Biography
Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi (1928–1985), known popularly as Ahmed Yacoubi, was a self-taught Moroccan visual artist and an illiterate storyteller. Born in the el-Keddane neighbourhood of Fez, Yacoubi was a cherif, claiming matrilineal and patrilineal descent from the Prophet Muhammad. He came from a family of fuqaha’ (sing: fqih), who practised alternative healing and traditional medicine. His early exposure to his family’s profession continued throughout his life, remaining deeply entrenched in mysticism.
Although Yacoubi was a little-known figure within Morocco’s art scene while alive, partly due to the large amount of time he spent in the United States, despite this, he is one of the founding painters of modernity in Morocco and a pioneer of abstraction in the country. His position outside academic artistic circles makes his work difficult to categorise, with some critics even trying to classify it as “art brut” or “art spontané.” Paul Bowles defined his work as “abstrait naturel” (natural abstract), because his approach was simultaneously spontaneous and abstract.
While marginalised within Moroccan artistic circles in the mid-twentieth century, Yacoubi was part of an international network of cultural actors living and working in Tangier when it was an International Zone (1923–1956). It is in the relatively liberal environment of Tangier, referred to in the 1950s and 1960s as “Interzone,” where Yacoubi developed dynamic relationships with artists, musicians, and writers of the Beat Generation, such as William S. Burroughs, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, and fellow self-taught Moroccan artists Mohamed Hamri and Mohammed M’Rabet, to name a few. His most prominent advocate and presumed romantic partner was the American author, composer, and translator Paul Bowles, who first met Yacoubi in 1947 in Fez while writing The Sheltering Sky (1949). Together, Yacoubi and Bowles travelled extensively, with the latter introducing Yacoubi to influential, wealthy people, organising for him international exhibitions, and tape-recording his stories, which he translated from Colloquial Moroccan Arabic to English. Some of these stories include The Man and the Woman (1956), The Man Who Dreamed of Fish Eating Fish (1956), and The Game (1961).
In 1951, Bowles would arrange Yacoubi’s first solo exhibition at Tangier’s Gallimard bookstore (today known as the Librairie des Colonnes), where 28 of his paintings were sold. In 1952, Bowles organised an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Parsons was a leading art dealer specialising in modern art who was particularly interested in Abstract Expressionism and exhibited painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, amongst others. During a trip to Tetouan and Chefchaouen, Yacoubi met the American modern artists Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, who were working and travelling through northern Morocco then. In the same year, Bowles and Yacoubi would travel to India and British Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), exhibiting the latter’s artwork, and passed through Italy, where they both appeared in Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau’s experimental 1957 film 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements. In Venice, Italy, Bowles and Yacoubi were guests of the American art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim, who purchased several pieces from the young artist. The following year, they would sail to the United States, where Yacoubi cemented himself in various social scenes, appearing frequently in newspaper gossip columns and befriending celebrities and cultural figures such as Montgomery Clift, Libby Holman, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Tennessee Williams. Throughout his lifetime, Yacoubi exhibited and travelled to numerous places such as Hong Kong, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, and Zanzibar, to name a few.
In 1958, Yacoubi met an American in Tangier named Ruth Marthen, who would birth their child Karima shortly after. By 1966, Yacoubi would permanently move to the United States, where he had a small loft , which he shared with artist Carol Cannon until he died from lung cancer in 1985. In 1971, Yacoubi’s The Night Before Thinking, originally published in the Evergreen Review in 1961, was adapted into a play by La Mama’s founder Ellen Stewart and directed by Ozzie Rodriguez with the support of the Third World Institute of Theatre Arts Studies program. In 1974, the play was presented at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut. In 1972, Yacoubi published a cookbook consisting of 125 recipes based on the traditions of Moroccan alchemy called Alchemist’s Cookbook: Moroccan Scientific Cuisine. The book, which featured illustrations by Michael Cotton and Prairie Prince, was written on the ranch of American counterculture movement leader Walter Howard Bowart and published by Omen Press in Tuscon, Arizona.
After his death in 1985, Yacoubi gained posthumous popularity and the value of his work subsequently increased, resulting in fierce debates and lawsuits between numerous parties who claimed ownership of his work. In 2009, his body was exhumed and repatriated to Morocco and was reburied in Tangier’s Al-Moujahidin Cemetery in a large-scale funeral and ceremony under the patronage of King Mohammed VI.
