1929–02.04.2004
Chaïbia Talal
Chaïbia Talal (1929–2004), an illiterate peasant woman from near El Jadida, married off at thirteen and widowed at fifteen, took up paints in 1963 after a dream in which she was told to paint. Three years later her canvases hung at the Goethe-Institut in Casablanca and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris; she is placed with art brut and naive art, and her work is held in collections from Lausanne to Tunis.
Biography
Around 1963 Chaïbia Talal dreamed of a voice that said to her: “Chaïbia, take the colours and paint!” In another version of her story, strangers in the dream brought her brushes and paints. She began to paint.
She was thirty-four. She could neither read nor write, and never learned.
She was born in 1929 in Chtouka, a village near El Jadida on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and grew up in the countryside. At thirteen her parents sent her to Casablanca to be married; at fourteen her son Hocein was born, at fifteen she was widowed and went into service as a maid to feed herself and the child. Everything she could, she put into his schooling. Hocein Talal grew up to become a painter himself, and in 1965 he showed his mother’s canvases to Pierre Gaudibert, a Paris critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Gaudibert gave her his support. The Moroccan art world at first received the pictures coolly, but in 1966 they were shown all at once at the Goethe-Institut in Casablanca, at the Galerie Solstice in Paris and at the Salon des Surindépendants in the Paris Museum of Modern Art.
From then on the exhibitions followed one another: “École marocaine” in Copenhagen and the Kunstkabinett in Frankfurt in 1969, Paris in 1970, the Dar America centres in Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakesh, Fez and Tangier in 1971, a gallery in Ibiza and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1974, the Menton biennial in 1976, the Salon de Mai in 1977, Rotterdam and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 1980. Later came the FIAC, the Havana Biennial, the Salon d’Automne and shows in Japan, the United States, England, Italy and Scandinavia. She was hung alongside Corneille, Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse, Augustin Lesage and Adolf Wölfli, and in the catalogues she appears now as art brut, now as naive art; in her colour people see the influence of the CoBrA group. To my mind these labels say more about the viewers than about her: she was self-taught and painted the way she saw.
Her works are held at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the French Fonds national d’art contemporain, the Museum of Living Art in Tunis, the Fondation Cérès Franco in Lagrasse, the Site de la Création Franche in Bègles and the Musée de l’Art en marche in Lapalisse. In 2003 in Paris she was presented with the gold medal of the French academic society Arts-Sciences-Lettres.
Chaïbia Talal died on 2 April 2004 in Casablanca. The writer Fatima Mernissi addressed a letter to her, “Chaïbia, or Sincerity at the Source of Art”; in 2015 the director Youssef Britel made the film “Chaïbia” about her, and in 2024 her work was included in the Qatar–Morocco Year of Culture, in the section on women in society. A boulevard in Casablanca bears her name.
Profile notes