from the Zayane tribe, known for its weaving; his father belonged to the large Cherkaoui family, and his grandfather was regarded as a well-known Sufi. While still a child he moved with his family to Beni Mellal. In the summer of 1941, when he was seven, his mother died. He learned the Koran at a Koranic school, and his father then enrolled him in a school for the sons of notables in Casablanca. His elder brother Mohamed recalled that in class he drew trees, storks and minarets in his notebooks.

As a young man Cherkaoui led a troop in the Moroccan scout movement, worked as a calligrapher for the newspapers Al Alam and Al Ray Alaam, and made posters and banners for the Atlas paint and hardware shop in Casablanca. With money from his elder brother he studied in Paris from 1956 at the École des métiers d’art, in the graphic arts department, and received his diploma in 1959. After that he designed record sleeves for the oriental department of the record company Pathé-Marconi. His first canvases were figurative: Moroccan landscapes. Monique de Gouvenain, who then ran the hostel for North African students and later directed the Galerie Solstice, persuaded him to show them, and in 1959 his first exhibition was held in the printing workshop of Lucienne Thalheimer in Paris. In 1960 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Jean Aujame. In April he saw the retrospective of Roger Bissière at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In 1961 he received a one-year scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, worked with Henryk Stażewski, and came to know Polish graphic art and the work of Paul Klee. In the summer, at the end of his stay, he showed new work in Warsaw, and alongside his studies he taught French to a group of students.

From August 1961 he lived in Morocco, went through a period of doubt, and began to look closely at the designs of Berber tattoos and pottery ornament. According to his brother and later critics, his mother had worn such signs on her face and hands. He began to break these signs apart and introduce them into his compositions without any hint of representation. This is how his language took shape: abstract, but with motifs from tattoos, pottery, leatherwork, weaving, ornament and architecture. His exhibitions in Paris and Casablanca were supported by Gaston Diehl, founder of the Salon de Mai and then French cultural attaché in Morocco. At about the same time Cherkaoui met the writer Abdelkébir Khatibi, who from 1976 wrote about his painting.

Later that year he settled in Paris and worked on gouaches and large canvases in which the features of his manner appeared. In March 1962 a solo exhibition was held at the gallery of Ursula Girardon; he took part in the show “Painters of the School of Paris and Moroccan Painters” at the Mohammed V National Theatre in Rabat, and won a bronze medal at the Salon Interministériel in Paris. A UNESCO grant allowed him to study more deeply the signs of Berber art and Arabic calligraphy. From January 1963 he exhibited at the French cultural centres in Rabat, Tangier and Casablanca; in March he was among the “Twenty Foreign Painters” at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and in 1964 among the “Ten Painters of the Maghreb”. In May 1965 he began teaching drawing at a technical college in Beaumont-sur-Oise. In 1966 he took part in the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar and received a Moroccan prize.

Until 1965 dark colour combinations dominated his canvases; after that his manner became lighter and more open. Examples from the later period are “Red Mirrors” (1965) and “Red Talisman” (1967). From 1966 he began to apply his language to leather.

He died in Casablanca on 17 August 1967 after an operation. Memorial exhibitions were held in Paris and Rabat; in 1996 the Institut du monde arabe in Paris showed the retrospective “Cherkaoui ou la passion du signe”, and in 2018 the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat mounted a large exhibition of seventy to eighty works.