Hassan El Glaoui

Biography

In the spring of 1943 Thami El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh, showed his son’s paintings to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and asked what he thought of them. Hassan himself later said that Churchill’s opinion helped him persuade his formidable father that painting could be more than a private pursuit.

Hassan El Mezouari El Glaoui was born on 23 December 1923 in Marrakesh. His father, Thami El Glaoui, was the last Pasha of the city and head of one of the most influential Berber families in the country. His mother, Lalla Zineb El Mokri, came from the family of the Grand Vizier El Mokri. The young man had no formal artistic training at that point. In 1950 Thami El Glaoui invited friends to Marrakesh: the actor Edward G. Robinson and his wife Gladys Lloyd Robinson, an art collector and painter, and Sir Anson Goodyear, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The guests met Hassan and saw his work. They persuaded the Pasha to let his son show his paintings in Paris and New York. In 1951 he exhibited in both cities for the first time, alongside Gladys Lloyd Robinson. Both exhibitions were successful, and he was allowed to study abroad.

In the early 1950s he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean Souverbie and Émilie Charmy, and mastered drawing and oil painting. Sources call him the first Moroccan artist to be educated abroad; I could not verify this claim from documents. In Paris he married a Frenchwoman of Egyptian origin, Évelyne Kahil. In 1954, at Aix-les-Bains, he was injured with his wife in a car accident.

In 1956, soon after Morocco gained independence, his father died. The family’s property was confiscated for about a year. On 1 May 1957 Hassan was kidnapped in Marrakesh together with three of his brothers: by one account, by uncontrolled elements of the Istiqlal party. For more than eighteen months they were held in various places, the last of them Boucheron, near Casablanca.

After his release (late 1958 or 1959; sources differ) he left for Paris. His first wife soon filed for divorce. He settled alone not far from the Château de Rambouillet. There he met Christine Legendre, a model for the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy; they married in Brussels in 1963.

In 1964 he returned to Morocco to be closer to his mother. His first show after the return, in 1965, was held in a large tent.

By then he already had a long list of exhibitions behind him: Paris (1950), New York (1951 or 1952, and 1967), London (1960), Brussels (1969), and later Casablanca. Wide recognition came in the 1980s, when he painted fantasia horsemen against landscapes, along with unusual portraits. His pictures continue the Moroccan and French figurative tradition. King Hassan II and King Mohammed VI admired his work, and it is held in the collection of the Royal Palace in Fez and in the Parliament collection in Rabat.

Hassan El Glaoui died on 21 June 2018 in Rabat, aged 94. In 2012 his paintings were shown beside Winston Churchill’s Moroccan landscapes at Leighton House Museum in London. In April 2019 the family, together with the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, organised the exhibition “The Salt of My Earth”: more than a hundred works, mostly unknown to the public. His daughter Touria El Glaoui founded the London-based contemporary African art fair 1-54.