Five Algerian Postcards: A Brief History of ‘Images Populaires’ in Maghribi Chromolithography

Introduction

Most of the scholarship on colonial-era postcards from North Africa has focused on ‘picture postcards’, especially those that reproduce examples of ethnographic or Orientalist photography (e.g. Alloula 1986; Boum 2020; DeRoo 2013; Goldsworthy 2010; Prochaska 1990). This article looks instead to nonphotographic images and, in particular, to the vibrant illus- trations found in postcards produced through a colour printing method known as chromolithography. While a photographic postcard touts or even exaggerates its indexical qualities, these polychrome postcards prefer to give the impression of something drawn or painted by hand – even if they too rely on chemical processes and techniques of mechanical reproduction.¹

Chromolithography was used throughout French-occupied North Africa to print colourful imagery on all things big and small, across a wide range of thematic content and aesthetic criteria.² My focus here remains on a more narrow genre of what are often referred to as Islamic ‘images populaires’. Their illustrations, found on both postcard-sized and larger-format prints, are sometimes calligraphic or textual in nature but the vast majority are figurative and depict a variety of figures, creatures, and narrative scenes broadly associated with Islamic history and belief.³ Perhaps because of this explicitly religious iconography, what has often been overlooked is how these prints and postcards were co-produced by colonial and indigenous actors, and how they were consumed from early on by diverse markets of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. If the mixed origins of these prints and postcards defy some of the expectations surrounding them, however, I ultimately suggest here that a new reading of them as popular ‘Islamic’ images may yet be possible – but only if we look to their historical (re)appropriations within different communities, geographies, and political or artistic movements.

Despite their wide circulation, the illustrated postcards discussed below – and the wider body of chromolithographs to which they belong – remain largely overlooked in both the literature on colonial visual culture and Islamic art. My aim in this article is to provide a brief historical survey of chromolithographic printing in the Maghrib, one that pays special attention to the role of print in the spread of vernacular iconographies and narrative forms of Islamic art. I rely on five specific postcards to anchor the telling of this history, all of which were produced in Algeria before 1928 by the publisher Éditions Bonestève. Each one tells a different story – visually in the content of their images but also in their trajectories as manufactured and circulated objects. They act as windows onto a huge visual archive of printed imagery whose study, I argue, will deepen our historical understanding of colonial relations and the development of artistic practice in the region. Viewing these prints as fundamentally hybrid is crucial to understanding their mobility, their widespread aesthetic and political influence, and their ability to be read in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways.

I. Postcolonial afterlives

In the 1960s – decades after the production of chromolithographs in the Maghrib had already waned – these prints and postcards began to make semi-frequent cameos in regional cinema and theatre.⁴ Mass-produced images of saints or holy creatures like al-buraq can be found hanging on the walls of communal gathering spaces or people’s homes in the sets of films and plays, especially those concerned with the experience of working-class or rural populations under colonial rule. A renewed interest in popular figurative Islamic imagery of this kind took hold across the region after the independence movements of the 1950s–60s, notably in the work of avant-garde artists like Moroccan writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011).⁵ Without collapsing the difference between parts of the Maghrib or between its varied modern art movements, I want to begin by considering a few examples of the afterlives chromolithographic images led and the ways they were used in service of a ‘vernacular modernism’ shaped during the nation-building period. In other words, this history of Maghribi chromolithography starts not at its chronological origins but at its ‘end’.

In one scene from a short film of Bouanani’s from 1966, a wandering poet enters a village in southern Morocco pushing a cart decorated with postcard- sized images of saintly figures, fantastic creatures, and epic battles, as an excited crowd gathers to hear him tell their popular tales (Figure 1). Though rendered on screen in black-and-white, these images are recognisable as the multi-colour chromolithographs from earlier in the century. The film, Tarfaya aw Masirat Sha‘ir (Tarfaya, or a Poet’s Journey), tells the fictionalised story of a young boy from southern Morocco who travels the country as an apprentice to the poet during an unspecified moment of French colonial rule. The story of these two characters serves additionally as a framing device for scenes of documentary footage showing the daily life and customs in Tarfaya. As Peter Limbrick has analyzed, the film’s narrative structure echoes the meandering and immersive nature of the Moroccan oral and musical traditions that Bouanani’s fictional protagonist seeks (2015, 400). In the scene described above, the prints themselves also act as narrative devices that move the film through an exploration of the country’s history and culture through the telling of stories.

For Bouanani, the ‘vernacular’ and the ‘modern’ are not in opposition but are used instead to understand and ultimately transform one other. The presentation of popular traditions in his films was not, according to Lim- brick, ‘a rearticulation of some kind of authentic local knowledge against the modern, but rather the incorporation of those existing practices, already diversified and comprising many linguistic and social encounters, of even science and art, into a vernacular modernism that might be pursued after (but never free from) the colonial experience of the Protectorate’ (2015, 400). Similar modes of artistic production and questioning were pursued by modern artists across the Maghrib, who were grappling with how vernacular traditions could be incorporated into, but also fundamentally reorient, an arts education system established within a colonial framework.

