EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE CASABLANCA SCHOOL: MODERNISM WITHOUT PERMISSION

ÉTIENNE DE MONTCLAR

January 6, 2026

Centered on the Casablanca School, this essay looks at how artists in post-independence Morocco practiced abstraction with ease, visibility, and institutional ambition, while the wider art historical record somehow managed to look straight past them. What emerges is not a regional footnote to modernism, but a parallel articulation that functioned perfectly well without waiting to be acknowledged.

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I came to the Casablanca School (also known as Casablanca Art School, CAS) not as an explorer, nor even as a belated enthusiast, but as someone forced to recognize a familiar omission. This distinction matters. An explorer discovers what was unknown; an omission reveals what was systematically unacknowledged. The fiction was never that non-Western modernism required permission, but that someone apparently had the authority to grant it. The Casablanca School was never hidden. It was simply never placed where European art history could trip over it.

For decades, Casablanca existed just outside the frame—present enough to be named, absent enough to be ignored. This is not an accident. It is a symptom. French criticism has long mastered the art of universalizing its own experience while treating parallel histories as regional variations. We call this modernism. We call this neutrality. We rarely call it power.

When I finally encountered the work associated with the Casablanca School—initially through reproductions, later through exhibitions—it did not strike me as exotic or derivative. On the contrary, it felt disconcertingly fluent. The problem was not that it challenged modernism, but that it seemed to speak it without permission. Which is precisely why it had remained invisible.

The Casablanca School emerged in the 1960s, in the decade following Morocco’s independence from France in 1956. It formed around the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca, an institution founded in 1919 under the French Protectorate. Like many colonial art schools, it was conceived as an instrument of cultural transmission, though “transmission” is perhaps too generous a term. It functioned instead as a regulatory device, filtering what counted as art, knowledge, and legitimacy.

Mohamed Melehi (in chair) at the Casablanca Art School with a group of teachers (including Mohammed Chabâa and Farid Belkahia) and students (among them, on the far right, Malika Agueznay)

European art history was taught as a universal language; Moroccan visual culture was tolerated as ornament, folklore, or craft, categories that allowed it to exist without becoming threatening. This distinction is not merely aesthetic. It was political. Craft could be admired. Art could be argued with. Only one of these options was permitted.

Independence did not immediately dismantle this structure. Political sovereignty has a way of leaving syllabi untouched. The art school continued, for several years, to reproduce the same hierarchies it had been designed to enforce. The decisive rupture came only in 1962, when Farid Belkahia was appointed director.

Farid Belkahia, Somalia 2, 1994. Natural pigments on skin and sand on panel, 208 x 116 x 1.3 cm

Belkahia was not an enemy of European modernism. He had studied in Paris and Prague, and he knew modernism’s arguments, its ambitions, its blind spots. Which is why his intervention took the form not of rejection, but of displacement. He did not replace one canon with another. He removed the assumption that there had to be a canon at all.

Under his leadership, academic painting lost its privileged status. The hierarchy between fine art and applied art dissolved. Students were encouraged to work across materials, to look at architecture, textiles, signage, and calligraphy not as sources of identity, but as operative visual systems. This shift was presented not as a nationalist correction, but as a methodological necessity.

For a French critic like me, this moment is uncomfortable. It exposes a colonial contradiction we prefer not to name. France exported modernism as a universal language while reserving the right to decide who spoke it correctly. The Casablanca School did not contest French culture; it contested France’s authority to arbitrate modernity.

Alongside Belkahia, two figures became central: Mohamed Melehi and Mohammed Chabâa. Both had studied abroad—Melehi in Rome, Madrid, and New York; Chabâa in Italy—and both returned to Morocco with an acute awareness of repetition’s futility. They had seen modernism performed at full volume. They were not interested in covers.

Mohamed Melehi, Untitled, 1983. Cellulose paint on wood, 150 x 200 cm

This is where the Casablanca School diverged sharply from the post-independence cultural strategies France often expected. There was no attempt to “Moroccanize” European forms, and no desire to translate local motifs into recognizably modern compositions. Instead, the group operated on a more destabilizing level: It questioned the ownership of abstraction itself.

