Jacques MAJORELLE
Nancy 1886 - Paris 1962
Biography
The son of the Art Nouveau cabinetmaker, designer and decorator Louis Majorelle, Jacques Majorelle studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts Appliqués in his native Nancy, initially studying architecture before turning to painting and studying with the gifted artist and draughtsman Emile Friant. In 1906 Majorelle enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, a private art school where he remained for about a year, while continuing his occasional studies with Friant, who was now teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, although he was not formally enrolled in the school. In 1908 Majorelle travelled to the Pyrenees and Spain, apparently for the sake of his poor health, as he had been diagnosed with early signs of tuberculosis. This was to be the first of the artist’s many journeys outside France. It was also in 1908 that Majorelle first exhibited his work in public, at the Société des Artistes Français in Paris, where he continued to show until 1913. A trip to Venice in the summer of 1909 resulted in a number of paintings that were exhibited in Nancy in January 1910, not long before he made his first visit to Egypt. Majorelle was to make three long trips to Egypt between 1910 and 1914, each stay lasting several months. He often based himself in the small village of Marg, on the Nile near Cairo, and travelled down the river as far as Karnak and Luxor, setting up his easel on the boat.
The next three decades of Majorelle’s life were spent largely in Morocco, and were the most productive of his career. He first arrived in the country in the autumn of 1917, at the age of thirty-one, and after brief stays in the coastal cities of Tangier, Rabat and Casablanca, where he found the damp Atlantic climate difficult for his weak lungs, eventually chose to settl further inland, in Marrakesh, which was to be his home for much of his career. As one writer noted in 1930, ‘All the ragged, intense life of the great city that was both Saharan and Moroccan became familiar to him. Better still, it became his life, the life of his eyes and his artist’s hands.’ Majorelle began to send his Moroccan paintings back to France to be exhibited at galleries in Nancy and in Paris. A show of nearly a hundred paintings of views of Marrakesh and the Atlas mountains was mounted at the Galerie Georges Petit in January 1922, achieving much critical and commercial success, while another exhibition of over sixty Moroccan paintings took place at the Cercle artistique de l’Est in Nancy in 1924. Between 1923 and 1929 Majorelle also designed a number of striking travel posters of Moroccan subjects, for such clients as the Syndicats d’Initiative et de Tourisme du Maroc.
In 1923 the artist acquired a house in Marrakesh, just outside the walls of the Arab city, which he named the Villa Bou Saf Saf, after the Arab word for the poplar trees with which the property was surrounded. A few years later he purchased two adjoining plots of land and created a magnificent walled garden, filled with exotic plants, which was expanded yet again in 1932. (Now known as the Villa Majorelle, the building and its gardens remain one of the leading sights of the city today.) Between 1923 and 1928 he also provided interior decorations for the grand, newly built Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh. Majorelle travelled extensively throughout Morocco, painting views of the inland towns and villages and undertaking several expeditions into the mountain areas of the Middle and High Atlas. He established a significant reputation in France as a painter of Orientalist and Near Eastern subjects, and in 1930 published a portfolio reproducing several of his paintings of views in the Atlas mountains, issued in a lavish album entitled Les Kasbahs de l’Atlas and accompanied by an exhibition at the Galerie de La Renaissance in Paris. In 1931 several works by Majorelle decorated in the Moroccan pavilion at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris. Within a few years, the artist also began to explore a new theme in his work, producing large, sensual paintings of black female nudes. The first public exhibitions of these works, in Rabat in March 1934 and Casablanca the following month, was followed later that year by a large exhibition at the Galerie Jean Charpentier in Paris. The vast majority of the 112 works shown were depictions of female nudes, their ebony skin touched with highlights of metallic powders, and the exhibition attracted considerable acclaim. In 1937 Majorelle painted a pair of very large mural-like canvases of crowded festival scenes for the stairwell of the new Hôtel de Ville in Casablanca, and the following year sent twenty-four paintings to a London gallery as part of an exhibition of three Moroccan-based artists. Between 1945 and 1952 Majorelle made several visits to West Africa in search of new subjects to paint, travelling and working in French Sudan (modern day Mali), Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Niger and Senegal. He continued to live and work in Marrakesh until a few months before his death from leukaemia in 1962.