Chromolithographic images resurfaced in Maghribi cinema as part of a wider resurgence of interest in the ‘popular arts’ within mid-twentieth-century discourses of modern art and ethnography, that sought to distinguish themselves from earlier colonial approaches to the same material. Bouanani, for instance, was a prominent member of a Moroccan experimental film movement in the 1960s and 70s that was politically and creatively invested in an ‘engagement of Moroccan popular traditions and languages while avoiding the Orientalism and folklorism that had typified colonial responses to those phenomena’ (Limbrick 2015, 390). Meanwhile the ‘identity quests’ pursued by nations in the post-independence era saw the establishment of government institutions – such as the Centre des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Tunis – to collect, preserve, and study examples of local vernacular culture (Rey 2019, 57).⁶ And, on an individual level, many of the van- guard artists of the time began building personal collections of local arts and handicrafts, which they used to inform their own artistic practices but also to revive what they understood as their collective artistic heritage. For the École de Tunis and other vanguard movements within visual art, revival meant reviving certain modes of production – including mosaics, textiles, and under-glass paintings – but also reviving the stories, figures, and iconography associated with the region’s non-elite traditions of visual and oral storytelling, much of which had been represented in colour prints of the colonial period.⁷ Not only was Bouanani invested in showing examples of vernacular arts and traditions in the scenes of his films but also, like other artist contemporaries of his, in how they could be used to create new forms of art – in his case, experimental, genre-bending cinema.

In Mémoire 14 (1971), Bouanani uses a printed image found in the first of our five Éditions Bonestève postcards in the opening sequences of the film (Figures 2 and 3). The image shows ʿAli, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, using his double-bladed sword to slay the horned demon Raʾs al-Ghul. The popularity in Maghribi painting and printmaking of ʿAli – whose representation is traditionally associated with Shiʿi visual practices – is often explained as being recontextualised in Sunni-majority North Africa to relay a general message about the inherent good or strength of Islam prevailing over forces of evil (Connelly and Massie 1989, 106 and 116; Masmoudi 1972, 41; Renard 1996, 97). Alternatively, William Gallois argues for a historically specific interpretation of the postcard’s image, one that takes into consideration the mixed markets that existed for these prints during the colonial era. Accordingly, Gallois proposes divergent meanings the image might hold depending on its audience: ‘To the white settler, the work proposed itself as an instance of local color that might be sent to audiences back home in Europe, but to an Algerian or a Tunisian, it seemed quite apparent that the devilish figure sported the colors of French troops in the region: with his red hat transmuted into horns, a blue frock coat, and his stereotypically bald head and mustache’ (Gallois 2021, 10).

The double entendre of this print makes it a fitting choice for the opening of Mémoire 14, a work that is ultimately about how the tools of the colonisers can be used against them. This radical film is spliced almost entirely from French colonial ethnographic footage, repurposed to explore the everyday experience of colonial violence in Morocco during the first half of the twentieth century (the fourteenth century of the Hijri calendar, hence the film’s title). By blurring the boundaries between documentary and art films, Mémoire 14 is also a commentary on the fraught legacy of filmmaking itself, a practice established and institutionalised in Morocco by the French Protectorate (Bouanani himself and most of his peers had, after all, been educated at the l’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris).

Confronting his own demons as an indigenous Moroccan filmmaker educated in France, Bouanani ends up using French colonial footage to critique French colonialism. Similarly, the film’s image of ‘Ali and his demon was printed by a colonial technology and appealed to colonial audiences, while also containing a subversive anti-colonial message. Beginning this article with later North African responses to these images sets the stage for understanding the prints as neither purely ‘colonial’ nor ‘Islamic’, but as active contributors to paradigms of ‘vernacular modernism’ that were developing beyond the European museums and discourses where the prints have long been held. A film like Mémoire 14 show us how the printed images of Maghribi chromolithography, much like its reappropriated archival footage, take on lives of their own beyond the imperial conditions of their original production.

II. Origins and the question of authorship

What were these imperial conditions of chromolithographic production in North Africa? As is the case with many forms of mass-produced art, it would be a gruelling if not impossible task to recover the names of all contributors at various stages in the making of any given chromolithograph. Chromolithography as a medium challenges us to look beyond a model of art history driven by individual artists, while also not losing sight of the multi-layered collaborations and uneven power relations between the North African and European actors involved.

As previously mentioned, all five of the postcards examined here were published by Éditions Bonestève in Algiers sometime in the 1920s or earlier.⁸ Although indigenous lithographic presses took off across the region from the 1870s — prompted by state-sponsored ventures focused on the production of textual material — the commercial printing of images was operated privately and sustained heavier European involvement throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.⁹ Commercial image printing in the colonial Maghrib, as was also the case in Europe, involved the collaboration of publishers (éditeurs) and printers (imprimeurs). Collaborations between the two took many forms and were sometimes ad hoc or remote. A publisher based in Cairo, Algiers, or Tunis might have sent matrices to Europe for printing or vice versa. Thus many chromolithographs found in North Africa, including those with prominent Islamic themes and Arabic text in their designs, bear the initials or insignias of German or other European printers. Publishers were also known to buy, trade, and sometimes steal one another’s designs for picture postcards as for illustrated ones – which accounts for the significant overlap found in designs from the region during this period.

