The Casablanca School: A Founding Movement in Modern Moroccan Art
In the 1960s, a group of Moroccan artists redefined the contours of national artistic modernity. A look back at the Casablanca School and its legacy.
The Casablanca School refers to a Moroccan artistic movement born in the 1960s around the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca. Driven by figures such as Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Mohamed Chabâa and Mohamed Hamidi, it formed in rupture with the academic teaching inherited from the colonial period, seen as too dependent on Western aesthetic canons.
The movement's programme rested on a simple but, for its time, radical idea: abstraction was not an exclusively Western invention, but a practice already present for centuries in Arab-Berber craft and ornamentation — zellij tilework, rugs, calligraphy, henna tattoos. By reclaiming these forms as full-fledged plastic resources rather than mere decorative folklore, the artists of the Casablanca School proposed a path to modernity that did not pass through the imitation of Parisian or New York avant-gardes.
This stance translated concretely into a renewed teaching approach: students were encouraged to observe traditional craft as a living formal repertoire, to experiment with unconventional materials — copper, hides, natural dyes — and to conceive of art as an act engaged in building a post-independence national cultural identity. Exhibitions organised outside traditional institutional circuits, notably in public squares, accompanied this drive to democratise art.
The influence of the Casablanca School extends well beyond the period of its active existence. It continues to shape the way part of the contemporary Moroccan art scene approaches the relationship between geometric abstraction, heritage and modernity, and its founding figures are today represented in the collections of several Moroccan and international museum institutions.
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