Every history of art has its compass points. For Moroccan painting, they come down to some twenty names, born between the mid-nineteenth century and the late 1950s, whose works now form the heart of the Kingdom’s great private and institutional collections. This essay reads them chapter by chapter, and sets out what to know before acquiring one of their works.
The pioneers
Mohamed Ben Ali R’bati (1861-1939) opens the story. Born in Rabat and settled in Tangier, he was noticed in the early twentieth century by the Irish painter John Lavery, who encouraged him to paint. His first exhibition, in London in 1916, made him one of the very first Moroccan painters shown in Europe. His watercolours and gouaches look at the city from within: souks, processions, musicians and ceremonies, rendered with a narrative precision that belongs as much to chronicle as to painting.
In another register, he must be read alongside Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962). Settled in Morocco from 1917, the painter from Nancy belongs to the history of painting in Morocco rather than to that of Moroccan painting; yet his kasbahs of the Atlas, and the blue he invented in 1937 for his Marrakech villa, have made him a reference no collection devoted to Morocco ignores.
The singular voices
These artists were long filed under the convenient label of “naïve”. It does little justice to the inventive power of painters who forged, outside any school, entirely personal languages.
Chaïbia Talal (1929-2004), born in the Doukkala region, never went to school. She began painting in the early 1960s, after a dream she would recount all her life. Pure colour straight from the tube, flat areas outlined in black, frontal figures with immense eyes: noticed by Ahmed Cherkaoui and the critic Pierre Gaudibert, she was soon exhibiting in Europe, where her work was compared to art brut and the CoBrA movement.
Ahmed Louardiri (1928-1974) worked as a gardener until the age of thirty-one before painting what he saw every day. He first exhibited in 1961. His gardens, palaces and mosques overrun the entire surface of the picture, as though vegetation had to ward off the void.
Abbès Saladi (1950-1992), who came from philosophy, devoted himself to painting as a self-taught artist in Marrakech in the late 1970s. Hybrid creatures, bodies in metamorphosis, birds, fish and plants intertwined: a fantastic vision painted with a miniaturist’s precision, and a body of work all the more sought after for being small.
The founders of modernism
Two opposing temperaments inaugurate Moroccan abstraction: the gesture and the sign.
Jilali Gharbaoui (1930-1971), born near Fez and orphaned very young, reached Paris in the early 1950s on a scholarship; he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, then spent time in Rome. His canvases are made of nervous strokes, swirls and masses of colour thrown down with almost physical energy: a painting of momentum and urgency that shows the gesture rather than a subject. His fragile life ended in Paris in 1971.
Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934-1967), born in Boujad and introduced to calligraphy as a child, trained in Paris and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He was among the first to bring modern abstraction into dialogue with the signs of Moroccan culture, Amazigh tattoo, henna, jewellery and carpet motifs, often painted on jute. He died at thirty-three, after barely ten years of work that opened a path for an entire generation.
The Casablanca School
In the 1960s, the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca became the laboratory of a modernism that owed nothing to imitating Paris. Farid Belkahia (1934-2014) directed it from 1962 to 1974; with Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chebâa, he brought crafts, popular arts and the country’s visual heritage into the teaching.
Belkahia later left canvas for stretched skin, copper and natural pigments, henna, saffron, pomegranate, on which he traced signs, hands, circles and arrows. Melehi (1936-2020), who passed through Seville, Madrid, Rome and New York, made the wave, an undulation of bold colour repeated and offset, his signature; in 1978 he co-founded the Asilah Cultural Moussem. Chebâa, who died in 2013, a teacher and theorist who wrote for the review Souffles, would later claim an “airy” painting freed from ideology, and carried geometry all the way into interior design.
Those who carried the adventure forward
Hassan El Glaoui (1924-2018), son of the Pasha of Marrakech, painted in secret at first before leaving to study in Paris in the early 1950s; his riders, fantasias and galloping horses made him the great Moroccan painter of the horse. Miloud Labied (1939-2008), self-taught, refused to be called a naïve painter and never stopped putting his own sign back into play. Mohamed Hamidi (1941-2025), a figure of the Casablanca School, pursued an abstraction of signs borrowed from carpets, ceramics and jewellery, with sharp transitions of colour and great sensuality.
Mohammed Kacimi (1942-2003), as much a poet as a painter, relentlessly developed a body of work moving from bodies to signs and then to vast compositions inhabited by Africa, the earth and travel. Saâd Hassani (1948-2026), self-taught, held his first exhibition at eighteen and passed through abstract expressionism before returning, from 1990, to a renewed figuration. Fouad Bellamine, born in Fez in 1950, author of the line “there is no Moroccan painting, only Moroccan painters”, builds an abstraction of arches, vaults and thresholds dissolving into light. Mahi Binebine, born in Marrakech in 1959, painter, sculptor and novelist, makes the human figure, often masked or constrained, the site of a grave meditation on confinement and dignity.
What public sales say, and do not say
Major auctions have made collectors’ interest in these names visible. In June 2015 in Paris, Abbès Saladi’s L’Offrande reached 466,000 euros, according to Médias24, in a sale held by Millon jointly with the Tangier auction house Mazad & Art. The same year at Millon, a 1959 canvas by Jilali Gharbaoui was knocked down for 660,000 euros before the sale was cancelled. In June 2020 in Casablanca, Chaïbia Talal’s Les Tisseuses de Chtouka sold for 2.1 million dirhams at CMOOA.
These results describe one specific work, at a given date and in a given room. They do not set the value of another work by the same artist: period, format, condition and, above all, provenance account for most of the price.
Acquiring a master’s work today
These works are rare. They usually pass from one private collection to another, and the greatest names are also the most imitated. Three principles apply: insist on documented provenance, see the work before acquiring it, and deal with a professional who takes responsibility for what they sell. We set them out in our guide: how to make sure a Moroccan artwork is authentic.
The gallery never promises a work it does not have. It records its collectors’ search requests and tells them first, in confidence, when a work is entrusted to it, once checked under its authenticity protocol.
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