At other times collaborations between éditeurs and imprimeurs manifested in stable, long-lasting partnerships, as in the case of the publisher Éditions Bonestève and the printing house Éditions Baconnier.¹⁰ Both were successful, generations-old businesses managed by European settler families who had moved from France in the nineteenth century and reestablished their printing franchises in Algiers’ Bab El Oued neighbourhood (Baconnier 2009; Berthon- net 2006, 6). Specialising in art prints, Bonestève and Baconnier frequently partnered together to produce limited edition books and catalogues as well as popular posters and postcards. Postcards were printed using the same technique as larger prints but on different paper stock, where a single sheet with multiple self-contained scenes could then be cut down into individual postcard-sized prints (Figure 4).

Little is known of the North Africans involved in chromolithographic pro- duction, and reconstructing the division of labour within this print industry is still a matter of speculation. As David Prochaska notes, this area of study involves methodological, historiographical, and archival challenges that are all intertwined: ‘the dearth of sources beyond the extant cards themselves severely hinders investigation. Thus, the scholarly literature on postcards still concentrates more on images and their interpretation than on production or reception’ (2001, 383). Yet clues within the images themselves sometimes hint at the conditions of their production. Captions are a good example: in picture postcards, they are almost always only in French and use movable type stamps, whereas illustrated chromolithographic postcards often include text in Arabic that is hand rendered. The producer of a print’s image or ‘matrix’, then, not only needed to know Arabic but needed to know it well enough to be able to write in reverse. In this case the technical requirements of chromolithography suggest beyond a reasonable doubt that businesses relied on the knowledge and know-how of Arabic-speakers. And, while most commercially printed chromolithographs are unsigned, additional clues about the nature of their co-production by Europeans and North Africans can be traced in the biographies of twentieth-century Maghribi artists who worked on (chromo)lithographic productions early on in their careers or as commercial side jobs.¹¹

Recently, Gallois has commented on the aesthetic resonances between the anonymous chromolithographs discussed here and the work of the Algerian painter Mohammed Racim. Gallois argues that the fixated attention on only a few dozen of Racim’s miniature paintings has meant ‘leaving aside the plentiful instances of signed commercial illustration, book decoration, and works of propaganda, which tend to be treated as banal instances of popular visual culture. It also ignores a whole shadow oeuvre of anonymously produced chromolithographic postcards and posters that collectors and enthusiasts have long ascribed to Racim’, among which are some of those discussed in this article (Gallois 2021, 7). On the one hand, it is very likely that artists like Mohammed Racim and his peers contributed directly or indirectly to the vibrant industry of commercial chromolithographic printing in Algiers, but on the other, reconstituting exactly which of the hundreds or even thousands of Algerian chromolithographs belong specifically to Mohammed Racim remains conjectural. We might prefer to see this ‘shadow oeuvre’ as one shared not only by him and his brother – who was more deeply involved in the world of print throughout his life – but also a whole host of other unnamed Maghribi artists.

The story of these two artist brothers sheds some light on the fraught working relationships between colonial entities and local artists when it came to (chromo)lithographic printing. Born to a family of well-established artisans in the Casbah of Algiers, Omar Racim (1884–1959) and his more famous younger brother Mohammed Racim (1896–1975) both launched their careers as teenagers in various branches of the colonial administration.¹² Later, as Mohammed rubbed shoulders with Orientalist painters in Paris, Omar travelled to Egypt and the Levant, gaining exposure to calligraphy and illuminated Qurans but also to the reformist movements of Sheikh Muhammad ʿAbduh and other religious leaders calling for anti-colonial resistance (Orif 1988, 36). Returning to Algiers, Omar Racim started several periodicals including al-Jazaʾir in 1908 and Dhu al-Fiqar in 1913 whose contents he wrote, calligraphied, illustrated, and lithographed himself – no doubt using the very skills he had learned as a teen at the colonial government’s official printing press (Shehab and Nawar 2020, 60). The political and pan-Islamist tenor of these publications led to his imprisonment and life sentence in 1913. After eventually receiving a pardon in 1921, Omar Racim was able to reenter the world of visual arts, but only in a way that was more palatable to colonial authorities – commercial graphic design. Tragically, while the younger Racim brother was celebrated by French colonialists and the postcolonial nation-state alike as the ‘first Algerian painter’, the elder had to neutralise his work in order to survive and never lived to see the indepen- dence he fervently dreamed of in his youth.

The (chromo)lithographic works bearing Omar Racim’s signature upon his release from prison include commercial posters sometimes printed by Baconnier. These were ads for international companies like Shell Gas or the car manufacturer Citroën, as well as local businesses specialising in tobacco and cigarettes, coffee, lemonade, and other goods, and their decorative borders and floral or linear motifs recall the graphic character of the prints and post- cards released by Bonestève (Shehab and Nawar 2020, 60–61). One affiche design from 1923, launched as part of a Ramadan campaign for Citroën, invites an ascendant class of Muslim elite to celebrate the holy month with the purchase of a new automobile (Figure 5).¹³ It signals the importance of this colourful medium in the expansion of global commercial audiences, especially those in the colonies.

Our second example from Bonestève’s postcard stock happens to also be an image whose theme is transportation (Figure 6). Its illustration is a busy scene set outside a generic desert city where a mixed crowd gathers to watch a travelling procession go by. Central to the composition is a mahmal, a ceremonial palanquin that was used to transport high-profile visitors to Mecca by camel from the thirteenth to early-twentieth centuries. The postcard’s two captions read, in Arabic, ‘al-mahmal al-sharif’ (the honourable mahmal) and, in French, ‘la caravane sacrée se dirige vers La Mecque’ (the sacred caravan heads towards Mecca).

