Mohammed Racim was an Algerian artist who was the founder of the Algerian school of miniature painting that still exists today.
Background
Racim was born in Algiers, Algeria in 1896 into a distinguished family of artists of Turkish descent whose pre-colonial prosperity had been undermined by the French regime’s confiscation of property. In 1880, Racim’s father had re-established a wood-carving and copper-working workshop in the Casbah of Algiers, where his brother, Omar Racim, engraved decorated tombstones.
Career
His talent for drawing was recognised during his primary education when he was given work copying Islamic decorative motifs for the state workshops set up by the Governor Charles Jonnart. He evolved a personal hybrid form of expression through the miniature whereby he would use traditional materials and classical arabesque and calligraphic styles, yet use them to frame figurative inserts that had some modern features. As a teenager Racim befriended Nasreddine Dinet, who advised him on painting the figure and helped him obtain commissions to decorate books with calligraphic plates.
Racim’s main patrons were businessmen and government officials who valued his re-creation of the milieu of old Algeris.
By the late 1930s he became a major figure in Algerian culture. As with most of his work, Racim’s "Women at the Cascade" set out an imagined past, before the arrival of the French colonizers, when the indigenous were masters of the Maghreb.
In fact, Roger Benjamin has argued that Racim’s work could be said to wish away the presence of the foreign French settlors in his country. He celebrates a pristine Turkish city, not the industrialized port that had resulted for a century of French modernization.
Nonetheless, he was not an ideologue, and recognized that his work had been enabled by the French scholarly.