Moroccan Modernism

A group of artists who worked together as faculty at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts from approximately 1956 to 1978 collectively produced works that were key vectors in Moroccan modernism, which the author locates in relation to postcoloniality.

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In the years after independence, new art forms and practices flourished at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts, transforming the colonial relic into a zeitgeist of Moroccan modernism. Casablanca School artists, including Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi, defined the modernist movement in Morocco through their radical anticolonial pedagogy and their use of abstraction as a means of expanding the horizons of postcolonial national culture. Best known for their iconic outdoor exhibition in the large public plaza, Djemaa al Fna, in Marrakech, and for their collaborations with the cultural and political journal Souffles, the Casablanca School artists shaped the Moroccan experience of modernism through their visual arts activism. In Moroccan Modernism, Holiday Powers argues that the pedagogy and transnational solidarities of this generation of artists were intrinsic to their broader artistic projects. Powers advances a novel reading of Moroccan modernism that is rooted in its cosmopolitan national context and in the transnational anticolonial, pan-African, and pan-Arab intellectual movements that defined the era.