In its thematic content, Bonestève’s mahmal postcard is typical in that it speaks to a wider array of chromolithographic material from North Africa related to Islamic holy sites and pilgrimage. As the Hajj industry grew sharply at the turn of the twentieth century so too did the need for souvenirs, and Saudi Arabia was soon outsourcing these to cities already established as cosmopolitan printing centres.¹⁴ Printers like Dar Masr in Cairo or Al-Manar Press in Tunis produced colour prints and postcards as well as pilgrimage certificates that were imported into Mecca and Medina but also sold to local clientele, thus contributing to the circulation of these images within North Africa as well. These examples bear witness to the use of (chromo)lithography as a tool, not only for disseminating religion or ideology, but also for produ- cing and marketing to new global commercial audiences in the beginning of the century.

On the other hand, the trajectory and traceability of the image in Bonestève’s mahmal postcard is unique. Unlike the rare signed chromolithographs of Omar Racim’s, this postcard example shows us how the mechanically and commercially reproduced medium of chromolithography complicates traditional notions of artistic authorship. Its pictorial reference appears to be an earlier stencil-coloured lithograph from around 1880 (Akbarnia, Porter, and Suleman 2018, 124) (Figure 7), or perhaps a twentieth-century colour version of it (Folsach, Lundbæk, and Mortensen 1996, cat. no. 22). According to the lithograph’s Arabic inscriptions, it was sold in Cairo at ‘[the shop of] Hassan ʿUways on ‘Abidin Street, Egypt’. Though no European names are included on the print, its original publisher was Camille Burckardt, a French printmaker working for the Wentzel printing firm in Weissenberg, Germany. It was from there that this print and others featuring aerial views of pilgrimage sites were designed, printed, and exported on contract with ʿUways into Egypt (Picard 2010, 58–59).

In 2012, Sotheby’s held a sale of the print and made the origins of the lithograph public, implying that anonymous authorship was mutually beneficial for ʿUways and Wentzel: ‘The fact that this print was actually made in Europe appears to have been deliberately obscured to improve its sale potential in the Middle East’ (2012, Lot 156). The postcard version speaks to the fundamentally overlapping and highly mobile conditions of print production. It also hints at marketing strategies that motivated the presentation of such prints as ‘Islamic’ or ‘indigenous’ images rather than the hybrid objects they were. Here, questions around the origins or authorship of chromolithographic images can get caught between the technical complexities of the medium and the various commercial interests vested in it. The anonymity of artworks might stem from market-driven stakes in keeping certain authors unnamed – whether European or North African – or else from the processes of citation, reference, and copying that take place across media but seem especially prevalent in the case of printed ephemera.

III. Collecting ‘images populaires’

If, as Sotheby’s suggests, European involvement in the ‘Uways-Wentzel print was obscured to ‘improve its sale potential in the Middle East’ (and, presumably, North Africa), what about its effect on sales to other demographics? It does appear that the role of Europeans was similarly deemphasized by the Euro-American buyers who brought these chromolithographs back home. The legacy of this today is that you are most likely to encounter the chromolithographs under discussion here, if not on eBay, then in the context of museums dedicated to ‘non-Western’ art.

Many of these museum collections house copies of the same North African chromolithographs or very close versions of them. The pervasive presence of these mass-printed images in ethnographic museums – and the fact that artists, ethnographers, and museum directors all bought the same ones – reflects the robust tourist market that existed for them from early on in the history of their production, during a period of heightened colonial and tourist activity in the region.¹⁵ The five Bonestève examples considered in this study were bought in the 1920s by the founder and then director of the Newark Museum in New Jersey, John Cotton Dana. They are part of a larger group of 101 chromolithographic postcards brought back from his collecting trips to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Collectively, they are accompanied only by an exceedingly brief curatorial note likely written by Dana himself, which reads, ‘Postcards of Arabic design. Natives buy them nowadays to tack up on their walls’. By foregoing the cross-cultural aspects of print production and circulation, the one-line note immediately raises certain questions. Were these in fact images made by Muslims, for Muslims? If so, how is their genesis as such complicated by the insignias of the European printers they bear? Or by the market through which tourists, like Dana himself, were able to purchase them?

The third postcard is one that is found in similar museum collections around the world – even the Newark Museum includes three copies and two similar versions of the same scene within its selection. Printed in black, yellow, green, red, and blue, its image shows a man and a woman riding together on a single galloping horse (Figure 8). The male rider points the way ahead with a long sword, his gaze directed at the viewer. Two birds fly alongside, from the right to the left side of the landscape, an undefined expanse of green.

The postcard’s Arabic inscriptions identify the male figure as Sidi ʿAbdallah, otherwise known as ʿAbdallah ibn Jaʿfar, the head of a Meccan caliphate who helped lead the seventh-century Muslim conquest of North Africa. The story of the postcard’s equestrian couple traces back to a seventh-century chronicle of Muslim conquest known as Futuh Ifriqiya by Abbasid historian ʿUmar al-Waqidi; though no longer extant, the tale lived on in traditions of folklore and oral storytelling (Masmoudi 1968, 11). According to these legends, Sidi ʿAbdallah captured Tunisia and rode off with the daughter of the region’s then Byzantine ruler, Gregory the Patrician. Yamina is the name used to identify the princess in some visual representations of this tale, including chromolithographs like this postcard as well as larger-format copies like those held at the Quai Branly and Tropenmuseum.

