Interview
Étienne Dinet, French painter and Algerian icon, passionate about Algeria, Islam and women
Celebrated after his death in 1929 by colonial France, he became an icon of Algerian painting after Algeria's independence.
Until today, Etienne Dinet remains a mystery and his work carries the promise of a reconciliation of memories.
Interview with Mario Choueiry, curator of the exhibition “Étienne Dinet, Algerian passions” at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris.
Étienne Dinet: “Man in the Big Hat” (1901) and “La Balançoire” (1899).
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais Claude Germain / Museum of Fine Arts of Reims - Christian Devleeschauwer
By: Siegfried Forster Follow
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His paintings attract the eye and exude a fascination worthy of their titles:
The viper charmer
,
The oasis of Biskra
,
Market in Bou-Saâda
,
The chatters
,
The dance of the scarves
,
The spring of hearts
... When the ravages of colonialism sowed hatred, Étienne Dinet painted in a way that was as marvelous as it was realistic and colorful the joy of living and daily life in the oases of southern Algeria.
Thus, his paintings have built a bridge between people and cultures.
Born in 1861 into a bourgeois, Catholic family in Paris, he became both French and Algerian by passion, as much a painter as he was a converted Muslim, as much a privileged observer of an unknown society as a member of an Algerian family.
The Institut du Monde Arabe is dedicating the first exhibition to him in a French institution in a century.
RFI: Why does this exhibition
Étienne Dinet, Algerian Passions
represent a real event for you
?
Mario Choueiry:
It’s an event in that Étienne Dinet is an artist who has fallen into relative oblivion.
He is certainly an orientalist painter, but heterodox, and he is unlike any other painter.
French by birth, he idolized Rembrandt, Delacroix... He is a realistic painter who discovered Algeria by pure accident since in 1884 he followed a friend, whose entomologist brother was hunting a rare beetle in Algeria.
He fell under the spell of a country where he ended up settling and which he embraced down to the smallest details, until converting to Islam in 1913.
Detail of a “Self-portrait” (1891) by Étienne Dinet, exhibited in “Étienne Dinet, passions algériens” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
At the entrance to the exhibition, we see a self-portrait where Étienne
Dinet holds a brush between his teeth.
What kind of personality was he?
He is a character with a great sense of friendship.
He has always preserved extremely strong ties in France and Algeria.
His move to Algeria will not cut him off from his friends in France.
He was someone close to Léonce Bénédite, at the time the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Beyond his conversion to Islam, he kept extremely close ties with his family who remained Catholic.
In Algeria, he settled in Bou-Saâda in 1904. He will be perceived as a righteous person, in the sense that he will, for example, in 1912, work politically so that Bou-Saâda passes from a military administration to a civil administration.
He is a painter of childhood, but also a painter of the humble.
This is precisely what will ensure his fortune in Algeria.
Also read: The new museum and the new ambitions of the Arab World Institute in Paris
In what way has it gone beyond the ethnographic and colonial gaze
?
It is a fact, among the so-called orientalist painters, he is the one who most escapes the criticism made of the colonial gaze, as if the gaze he held was not exotic.
As if his painting, through its realism, cut out fragments of reality.
It is as if his painting was perceived as less exotic than those of great painters like Ingres or Gérôme, who painted scenes they had not seen, fantasized harems, etc.
None of that at Dinet.
The slightest color of fabric, the slightest grimace, the slightest silver jewelry, he really observed it.
Dinet has no need to magnify a reality that is already extraordinary before his eyes.
He is a painter who is aware of fixing for eternity a world that is disappearing.
Does his very detailed look at everyday life come from his fascination with photography
?
He doesn't work with photography, like Bonnard for example, but he is interested in photography.
He has an almost photographic approach, without going through photography before painting a canvas.
“The Spring of Hearts” (1904), exhibited in “Étienne Dinet, passions algériens” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
No harem or exotic look in Dinet, but he still paints naked women with great passion. So what sets it apart from the others?
There are four naked ones in the exhibition.
The question of nudes in Dinet does indeed raise questions, since Dinet painted these nudes even after his conversion to Islam.
There is a kind of contradiction between carnal exaltation and orthodox Muslim principles.
He got away with a pirouette by quoting the Persian poet Omar Khayyam: “
God gives me eyes and will not blame me for looking
.”
Now, we have an effectively ambiguous perception, since the work shows a kind of sexual Eden, which raises the question of the body subjugated by the colonial.
Despite everything, it is a place of symbolic and real violence.
In the exhibition, we took precautions, we talked about the reserved areas of Bou-Saâda, there will be conferences at the Institut du Monde Arabe dedicated to this reflection.
We wanted to show the complexity and ambiguity of a painter who became sincerely Muslim and who, in a French tradition, continues to paint nudes.
Dinet learned the Arabic language, settled there, and converted to Islam. Did he consider himself a naturalized Arab
?
After his first trips, upon his return, he enrolled in oriental languages and began working on his Arabic.
He blends into this Algerian society.
Dinet will have a link with Algerian society, it is Slimane Ben Ibrahim.
His friend saves his life during an altercation where Slimane is stabbed.
