Some Observations on Traditional Popular Art in Morocco

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Notes

Notes

1 It has often been remarked how their art almost always tends towards abstraction, is essentially an applied art, and uses signs and forms that are striking in their universality. See Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art. (London: Penguin Books, 1951).

2 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963), 12.

3 “The humble example of the clogs the Bambara offer to their new wives is significant. These wooden shoes are small art objects given that they are decorated with geometrical designs branded on the flat surface with a red-hot iron by blacksmiths […] These double lines […] are made starting at the heel; each one conforms to a particular formula and has a name. The first X indicates the multiplying of children and consists of two lines that are the parents. The second has the same meaning. The third symbolises the husband’s family […] Lastly, the triangle at the end of the foot is the closure of the association, whereas the longitudinal line across the foot is the sign of the union of the whole. It is, then, no longer simple decoration marked on the object: the wife, onlookers and members of the family, while admiring it as such, give it a profound meaning […].” Marcel Griaule, “Les symboles des arts africains”, in Alioune Diop et al., l’Art nègre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951), 13-15.

4 “Studying the rural societies of Europe provides some basis for understanding the religious world of Neolithic cultivators. In many cases the customs and beliefs of European peasants represent a more archaic state of culture than that documented in the mythology of classic Greece.” Eliade, Sacred, p. 164.

5 Jean Mathias, “L’Artisanat Marocain”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc XXVII (1963): 58.

6 Ibid., 65.

7 “Muslim guilds and trade associations have remained extremely popular and have not split, as has occurred in Western Europe, into management […] bosses in opposition to the workers. In Morocco, the guild [hanta] consists of masters, apprentices and journeymen all working […] in the same trade […].” Louis Massignon ed., Enquête sur les corporations musulmanes d’artisans et de commerçants au Maroc, published by the Direction des Affaires indigènes (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1925), 99.

8 Doctoresse Legey, Essai sur le Folklore Marocain (Paris: Geuthner, 1926), 185.

9 Henri Basset, “Les Rites du travail de la laine à Rabat”, Hespéris 2 (1922): 139-60.

10 But “in Islam there is no artisanal profession that has not set up a guild or association with an apprenticeship, initiation ceremony, mentoring and masters”. Jean Sauvaget, “Introduction à l’étude de la céramique musulmane”, Revue des Etudes Islamiques 33 (1965): 45.

11 “Les tapis et les bijoux dans le tradition berbére et populaire”, Maghreb Art 1 (Autumn 1965): 20.

12 “[…] there are strange analogies with the rites you see in the culture of the earth […] weavers have adopted without changing a single word the formulae of the harvest.” Basset, “Les Rites”, 157.

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Toni Maraini

Toni Maraini (b. 1941) is an Italian writer, poet, art historian, essayist, and scholar in Moroccan and North African art and culture. She lived in Morocco from 1964 to 1986, during which time she was actively involved in the Casablanca School of Art. Her book Écrits sur l’art au Maroc (1991, new edition 2014) is a recollection of research studies on Moroccan art history and artists. She participates in numerous conferences on Mediterranean arts and cultures, and is the author of many articles, most recently “The Bauhaus and Morocco”, Bauhaus Imaginista: Learning from, Rabat (2018). She lives in Rome.