If the legend can sometimes serve as a parable of the relations between the indigenous peoples of Tunisia and their successive invaders – Phoenicians, Roman, Arab, French – it is certainly not without implications of tragedy. In some versions of the tale the Byzantine princess escapes her fate by taking a fatal jump from the back of a camel (Masmoudi 1972, 48– 50). But the visual story told in these chromolithographs is decidedly more positive, with Sidi ʿAbdallah and Yamina shown instead as an amorous couple. As Roger Benjamin observes, these prints visually celebrate the introduction of Islam to North Africa through their ‘buoyant image where every- thing curves upward in triumph: Sidi Abdallah’s sword, his black moustaches, the princess’s headdress, the polka-dotted charger’s tail, and the birds’ wings’ (Benjamin and Ashjian 2015, 61).

Mythico-historical figures from epics like Futuh Ifriqiya and various sira legends¹⁶ make up a rotating cast of characters that appear throughout the painted and printed images of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Arab world. Central to these legends are the foundational myths of Arab identity and histories of early Muslim expansion, refracted through stories of heroic battles and romance. At the Quai Branly in Paris and similar institutions, North African chromolithographs fall under a category of graphic artworks from around the world that are referred to as ‘images populaires’. Their designation as such is less likely to derive from their mass-produced nature (since one-off works, like under-glass paintings, are also included in this category)¹⁷ than from their association with folk legends and oral forms of storytelling. Scholars of Arabic literature have occasionally mentioned how figural prints were used to ‘serve as illustrations for live performances’, but a lack of ethno- graphic research leaves uncertain precisely how, when, and where this was the case (Connelly 1986, 206–207; Renard 1999, 34). ¹⁸

There is one major exception to the placement of Maghribi chromolitho- graphs in ethnographic collections. At the Centre Pompidou, home to the National Museum of Modern Art in France, is a large-format analog of Bonestève’s postcard (AM 81-65-1266 which is very similar to the poster image at the beginning of this essay). Also published in Algiers by Bonestève, the Pompidou’s version is about nine times the postcard’s size. Though its pictured scene is nearly identical, it features an additional French caption as well as a decorative frame with Qur’anic suras that are not immediately relevant to the pictorial subject. The anonymous print’s unconventional inclusion in an institution expressly dedicated to modern art can be understood through its arrival to the Pompidou in the personal archive of a canonical artist.

As has been well-documented, tourists to the Maghrib around the turn of the twentieth century included artists seen as the leading figures of European modernism, like Henri Matisse or Paul Klee. Among these was the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who bought the Pompidou’s chromolithograph while travelling in Tunisia between 1904–1905. Benjamin has explored how the storied trip taken by Kandinsky and the German expressionist painter Gabriele Münter – as well as the local handicrafts they collected while there – informed developments in the artist’s career upon his return to Europe. The rarity of images with men and women sharing a horse, coupled with the ‘deep attachment’ Kandinsky felt towards the Sidi ʿAbdallah print throughout his life, has led to speculations around its role in inspiring several of his equestrian-themed artworks, including his iconic painting from 1907, Riding Couple (Benjamin and Ashjian 2015, 60, and note 16 on 196).

Kandinsky’s prized chromolithograph was eventually donated to the Pompidou as part of the artist’s personal archive. But more often, the transfer of Maghribi prints from Africa to the collecting institutions of Europe was predicated on their ability to be viewed as images made for the decorative or devotional purposes of local Muslim populations. Since the time of their collection, years of occupying a subordinate position to the more elite traditions of Islamic art and years of being decontextualised within museum displays and publications has rendered invisible the details of their use and meaning within Muslim North African contexts. This decontextualization resulted in part from the extremely limited ethnographic data that accompanied prints into the museum – as Dana’s brief curatorial note at the Newark Museum attests to. At the same time, information on images populaires was also lost in the process as they were ‘ventriloquized by their modern supporters’, seen as relevant to modern art museums and scholarship only by virtue of the European avant-garde artists who admired them (Flood 2017, 60).

IV. Ambivalent prints and their multiple audiences

How did these images succeed in appealing to so many audiences? The ‘chromos’ described here were hung up in cafes, homes, and businesses in the Maghrib but also on the walls of artists’ studios and museums in Europe – not to mention the many that travelled the world as postcards. To bring some perspective to their widespread popularity, I want to now examine a single chromolithographic image as a hybrid of visual forms and layered references, capable of multiple readings depending on its viewer.

Turning to the fourth postcard example, our gaze is met directly by a seated woman who holds a fan in one hand and a string of prayer beads in the other (Figure 9). She is identified in Arabic as ‘murabita Zaynab’ using the feminine cognate of murabit, from which the French and English terms marabout is derived.¹⁹ This Algerian marabouta’s complex reception as a historical figure makes her a particularly interesting choice of subject for an illustrated postcard. Zaynab bint Shaykh Muhammad (1850–1904), known colloquially as Lalla Zaynab, was a Kabyle woman renowned for her piety and saintly qualities who served for many years as the leader of the Rahmaniyya Sufi order in al-Hamil, her small oasis town near Bou Saâda. This followed a bitter struggle over succession with her male cousin and the colonial authorities who favoured him to replace her father, during which Lalla Zaynab’s ‘indocility toward those in authority – male military officers and their Muslim allies – provoked panic in Algiers in an era celebrated as the apogee of French Algeria’ (Clancy-Smith 1994, 10).

