Algeria unveiled
Two major Paris exhibitions display a fascinating panorama of Algerian history, writes David Tresilian
Opened last week at a special ceremony by French President Jacques Chirac and Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika while on an official visit to the French capital, L'Algérie en héritage, art et histoire and Du Delacroix à Renoir, l'Algérie des peintres are two exhibitions at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris designed to crown events taking place across France to celebrate the "Year of Algeria in France" (2003). The exhibitions shed new light on their respective subject matter, Algerian history until 1830 and representations of Algeria in French 19th-century painting, while at the same time complicating and deepening preconceived views.
The first of the two exhibitions, L'Algerie en heritage, presents some 300 objects lent by museums and institutions in Algeria and not previously seen outside the country, dividing these into three broad periods, pre-historic, classical and Islamic.
Introducing the magnificent, if pricey, catalogue that accompanies the exhibition Algerian archaeologist Mounir Bouchenaki remarks that while Algeria's recent history is generally well-known to international audiences, its ancient past is not. "Few people," he quotes a French expert as saying, "know that excavations carried out at Algerian sites have extended our knowledge of prehistoric man, that powerful civilisations, such as the Numidians and the Moors, existed before the arrival of the Romans in Algeria, or that the Vandals, and then the Byzantines, ruled the country before the advent of Islam," and it is lacunae of this sort that the present exhibition will do most to fill.
The subject of a recent exhibition in Paris, the prehistoric rock paintings of the Tassili n'Ajjer area of the Algerian Sahara near the country's borders with Libya and Niger are again on display here, together with other testimonies of the country's prehistoric past. The exhibition's first room is dedicated to such objects, including the intriguing bétyles, carved stone sculptures representing human figures discovered near Tassili n'Ajjer in 1905. Lent by the Bardo Museum in Algeria, these are presented in the company of similar zoomorphic stone bosses, carved animal sculptures discovered in the Algerian desert in the same region, whose purpose and significance is unknown.
Algeria, as Bouchenaki notes in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, entered history through the descriptions of the country found in ancient Greek and Roman authors. For the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the native populations of ancient North Africa were Libyans, whether sedentary or nomadic, and these endogenous populations lived sometimes in a state of tension with the Phoenician settlements established along the country's coastline. Carthage, founded in 814 BC, the best-known of these settlements, today forms the site of modern Tunis in neighbouring Tunisia, and in order to achieve supremacy in the Mediterranean the Romans fought a series of wars against the Carthaginians, ending with the city's sack in 109 BC.
However, for Bouchenaki, one question not fully answered by the ancient sources, which concentrate on the Roman wars and the defeat of Carthage, is the relationship between the native North African populations of the time, called barbares by the Greeks and Romans, and the Phoenician and Carthaginian coastal cities. As he points out, Herodotus's "Libyans", and the Roman barbares, later berbers, in fact called themselves Amazigh (pl. Imazighen), or "free men", and these populations, organised in Numidian or Moorish kingdoms, resisted first the Roman, and then the Arab invasions of the seventh century AD.
"From these beginnings of history in Algeria," writes Serge Lancel in the catalogue, "a language has come down to us [Berber] that is earlier than any other, and that has survived the centuries to still be spoken today. This linguistic situation has no parallel elsewhere in the western Mediterranean."
For international audiences the Numidians are likely to be most familiar from the Roman historian Sallust's narrative of the Jurgurthine Wars, which pitched Roman invading forces against the Numidian leader Jurgurtha in a seven-year conflict ending in the annexation of the empire's North African territories and the formation of Roman Africa.
The exhibition contains objects both from the Roman civilisation installed in North Africa following Carthaginian and Numidian defeat and from the Numidian civilisation that continued to coexist with it. In addition to Roman sculpture, mosaics and architectural and funerary elements, for example, the exhibition contains effigies of "Libyan" or Punic divinities taken from museums in Cherchel, Constantine and Algiers. Among the Roman items exhibited are representations of the goddess Dea Africa, Genius Terrae Africae (the goddess Africa, genius of the African continent), usually represented with an elaborate elephantine coiffeur and featuring elephant tusks and ears. According to Mustapha Dorbane and Nedjma Serradji-Remili, writing on cults of Africa in classical period Algeria, the elephant was chosen because of its famous role during the Punic Wars, when the Carthaginian general Hannibal led a contingent of North African elements across the Alps to attack Rome.
The catalogue is particularly good on Roman expansionism in North Africa from the time of Julius Caesar, explaining the function of the Roman towns that began to be established from a coastal base around Carthage. Under the emperors Augustus and Claudius new settlements began to appear and native towns were given the title of Roman colonies. Thus, Icosium (Algiers) became a Roman colony under Vespasian, Cirta (Constantine) having already received that title under Julius Caesar, and Cuicul (Djemila), Sitifis (Sétif) and Thamugadi (Timgad) were founded in the final decades of the first century AD, these towns extending and deepening Roman penetration of the interior from Roman, or Romanised coastal settlements such as Caesarea (Cherchel), Tipasa and Hippo Regius (Annaba). Today, the remains of these towns are archaeological windows onto the history of Algeria, the Paris exhibition including a magnificent mosaic of hunting scenes from Roman Castellum Tingitanum (later Orléansville, now Chlef), among other items.
