William Gallois Inaugural Lecture

The history of modern art In the Middle East and North Africa tends to describe the death of a culture of traditional crafts and forms in the later nineteenth century, which is then followed by the advent of indigenous modes of modernist painting and sculpture in the second half of the twentieth century. Artists, so the story goes, moved from creating strictly geometric, calligraphic or courtly forms in the shape of miniatures and buildings, so as to move towards the global norms of art-making presented in galleries and museums.

What, though, if this story missed the forging of one of humanity’s great cultural moments in the time which lay between these eras? What if we have managed to forget or not see a unified culture of aesthetic production which spanned the whole of the Mediterranean Islamic world from the 1880s until the 1930s?

Presenting scores of examples from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Turkey and beyond, this talk will make the case that unsung, almost exclusively anonymous, women artists created an Islamic artistic field which stands comparison with domains such as modern art.  

William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He has published widely on the history of north Africa, with a special focus on the twin problems of the underestimation of the scales of colonial violence in settings such as Algeria and the conceptual and actual difficulties (and gains) of reconstructing accounts of indigenous culture in the Maghreb.