The exhibition “Les Painters Pionniers” was inaugurated Wednesday September 27 in TGM Gallery (La Marsa) around a dozen first generation artists, straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thought as an exhibition of collectors, “pioneer painters” brings together rare works and for some, never presented to the general public.
On three different spaces, the visitor of the exhibition discovers the paintings of several tenors, starting with the Khayachi father and son, Aly Ben Salem, Hatim El Mekki, Amara Debbeche, Abdelaziz Berrais and Abdelwahab Djilani.
Also visible within this exhibition, several works by Léo Nardus, a Dutch artist who lived in Tunisia, and a selection of paintings by Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger, from the collection of the center of Arab and Mediterranean music.
Finally, the exhibition “Pioneers’ painters” presents in an unprecedented way, several paintings by the great artist Ahmed Osman whose life and work remain nimpted with mystery. In itself, the presence of these paintings by an essential artist in the history of Tunisian painting gives an exceptional momentum to this exhibition.
Indeed, Ahmed Osman puts us in front of a crucial question: what if he was the ancestor of all Tunisian painters, the first to have inscribed his name in the history of the plastic arts in our country?
Painter of the Husseinite Beys, Ahmed Osman is a pioneer in this area and his works bear witness to the first pages of the history of our painting.
When we talk about artists whose pictorial practice dates back to the nineteenth century, the name of Ahmed Osman stands out for himself. Indeed, while Yahia Turki (1903-1969) is considered to be the father of easel’s painting in Tunisia, Ahmed Osman’s anteriority is obvious.
Born in 1838 and died in 1920, he evolves however in a context and a style different from those of Yahia Turki. However, even if his artistic practice was that of a courtyard, anteriority remains the fact of Ahmed Osman whose posterity is important to restore posterity in the history of our painting.
The legacy of Ahmed Osman remains dependent on the nineteenth century of the Husseinite dynasty. He was thus the portrait painter of Sadok Bey and Mohamed Hédi Bey and his works are a reflection of these sovereigns which are represented there. Few and highly sought after, Ahmed Osman’s canvases are only the dozen to be listed.
This Ahmed Osman collection is preserved by the services of the National Heritage Institute and the Museum of Contemporary History in Ksar Said. Some individuals also have some paintings by this artist whose own portraits are struggled to find.
There is indeed little information on this artist whose most emblematic work is the famous representation of Sadok Bey, Khereddine Pasha, the dignitaries of the Court and the Beylical Guard, all gathered around the staircase at the Lions of the Bardo Palace.
Who was Ahmed Osman? Born in Monastir in 1838, he lived in Sousse and then moved to Tunis where he died in 1920. Career military, he has the violin of Ingres, the painting he practices at the service of the Husseinite Court, after having attended Italian schools. His works were produced between 1870 and the first decade of the twentieth century and almost everything remains to be discovered about it.
According to his biography, he is the son of a Mamluk from Candie (Crete). His father was the director of Habous property in the south of Tunisia. If biographical information about him remain rare, the fact remains that his technical mastery is indisputable and that by certain aspects, he foreshadows Yahia Turki’s approach.
Consequently, how to restore the posterity of this forgotten artist who remains the root of our modern pictorial art? Because on his own, Ahmed Osman constitutes a whole part of our classic pictorial tradition, a secular tradition that perfectly restores, the exhibition “Pioneer painters”.
