Biography
Considered one of the first Algerian painters, Mohammed Racim was born into a family of artisans of Turkish origin who lived and worked in the Casbah, in Algiers. Racim’s father had a woodcarving and copper business, while his paternal uncle engraved tombstones. His older brother, Omar Racim, was a calligrapher who devoted much of his life to religion and politics and later taught illumination to Algerian students in colonial Algeria.
Mohammed Racim was raised to join his family’s business. In 1910, Racim completed his studies at a French colonial school that trained Algerians for the skilled trades. Prosper Ricard, the inspector of artistic and industrial education in Algiers, was impressed by Racim’s exceptional work, which facilitated his placement as a draftsman in the Cabinet de Dessin within the Service of Indigenous Arts. As the artist explained, “From the age of fourteen, I spent part of my days making copies and composing carpets, Arab embroideries, ornaments on copper, and sculpted wood destined to furnish models for schools, the workshops of Algeria” (quoted in Roger Benjamin, “Colonial Tutelage To Nationalist Affirmation: Mammeri And Racim, Painters Of The Maghreb.”)
At the Cabinet de Dessin, Racim discovered Persian miniature painting, which would form the basis of his artistic production throughout his career. During Racim’s early attempts at painting, his uncle provided technical advice. At the same time, French Orientalist and Muslim convert Nasreddine Dinet (born Etienne Dinet, 1861-1929) offered encouragement and Racim’s first commission: 15 full-page colour illustrations with Qur’anic inscriptions for the publication Vie de Mohammed, Prophete d’Allah (1918), which Dinet co-wrote with Sliman ben Ibrahim (1870-1953). Racim produced similar traditional illuminations until the 1940s.
Racim exhibited at the Salon of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists in 1923. That same year, he also won a grant from the municipality of Algiers and a medal from the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in Paris. He subsequently spent eight years in Paris (1924–1932), where he completed page decorations for Henri Piazza’s (1861–1929) twelve-volume edition of One Thousand and One Nights (1926–1932). In 1933, he became the first Algerian to win the Grand Prix Artistique de l’Algérie. He was named professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Algiers, where he established a school of miniaturists. He stopped painting miniatures in 1955 due to eye problems. After Algeria gained independence in 1962, Racim was hired as a counsellor to the Minister of Culture. His work has been exhibited worldwide in Paris, Cairo, Rome, Bucharest, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tunis, and Algiers. Much of the artist’s collection is now preserved at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers.
In his paintings, Racim blends traditional Persian and Mughal miniature painting and techniques, rarely practised in the Maghreb, with a Western perspective to depict pre-colonial Algeria. Frequent themes include historical events, religious festivities, and moments of everyday life set before Algeria’s colonisation by the French in 1830. Racim’s style is characterised by this synthesis of traditional miniature painting with Western traditions, his vivid colours, and his preference for Persian mise-en-page.
Well-versed in the different styles and history of miniature painting, Racim often labelled his paintings ‘Persian style’ or ‘Egyptian style,’ depending on the style he employed. Later in his career, Racim reflected on his work, saying that he wanted to fix the memory of an Arab culture that French colonisation was rapidly transforming. Art historian Roger Benjamin argues that Racim purposely employed imperfect and subtly distorted perspectives to assert his Maghrebi identity and to privilege the miniature tradition over European models. At the same time, his paintings, as Benjamin notes, evidence his careful understanding of local gestures and customs and “rewrite the degrading protocols of Orientalist painting.”
Racim is the rare artist who was embraced by French colonisers, Algerian nationalists, and the pan-Arab Institut du Monde Arabe, which organised a posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work in 1992.
