Biography
Jellal Ben Abdallah was born on May 26, 1921, in Bab Menara, Tunis. He died on November 9 2017 in his home in Sidi Bou Saïd, a suburban area of Tunis where he had resided and worked since 1939.
He was from an upper-class family native to Tunis. His father, Arbi Ben Abdallah, was a high-ranked official for the Bey. Jellal Ben Abdallah studied at the French school Lycée Carnot, where he began painting after being encouraged by one of his teachers, Maurice Picard. He married Latifa Bach Hamba in 1957, an artist herself and the muse of Tunisian fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa.
Ben Abdallah was a self-taught artist who had been drawing and painting since his youth. He began primarily drawing miniatures and had his first exhibition at 16 at Café Baghdad in Tunis. His early drawings appeared in the periodical Leïla in the 1930s. By the end of the 1930s, he had started frequenting the École de Tunis and the Tunisian intellectual group Taht Essour (Under the Ramparts). Around the same time, he became interested in various formats and techniques, including easel painting and miniature drawing. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis in 1948 for less than a trimester, having won his first award that year, the Premier Prix de La Peinture Tunisienne, and was subsequently granted a scholarship to study in Paris. He spent the winter of 1948-1949 there, took classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and befriended Spanish painters living in Montparnasse, such as Oscar Domínguez, Orlando Pelayo, and Antoni Calvé. In 1949, he travelled to Italy, where he was a three-week resident at the Villa Massimo in Rome.
In the 1950s, Ben Abdallah began working on decorative projects, adopting larger formats and incorporating new techniques, including mural painting, sculpture, ceramics, and stained glass. In 1951, the French Protectorate commissioned him to paint two decorative panels in a public building for the College de Jeune Filles in Sousse, Tunisia (completed in 1952), on the theme of ancient Greece. He was then sent the same year to Paris to paint a mural for the Maison de la Tunisie in the Paris Cité Universitaire (completed in 1953), where he depicted a Tunisian interior scene with women weaving, threading, and knitting. He returned to Tunisia in 1953 and pursued his artistic practice in his atelier house in Sidi Bou Said.
Ben Abdallah forged a national iconography after Tunisia’s independence in 1956. He collaborated with the Tunisian state to design stamps and create artwork to decorate official buildings and hotels. Among his notable stamps are the regional wedding costume series (1967), the Tunisian musical instruments series (1970), and the Fauna series (1986). Among the decorative commissions he created, one can cite the two-sided ceramic tile panel for Hotel Les Palmiers in Monastir (1961), the painted dining room door and stained-glass panel for Hotel Jugurtha in Gafsa (1963), and the ceramic tile mural at the Palais des Congrès Bizerte (1963). Ben Abdallah also worked as a scenic designer for 13 years at the Théâtre municipal de Tunis, a position he assumed in 1957.
He was part of the first generation of modern Tunisian painters and a core member of the École de Tunis group that he joined in 1944. The École de Tunis was founded in 1935 by a group of graduates from the Tunis School of Fine Arts and marked the first wave of Tunisian artistic modernism. After the end of the Protectorate in 1956, the École de Tunis artists, including Abdelaziz Gorgi, Safia Farhat, and Hatim El Mekki, became central in developing nationalist aesthetic discourses and practices. The group benefited from institutional and financial support, favouring and enabling grand-scale commissions of public artworks. In 1950, Ben Abdallah joined the committee responsible for public art commissions as the only Tunisian artist and remained a member after independence for two decades. Ben Abdallah was, therefore, a highly influential figure who held decision-making powers at the institutional level. He achieved commercial success in the early 1970s and continued practising painting until the end of his life.
Aside from public artworks, set designs and decorative commissions, his main work consisted of miniature painting, acrylic on wood and paper, and gouache. As a member of École de Tunis, Ben Abdallah sought to create artworks that reflected a sense of Tunisianité, or Tunisian personality. His oeuvre thus draws from typical colour palettes, light effects, objects, symbolisms, and scenes representing an idealised Tunisian experience. Most of Benabdallah’s compositions are figurative and depict quotidian life — often in female-exclusive spaces and anchored in a pre-colonial temporality — as well as local marine creatures, Mediterranean mythology, fauna and flora, fruits and vegetables, and seascapes. His work tends to have a surreal, dream-like, and fantastic feel. This tendency can be attributed to his contacts with the surrealist Spanish school in Paris. Earlier in his practice, Ben Abdallah drew inspiration from the primitive Italian Renaissance painters and borrowed the techniques of chiaroscuro and aerial perspective. Throughout his career, Ben Abdallah never stopped making miniatures. The influence of Islamic miniature painting was evident in his practice, particularly in how he depicted facial features, incorporated gold illumination techniques, and chose to portray scenes that evoked mystical parables.
Ben Abdallah exhibited his work extensively and participated in numerous group exhibitions, primarily in the Arabic-speaking world and Western Europe. Ben Abdallah participated in the 29ª Biennale di Venezia in 1958 and the X Bienal de São Paulo in 1969, representing Tunisia alongside Ammar Farhat, Ali Bellagha, Brahim Dhahak, and Abdelaziz Gorgi, among others.
