Moroccan Modernism

The Casablanca School artists shaped the Moroccan experience of modernism through their visual arts activism. Here Powers explores their work to 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.

This groundbreaking study of Moroccan modernism in the visual arts contextualizes the work in terms of postcolonial struggles and a constellation of contemporary artistic movements. In the years after independence, new art forms and practices flourished at the Casablanca École des beaux-arts, transforming the colonial relic into a wellspring of Moroccan modernism. Casablanca School artists, including Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi, defined the modernist movement in Morocco. Their visual arts activism was displayed at their iconic outdoor exhibition in the Djemaa al-Fna plaza in Marrakech, in their collaborations with the cultural and political journal Souffles, through their radical anticolonial pedagogy, and through their use of abstraction to expand the horizons of postcolonial national culture. In Moroccan Modernism, Holiday Powers argues that the pedagogy and transnational solidarities of this generation of artists were intrinsic to their broader artistic projects. She advances a novel reading of Moroccan modernism that is rooted in its cosmopolitan national context and in Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, the transnational anticolonial intellectual movements that defined the era.