What if the greatest art brut artist in Paris was... Moroccan? And the greatest abstract painter in the capital, Iraqi? Exit the traditional figures of the avant-garde, the Museum of Modern Art of Paris wishes to explore a little-known chapter of the History of art by offering us this audacious rereading of the 20th century. A unique story in the shadow of Arab modernity, marked by the colorful universe of the captivating Baya, the abstract and infinitely colorful compositions of Jamil Hamoudi or the curious sculpted heads of Jaber Al-Mahjoub. Among this gallery of colorful characters, other unfairly overlooked artists are finally attracting all the light on them. Through the selection of more than 200 fascinating works, most of which have never been exhibited in France, the exhibition invites us to discover the stylized portraits of the Egyptian artist Amy Nimr, to admire the calligraphic poetry of the Algerian painter Rachid Koraïchi before to linger on the mosaics of the late Souhila Bel Bahar, one of the irreducible “signettes of the brush”. It is therefore high time to revise our textbooks, because another history of modern art has already been written...

Did you know?
She is undoubtedly one of the stars of this exhibition. The painter Baya was only 15 years old when the famous gallery owner Aimé Maeght spotted her work during a trip to the Algerian capital and organized her first Parisian exhibition. Shortly after, André Breton crowned this young orphan Queen of Sheba.