Biskra. Seguia in old city.
Marabout of Sidi Ali
Photochrome Zurich, Library of Congress
Matisse spent two weeks in the oasis of Biskra and its surroundings in spring 1906. He reports that one table, Street in Biskra (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), but is deeply marked by this first contact with the Orient.
This exhibition proposes to provide a cultural perspective on what is then the Biskra that the artist discovered this early in the twentieth century. Through photographs and postcards of the time, is a spa resort of winter, to the many tourist attractions that gladly exploit the orientalist cliché. Biskra is a tourist town, attracting many foreign visitors seeking easy exoticism.
Among them the artists or writers, some of whom another approach. The one by André Gide, inspired by the place to write his novel The Immoraliste, that of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who studied Arabic singing, and also of Matisse who wrote to his friend Georges Rouault upon his return, "I learned to know myself a little. more» What he learned there, in the middle of the desert and palm trees, it's good to abandon the exotic picturesque to indulge instead in the exercise of the reverie. Therefore, across the spectrum of a now distant memory that resurfaces Biskra, its fragrance and colours, in some of the odalisques painted in Nice in the 1920s, as turns at the Victorine studios the film by Rex Ingram the garden of Allah.
The course, collecting paintings and period photographs, archive documents (posters, cards, postcards, maps and sound recordings) and movies, is divided into 7 sections:
All the works and documents of the exhibition come mainly from the private collections of master Salim Becha, Madam Béatrice Baconnier, Mr Gilles DuPont collection DORA, Sydney, and the Fund of the Institute of the Arab world, Paris.
The exhibition is carried out with the assistance of the Institute of the Arab world, Paris, and the support of the Consulate of Algeria in Nice.
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