For Bouchenaki, the Vandal kingdom set up on the ruins of Roman rule in North Africa remains an enigma. There was, he says, an "indigenous renaissance" of the Berber peoples under Vandal rule, this "coming to the surface of a style of life and of institutions dating from before the Roman conquest proving a deep continuity with the pre-Roman past". However, the Vandals themselves proved surprisingly short-lived, disappearing from North African history before the Byzantine re- conquest of Roman Africa in 533 AD. From this period the exhibition contains only a few fragmentary commercial and legal records, written, tellingly, in Latin on small pieces of stone, or ostraka. Until 647 Algeria was once again under Roman rule, this time from the Eastern empire in Byzantium, the Emperor Justinian having decided "to reunite the whole of Libya to the Empire". However, most of the west of the country was never re- conquered, instead being the site of the Berber kingdoms that most resisted the Arabs when they arrived in North Africa in the 7th century.
The exhibition's third and final section considers the Arab and Islamic civilisation that arrived in Algeria following the defeat of Byzantine forces under the Patriarch Gregory by the Arab army of Abdallah Ibn Saad in 647, from which period the exhibition contains architectural elements, examples of books and writing, coins, stone inscriptions and domestic items.
The second of the two exhibitions, Du Delacroix à Renoir, revisits French 19th century Orientalist painting, presenting a large selection of paintings, some well-known, others less so, painted between the 1830s, in the wake of the 1830 French invasion of Algiers, and the 1880s, by which time modern Algeria had taken shape as a French colony. Divided by subject matter, it presents well-known Salon pieces, obscure commissions, smaller prints and drawings and a few early photographs that represent, successively, the Algerian harem, the French conquest of Algeria between 1830 and 1847, the Arab Kingdom dreamed of by Napoleon III and Renoir's Algerian pictures, this last section organised in conjunction with the Williamstown Clark Art Institute in the US. Chronologically, the exhibition takes in work completed between Delacroix's visit to Algiers in June 1832 to Renoir's visits to the country in the 1880s.
The star turn is by Delacroix and though the curators were apparently unable to secure the loan of Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, the show does include a second version, Femmes d'Alger dans leur intérieur, from 1849 (lent by the musée Fabre) and a further smaller version, also entitled Femmes d'Alger dans leur intérieur but without a secure date, lent by the musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.
The French conquest of Algeria produced a number of large canvases recording the heroism of the defeated Algerian resistance. Among these are works by Chassériau, for example Cavaliers arabes emportant leur morts après une affaire contre des spahis (Arab horseman carrying off their dead after a battle with the spahis), that represent the defeated Algerian forces as doomed representatives of a dying feudal order in the manner of the European romanticism pioneered by Sir Walter Scott. A series of pictures depict the fall of Constantine to French forces in 1837, a dramatic subject presumably designed to pique the ennui of France under the July Monarchy: Théodore Frère's La prise de Constantine (The Taking of Constantine, 1843) is a Salon painting showing "the Arab tribes around Constantine fleeing the French army ... as flames consume the town and the inhabitants flee down ropes," while Jean Antoine Siméon Fort's mural-type paintings, commissioned for Versailles in the 1840s, show the taking of Constantine and the defeat of Algerian forces under Abdel-Kader at Taguin in 1843, which led to their eventual surrender in 1847 (Vue panoramique de la smala d'Abd el-Kader installée à Taguin et attaquée par le duc d'Aumale, le 16 mai 1843: A general view of the fortified camp of Abdel-Kader at Taguin, attacked by the Duke of Aumale in May 1843 [1847]).
From later in the century there are scenes of Algerian life, as seen by visiting French painters. These include some fine pieces by Chassériau lent by the Algiers Fine Art Museum (Marché à Constantine, 1850) and by the Caen Museum of Fine Arts (Groupe d'Arabes, 1850), and they confirm the value of the present exhibition in bringing together works spread over three or more continents. There is an atmospheric painting by Eugène Fromentin, Lisière d'oasis pendant le sirocco (Oasis Edge during the Sirocco Wind), lent by Sheikh Hassan Ibn Mohamed Ibn Ali Al-Thani and exhibited at the 1859 Paris Salon, pastoral and hunting scenes by the same artist (Bergers kabyles; Chasse au faucon en Algérie, la curée, 1863) presumably designed to give the impression of a sedate, prosperous Algeria under French colonial rule, and a series of paintings from the south of the country, as French painters discovered the effects of light that could be had in painting scenes from the Algerian Sahara: among these are canvases by Etienne Dinet (Ruelle ensoleillée à Biskra: A Sun-Drenched Biskra Street) and Gustave Guillaumet (Laghouat, Sahara algérien: A View of Laghouat in the Algerian Sahara, 1879), while Renoir contributes paintings of Algerian women and Arab scenes hailing from private and public collections in Europe and the US.
L'Algérie en héritage, art et histoire, 7 October 2003 -- 25 January 2004; Du Delacroix à Renoir, l'Algérie des peintres, 7 October 2003 -- 18 January 2004, Institut du monde arabe, Paris.
