The IMA-Tourcoing presents a retrospective devoted to the work of Étienne Dinet, a painter with an extraordinary destiny.
This exhibition will seek to solve a double mystery: How did the work of a French colonial painter become one of the visual identities of Algeria after independence? Why is Étienne Dinet one of the only orientalist painters who escapes the reproach of exoticism and the process made to the colonial look?
Étienne Dinet received an academic education in Paris from which he left. He discovered Algeria in 1884. From 1895 he renounced any source of inspiration outside the Algerian subjects and settled in the oasis of Bou-Saâda in the family of Slimane Ben Ibrahim who will be his link with Saharan society.His painting is out of step with the orientalist painters who were attached only to the most gleaming aspects of a fake «Orient» that he denounces. Dinet is above all a realistic painter.
The unity of his approach passes by his painting but also by his illustrations of works that will be presented in the exhibition. Étienne Dinet converted to Islam in 1913 under the name of Nasreddine and this personal turn completes from a spiritual and moral point of view his aesthetic choices.
Étienne Dinet publicly protested against dramatically unfair social realities. He said he was “forced to live in the midst of this filthy colonial rot.” He played an important civic role with the French authorities during the Great War by hammering the elementary gratitude due to the indigenous Muslim soldiers. It was in this context that he published The Life of Muhammad, Prophet of Allah in 1918. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) in 1929, shortly before his death. On his death, he was buried according to his wish in Bou-Saâda.
Celebrated by the Republic as an essential actor in the rapprochement between France and Islam, President Paul Doumer himself wanted to inaugurate the retrospective dedicated to him a year after his death.. Étienne Dinet ended up occupying a prominent place in Algerian culture. The national historiography dissociates it from colonialism, going so far as to make it a figure of nascent nationalism, which it was not. The work of Étienne Dinet appears today as a link and a bridge to reconcile memories.
Curator Mario Choueiry, art historian, chargé de mission at the Institut du monde arabe, Paris With the exceptional support of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris