André Elbaz

Biography

In 1961 André Elbaz had his first exhibition, in Casablanca. It was very successful, and afterwards he was appointed a teacher at the fine arts school in the same city. He was twenty-seven, and had been painting for only about six years.

He was born on 26 April 1934 in El Jadida, into a Jewish family. He was the third of seven children; his father, Elie Elbaz, was among the first Moroccan photographers. André studied at the graphic arts school in Rabat and at the same time took theatre classes. For the troupe Mazagan, in which he acted in El Jadida, he made posters, and on them he first tried collage. Until the age of twenty-one he was interested chiefly in the theatre, and took up the brush later. In 1955 he made a trip to France, in 1957 he returned to Paris and entered the School of Fine Arts, where he stayed until 1961. Some sources say that he studied in Rabat and Paris from 1950 to 1961, others give narrower limits; I would hold to these two dates: 1957 and 1961. In those years he showed in Paris salons: in 1955 and 1959 at the Salon des Surindépendants, later at the Paris Biennales of 1961, 1963, 1965 and 1967. In 1960 he exhibited at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1964 at the Zwemmer Gallery in London.

A few years after his studies he found a way to join theatre and painting. With his wife, a psychiatrist, he developed the Pictodrame, an approach to art therapy that brought him international recognition.

From the mid-1960s Elbaz also made films. His short film “La nuit n’est jamais complète” (“The Night Is Never Complete”, 1966) was made to Arnold Schoenberg’s oratorio “A Survivor from Warsaw” at the research service of French television, ORTF. It was shown at the short film festival in Tours as a French entry, and at the Paris Biennale in 1967 or 1968 (sources differ) it won a prize. In 1969 Elbaz made graphic sequences for Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish”. In 1970, at the request of Norman McLaren, he created “L’homme à la bouteille” at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and in the same year made “Les Mobiles chez Calder” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1971 he made the film “Regard sur la peinture américaine” for the Whitney Museum in New York, and in 1972 he made the animation “Histoire d’œufs” in Montreal.

The Holocaust runs through his films and graphic work. In 1971 he published a portfolio of twenty screenprints, “Seuls” (“Alone”), with texts by Elie Wiesel and Naim Kattan. Works on this theme were shown in 1985 at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. In his paintings he often turns to traditional Jewish subjects, most often in an Expressionist manner. In 1991 came another portfolio of twenty screenprints, “De feu et d’exil” (“Of Fire and Exile”), on the Spanish Inquisition, with texts by François-Marc Gagnon, Shmuel Trigano and Kattan.

His exhibitions took place in Montreal (1969, 1970, 1993), Toronto (1972), Tel Aviv (1976, Tel Aviv Museum), Munich (1984), Tokyo (1989–1990), and Milan and Livorno (1992). In 1990 a retrospective was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked to the Biennale of Art Films. In 1998 he received the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah of the Foundation for French Judaism. He took French citizenship in 1981 and Canadian in 1993. In 2002 he decided to destroy a large part of his works, and then reassembled them in a series called “L’Exécution de l’œuvre” (“The Execution of the Work”). In 2006 his works of 1986–2005 were shown in Morocco: in Rabat, Casablanca, El Jadida and Fès. In 2010 a retrospective of 250 works was held in Casablanca and Rabat, in 2013 an exhibition in Madrid, and in 2019 one in Narbonne.