French art history has long treated abstraction as a European invention, born from a crisis of representation and perfected through formal rigor. Wassily Kandinsky spiritualized it. Piet Mondrian rationalized it. Paris debated it endlessly before exporting it as doctrine. Within this narrative, abstraction was a departure—an escape from the world into autonomy.

The Casablanca School proposed a different chronology. Islamic geometric ornament, Amazigh textile patterns, architectural repetition, calligraphic rhythm. These were not figurative traditions waiting to be modernized. They were abstract systems already operating with precision and complexity. What the Casablanca artists did was to recognize them as contemporaries.

This recognition was not theoretical. It is visible in the work. Melehi’s paintings—undulating bands of color, rhythmically repeated—are often compared to Op art or hard-edge abstraction. Formally, the comparison holds. But conceptually, it collapses. The paintings do not aspire to optical neutrality or perceptual gamesmanship. They function as environments. They echo the visual saturation of Moroccan cities: painted facades, commercial signage, the constant negotiation between decoration and information.

What is striking about Melehi’s abstraction is its lack of anxiety. It does not justify itself. It does not perform rupture. It assumes abstraction as a given condition. From Paris, this assumption feels almost insolent. Abstraction, after all, was supposed to arrive trailing theory and validation behind it. In Casablanca, it simply existed.

Farid Belkahia, Untitled, 2003. Oil on skin, 124 × 77 cm

Belkahia’s work pressed this affront further. In the late 1960s, he abandoned canvas and began working with leather, copper, and natural pigments. To a French modernist eye, trained to associate progress with industrial materials and artisanal practices with nostalgia, this move would have appeared suspiciously reactionary. It was nothing of the sort. By rejecting canvas, Belkahia exposed the silent material ideology of modernism: the belief that innovation requires specific supports, specific economies, specific distances from the body. His abstract forms—often biomorphic, sometimes archaic—do not perform identity. They perform refusal. Refusal to accept that modernity must age in a particular way.

And Chabâa extended this logic beyond painting. Deeply invested in graphic design, typography, and visual communication, he understood something European modernism often preferred to forget: Art that isolates itself from circulation compensates by mythologizing itself. The Casablanca School chose circulation.

Mohammed Chabâa, Untitled, 1977. Acrylic paint on canvas, 75 x 95 cm

This insight found its most articulate platform in Souffles, the cultural journal closely associated with the movement. Souffles was not an art magazine, but a hybrid space where poetry, political critique, and graphic experimentation coexisted without hierarchy. Its visual language was not illustrative; it was declarative. Design was not decoration. It was argument.

For France, Souffles was particularly uncomfortable. It spoke in French while dismantling French cultural authority. It used the colonizer’s language without asking for permission. Language here functioned as both inheritance and weapon. Souffles demonstrates that postcolonial critique does not require a change of tongue—only a change of intention.

Malika Agueznay, Untitled, 1986. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 87 cm

At a certain point, theory becomes an alibi. One speaks of abstraction, pedagogy, postcoloniality, and suddenly the works themselves recede, as if they were illustrations of an argument rather than its source. The Casablanca School resisted this treatment. Its works insisted on being described, if only because they refused to behave as examples.

Take Melehi’s paintings from the late 1960s—works such as Flamme (1967) or the untitled wave compositions he produced upon returning to Morocco after time in New York. Reproduced in catalogues, they risk being mistaken for polite cousins of Op art: bands of color rising and falling in rhythmic repetition, chromatically confident, formally contained. Seen in person, this reading collapses. The surface is not optical in the European sense; it is physical. The waves are not illusions; they feel applied, asserted, almost architectural. Color does not dissolve into perception, but occupies space. One senses that these paintings are less interested in destabilizing vision than in organizing it. They do not ask how we see, but where we stand.

