On Wednesday, April 2018, PIASA will present its sixth contemporary African art sale, offering a panorama of African artistic production, from the moderns to the most recent creations of artists from the continent and the diaspora. Amongst the selected works will be a nude by Jacques Majorelle, a major Moroccan artist.
Born in 1886 in the cold of Nancy, France, Jacques Majorelle discovered in 1910 the colors and warmth of Northern Africa, which he will permanently adopt by moving to Marrakech in 1919.
His paintings are an homage to the shimmering tones, the dust and harmonies of the Atlas landscapes he roamed during eight long journeys, as well as to the streets, daily life, souks and Kasbahs of Marrakech.
In the 1930s, he committed himself to a very different theme, the « Négresses nues ». These paintings, presented in 1934 in the Mamounia Pavilion, depict languid black women, giving off a troubling sensuality. They are shown in a setting of diverse compositions, posing, for the most part, in the gardens of the painter’s villa, that today bear the name of Jacques Majorelle. Created and tended to by the artist-gardener, their sumptuous scenery brings out the ebony, ochre and gold tones of the nudes. Majorelle applies metal oxides, gold and silver powder, to his canvases, incorporating them in the paint in order to give glint and light to the sensuous curves of his models. These models are often young women working in the artisanal workshop he created with his wife in order to produce furniture, fine leather goods or woodwork.
This theme Majorelle will explore throughout his life brings the beauty of black Glaoui region women to the canons of classical beauty; these descendants of beautiful slaves from the Souss and Drâa valleys brought from Timbuktu are, to Jacques Majorelle, the personification and concretization of his dreams, of this « fantasy Orient only poets know, and that so rarely offers itself to our eyes », as he writes to Etienne Cournault.
From 1945 to 1952, he explores the sources of his inspiration through three trips to Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Niger and Senegal, and his palette transforms into bright colors and striking contrasts.
Jacques Majorelle suffered from a car accident in 1955, leading to his death in 1962. His garden, abandoned for several years, was resuscitated by Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1980s; it remains, like the painted work of its creator, an icon of Moroccan splendor.