Meanwhile word of her strength, piety, and saintliness had extended so far beyond al-Hamil that several Western women, including Isabelle Eberhardt, travelled there to meet her in person. Lalla Zaynab’s respect and popularity among her own followers, her marginalisation by colonial authorities, and the interest expressed in her by certain foreign travellers muddy any clear-cut sense of who this postcard and others like it were printed for. Yet even if we remain unable to reconstruct precisely who made them, to whom they were sold, or what functions they served, chromolithographic images provoke speculation about their role in spreading information and in spreading the sway of certain historical actors.

Like a number of other chromolithographic postcards, this one of Lalla Zaynab clearly references a historical photograph. Although the context in which it was taken remains obscure, the image was distributed widely as a collotype postcard by Collection Idéale P.S., one of three major picture post- card publishers in Algeria (Figure 10).²⁰ Religious leaders and holy persons are among the most frequent subjects of both illustrated and photographic post- cards from the colonial-era Maghrib, and especially Algeria.²¹ The great majority in both however are men, making Lalla Zaynab an exceptional figure in postcards as in history. To help us better understand her representation in Bonestève’s version, it is worth noting several of the differences between maraboutic images in both types of postcards – besides the obvious between, say, colour and black-and-white or a lens-based image and a hand-rendered one.

Marabouts form a popular subcategory of ‘sceǹes et types’, a genre of colonial picture postcards that divides the colonised world and its populations into ahistorical representations of occupations and activities, environments, and people – often according to ethnic, racial, or tribal stereotypes (Prochaska 1990, 378). Sceǹes et types images follow a formulaic mode of representation that is both exoticizing and decontextualising, a convention in which, as Susan Slyomovics describes, ‘an individual appears within the frame, with or without background, on location or in a studio, but always in visual contexts that masked urgent political and economic realities in the colony’ (2012, 129). As a photographic ‘type’, marabouts remain mostly anonymous in these representations: whether posed by a veritable historical figure or a paid studio model, his (or her) name was usually only given when accompanying an insurrec- tionary or criminal act they participated in (Prochaska 1990, 381). Unlike many picture postcards, Lalla Zaynab is (at least partially) named in the Collection Idéale P.S. example, but the caption also places it squarely within the category of ‘sceǹes et types’.

The tendency to overgeneralise in photographic postcards contrasts with the specificity of chromolithographic postcards, which often rely on texts to anchor their recognition and meaning. Typically these colourful illustrations show saints and marabouts outdoors, praying or otherwise facing the viewer as though posed for a portrait, with a domed white structure – known also as a marabout in French or English – in the background.

These images are therefore asynchronous representations in that the individual poses in front of the commemorative shrine that would have been built and dedicated to them after their death. Though they are real and (at least locally) famous historical figures, their physical features and sur- rounding landscapes look generic. It is instead written captions in both French and Arabic that communicate specific information like the figure’s name and some combination of where they were from, the location of their shrine, the name of their sect or order, and any achievements or miracles they are known for.

The chromolithographic image of Lalla Zaynab appears caught between these two modes of representation. To what extent does it traffic in colonial stereotypes? Is it culturally essentializing, or does it celebrate her as an individual? Looking to a different chromolithograph attributed to Mohammed Racim, Gallois argues that its image was intentionally encoded for multiple audiences: ‘European viewers looked at this picture in such a way that all their generic preconceptions about Arab art and culture were fulfilled – no matter how divorced they were from reality – while the work’s true audience was able to access a completely different set of ideas whose emotional, religious, and political charge could be instinctively and universally understood’ (2021, 14). Here too we can see how Lalla Zaynab’s depiction in the colour postcard would appeal to a European sensibility through its direct reference to a circulating example of a sceǹes et types postcard, a genre which is, as Prochaska puts it, ‘a European construction of Algerian alterity’ (1990, 373).

Yet this colourful version of the card also makes deliberate amendments to the lens-based original. Lalla Zaynab’s body is bestowed a grander presence, sitting more upright and occupying more space within the frame. The chromolithograph also has a more playful and imaginative approach to space: the peaked top of its ornamental frame evokes the exterior of the tent structure whose interior is implied by its photographic referent. Whereas colonial picture postcards tend to emphasise the inferiority of women to men even when portrayed in the same role – e.g. a marabouta is typically shown in coarse cloths compared to the more refined dress of a marabout – chromolithography proposes an opportunity to reverse this dynamic (Prochaska 1990, 396). The decorative patterns surrounding Lalla Zaynab lend an air of luxury to her and activate the image with their vivid and almost dizzying reds and yellows. Compared with the drab black-and-white postcard, this exaggerated use of colour strikes a decidedly celebratory tone.

Chromolithography here opens up a possible alternative reading of Lalla Zaynab’s image that associates it not necessarily with sceǹes et types but instead – as was argued about the Sidi ʿAbdallah postcard – with a celebration of Islam through the joyous representation of a strong Muslim leader.²² The significant demographic of non-Arab Muslims in the region meant that political mobilisation against colonial power at times occurred more frequently around the term ‘Muslim’ than ‘Arab’.²³ This phenomenon has been used to explain the investment in images of strong Muslim leaders, even those at a far remove like the Ottoman leaders whose painted and printed portraits were hung in Algerian homes.²⁴ Mustafa Kemal’s likeness, for instance, replicated ‘in broad daylight’ quickly and widely across North Africa in photographic and chromolithographic printed material as well as under-glass paintings, while images of other, more controversial figures had to circulate on the sly (Carlier 2007, 334–335; see also Masmoudi 1972, 63).

Would chromolithographic postcards of local figures, like Lalla Zaynab, have been similarly used by Maghribi audiences? If so, were the possible political implications of their images perceived by or lost on the non-Muslim publishers, printers, and tourists who were crucial to their production and circulation? It seems unlikely that illustrated Lalla Zaynab postcards published by Bonestève would have circulated surreptitiously but the fact that her name is given only in Arabic and not in French arouses certain curiosities: is it a half-guarded identification? Was she so famous that explicitly naming her was gratuitous, or were there political benefits for her recognition to be restricted?

Such mysteries remain, but the multiple possibilities they evoke encourage us to reject the dismissal of these chromolithographs in scholarship as ‘images populaires’ and their oversimplification as purely ‘Islamic’, ‘non- Western’, or ‘Arab’ images by Euro-American cultural institutions. On the other hand, a different reading of them as ‘Islamic’ images might be possible if scholarly research begins to uncover their historical reappropriations by Sufi networks or political movements, through which they might even threaten the very imperial and colonial systems that participated in their own creation.

V. Iconography in transit

Chromolithography’s power to move certain kinds of imagery was perceived even in its own time by colonial authorities and was viewed, at least in certain contexts, as a threat. A rare, documented reference to these colour prints (erroneously referred to as ‘gravures colorées’, or colour engravings) comes from Senegal in 1908. Out of fear such images would influence further conversion to Islam, the Governor General of French West Africa, William Ponty, issued a directive denouncing and banning their importation:

Noting here that the reference made to Islam as the ‘only true religion’ is sarcastic, it is likely that a colonial anxiety over images of Islamic themes or figures – especially marabouts – was heightened in this part of the continent where the proselytising agenda was more vigorous than in the north. Still, Ponty’s words illuminate modes of thinking that informed the wider colonial imaginary: it was their susceptibility to spreading, mixed with their popular and even rough or crude (‘grossiere’) nature, that made chromolithographs so dangerous. The irony that Europeans were involved in various aspects of producing and circulating images that were then banned by European authorities elsewhere reveals the deeply ambivalent and entangled nature of these prints, but also their generative political potential.

The fifth and final Bonestève postcard shows the power of chromolithography to move vernacular Islamic iconography across media and across territories. Its subject is among the most prevalent found in prints from the Muslim world as well as certain genres of painting. Central to the postcard’s image is al-buraq, the winged steed with a human head that transported the Prophet Muhammad during his Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and then to the heavens (Figure 11). This tale of celestial ascent has a long and rich history of literary-visual representation in earlier manuscripts and miniatures across the Islamic world (Gruber and Colby 2010). Looking to lesser- studied forms of vernacular art such as under-glass painting, however, suggests that a global revival of al-buraq imagery was underway around the turn of the twentieth century and that print media likely encouraged its spread.²⁵ By this time, versions of al-buraq were being printed across the Levant and North Africa, eventually also in South Asia and West Africa. The sacred creature remained one of the most popular subjects of both large and small chromolithographs collected in these regions for decades including several examples from Éditions Bonestève.²⁶

In its reproducibility and portability, print was responsible for transporting images of the Night Journey with precision and consistency. At the same time, its flexibility as a medium allowed virtually limitless modifications for local contexts and niche markets. Across the board, al-buraq is represented as a winged steed with a human, usually feminised head. Though the hybrid creature typically features a peacock tail in its modern Iranian iterations as well as those from Central or South Asia, further west it is shown with the tail of a horse or a mule. Print alterations sometimes replace the sites over which al-buraq flies from those in Jerusalem or Mecca to, for example, the Giza pyramids or the Taj Mahal. Or, the scene’s figures might be dressed up in the costumes of a certain cultural milieu or era: in single-colour lithographs from Iran, the angels encountered by al-buraq and/or the Prophet often sport Qajar fashions, while in some Algerian chromolithographs they wear the red Ottoman fez (tarbush).

The quick spread of al-buraq in print likely also played a part in the many interpretations of the miraculous creature across twentieth-century African art, ranging from wooden sculpture to puppetry, plays, music, textiles, drawings, amulets, and paintings on a variety of backings (Mazrui 1994, 55–57). Interestingly, the repercussions of Ponty’s ban have given Islamic chromolithography a more prominent position in the scholarship on Senegalese under-glass painting than almost anywhere else in art history.²⁷ Scholars have argued that an unintended consequence of censoring these prints – which were imported by Arabic-speaking merchants from 1895 if not earlier – was the translation of their images onto glass by Senegalese painters (Bouttiaux-Ndiaye 1994; Diouf 1992; Roberts and Nooter- Roberts 2000).²⁸ Whether or not the ban did inadvertently trigger the birth of Senegal’s vibrant under-glass painting tradition, the strong relation- ship between these paintings and Maghribi chromolithographs is supported visually by the striking overlaps in their iconographic and formal programmes.