Dinet will eventually settle in the Arab district of Bou-Saâda by buying a house that he shares with Slimane's family.
He lives in an Arab family, in a house cut in two.
It is totally immersed in this south of the Sahara.
And he will only paint Algerian subjects.
From 1895, he devoted himself to this single subject.
That's the mystery.
And that’s also the interest of the exhibition.
“Slave of love and Light of eyes: Abd-el-Gheram and Nouriel-Aîn, Arab legend” (1900), exhibited in “Étienne Dinet, passions algériens” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
40 or 50 years after his death, independent Algeria will consecrate Nasreddine Dinet, with his converted first name, as a master of Algerian painting.
These are fellow travelers of the FLN, of the National Liberation Front, who will resurrect this figure who painted the humble people of Algeria and who, according to them, will speak more to the population, in the stamps, in the posters, than the a little too intellectual and abstract painting by fellow travelers of the FLN, like Mohammed Khadda and other great painters... Dinet will be recited as a kind of socialist realist painter - which he was not since he is a man rather conservative.
Its iconography is suddenly reused with a change of meaning, perhaps a love lie.
Did his conversion to Islam change his outlook and his painting?
I have not observed any change linked to the conversion.
He officially converted in 1913, but he probably felt Muslim years before.
There are periods at Dinet, the Biskra period, the Laghouat period… it is rather through periods of installation in places that his painting can change.
After his death in 1929, he was honored by Paul Doumer, president of colonial France. And after Algerian independence, Étienne Dinet became an icon of Algerian painting. How is it possible that he was revered by both Algeria and France
?
Indeed, Étienne Dinet was both recognized during his lifetime by France and Algeria.
The French state bought works from him.
After his death, the president at the time paid tribute to this great French Muslim.
Dinet is one of those who wanted there to be a mosque in Paris, in homage to those who shed their blood, the natives.
Dinet wrote the first edition of
The Life of Mohammed, Prophet of Allah,
in 1918, also with the help of the Ministry of the Army.
Dinet was overcome with great emotion during the First World War at the sight of these natives shedding their blood.
He wanted them to be recognized naturally and paid homage to.
It is he who will design the steles which will be placed until today in the French military squares for Muslim tombs.
Obviously, it is a paradox that he was simultaneously dubbed by colonial France at a time when few imagined the end of French Algeria.
As for independent Algeria, it will recognize Dinet as a father of Algerian painting.
Dinet will put his foot in the stirrup of a great illuminator, Mohammed Racim.
The latter will draw the book illuminations that we see in the exhibition and Racim will be the teacher of young Algerian painting which will emerge after 1945. So there is an organic link between Étienne Dinet and Algerian painting through the medium of Mohammed Racim.
Two “Antar” wash paintings (1896/97) by Étienne Dinet, exhibited in “Étienne Dinet, passions algériens” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
What was its position in relation to colonial France
?
Dinet is paradoxical.
On the one hand, he does not imagine the end of French Algeria.
On the other hand, he speaks of “
colonial rot
”.
These are very strong words.
He saw the centenary of the conquest arrive, a few months before his death.
He is frightened by this, in the sense that he will write that France's Muslim policy has reached an incredible degree of imbecility.
On the other hand, for him, Islam is a wealth and he thinks Islam and France are partly linked.
It's moving because his family remains Catholic.
When his sister released her biography, she said: “
My brother asked me two things, to write his life, that’s it, it’s done.
And pray for his soul.
» A very beautiful story about an artist who embraces a very beautiful faith, but also a story about the acceptance of this strange faith for a family which obviously remains Catholic.
You know, there aren't always opportunities to say we love each other.
There are tensions, politics, problems, terrible history, suffering, torture... And then, there are subjects like Étienne Dinet who remind us that there are hyphens and that there are opportunities to hug.
Here, we bring together almost all the Dinets from the French national collections, as well as marvelous paintings which are in private hands.
So many works never seen by the public.
This is the first exhibition in a century of Dinet's work in a French institution. But, there is also a Dinet museum in Bou-Saâda and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers also has magnificent works by him. Have you obtained loans from Algerian institutions
?
This exhibition is a first step.
We chose to do it for organizational reasons with French national collections and French private lenders and collectors.
We hope for an even larger exhibition which would ultimately bring together paintings from France, but also from the south of the Mediterranean and Algeria.
There are beautiful Dinets also in Morocco.
There are some wonderful ones in Qatar and elsewhere.
Dinet is an artist who returned to the art market in the 1980s.
Today, it is present in many Arab countries.
It will be another moment, another exhibition which will be the one which will bring together the two shores of the Mediterranean.
Read alsoThe Africa of museums: the national museum of fine arts of Algiers, “the most important in Africa”
For this exhibition, there was no possibility of Algerian loans?
This is not a lack of possibility.
I believe that our Algerian friends would have helped us.
In fact, we had a space and the periods of Dinet that we wanted to show were present in the French collections.
So it is not a desire or a lack of desire on the part of the Algerian side.
No way.
View of “Le Muezzin” (detail) (1922) by Étienne Dinet, exhibited in “Étienne Dinet, passions algériens” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
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