Casablanca Art School: A Postcolonial Avant-Garde 1962-1987

Abstract mural paintings, graphic experiments and everyday objects revealing a specifically Moroccan art scene with transnational aspirations

Published with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Just a few years after Morocco gained independence in 1956, a vibrant center of cultural renewal developed in Casablanca. This publication, featuring 160 color and black-and-white illustrations, offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of the Casablanca Art School. The main protagonists--Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa, Bert Flint, Toni Maraini and Mohamed Melehi, together with students, teachers and associated artists--feature in the book with a large number of works. Their aims combined an openness toward local history with the new social reality, including a reassessment of the relationship between art, handicrafts, design and architecture within the local context in dialogue with the ideas of the Bauhaus manifesto. These aspects are explored in more detail in an essay by Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa on Morocco's vernacular artistic heritage and an examination of the role and significance of public space by Maud Houssais.