The Happy Marriage

He had worked every day for thirty years, always applying himself with the same diligence, revising each painting as many times as necessary, refusing lucrative offers from many gallerists when they didn’t seem serious enough. Acclaim for his work had come slowly but surely. Nothing had come easy to him and some artists, especially the mediocre ones, had tried to cause him problems and had ganged up to lay traps for him in the hopes of sullying his reputation. These had been cheap shots that had nothing to do with his work in progress. Those mediocre artists had failed, but as that stupid old saying goes, “There’s no smoke without fire!” His father had been worried about him: “Sooner or later you’ll get devoured by frustrated people. Don’t show your face too often, be discreet. Never forget what the Prophet said, avoid extremes and always go for the middle ground! Look, whenever someone is under the spotlight, there will always be people who go digging around in the gutter, and if they don’t find anything, they’ll just make something up! The press loves it, and when you set the record straight, nobody cares, the damage has already been done!”

Thanks to his prudence and wisdom, the year the painter turned thirty a big gallery in London organized the first retrospective dedicated to his work, which was an invaluable springboard that helped launch him onto the world stage. Shows in other capitals had quickly followed. His agent had been especially happy; he’d called the painter from his office in New York and spoke in his broken French: “You see, it only takes a Jew to make an Arab a lot of argent, you see, mon ami, we’ve sold everything, the price will go up and up!” That same year, he was awarded the Prix de Rome, and had been able to spend a year in the Villa Medici and get to know Italy. His dazzling success hadn’t compromised his modesty or altered his behavior. His parents were proud of him, women admired him and surrounded him at all turns. He continued to work just as he’d always done. Implausible rumors made the rounds, then evaporated, as all well know they do. A Moroccan newspaper accused him of profiteering by exploiting his country’s beauty … A Libyan newspaper called for his work to be boycotted: “This is a painter who sold out to the Zionists, whose agent is a Jew, and who exhibits his work in galleries that belong to Americans who support Israel’s criminal policies!” So many bad memories flashed past his mind, but they didn’t affect him. He knew there was a price to pay for success. His father had often told him: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

He was rational in all spheres of life, which contrasted sharply with the sumptuousness and extravagance of his hyper-realist paintings. The portraits he did from time to time, which were always executed in the strictest classicism, were the canvases that most closely resembled who he was as a man. Yet when it came to the rest of his paintings, he tended to vary the sources of his inspiration, and prove that his art wasn’t based on chance, but rather was the result of his thorough command of technique, which was the only way to transpose reality into a medium. He had a deep-seated aversion to schools that were either self-proclaimed or invented by art critics. As far as he was concerned, these were nothing but boxes where radically different artists were arbitrarily put together. He didn’t belong to any movement or school. When they asked him too many questions, he would simply tell them that he belonged to the Adoua School, which was a primary school in Fez frequented by the sons of Fez’s bourgeoisie, where he’d been enrolled by his father after completing Qur’anic school. That was where he’d learned to write and draw. Their teacher had been passionate about painting, and had often showed them books with reproductions of Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Some of the other children had laughed, but those reproductions had awoken a burning curiosity in him, which he still carried to this day.

Light was scarce in the medina of Fez. When the weather was good, he would go up to the rooftop of his parents’ house and sketch whatever he saw. It had been difficult at first and he would tear up his sketches and start all over again so he could reproduce as accurate a portrait of the city as he could manage. All the houses looked alike: they were cube-shaped and fit together like the jagged pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He had to go beyond those appearances and re-create an atmosphere. Aged ten, he’d dared to show his teacher a drawing that he’d thought had turned out well. The teacher had encouraged him and had given him a box of colored pencils at the end of the year.