What becomes apparent, especially when one resists the temptation to compare them immediately to Bridget Riley or Kenneth Noland, is that Melehi’s abstraction does not perform rupture. It performs continuity. The repetition recalls not a laboratory experiment, but an environment: tiled walls, painted doors, urban signage, the everyday choreography of color in Moroccan cities. These paintings do not escape the world; they condense it.

Mohamed Melehi, Flamme, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 121 x 75 cm

This is perhaps why Melehi’s work feels curiously unheroic. There is none of the metaphysical strain one finds in European abstraction, no anxiety about purity or transcendence. The paintings do not claim to invent abstraction. They behave as if abstraction had always been there—and the painter’s task were simply to tune it.

If Melehi’s work unsettled French expectations by its ease, Belkahia’s unsettled them by refusal. Consider his leather works from the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Talisman Rouge or Sevisses, executed on treated hide rather than canvas. To describe them as paintings already feels inaccurate. They hang like paintings, but they insist on their objecthood. The leather is not a support; it is a participant. Its grain remains visible, its edges irregular. Pigments—often natural, often earthen—are absorbed rather than layered. Forms emerge that suggest organs, symbols, shields, without ever settling into legibility. The works resist interpretation in precisely the way European abstraction often pretends to.

Farid Belkahia, Sevisses, 1961. Mixed media, 104 x 130 cm

Seen from Paris, one is tempted to read these works through the familiar opposition of modernity and tradition. Leather equals craft; craft equals past. But Belkahia’s works refuse this regression narrative. They do not operationalize tradition. The choice of material is not nostalgic, but strategic. By rejecting canvas, Belkahia rejected the silent contract modernism made with industrial production and market circulation.

What is striking is how contemporary these works feel—not in spite of their materials, but because of them. They foreground the body: the animal skin, the tactility, the sense that abstraction here is not an escape from matter but an engagement with it. If European abstraction sought autonomy, Belkahia’s abstraction accepted implication.

Chabâa’s contribution becomes clearest when one looks not at a single autonomous artwork, but at his graphic and spatial practices—posters, layouts, typographic compositions, exhibition designs. A poster designed by Chabâa for a cultural event in the late 1960s does not announce itself as “art.” It announces clarity. Forms are reduced, colors decisive, typography assertive without decoration. There is no attempt to seduce. The visual language is closer to instruction than expression. And yet, it is unmistakably modern—not because it imitates Swiss design or Italian rationalism, but because it understands communication as a visual problem rather than a stylistic one.

This is where the Casablanca School’s rejection of the fine art / applied art divide becomes concrete. Chabâa’s works did not aspire to gallery walls, but neither did they accept anonymity. They operated in the space where modernism once promised to live—between art and life—before retreating into institutions. Seen together, these works dismantle a comforting French assumption: that postcolonial modernism must announce itself as either resistance or adaptation. The Casablanca School did neither. It proceeded as if the argument had already been settled elsewhere.

What finally makes the Casablanca School impossible to ignore is not any single work, but the cumulative effect of seeing it all together. In exhibition, the movement does not read as a “chapter” of modernism but as a parallel draft—fully articulated, internally coherent, and conspicuously unconcerned with Parisian approval. One does not leave these rooms thinking that Moroccan artists participated in modernism. One leaves thinking that modernism was larger than the story France told itself.

I can point to three moments when this parallel draft of modernism ceased to be an argument and became an experience. The first occurred in 2016 at the Marrakech Biennale, where works associated with the Casablanca School appeared not as history but as presence. There, the encounter was almost disarming in its lack of ceremony. The works did not announce themselves as a movement, nor did they arrive framed by corrective ambition. They simply occupied space. Melehi’s paintings read as part of a visual continuum rather than as quotations; Belkahia’s material decisions felt native rather than strategic. In Marrakech, nothing had to be proven. I remember thinking—mistakenly—that context had done most of the work.

The second was more unsettling, but for this reason, more enlightening. In the summer of 2024 at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, where Casablanca Art School: A Postcolonial Avant-Garde, 1962–1987 was presented at full scale, the same works behaved differently—or, rather, revealed what earlier contexts had allowed me to overlook. Seen inside a European institution accustomed to narrating postwar abstraction as its own inheritance, the Casablanca School became quietly corrosive. Melehi’s paintings no longer read as regional inflections; they read as alternatives. Belkahia’s leather works did not feel supplemental; they recalibrated the material expectations of the room. What unsettled me was not discovery, but recognition—the uncomfortable realization that this was not a forgotten chapter, but a chapter I had been trained to pass over.

Installation view, Casablanca Art School: A Postcolonial Avant-Garde, 1962–1987, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2024, presentation of graphic design, artists' books, editions, and periodicals, including the journals Souffles and Integral

The third encounter came at the Venice Biennale in late 2024, where the Casablanca School was situated within a broader constellation of postcolonial modernisms and abstraction. That earlier ease returned, but now with a different clarity. Removed entirely from the European American axis, the works no longer seemed to address the Northern Hemisphere at all. They operated among peers—Latin American, Middle Eastern, South Asian—without hierarchy. Abstraction did not appear as a European export, nor as a reclaimed property. It appeared as a shared condition. Here, Casablanca did not look like a response. It looked like a node.

Taken together, these encounters produced a belated clarity. The shock was not aesthetic but historiographic. What shifted was not my taste, but my sense of scale. I did not leave these exhibitions thinking that Moroccan artists had finally entered modernism. I left thinking that modernism as I had learned to tell it had been smaller than the world that produced it.

The politics of the Casablanca School did not announce themselves through imagery. There were no heroic figures, no allegories of liberation. The politics operated structurally: how art is taught, where it appears, and whom it addresses. This was unmistakable in the 1969 exhibition titled Présence Plastique staged in Jemaa el-Fna, the central square of Marrakech. There, abstract paintings were displayed outdoors, without explanatory texts, without institutional framing. It was a simple gesture, and therefore a radical one. Abstraction—so often accused in Paris of elitism—was placed directly into public space. No mediation. No apology.

Présence Plastique, Jemaa el-Fna, Marrakech, May 1969

This episode exposes a difference that French abstraction never fully resolved. In France, abstraction spent decades defending itself through theory, institutions, and pedagogy. Casablanca skipped the defense and went straight to trust. It assumed visual intelligence rather than demanding it be acquired. Murals and architectural collaborations extended this logic. Art was not inserted into public space as an exception; it functioned as visual infrastructure. This was not “public art” as a category—often a way of neutralizing ambition—but art that understood the city as its medium.

The optimism of this period was brief. By the early 1970s, Morocco entered a phase of repression. Souffles was banned. Intellectuals were censored or imprisoned. Cultural autonomy narrowed sharply. The Casablanca School did not collapse under its own contradictions; it collided with power.

This interruption matters. It prevents us from turning the movement into a comforting success story. The Casablanca School was not a resolution. It was a proposition. Its politics were structural rather than spectacular, and therefore fragile.

Internationally, the movement was never isolated. Melehi’s time in New York, Belkahia’s education in Paris—these were not detours. They were conversations conducted on unequal terms. The Casablanca School refused to accept those terms as permanent. That art history has only recently begun to acknowledge this refusal tells us less about Casablanca than about the discipline itself. The current “rediscovery” of the Casablanca School is often framed as inclusion. This is misleading. Inclusion suggests generosity. What is happening instead is correction.

Encountering the Casablanca School now, from Paris, is not an act of benevolence. It is an act of overdue self-adjustment. It reveals that what we once mistook for the horizon of modernism was, in fact, a carefully maintained blind spot.

Casablanca was never peripheral to modernism. It was peripheral to French comfort. And perhaps that is why it remained invisible for so long.

Étienne de Montclar (b. 1968 in Clermont-Ferrand) is a Paris-based art critic educated exactly where one would expect. He has written extensively on the internal logic of French modernism and is the author of “La Pureté du Geste: French Modernist Painting, 1905–1968.” This essay marks an unexpected outward glance.

Cover image: Mohamed Melehi, Untitled, 1969, Oil on canvas, 75 x 111 cm