Abstract
A Tunisian painter, draughtsman, and postage-stamp designer, Hatim Elmekki developed a practice largely devoted to the printed and disseminated image, notably in the press, the poster, the stamp, and the banknote. Born in Java to a Tunisian journalist father and an Indonesian mother, he was brought to Tunis in 1924 and received no formal art-school training; he worked as an illustrator in Paris for Marianne and later for Combat, then held public positions in independent Tunisia and designed several hundred stamps for international circulation. An exhibitor with the École de Tunis from 1951 to 1963, he subsequently distanced himself from the group. He was also a muralist and mosaicist, an art critic and essayist, and took part in the debates and institutions that accompanied the transformation of the Tunisian art scene.
Biography
Origins and family background
Hatim Elmekki was born on 16 May 1918 in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies. His father, Mohamed El-Hachemi El-Mekki, born around 1881 in Tozeur and trained at the Zitouna and then the Khaldounia, was an opposition journalist from 1908. He settled in Java, founded Boro-Budur, an organ of the Arab diaspora, in 1920, and died in 1942. His mother was Indonesian, of Chinese descent. In 1924, aged six, he was sent to Tunis with his elder brother Kussai (1915–2010), to their grandfather Sheikh Othman El-Mekki (1850– 1931), a scholar of the Great Mosque; he did not see his mother again until 1962, in Jakarta. Knowing no Arabic, he was sent to the school in Rue du Tribunal. Chromolithographs, labels and devotional images of his Javanese childhood were his first visual experiences.
Training and first appearances
At the Lycée Carnot from 1929, he won four first prizes in drawing between 1931 and 1934, in the class of Maurice Picard (1886– 1941), whose teaching was described as hostile to academicism. He left in troisième (middle school) without the baccalauréat, and later called himself self-taught.
By his own account, his beginnings date to 1932; the first documented appearance was the inaugural exhibition of the Jeunesse Scolaire, the school branch of the Sadiki alumni association, in February 1933. On 21 May that year, he lectured there himself, on La poésie du dessin. Public appearances multiplied in 1934: in February with the Jeunesse Scolaire again, then at the Claridge alongside, among others, Jules Lellouche (1903– 1963) and Hermann-Paul (1864–1940); in spring, watercolours at the Salon Tunisien. The association's bulletin reviewed him for the first time. His first solo exhibition, of watercolours, took place in December 1936 in the parlour of the Lycée Carnot.
He frequented the Taht Essour circle, around Ali Douagi (1909–1949), and said he had met Aboul Kacem Chebbi (1909–1934). Around 1935 he set up as an advertising designer with the calligrapher Mohamed Salah Khammassi (1910–1992), drawing advertisements for the press; he later credited that partnership with his initiation into the arts of the East.
Press beginnings and the 1938 travel grant
The State acquired one of his works at the 1937 Salon Tunisien, as it did works by Yahia Turki (1903–1969) and Alexandre Roubtzoff (1884–1949). From December 1937 to April 1938, he wrote a film column in Hebdo de Tunis, illustrating the paper as well; one installment, in February 1938, theorised the poster. In June 1938, the Arabic-language weekly La Radio et le Cinéma opened a topical-drawing feature for him, which he signed in Latin script. Though he was not a student of the École des Beaux-Arts, he won the travel grant of the Direction de l'instruction publique et des beaux-arts that same month, as its youngest laureate.
Paris, the war, and Combat
He left Tunis for Paris in autumn 1938 and earned a living creating advertising drawings for film companies. The critic Louis Chéronnet (1899– 1950) brought him into the weekly Marianne, edited by Emmanuel Berl (1892–1976), where his illustrations appeared in 1939; he later credited Jean Effel (1908–1982) with the introduction. The war brought him back to Tunisia, where he wrote occasionally, notably in Leïla, and drew for newspapers, from La Tunisie Française (1941) to the Algiers weekly TAM (1946). In November 1940 he took part in the inaugural exhibition of the Hôtel du Casino, run by the writer Marcel Sauvage (1895–1988), a refugee in Tunis; he exhibited alone there from December 1940 to January 1941, as Sauvage published a serialised portrait of him, and again in June 1941. In November 1944, the Tunis review Al-Mabâhith published a study of his art and his theoretical fragments.
He returned to Paris in 1947 as an illustrator for Combat, contributing writers' portraits until 1950 to the literary pages edited by Maurice Nadeau (1911–2013), and to Carrefour and La Gazette des Lettres; the press picked them up, and they circulated as far as Brazil in 1950. In 1949, the Galerie Suillerot showed his gouaches and drawings with those of Jacques Zeitoun (1916–before 1999); critics singled out his drawings for La Peste by Albert Camus (1913–1960). Attached to three publishing houses, Corréa and Charlot among them, he counted, by his own account, some 20 illustrated novels by late 1949, and gave Hikma two essays: one against the Tunis art world, the other on the ethics of creation.
Return to Tunisia and the 1950s
Back in Tunis in late 1949, he showed at the Galerie Ars in January 1950 works that critics linked to Surrealism. He continued to write, notably in Tunisie-France; on 25 January he lectured on abstract painting at the café Le Bagdad, prompting an open letter in the press to which he replied on 1 February in La Presse de Tunisie with Défense et illustration de l’art abstrait. Present at the École de Tunis from its first exhibition under that name, in 1951, he took part in every edition until 1963. His poster for the 1952 Salon Tunisien won a prize; in 1954 he took first prize in the poster competition of the Office tunisien de l'expansion commerciale et du tourisme. In 1955 he exhibited watercolours brought back from Sweden, and in November published Le Peintre dans la Cité in L'Étudiant de Tunisie, an essay refusing to reduce art to propaganda.
From 1955 to 1958 he was the cartoonist of the weekly L'Action as Mahmoud, while writing under his own name on Tunisian painters, among them Abdelaziz Gorgi (1928–2008) and Ammar Farhat (1911–1988), on the Salon Tunisien and the École de Tunis, and on Egyptian, Yugoslav and Italian artists and children's art. In 1958 he produced Sakiet, on the refugees of the bombing of Sakiet Sidi Youssef. The same year East German television invited him to draw live alongside other draughtsmen.
Public functions and the international scene
After independence, he held positions in the Information services, the Post Office and the film administration. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and, from 1959, oversaw Tunisian participation abroad as commissioner-general, including the Venice, Paris, and São Paulo biennials. In 1959 he declared himself a committed painter in Al-Chabâb and ranked abstraction, which he had defended in 1950, among fashionable conformisms. He presented the travelling exhibition of Tunisian painting shown in Washington, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and travelled to China in 1962. After the March 1963 exhibition, his last with the École de Tunis, he drifted from the group; in 1970 he was appointed commissioner of the Tunisian plastic-arts exhibition in Cairo. He supported emerging generations: in 1959 he hailed the first exhibition of Néjib Belkhodja (1933– 2007) as an advent, in 1972 cited him with Ridha Bettaïeb (1939–1993) among the promising young, and joined the Irtissem group in February 1977, a year after it opened its gallery.