The Senegalese under-glass painting in Figure 12 reveals a nearly identical composition, ornamental details, and technique of perspectival flattening as the Bonestève postcard from Algiers, implying that its maker may have encountered the same postcard or perhaps a larger poster version. Yet the adaptability of print images for local contexts extends to the under-glass medium as well. The Senegalese painting expresses a singular modification from the postcard, which is that the hair and skin tone of the figures – the Prophet, the angel Jibril (Gabriel), and the face of al-buraq – all take on a darker complexion. Many twin examples of this kind exist, and it has even been suggested that print compositions were directly copied or even traced onto glass in some cases. Moreover, certain printed scenes remained open to context-specific reinterpretation, which may have influenced the choices made by Senegalese painters about which source images to use as models. A replicated image of an Algerian saint praying as he floats on the ocean, for instance, held additional resonance in Senegal where the famous saint Amadou Bamba is said to have performed similar miracles (Bouttiaux-Ndiaye 1994, 56; Strobel and Renaudeau 1984, 51).²⁹

Giulia Paoletti (2022) has recently argued that the relationship between under-glass painting in Senegal and imported chromolithographs (including those from the Maghrib) is one of interactive and mutually informed visual practices that deserve to be studied together. This approach will also benefit future scholarship on Maghribi under-glass painting, a research area that remains significantly underdeveloped. In the only study to date on Tunisian peinture sous verre, published in 1972, Mohamed Masmoudi claims that under-glass paintings were at times ‘directly inspired by images printed in Algiers during the last century’ – a twentieth-century painting of Imam ʿAli very similar to the one shown in Bouanani’s film is one such example (Masmoudi 1972, 20; see also 36).³⁰ Notably, al-buraq is also a popular subject of these Tunisian paintings and Masmoudi’s study includes several that are nearly identical to examples from Bonestève’s stock of postcards (Masmoudi 1972, 72).

Under-glass painting flourished in Tunisia around the same time as chromolithography in cities like Tunis, Sfax, or Bizerte, which were major centres of printing for the whole Maghrib. Moreover, the production of under-glass paintings – also called reverse-glass paintings – requires the same maneuver of reversal and negative thinking on behalf of the practitioner that (chromo)lithography does: they are painted on the backs of panes of window glass so that the viewer sees what the painter has com- posed in reverse. The concentration of chromolithographs and peintures sous verre in certain cities, paired with the comparable requirements of their production, helps us to imagine a close and entangled relationship between the two media, rather than a unidirectional line of influence from one medium to the other.

By most accounts, it was North Africans around the turn of the twentieth century who first brought under-glass painting to Senegal – where it is known as souwer, a Wolofisation of the French sous verre. Once more wide- spread within Africa, today under-glass painting is actively practiced in only Senegal and Tunisia; though their historical relationship has yet to be explored, the role of print in reinforcing connections between the two will undoubtedly be central. After all, though the introduction of the practice in West Africa coincided with the influx of print material, innumerably more extant examples of chromolithographs can be found in the region than Maghribi under-glass paintings.

It is clear that print material played a crucial intermediary role in the translation, transmission, and creative reinterpretation of Islamic imagery around the world – especially when we consider how easy it is to transport prints and how difficult or precarious it is to move panes of painted glass, murals, or other media with similar iconography.³¹ Chromolithographs were not mere reflections of global Islam’s visual network, but instead served as active agents in the processes that expanded it. As objects cross borders and iconographies cross media, how does an image itself come to embody these movements and translations?

Tracking the continuities and transformations of images as they travel between paper, walls, glass, and other material conditions opens up new areas of research within the vernacular Islamic iconography of Africa; at the same time, this method also helps to identify the medium specificities of chromolithography and to view artworks, like prints, as physical objects. Closer attention to the movements and transformations of printed images, especially across the borders of North and West Africa, will further serve to challenge longstanding biases in art history and area studies that see the Sahara Desert as a dividing line rather than a productive space of cultural and commercial exchange.

Conclusion

Paoletti has recently encouraged historians of vernacular art in Africa to ‘recogniz[e] the unstable meaning of images that lack any predictable path’, in order to consider how ‘the act of repeating, reworking, and reinserting previous motifs and visual references across media became a critical strategy in fostering and expanding the Sufi image-world’ (2022, 794). Following in this vein, the present article has examined five Algerian postcards that offer a glimpse of the many lives led by the printed images of Maghribi chromo- lithography. As these prints and postcards move between physical locations, we have seen their images slip between media, between epistemological categories, and between binaries of the colonizer/colonised, foreign/native, Eastern/Western, traditional/modern, sacred/profane, or high/low art. Their mobility, mutability, and ability to capture the attention of diverse audiences deserves a much closer look.

The examples of chromolithography examined here may raise as many questions as they answer, but at the very least, they have proven to be active agents in a global network through which imagery is continually shared and reinvented. On the one hand, I began by questioning whether the explicitly religious iconography of these prints helped obscure the early history of their production and circulation – namely, their co-production by colonial as well as indigenous actors and their consumption by diverse (rather than strictly Muslim) markets. On the other hand is the provocation that certain North African prints of the colonial era may be approached as a type of ‘Islamic’ image after all. These ‘Islamic’ images are plural, multi- layered, and widely networked – both in their content and in their circulation as objects. Like the archival colonial footage with which I began, revived and transformed by Bouanani in Mémoire 14, this corpus of chromolithographic prints also led rich postcolonial afterlives. Such historical (re)appropriations must now figure into new and non-reductive readings of these prints.

Footnotes