Galerie Claude Lemand

Abdallah BENANTEUR (Algeria, 1931 - France, 2017).

(After Claude Lemand)

Born in 1931 in Mostaghanem, Abdallah Benanteur was brought up in an Algerian family and cul­tural envi­ron­ment, specif­i­cally enthralled by writing and illu­mi­nated manuscripts, by mystic Muslim poetry, by Andalusian music and songs. In 1953, he set­tled down in Paris, which he trans­formed into his own cap­ital of life and cre­ativity. Abdallah Benanteur passed away on 31 December 2017, at Ivry sur Seine, France.

Impregnated by the Arab cul­ture from his native Algeria, by the great European painting in museums across France and Europe, by the graphic arts and manuscripts from Europe, the East and the Far East,
nour­ished by the imag­i­na­tion of poets from all over the world, of whom he had become a fine con­nois­seur, Benanteur was able to create per­sonal works, poetic land­scapes bathed in the very real light of his Mediterranean home­land and that of his adopted Brittany, and by a tran­scen­dental light, "nei­ther ori­ental nor occi­dental" (Koran, 24:35), which trans­fig­ures the memory’s land­scapes into par­adises peo­pled by his beloved Chosen Ones.

Benanteur’s work reflects an ide­alist and humanist vision, stem­ming from three con­cep­tions of the world that suc­ces­sively influ­enced him and whose cat­e­gories he deeply inte­grated, because they cor­re­sponded to his human, aes­thetic and social ideal: the Sufism of his child­hood in Mostaganem (mys­tical prayers and poems chanted in Arabic, pro­ces­sions on the occa­sion of cer­tain reli­gious fes­ti­vals, illu­mi­nated books and learning Arabic cal­lig­raphy), a utopian and paci­fist com­mu­nism that marked him during the 1950s and 1960s in France, both close to the Buddhism of the Far East whose poets and painters he knew so well and admired so much (wisdom, poetry and painting: ideal land­scape and modest and har­mo­nious place of man in Nature). Convinced that he was born at the wrong time, Benanteur would have liked to live and work in a country and at a time when this human, aes­thetic and social ideal still existed: the end of the European Middle Ages or the height of Arab-Andalusian civil­i­sa­tion.

 Abdallah Benanteur, Le Hoggar, 1960. Oil on canvas, 100 x 200 cm. © Donation Claude & France Lemand. IMA Museum, Paris.
To obtain the inde­pen­dence of Algeria, col­o­nized by France, Benanteur was not in favor of armed struggle, but of peaceful resis­tance and tes­ti­mony, like Mahatma Gandhi, whom he had held up as a model. In 1958, he learned of the death in combat in the maquis of his younger brother Charef. He was shocked and sus­pended all artistic activity. When he resumed painting in 1959, his paint­ings rad­i­cally changed in style, tech­nique, format, and theme. During two years of intense activity, he pro­duced a coherent and pow­erful ensemble. His painting became land­scape, mate­ri­alist, and monochrome, with an impres­sionist tech­nique made up of thou­sands of strokes accu­mu­lated with a fine brush. The drawing that sur­rounded its forms and flat areas dis­ap­peared, and the com­po­si­tion became linear, hor­i­zontal, and repet­i­tive. This was his "desert period": the Algerian land as a symbol of pain (red, arid), resis­tance, and an iden­tity that col­o­niza­tion had always sought to tear away. The art his­to­rian Raoul-Jean Moulin would say of these land­scapes from the desert period that they are like a por­trait of his mar­tyred brother and Algeria and per­haps even like self-por­traits of the painter him­self.

 Abdallah Benanteur, Le Bois d’Amour, 1981. Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. © Donation Claude & France Lemand. IMA Museum, Paris.
A sou­venir of the Bois d’Amour in Pont-Aven, a mecca of inspi­ra­tion for painters, this painting closes Abdallah Benanteur’s long Breton period and her­alds his Italian period (1982-89). More finan­cially secure, the Benanteurs now spend their summer hol­i­days in all the European coun­tries rich in museums. The Bois d’Amour is the work of a painter freed from the neg­a­tive images of his native Algeria and the morbid obses­sion with his sick and dead mother. On the canvas, she joins other deceased Algerian women, them­selves mothers of mar­tyrs, and all march toward the Bois d’Amour, a green and beau­tiful ceme­tery, the par­adise of the Chosen Ones.
Le Bois d’Amour is a tribute to Brittany, which rep­re­sented for him a peaceful and inspiring Algeria. In its smooth tech­nique, and espe­cially in its theme of the world of the dead, this painting is a tribute to the sym­bolist painters he admired. It announces those of the years 1984-89 (My mother saw, The Departure of Halouma, The Chosen Ones,…), in which he will rep­re­sent his mother and his brother in the com­pany of other dead people, sub­li­mated and ide­al­ized fig­ures, floating in an idyllic land­scape, an earthly-celes­tial par­adise.

 Abdallah Benanteur, Poésie, 1962. Loose leaf book, 92 pages, 38 x 28 cm. Poems by Jean Sénac, illus­trated with 10 engrav­ings by Benanteur. Edition of 50 copies. Presentation by Monique Boucher: "This work, born of Sénac’s lived inde­pen­dence and Benanteur’s ardent silence, was a quest con­stantly torn from pre­car­i­ous­ness. It will be the sen­si­tive meta­mor­phosis of for­gotten roots."
This first artist’s book, pro­duced in Paris by two Algerian friends to announce the upcoming inde­pen­dence of their country, will be exhib­ited at the National Library of Algiers in December 1962. In the pres­ence of the poet and the artist, press con­fer­ence by its admin­is­trator, Mr. Mahmoud Bouayed. Official inau­gu­ra­tion cer­e­mony on December 15, in the pres­ence of the Minister of National Education and many per­son­al­i­ties.

 Abdallah Benanteur, A Jamila Bouhired, 2001. Painted manuscript, 88 pages, 32.5 x 42 cm. Poem by Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, hand­written by the artist on a print and dec­o­rated with 27 water­colors and 4 sketches. Donation Claude & France Lemand. IMA Museum, Paris.
A bril­liant typog­ra­pher, designer and engraver, he designed and pro­duced his books entirely by him­self, as much the work on the paper itself, as the printing of all the proofs on his hand press. Between 1961 and 1994, he cre­ated a hun­dred bib­lio­phile books, on ancient and con­tem­po­rary poems, from the East and the West. From 1994 onwards, Benanteur mostly cre­ated an excep­tional and impres­sive group of over 1400 books in a single copy, based on the texts of more than 360 poets world-wide. These 1500 books revealed his excep­tional qual­i­ties as a book artist : his over­whelming cre­ativity and his abso­lute vir­tu­osity in the orches­tra­tion of the var­ious com­po­nents pro­vided each work with an orig­inal reading rhythm. No twen­tieth cen­tury artist, nor in any other cen­tury, nor any civ­i­liza­tion, has proved to have so much energy and imag­i­na­tion in the cre­ation of so many admirable and unique books, in such a short span of time. A truly great master!
(Claude Lemand, Benanteur. Graphic Works. Monograph, volume 2, Paris, 2005)